Vanity Fair on Woodward: Schlock and Awe

Yesterday I looked at Marie Brenner's laughably biased attempt to rehab her good friend Judy Miller's reputation in the April Vanity Fair.

Today, it's her equally laughable whitewashing of Bob Woodward's role in Plamegate.

Brenner's handling of Woodward combines sloppy, credulous reporting with a starry-eyed adulation.

Call it Schlock and Awe.

The hero worship starts in the opening graphs, with Brenner describing Woodward as having "the decency of a Dodsworth," a man with "a fierce attachment to the reporters' code," a journalistic throwback who (along with Post colleague Walter Pincus) are "labor intensive masters of detail, making endless phone calls, working sources, putting stories on hold until they had triple confirmation" (which is not be confused with double super secret background). The kind of man in full who no longer "needed to shake [his] maracas -- as he once had -- to make the front page." No, Brenner's Woodward is beyond such things. He has morphed into, as Brenner quotes a fellow reporter, "the absolute gold standard."

Gee, maybe he'll give her his ID bracelet and ask her to go steady (although, given the lit major's reference to Dodsworth, maybe a frat pin would be more age-accurate).

Brenner's breathlessness would be amusing if it didn't serve to mask the truth about how Woodward has gone from asking questions that helped take down a president to unquestioningly taking down whatever our current president tells him.

"Woodward," Brenner gushes, "had reached the stage of importance where his sources often came to him." Which sounds great... until you realize the reason those sources were coming to him is because they knew they could use him, that he would buy what they were selling, and dutifully spread the word -- with the added sheen that comes from having your spin delivered by the absolute gold standard.

Again and again, Brenner lets Woodward make ludicrous, self-serving statements without ever once arching her reportorial eyebrow.

"What I do is all on the page," Woodward tells her. "I don't weaponize my words. I don't feel the need to write, 'Guilty, guilty, guilty." Well, Bob, you might want to try it sometime -- especially if the powerful people you are writing about are "guilty, guilty, guilty." "I don't take a position," he tells Brenner when she asks his position on the war. "Paul Wolfowitz said it in Vanity Fair: 'You needed a vehicle.' The vehicle was WMD." Exactly, but instead of following up on doubts about the administration's WMD claims, Woodward chose to pen his chronicles of the determined president and his fearless aides. But we get none of this from Brenner.

Instead, she gives us more wistful portraiture of Woodward as the last of a dying breed: "From a distance, he looked like a character from another era, graying and hunched, while all around him young professionals were working their laptops, listening to iPods, or watching CNN. Woodward was the only person reading a newspaper." You can almost feel the lump in Brenner's throat. No wonder she and Woodward both come across as utterly clueless and dismissive of blogs -- even laptops are too new school.

Brenner even gives the famously humorless Woodward the only laugh line in the piece -- his lamer-than-lame contention that, "The rest of the country does not care about Fitzgerald -- they think Fitzgerld is the author of The Great Gatsby." A knee-slapper!

And on top of Brenner's Woodward Worship, we get her sloppy and unquestioning reporting.

For instance, in the piece, Brenner reports that Ben Bradlee says that Richard Armitage is likely Woodward's Plamegate source, quoting the former Washington Post editor as having told her: "That Armitage is the likely source is a fair assumption." Only trouble is, Bradlee says Brenner isn't quoting him accurately, telling the Washington Post: "I have not told a soul who it is." Misquoting sources, Marie? I thought only bloggers did that.

When the Post's Jim VandeHei tried to reach Brenner for comment, he was told she was traveling in India and unavailable. I know Brenner and Woodward like kickin' it Old School, but even in India there are such things as cell phones, e-mails, and the Internet (just call Dell customer service if you don't believe me).

Brenner is at her schlockiest when she lets Woodward preen himself as heroic, without delving into the unheroic elements of his behavior in Plamegate.

She quotes at length his infamous declaration on Larry King that he, like Miller, would be willing to go to jail over "this principle of trust": "If the judge would permit it, I would go serve some of [Miller's] jail time, because I think the principle is that important... if we could divvy up this four-month jail sentence -- I suspect the judge would not permit that, but if he would, I'll be first in line." But she fails to point out the hypocrisy in the fact that, as an anchorwoman puts it, "When all these reporters are close to going to jail, Woodward is trying to avoid a subpoena." Nor does she let this get in the way of allowing Woodward to hop right back on his journalistic high horse: "I have a strong belief that you do not hide" he tells her. "It is critical. If you are going to be a reporter, then there is an obligation to speak. We cannot take a step down the road of not speaking."

But this is precisely, specifically, unequivocally what Woodward chose to do in Plamegate: he sprinted all the way down the road of not speaking -- keeping his mouth shut, and his editors in the dark, until after Scooter Libby is indicted.

And Brenner never calls him on it.

Is this the absolute gold standard of whitewash journalism?