A few days ago, Bob Woodward addressed a group of reporters in Toronto and derided what he called the speed and impatience of American news reporting. "I always find that you do better work if you spend weeks, months, even years on something," he said. Could that be why it didn't occur to him to disclose -- even to the editorial management at his own newspaper -- that he was the first journalist to be on the receiving end of the Valerie Plame leak?
After all, the conversation with his still-mysterious White House source took place in mid-June 2003, a mere two years and five months ago. Why the ungodly rush?
The Toronto crowd also asked Woodward to compare and contrast himself with his closest rival for the title of Greatest Investigative Reporter alive, Seymour Hersh. Hersh, of course, was responsible for uncovering the abuses perpetrated by US forces at Abu Ghraib, among other distinctions. He's always been unapologetically critical of the Bush administration, and of power in general. I was always taught there is no higher calling in journalism than to act as just such a check on the uses and abuses of power, regardless of who wields it. But the notion clearly makes Woodward uncomfortable. His answer: "[Hersh] has very strong conclusions and judgments about the war. My approach is reportorial: to find out what happened as best I can and let people make their own judgments about the war. It's not necessary for me to make judgments."
Or, as another news organization far, far away might have put it: Bob Reports, You Decide. Curiously, such sentimental attachment to journalistic objectivity has not stopped Woodward from launching repeated public attacks on Special Prosecutor Patrick "junkyard dog" Fitzgerald. (And Woodward, as we know, never thought to mention that he might himself have a junkyard dog or two in this particular fight.)
Len Downie, the executive editor of the Washington Post, calls the behavior of his star reporter a "mistake." I'd call it an unforgivable sin against journalism. Like Judy Miller before him, Woodward seems more interested in demonstrating loyalty to his well-placed Washington sources than to the journalistic imperative to tell us what he knows, and to tell it with integrity. I'm not sure someone like that, someone who can hedge and dodge and finesse and play politics based on an undisclosed stash of privileged information, can properly be called a journalist at all.
The sad truth, of course, is that Woodward has been cozying up to those in power for years. (Check out his Iraq war book, Plan of Attack, which boasts 75 top-level government sources but names only three of them -- all the better, presumably, to ensure they will all talk to him again for his next book.) The question we have to ask ourselves is when exactly Bob Woodward stopped challenging power, like a proper investigative journalist, and started making every possible accommodation with it instead. We also have to ask why more people didn't notice the transformation while it was happening.
We've held an image of Bob Woodward as the great white knight of American journalism for so long, it's been easy to forget that the image is in fact of Robert Redford in All the President's Men. True, we've been sorely lacking in journalistic heroes in this country since the Watergate era. But hero-worship is rarely wise outside the confines of Hollywood fantasy, and heroes have an unnerving tendency to disappoint us sooner rather than later. Guess what, another one just bit the dust.