Word: woodwarding
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...police chief has said positively that there is no reason to believe the stabbing was racially motivated, and in light of all the positive things that have gone on in this school in recent months, I think it is reasonable to believe that statement will stand," Richard Woodward, assistant superintendant of schools for instruction, said last night...
...blinder-than-justice approach to their work also raises serious questions about the contents of the book. Once Woodward and Armstrong picked their target, how did they decide what to include in the book? Their unwillingness to separate the important from the titillating shows the trouble blind writing can cause. If Woodward and Armstrong spent two years studying this court, how could they not emerge with a few ideas on how it could be improved? But if they truly had no aim, then it is little wonder they ended up with 460-odd pages of whipped cream...
...industry, the sinister evil of Joe McCarthy, the links between political espionage and government officials--does not deserve to be called reporting. It is repeating what others have told, even if what they have said is pointless or silly. At best it is crude history ("History on the run," Woodward called it during his Harvard appearance), but historians too usually look for a way to focus their work, to prove a point, to establish a theory...
Most likely, Woodward and Armstrong don't mean everything they say about journalistic blindness. Perhaps they faced a more immediate problem--under contract to write a book, they produced it, realizing that it really contained little in the way of significant revelations. It is easy to praise them for their legwork and interviewing skill, easy to praise their book as interesting, readable and as good an account as exists of the way the Supreme Court operates...
...investigative journalism. The Brethren never reaches any bottom line--it gossips rather than exposes. This book will not reform the court, perhaps because it doesn't need to be reformed. The book is certainly a detailed account, but it is not investigative reporting in the Murrow or Bernstein or Woodward tradition. It is not Upton Sinclair muckraking--in fact, it veers close to the type of muckraking that made the word unstylish. It is truly "Inside the Supreme Court," as the jacket cover boasts. But 468 pages later, the boast sounds pretty empty...