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Everybody else played into this myth making that completely was anathetical to who your son was, but also what happened to him. >> i won't disagree with that. we tried to get quite a few of the major media organizations involved in it. basically spoon fed this stuff to a lot of people, and we got -- we call them fluff pieces. we got -- it's a cold, blustery day stuff. and they refused to address the points we wanted to address. the primary one being there was a homicide investigation that was falsified. >> not only falsified, but for months and months and months, it was left up to your family ...

Scholar and a journalist does something entirely different. and in obama's own book there's no politics. there's no congressional race. there's no getting started in politics. there's no senate race and running for president. it's just -- there's a search for identity, and it's a moving book, but it's a book that ends before politics, before public life. so it's an entirely different thing. >> and beyond that you concluded that not everything in his first book is literally true. >> yeah, you don't think in a mend ashs w mendacious way but in the way of memoir. he announces his intentions, i'm ...

Something that i don't want. >> you don't think other journalists are too promiscuous in offering the cloak of anonymity? >> i think it's case by case and if it's done too automatically it leads to a kind of lazy going over to off the record. but i think, you know, used carefully and used in the right instance i think it's very valuable and i think it's very necessary. it's very necessary to journalism of all different kinds. so i don't want to dismiss it and say just because i got all these hundreds of people on the record that you should never use it. i wouldn't be so arrogant as to say that...

Make. even james thurber was involved in a certain kind of myth making. memoir writers to an enormous degree do that. >> almost everyone in your book, not everyone but almost everyone is on the record. how did you do that in an age when particularly in washington there seems to be almost a genetic predisposition to speaking on background? >> asking and insisting. asking and insisting over and over and over again. and look, i don't want to take anything away from journalists who do it the other way. i work with some of them, and they're dealing with entirely different kinds of material. when bo...

Rather than abandoning any other people and doing their best, mobilising the whole nation in preventing people from getting infected with the virus. i suppose the point of propaganda is that it is a deliberate and systematic effort to create a narrative. it might be a narrative that bears little relation to reality, it might actually be myth—making. so, i'm just wondering what role there is for honesty right now in china — honesty about the past of the communist party? honesty about what happened under mao tse—tung? what happened to millions and millions of chinese who were starved to de...