Frank Rich : The last laugh is on Bob Woodward

Frank Rich points out that the last laugh will be on Bob Woodward  for his repeated shilling for the Bush administration. First of all, we need to note an important omission -- the most important omission by Woodward in his book "Plan of Attack" was the fact that he never once mentioned the Plame scandal, let alone any of its implications. Like the Washington Times' Wes Purden, Woodward had a jolly good time guffawing at the importance of the Plame scandal. But now, the last laugh will be on him and the Republican Party in the next election.

Who's laughing now?

Why Mr. Woodward took more than two years to tell his editor that he had his own personal Deep Throat in the Wilson affair is a mystery best tackled by combatants in the Washington Post newsroom. (Been there, done that here at The Times.) Mr. Woodward says he wanted to avoid a subpoena, but he first learned that Joseph Wilson's wife was in the C.I.A. in mid-June 2003, more than six months before Patrick Fitzgerald or subpoenas entered the picture. Never mind. Far more disturbing is Mr. Woodward's utter failure to recognize the import of the story that fell into his lap so long ago.

The whole implication of Woodward's argument was that because he did not recognize the importance of the information that fell into his lap, therefore, the whole scandal was just a bunch of baloney. But Woodward showed an astonishing hubris with that attitude. He thought that he was the Greatest Reporter Ever and that no other journalist was worthy to be on the same show as him. That was the implication of his whole defense. And this was in addition to the conflict of interest that he displayed in defending the Bush administration in a case in which he was directly involved.

"W.M.D. - I got it totally wrong," Judy Miller said, with no exaggeration, before leaving The Times. The Woodward affair, for all its superficial similarities to the Miller drama, offers an even wider window onto the White House flimflams and the press's role in enabling them. Mr. Woodward knows more about the internal workings of this presidency than any other reporter. He has been granted access to all its top officials, including lengthy interviews with the president himself, to produce two Bush best sellers since 9/11. But he was gamed anyway by the White House, which exploited his special stature to the fullest for its own propagandistic ends.

Mr. Woodward, to his credit, is not guilty of hyping Saddam's W.M.D.'s. And his books did contain valuable news: of the Wolfowitz axis' early push to take on Iraq, of the president's messianic view of himself as God's chosen warrior, of the Powell-Rumsfeld conflicts that led to the war's catastrophic execution. Yet to reread these Woodward books today, especially the second, the 2004 "Plan of Attack," is to understand just how slickly his lofty sources deflected him from the big picture, of which the Wilson case is just one small, if illuminating, piece.

Even Judith Miller admitted that she was wrong to hype the Bush administration's WMD claims. That makes Woodward even worse, because he had such a proven track record that he threw out the window. So, if Judith Miller can admit that she was wrong, then why can't Bob Woodward? Has Woodward come to the point where he thinks he is above normal standards of right and wrong? Does he think that he is above criticism because of this stature and that what the rest of the herd says is not worthy of consideration?

What remains unrecorded in "Plan of Attack" is any inkling of the disinformation campaign built to gin up this war. While Mr. Woodward tells us about the controversial posturing of Douglas Feith, the former under secretary of defense for policy, there's only an incidental, even dismissive allusion to Mr. Feith's Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. That was the secret intelligence unit established at the Pentagon to "prove" Iraq-Qaeda connections, which Vice President Dick Cheney then would trumpet in arenas like "Meet the Press." Mr. Woodward mentions in passing the White House Iraq Group, convened to market the war, but ignores the direct correlation between WHIG's inception and the accelerating hysteria in the Bush-Cheney-Rice warnings about Saddam's impending mushroom clouds in the late summer and fall of 2002. This story was broken by Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus in Mr. Woodward's own paper eight months before "Plan of Attack" was published.

Not only that, there is no mention of the Iraq payola scandal, the extent of which is massive and widespread and should have been detected by a journalist with the kind of access that Bob Woodward had. And Woodward is so out of touch, he is out of touch with his own reporters.

As another example of Woodward's belief that anybody else's work was not worthy of his consisderation., consider this example, pointed out by Rich: He failed to mention the massive Bush administration plan to conspire to fix facts around the case for war with Iraq. He failed to mention the fact that the Bush administration was blaming the CIA as a way of covering up its own flaws. He never mentioned the fact that Vice President Cheney was micromanaging the CIA, a fact reported by his own reporter, Walter Pincus. Any reasonable person should have concluded that Cheney could have been setting up the CIA for failure to cover his own tail.

Rich points out the sad case of Theodore White, the discredited journalist who failed to detect the Watergate scandal:

Joan Didion was among the first to point out that Mr. Woodward's passive notion of journalistic neutrality is easily manipulated by his sources. He flatters those who give him the most access by upholding their version of events. Hence Mary Matalin, the former Cheney flack who helped shape WHIG's war propaganda, rushed to defend Mr. Woodward last week. Asked by Howard Kurtz of The Post why "an administration not known for being fond of the press put so much effort into cooperating with Woodward," Ms. Matalin responded that he does "an extraordinary job" and that "it's in the White House's interest to have a neutral source writing the history of the way Bush makes decisions." You bet it is. Sounds as if she's read Didion as well as Machiavelli.

In an analysis of Mr. Woodward written for The Huffington Post, Nora Ephron likens him to Theodore H. White, who invented the modern "inside" Washington book with "The Making of the President 1960." White eventually became such an insider himself that in "The Making of the President 1972," he missed Watergate, the story broken under his (and much of the press's) nose by Woodward and Bernstein. "They were outsiders," Ms. Ephron writes of those then-lowly beat reporters, "and their lack of top-level access was probably their greatest asset."

White failed to detect the Watergate scandal, even though he was one of the best-known journalists of the time; he prostituted his vocation for insider access. In the same way, Woodward failed to heed the lessons of history and did the exact same thing with the Bush administration.

Rich concludes that insider access means nothing and has no ability on one's ability to get good news:

INDEED it's reporters who didn't have top-level access to the likes of Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney who have gotten the Iraq story right. In the new book "Feet to the Fire: The Media After 9/11," Kristina Borjesson interviews some of them, including Jonathan Landay of Knight Ridder, who heard early on from a low-level source that "the vice president is lying" and produced a story headlined "Lack of Hard Evidence of Iraqi Weapons Worries Top U.S. Officials" on Sept. 6, 2002. That was two days before administration officials fanned out on the Sunday-morning talk shows to point ominously at the now-discredited front-page Times story about Saddam's aluminum tubes. Warren Strobel, a frequent reportorial collaborator with Mr. Landay at Knight Ridder, tells Ms. Borjesson, "The most surprising thing to us was we had the field to ourselves for so long in terms of writing stuff that was critical or questioning the administration's case for war."

And Landay has also provided some of the key details about the Iraq Payola scandal; he discussed extensively the role of the Baghdad Press Club and their role in disseminating propaganda and passing it off as news.

tags: scandals  access  iraq  media  treason  investigations  plamegate  rich  woodward  journalism  libby  payola  cheney  

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