Trust Me: A visit from Bob Woodward

I was part of a fantastic seminar at last March's ACLA, entitled "Consensus in Fragments: Literature, Normativity, and Social Trust after 1989." I was thinking about trust in liberal journalism and objectivity.

Bruce Robbins at Politics/Letters kindly published my talk.

"The reception to this book — not the book itself but its reception — marked the end of an era. I read it here as the apotheosis of a narrative regime and its objective aesthetic, a regime that had structured journalistic objectivity for a long time. Both Trump and Woodward played a role in bringing this era to an end, and I want to be clear, I like Woodward a lot better than Trump, but they did an interesting dance together."