-By Warner Todd Huston
In an appearance on Fox News, former Bush White House Press Secretary Dana Perino noted that when the Bush team tried to push back against Bob Woodward’s reportage it “failed miserably” because the media rallied behind the iconic reporter. Yet now, after harsh words about Obama, Woodward is being treated like a pariah by that same media.
With Bob Woodward in the news over his report that someone in the Obama administration threatened that he’d “regret” writing so harshly about the President, Fox News talked about how the Bush administration dealt with the famed Washington Post reporter.
On the February 28 broadcast of Megyn Kelly’s America Live, former Bushie Dana Perino talked of the Bush administration’s reaction to Woodward’s 2006 book, State of Denial, a book that hit Bush over his prosecution of the war in Iraq.
Perino noted that they tried to discredit Woodward’s book, but to no avail.
“I tried to tangle with Bob Woodward once. Well, we basically tried to discredit his third book, when it came out, of the Bush administration. It was about the Iraq war,” Perino said. “We tried to put distance between us and Woodward. And it failed miserably. Everybody defended Bob Woodward.”
“In the mainstream media,” host Megyn Kelly asked. Perino confirmed Kelly’s supposition saying, “Yes of course they did.”
“But now they treat him like elephants treat the oldest elephant in the herd,” Perino noted. Kelly responded with: “Yeah, right, pushing him out.”
Kelly went on to show how many of the mainstream media and folks in the White House have attacked Woodward mercilessly in print and n the Internet.
“It’s basically a scorched earth campaign,” Perino said of the media’s treatment of Woodward. “It burns everything down, including trying to burn down his reputation.”
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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