The Washington Post is my newspaper of record. It always has been, and it will continue to be. I treated All the Presidents Men and likewise Bob Woodward with the same reverence I have for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Still do, which is why my disappointment and livid sense of betrayal is all the greater that Woodward let me down. And once the anger dies down, and Woodward goes back to writing his next blockbuster book with unprecedented insider access, all that will be left is an acute sense of disappointment that Woodward is not who he used to be. The Woodward of Watergate, investigating from the outside using shoe leather and labor to get inside the issue, has melted away as the celebrity status gained from Watergate placed him squarely on the inside. He is the Washington insider reporter who is too close to the administration to objectively pursue truth that he himself scorned in All the President's Men. And that is depressing.
It is neither terribly surprising nor unexpected that Woodward should no longer be able to be Woodward anymore. It is not because he is corrupt or lazy. I'm sure he researches extensively and tries to behave ethically, even if in this case he was utterly blindsided by his own beliefs. But it is not just Woodward. It is not just Miller. It is the entire press establishment. The salaries are too large. The cocktail parties too many. The social circle too small. The lines between reporter and reportee too blurred.
The administration should not be your friends, and any scoop you may receive for treating them as such is significantly undermined by the ethical breach of blurring the line. Should you have unnamed sources, yes. Should the entire press corps take an ethical class to learn when to use them? Yes. Maybe we need to go back to Woodward's day, when talking to the top officials at the FBI required flower pots and codes in the New York Times. When seeing the press and the administration chatting it up was cause for concern, not the status quo.
Or, perhaps, there is a place for the Woodward's of journalism. The celebrities who can get an interview discussing a wide range of issues with the Vice President. I wouldn't argue that. Woodward does have a role at the Post. His books are fascinating. But if Woodward is filling that role, than surely it is the job of the Post to make sure that they have young Watergate era Woodwards putting in the shoe leather. That an administration official is not leaking to five or six different journalists and effectively setting the tone for the coverage across the lines. It is the paper's job to make sure someone is doing the investigative job OUTSIDE of the box. That someone remembers that Woodward cannot be Woodward forever.
And I think this is where the blogs come in. They are the ones clinging to the stories that the rest of the press corps drops once shooed away by the administration. They are the ones putting in the shoe leather, finding the stories on White Phosphorus, or on Dan Rather, for that manner. (Yes, the conservative blogosphere has a role in this as well). They are there to bite at the ankles of an entrenched media establishment that until very recently has gotten lazy. So lazy that it is a controversy within itself how lazy it has gotten. That it took Katrina and a sharp drop in Bush's popularity to alert the media to their hypnotized status in regard to entrenched political forces, ON BOTH SIDES, is shameful.
That Bob Woodward should go on Larry King and state that a misuse of classified information is mere gossip is a testament to the problem.
The fact that the Post is circling the wagons around Woodward, while natural and understandable, I feel misses the point of people's rage. Woodward is not Judy Miller, but there is something wrong with the media process in general if it allows these things to happen. And the media needs to acknowledge and work with that. The press needs to be open and say, yes, your questions about Bob Woodward's practices are valid, not because you're attacking Bob Woodward, but because, let's face it, the media needs to look at how it comes up with information compared with how it did things back in the day. It needs to ask the question, was it really so impossible to get a story before we started bending over backwards? Or have we created a standard that made all of this an acceptable practice? The media needs to be culpable and say, we broke it. We own it.
And in the meantime, keep blogging away, folks, because you're doing all the hard stuff. And remember that you are in a unique situation of being on the outside. You are today's Woodward. Earn it. Earn your place as the shoe-leather of the modern media, not as the tabloid gossip mill. The blog can go either way. Do you want to be remembered as the rumor mongers who giggle about Bush being back on the sauce and bombs in the World Trade Center, or the ones who didn't let the Downing Street Memos die until the elite media establishment gave them their due?
And remember that as the celebrity of the blogosphere rises, the blogs too cannot remain Woodward forever.