"Fire and Fury" receives backlash not for its content, but how the content was gathered.

“Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” has been widely appreciated by some members of the public but highly bashed by some members of the government. The book is not necessarily controversial because of its content, but more so how the author of the book, Michael Wolff, obtained the information.

“I sat on the couch and that’s the point of view that I’ve written this book from. I mean, in the real intention of this book, is to have readers sit with me on the couch and watch what’s going on in the West Wing. I went into this with absolutely no agenda whatsoever,” said Wolff in an interview with Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” in a recent interview.

Wolff has spoken in many scrutinizing interviews about how he got his information for the building of the book. He has been placed under fire with questions asking if he thought how he wrote the book was ethical. His responses seemed quick and practiced.

Todd asked Wolff two straightforward questions, one of which had a slightly interesting answer. 

When asked “did he (President Trump) not know they were interviews,” Wolff answered with “yes, he probably did not think of them as interviews.”

In replies to the book, President Trump tweeted that he “never spoke to him for a book” and “turned the phony author down several times”. Those tweeted statements shed light onto the comment Wolff made about the President not knowing some of the conversations being had were interviews.

There was a high lack of communication between the President and Wolff on the intentions of their conversations, if any communication at all.

Any respectable journalist knows that when audio is being recorded, it is ethical (and sometimes a legal requirement) to have consent from all parties to proceed with the recording. If the interview is not being recorded in any way, there is potential for more danger in the situation because words and phrases can be twisted or made up.

When Wolff was asked “Do you, from a journalist standpoint, did you violate off-the-record agreements,” his answer was “no, I absolutely did not.”

One could argue that for this book, Wolff was not technically a journalist as much as he was an author, so his “reporting methods” could not be questioned since he was not looking to be a journalist in this situation. His goal was to quietly write a book, not a column.

“I tried to be unobtrusive. So I tried not to have anyone quite notice me or not notice me above the level that they notice the furniture,” said Wolff calmly. “So my goal was to keep going until somebody said, “Go away.”

There is constantly so much going on in the White House, especially the West Wing, that one could infer that if someone was just sitting in a corner watching instead of participating in the hustle and bustle, that nobody even noticed he was there watching and waiting for the hook to his book.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders has spoken out on behalf of the President in a press conference since the release of the book, taking a stab at the conflictive author.

“The fact that there was a claim that the president didn't know who John Boehner was is pretty ridiculous. Ages of employees, which would be super easy to fact check, are wrong. Again, it is absolutely laughable to think that somebody like this president would run for office with the purpose of losing,” said Sanders.

Sanders seems to have made it her mission to make sure readers don’t really believe the “lies” in the book with her remarks at the podium while Trump’s nemesis’, the North Korean leaders, praise the book saying it simply “foretells Trump’s political demise” because of its rapid success according to a recent “New York Times” article.

The book itself is said to have many factual errors according to Chuck Todd’s information. When confronted about it, Wolff didn’t deny those claims when Todd asked “There are a lot of little errors. 

 There’s a lot of them. One page had three in one. Some of them may be copy edits, small, factual errors. But it adds up. Why shouldn't a reader be concerned about some of these mistakes?”

Wolff replied by promoting his book, saying that people should just read the book and find out for themselves why the novel speaks for itself.

Whether one decides that they are okay with the methods of information obtaining are ethical or not, they must first ask themselves a question.

Ask yourself: “Would I be okay with information being gathered about me without my knowledge during times that I thought were personal and private conversations and then made into a book that I had no control over?

If you answered “no” to that question, then join the club.