Michael Wolff, From Local Media Scourge to National Newsmaker<br />“It’s almost a natural evolution of Michael Wolff,<br />that one day the president would be talking about him from the White House,” said Janice Min, the former editor of The Hollywood Reporter, where Mr. Wolff is a columnist.<br />“Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” his insider account of the year he spent reporting from the West Wing, has drawn denunciations from the White House lectern, threatened the career of the Breitbart News leader Stephen K. Bannon<br />and turned Mr. Wolff, an overnight sensation at age 64, into one of the world’s most famous journalists.<br />In a telephone interview on Thursday, she added, “People sometimes don’t like what he says,<br />but I think one of the things that’s unnerving about Michael is he’s loyal only to the story.” Of her own collaborations with Mr. Wolff, she added, “nobody ever disputed the facts that were included on a piece.”<br />Raised in the New Jersey suburbs, the son of an advertising executive (his father)<br />and a newspaper reporter (his mother), Mr. Wolff entered journalism early, as a copy boy for .<br />“Historically, one of the problems with Wolff’s omniscience is<br />that while he may know all, he gets some of it wrong,” David Carr, the late New York Times media columnist, wrote in 2008, reviewing a Wolff book that, he pointed out, contained errors.<br />On Thursday, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said the book contained “mistake, after mistake, after mistake.”<br />Mr. Wolff, who declined to be interviewed for this article, stands by his reporting.<br />He also describes Mr. Trump as being unaware of the identity of John Boehner, the former Republican House<br />speaker; in fact, the pair had golfed together long before Mr. Wolff began visiting the White House.
