The charge Didion brings against Woodward, that he only obtains insider information by protecting the interests of those insiders, she also levels against the entire industry.

“The genuflection toward ‘fairness’ is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal,” wrote Didion. “In Washington, however, a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what ‘fairness’ has often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.”

In the book, that essay appeared under the headline, “Political Pornography.”