If only Bob Woodward had used his inside sources for good instead of evil. Of course, he did just that in exposing the evils of the Nixon administration, but the revelation that the Washington Post journalist had concealed for 17 months the fact that a White House official had leaked former CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity to him has dulled the luster of this icon of investigative reporting.
When Bob Woodward, of all people, becomes just another journalist corrupted by a cozy relationship with those in power, it is obvious the rot is deep.
In many ways, Watergate was about Vietnam, as Daniel Ellsberg's leaking of the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times and The Washington Post exposed the deceit and incompetence behind the conducting of that war and prompted an enraged Nixon White House to launch a retaliatory campaign against its "enemies" in the press and Democratic Party. Mr. Nixon's men broke both the spirit and the letter of the law in that campaign and were brought down, making heroes of a courageous, truth-seeking press that had rescued America from a dangerously arrogant and immoral administration.
Skip ahead about 30 years to an administration that smears as unpatriotic anyone who dares to call attention to the deceit and incompetence that mark its conducting of the war in Iraq. In contrast to Vietnam, where the press was ahead of the public in turning against a needless, bloody war that tore at the fabric of the nation, the public has been well ahead of the press. The Bush White House has a gift for co-opting the press that the Nixon White House definitely did not have, but the press could not have been co-opted so easily if it had not been a willing partner in the process.
While Sept. 11, 2001 was a shock to the system of every American, it so rattled the press that it forgot many of the principles of Journalism 101. The White House would never have been able to shift the focus from the pursuit of al-Qaida to an invasion of Iraq cooked up by neoconservative cynics seeking an excuse to test their academic theories of American dominance of the Middle East if the press had not been busy cheerleading or cowed by fears of being labeled unpatriotic. The New York Times, which made the case for Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction largely on the reporting of the now disgraced Judith Miller, who was in essence a White House mole, has apologized in print for failing its readers.
When the Iraq war began, the Bush administration cagily permitted eager news organizations to "embed" reporters with the invading Army, thus assuring the allegiance of their newspapers and networks to the cause. But it wasn't just the reporters in the field who were embedded (as in "in bed with") the White House as it launched a disastrous war. So were the movers and shakers of the media, which brings us back to Mr. Woodward.
The young reporter who challenged the establishment during Watergate is now an establishment pillar, a one-man media empire who reports, edits, writes books and speaks learnedly about current events on television news shows. Mr. Woodward's currency is the many contacts in high places that he has cultivated for inside information, but those sources will obviously expect something in return. It could be advocacy of their causes or it could be nothing more than a timely silence.
When a Bush administration official leaked the identity of Ms. Plame to him, Mr. Woodward should have gone to his editors with this knowledge. Not only did he fail to do so, his inaction was grievously compounded when he went on television to denigrate special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's efforts to pursue the leak of Ms. Plame's identity, which was obviously done to retaliate against her husband, Joseph Wilson, for exposing the fallacy of the administration's claims that Saddam Hussein had sought material for nuclear weapons.
Whether Mr. Woodward was attempting to protect a source or keep the heat off himself in criticizing Mr. Fitzgerald he was working to conceal the truth, which was the opposite of what he did when he sent the White House rats scurrying during his work on Watergate.
From Ms. Miller to Mr. Woodward to, most ignobly, columnist and White House lackey Robert Novak, Americans have seen what can happen when journalists who are supposed to be working for readers and viewers are co-opted by power and money and end up protecting their pals in high places. They have seen how leaks, which can be used to serve the cause of truth as in Watergate, can be used to obscure the truth.
This is all coming out, unfortunately, a year after the press pitched in on the "swift-boating" of Senator John Kerry while giving the incumbent president a free ride on Iraq. With newspapers fighting to maintain circulation and advertising revenues, and television networks seeking to maintain audiences and something resembling journalistic credibility, these are tough times for the news media. The actions of the press, or more accurately the inaction, during the Iraq war, from its shady beginnings to its bloody failure, will make times that much tougher.
