There has been so much sudden hype over Bob Woodward's latest novel The State of Denial that we don't even know where to start. You know Woodward "scooped" the Washington Post by saving his juicy journalistic bits for his book, instead of giving them up to his paper. (Happens every time.) On top of that, he didn't even give WaPo a heads up that the book was being released early, and the New York Times' Kit Seelye jumped on the story last Friday.

And now today, we have David Carr's analysis, which is quite intriguing and explanatory. Not only is his piece totally dumbed down, but the journalist/blogger also insists on twice comparing the world of books to the world of blogs.

The actual journalistic accomplishment in “State of Denial” is less than grand. It took him three books to arrive at a conclusion thousands of basement-bound bloggers suggested years ago: that the Bush administration is composed of people who like war, don’t seem to be very good at it and have been known to turn the guns on each other.

Basement-bound? What the? Oh, whatever. We're sure Carr has some warpped sense of how bloggers live (dark, hermit-like Star Trek and computer locked in a basement) because of people like Matt Drudge and Pete Rojas. But he doesn't stop the blog comparisons there. Carr goes on to pull a quote from Simon & Schuster's publisher, who just can't believe that in a world of random 20-somethings throwing their opinions on the Internet that people even read books anymore.

It is interesting to me that in an age of blogs, Webs and texting that a book, something which is essentially a tortoise, very quaint in its own way, can carry the most immediacy.”

And so the circle of media life continues, with the blogs jumping on the hype of books, forcing the newspapers to work even harder to break news — and then spreading the news once it's broken with a bit of cheeky commentary. Until tomorrow when we all drop this half-witted political conversation, and go back to the things people actually care about: more Photoshopped photos of Lindsay Lohan's cooter.

A Reporter Who Scoops His Own Paper [David Carr, New York Times]