Miranda Devine: The Vanity Fair interview was a targeted hit job on Susie Wiles, entire Trump admin
When it comes to hit jobs, the 10,000-word Vanity Fair spread on Susie Wiles is a classic of the genre.Chris Whipple, a veteran journalist, producer and author with a career spanning the constellation of left-wing media — CBS’s “60 Minutes,” ABC, MSNBC, CNN, NPR, Politico, The Daily Beast, The New York Times, The Washington Post — has craftily framed the president’s chief of staff in a narrative of typical Trump-derangement fantasies.The wonder is that she let him do it.And there’s no doubt she did.Washington journalism veteran Mark Halperin on his 2WAY podcast says Wiles may have thought the 11 interviews Whipple said she did this year were off the record.Journalists talk to longtime sources all the time with an implicit understanding that everything’s off the record except when you come to a mutual agreement otherwise.In an industry where trust is everything, burning a source by revealing off-the-record confidences is career-limiting to say the least.
Exhibit A: Olivia Nuzzi, the short-lived West Coast correspondent for Vanity Fair, has coined the term “Michael Wolffing it,” meaning telling a source everything is off the record and printing it anyway.Trump biographer Wolff got rich burning sources and making up stories, but nobody buys his books or believes what he says anymore.Nuzzi’s journalistic career is over — and not just for having affairs with the politicians she covers.Wiles did not respond to The Post’s questions about whether she thought her conversations with Whipple were off the record — which is an answer in itself.Whipple told The New York Times he has tape recordings.
On CNN he responded to Wiles furious statement that he had taken her out of context with a knowing smirk: “The giveaway, when you’re a journalist and you hear your target, the subject . . .talking about things like ‘context’ and ‘omissions,’ you know you’re on the right track because there isn’t a single fact or a single assertion...