In 2002, I landed in New York City to study journalism at Columbia University. A few weeks into the course, the school came under attack by columnist Michael Wolff. Dripping with invective, his article created much heartburn among professors and students.
Taking off from criticism by the president of the university, Lee Bollinger, that what the school offered did not measure up to the standards of a big university, Wolff pointed out that the journalism school, while being part of an Ivy League institution, taught the craft of what was, and still is, a middle-class occupation. I found that what Wolff was describing was an existential conflict that went back to the school’s founder, Joseph Pulitzer, who was known for promoting muckraking journalism.
I emailed Wolff and said I agreed with his perspective. He thanked me but asked some questions, apparently trying to get more dirt on the school. To him I must have sounded like a malcontent who could be inveigled into becoming his source. Though I considered myself an outlier at the school, having come from a family that could barely be considered middle class in India, I had no intention of becoming Wolff’s source.
Wolff has often returned to verbally whip the journalism school. In his latest work, he has ripped apart some of the conventions of reporting on the U.S. presidency — show, don’t tell; and no editorialising. Bob Woodward, still the shining star of American journalism, started as an outsider who brought down a presidency and became an adversarial insider with the big wheels opening up to him while chronicling the shenanigans of the CIA during the Reagan era. His books on the Bush and Clinton presidencies were, however, pure inside the Beltway. In contrast, the slash-and-burn Fire and Fury has significantly undermined the credibility of the U.S. President. Although Wolff claims that the book is a product of due diligence by a fly on the White House wall, it is actually a 215-page opinion piece in which Wolff hammers on the point that President Trump is not only incompetent for the job, but that he also doesn’t care.
For Wolff, as for Trump, creating impact is higher priority than being a stickler. Yet, for all its pungent wit, Fire and Fury does not independently investigate or verify whether the money flowing into Trump’s real-estate business can be followed to Russia. Does such investigative journalism not belong to this era then?
