More than anyone else in the media universe, author and Washington Post editor Bob Woodward, former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Detroit Free-Press sports columnist Mitch Albom and Newsweek magazine had a year to forget.
Woodward and Miller were Pulitzer recipients. Albom is an award-winning sportswriter and a best-selling author to boot. Newsweek won the magazine industry's coveted General Excellence award as recently as 2004. In the past year, each of them had a lot of explaining to do.
Woodward had a double whammy. First, the author and assistant managing editor at the Washington Post looked foolish when he was scooped on his own career-making story of Watergate. Vanity Fair, of all publications -- not Woodward -- ended three decades of heavy speculation and disclosed that Mark Felt, the former assistant director of the FBI, was the actual Deep Throat, journalism's ultimate anonymous source. Woodward rush-released a book about his conversations with Felt, but it didn't do much to erase the sting of being scooped on a story he'd owned for three decades.
Then, even worse, it was reported that Woodward had been tipped off a few years ago that Valerie Plame Wilson was a CIA agent. But he didn't bother to tell his editor, Len Downie, at the Washington Post and shied away from the bombshell this year even as Miller rotted in a jail cell for declining to identify a source in the same case. Woodward looked like the ultimate prima donna.
Miller also had a unique double hit. She served 85 days in a Virginia prison after refusing to cooperate with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the outing of Plame Wilson. What Miller endured when she left The Big House proved even harder on her ego. She had barely tasted freedom when critics began excoriating her for massaging key facts.
Her shaky image as a journalistic martyr was demolished when rumors started to spread that she might eventually reap a seven-figure book deal. Suddenly, serving time seemed to have served her quite well. Mostly, the vicious treatment seemed to be a payback for Miller's misleading stories leading up to the U.S.'s invasion of Iraq. Miller recently walked away from the Times forever -- much to the relief of her former colleagues.
Albom looked like the poster child for shoddy journalism. True, his indiscretion didn't seem as momentous as those of the others on this list. Just the same, he's a towering figure in sportswriting -- and he should've known better. A Free Press story by the author of the best-selling memoir "Tuesdays with Morrie" described an emotional scene at a Final Four men's basketball game.
Problem was, the event never happened. It turned out that Albom had written it up BEFORE the game was played and didn't bother to set the record straight in his column.
Newsweek had the tensest time of all for a while. The prestige of the newsweekly suffered when it published a brief item suggesting that American military personnel had desecrated a Koran in front of Muslim detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba. Newsweek relied on an anonymous source for the information, which the magazine couldn't ultimately confirm. The piece was blamed for sparking riots that ended in the deaths of several people in Afghanistan. Newsweek issued a public apology.
Newsweek eventually tried hard to explain what happened and didn't shy away from the glare of the spotlight. While its mistake represented a cautionary tale on the use of anonymous sources, its media blitz afterward was a model of how a person or a company can rebound from a near-disaster by talking publicly about it. Because Newsweek's editors faced up to their woes, the magazine put the fiasco in the rear-view mirror pretty quickly.
