The Washington Post Won't Get Meta with Ben Bradlee Biographer
In today's meta-media circular circle-of-circleness news, the journalist who wrote a book about former a Washington Post editor says The Washington Post won't write about him because there's too many people talking about The Washington Post. (Got that?)
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Jeff Himmelman, whose book about Ben Bradlee, Yours in Truth, comes out tomorrow, has already caused a bit of stir among the book's subjects and their many media admirers over claims that Bradlee had some doubts about the full truth of Bob Woodward's Watergate reporting. It was a claim that Woodward was understandably not amused by.
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The stir was so great that Himmelman now tells Politico's Dylan Byers that a planned profile of him commissioned by the paper's Style section was spiked by editors who were "a little nervous about being the first people to write about me, given the controversy." Himmelman's story will now become a footnote in a larger Watergate "legacy" piece that won't be out for weeks. So, is the paper that paid Bradlee and Woodward to publish stories that took down a presidency a little gun-shy when it comes to writing about the people write about their own? (Because that means they're really writing about themselves?) Or is the story of the guy who wrote about the story, not as interesting as the fight over the story? Will we ever know the real story? Our bet is that those editors are probably just hoping that they don't become the story—or that this story just goes away.
