Axis of Assholes-Bob Woodward

Over the past few months, I'm constantly reminded of the leitmotif running through Paddy Chayefsky's Network. The Howard Beale character, wonderfully portrayed by the late Peter Finch, becomes unhinged and shouts that "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore."

I too wonder if I am becoming a bit unhinged. Is anyone else out there as mad as I am? I'm angered that Bush and his axis of assholes are running this country in to the ground. When are we going to hold these criminals and incompetents responsible?

Frankly there are just so many of these clowns out there, whether they be the architects or merely the enablers of the Bush Administration disasters. The list includes the Frat-Boy-in-chief of course, along with the tough-talking coward Dick Cheney, the war criminal Donald Rumsfeld, the legend-in-his-own-mind Karl Rove (permanent Republican majority? Just watch 2008 asshole), the woefully ill-prepared Condi Rice (who used to work for Gary Hart and then decided to work for a moron-in-chief in what can only be consider some sort of faustian bargain) and a lot of other gutless jokers serving in and about the White House.

And of course some of those prominent enablers are in the media. Originally I intended to write a more comprehensive piece on the decline of journalism, having gone to journalism school and plied that trade myself. The obvious easy targets are the NY Times and Washington Post. I don't consider broadcast journalism to be much more than a headline service. And Fox? Well it is run by the Republican political operative Roger Ailes. No need to say more.

The New York Times certainly has baggage with its support for the Iraq war, its withholding of the domestic spying story and of course Judith Miller. The NYT has blood on its hands with the ramping up to war from Thomas Friedman and the ineffectual Bill Keller asleep at the helm. Miller of course rivals Keller's incompetence and has the additional baggage of being both contemptibly inept and apparently a bit too keen to use her sexual prowess on interview subjects so perhaps she is too easy a target. Suffice it to say she is a classic example of an intellectually and morally bankrupt reporter co-opted by power. Her career is over.

Miller does share a common trait with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. Apparently they both are not as smart as they think they are.

Woodward carries the title of assistant managing editor of the Washington Post. He used to be a journalist. Not any more. Nowadays Woodward busies himself as the official Washington stenographer to the rich and powerful, serving their interests while promoting himself. He tends to take himself far too seriously while--sadly enough--trading access for truth and thereby allowing his unwitting readers to be mislead and manipulated by his stories while he poses as an investigative journalist.

Most importantly Woodward seems to confuse "being close to power" to "speaking truth to power." Woodward hasn't spoken truth to power since Watergate and looking back at his post Watergate resume, one wonders what his contribution really was in that collaboration with Carl Bernstein.

Is the truth more important to him then than personal ambition? I think not. Was it ever? Only he can answer that.

Woodward practices a kind of journalism, perversely popular in the political and the entertainment industries, commonly called "access journalism". This involves a sometimes questionable trade-off between sources and methods, where unattributed information will at least ensure that the anonymous source has his side of the story published. Unfortunately access journalism can be sullied by those with an axe to grind and it also brings the expectation of quid pro quo. Access journalism can be further complicated because it involves playing and rewarding favorites. So a story's subtext becomes less about truth and more about agenda. For those less gifted intellectually, the problem becomes in trying to distinguish between the two.

To a journalism student in the 1970s, Woodward was a demigod, having broken one of the most important stories of our life time.

But it has been a slow steady down hill slide ever since. Since Watergate Woodward has written a series of best selling but occasionally embarrassing books. After The Final Days (1976, with Bernstein), he followed with The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court (1979, with Scott Armstrong), Wired, the Life and Times of John Belushi (1985), Veil: The Secret Wars of the C.I.A., 1981-1987 (1987) and The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House (1994). Several were attacked by critics who saw Woodward as fawning over his subjects, According to Christopher Hitchens (another of my not-so favorite journalists because one he is an unrepentant supporter of the Iraq war AND two because he has the appearance of being constantly liquored up), they all use the same template. Reward access, punish those who shun Woodward. To his credit Hitchens is right on point.

Curiously Hitchens also points out that one book has effectively disappeared from Woodward's resume. In "The Man Who Would Be President," co-authored with David Broder, Woodward actually proposed serious consideration of J. Danforth Quayle as a successor to the Reagan-Bush tradition.

As Hitchens observed, the book concluded with the thought that Quayle would still have to beat such formidable "rivals as Baker, Jack Kemp, Richard B. Cheney, Senator Phil Gramm of Texas and, doubtless, others." Years later, the mind reels at this rather dubious conclusion. J. Danforth Quayle? No wonder Woodward doesn't acknowledge the book.

Hitchens makes the significant point that passages like the above are a handy reminder of the essential shallowness and vanity of Washington journalism, and indeed of the ethereal mediocrities that it purports to "cover" even as it acts as their megaphone.

Later came Woodward's conversation with the dying or already dead Bill Casey. I read Veil with a healthy dose of skepticism, still willing to give him the doubt though the Casey death bed conversations left me more than puzzled.

The downward spiral continued when Woodward completely compromised himself by trading truth for access to the Shrub Bush White House resulting in two books about the war in Iraq. Bush at War (2002) and Plan of Attack (2004) were both viewed as positive reviews of Bush's presidency. In an attempt to solidify his position as Washington's power boy, Woodward became an apologist and an enabler to a morally and ethically bankrupt administration. Now I understand why Joan Didion, who had written a lengthy evisceration of Woodward in the NY Review of Books in 1996 noting Woodward's reliability as a water carrier for his sources and the "disinclination of Mr. Woodward to exert cognitive energy on what he is told," calls his books "political pornography". She is being kind.

Woodward was also given incredible access for his next book State of Denial: Bush at War (2006) on Shrub's second term. The White House, ecstatic at Woodward's highly flattering treatment of Bush in Plan of Attack and Bush at War, gave Woodward extraordinary access, confident that he would put a kindly revisionist construction on their disastrous handling of the nation's affairs. Woodward, though, sensing the political winds shifting away from the Bush Presidency chose to offer up a slightly more critical analysis. Way to go Bob!

But for me, any doubts I had about Woodward as the consummate Beltway boot licker evaporated in 2005 when Woodward famously weighed in on Valerie Plame fiasco, attacking Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation numerous times on MSNBC's Scarborough Country, on CNN with Wolf Blitzer as well as other CNN programs including Reliable Sources and Larry King Live. At first Woodward chose a professional attack, claiming Fitzgerald's investigation was "just running like a chain saw right through the lifeline that reporters have to sources who will tell you the truth, what's really going on," and was "undermining the core function in journalism."

What he did not say was that he was part of the story, a sin that is really quite unforgivable. In November of 2005, the Washington Post revealed that Woodward had testified under oath on November 14 that in June 2003, a "senior administration official" told him that former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV's wife, Valerie Plame, worked at the CIA. In fact, Woodward had a personal stake in the outcome of the investigation. He personally mislead the public, his employer and his colleagues. He crossed the line--deliberately, and betrayed everyone but his source in the process while looking to cover his ass. So while Woodward was fully expecting to be subpoenaed by Fitzgerald's office, he still felt compelled and freely able to comment on Fitzgerald's investigation. How arrogant is that?

And comment he did. His statements to Larry King on CNN in October of 2005 were more targeted and more political: "And there's a lot of innocent actions in all of this, but what has happened this prosecutor...Well, this is a junkyard-dog prosecutor, and he goes everywhere and asks every question and turns over rocks and rocks under rocks and so forth." While seeking to marginalize Fitzgerald and his investigation, Woodward conveniently chose not to disclose that he, too, was a "rock" he did not want Fitzgerald to turn over.

And then matters got worse. Woodward made other false, inflammatory and contradictory statements regarding the Plame matter. On the Chris Matthews Show, Woodward baselessly claimed that Wilson's 2002 report to the CIA on the purported sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq contradicted his July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed, in which Wilson claimed it was unlikely such a transaction occurred. On Larry King Live, Woodward claimed that the CIA completed a "damage assessment" of Plame's outing and found that no serious harm had been done, only to be contradicted two days later by his own paper, which reported that the CIA has done no formal damage assessment.

Still on other occasions, Woodward dismissed the controversy as much ado about nothing. Some of Woodward's less admiring colleagues at the Post have vivid recollections of his unending belittling of the whole Plame affair as something of little consequence, "laughable", and "quite minimal". On NPR's Fresh Air, Woodward said: "There was no national security threat. There was no jeopardy to her life. There was no nothing. When I think all of the facts come out in this case, it's going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great."

Huh?

Judy Miller was quite rightly savaged for accepting what she claimed to be special credentials from the Pentagon in return for confidentiality. So what are we to say about Woodward, who is given special access and then repays the favor by belittling the Plame scandal, while simultaneously concealing his own personal knowledge of the White House's schedule on the outing of Valerie Plame? This is the great investigative journalist Bob Woodward? The wonderboy who broke the Watergate story? The wizard has been revealed to be nothing more than a partisan political hack touting a Republican agenda. For me, there is no question that Woodward has been carrying water for the Bush Administration since day one.

Like his assessment of Bush in his first two books, Woodward is on the wrong side of this. He emerges completely compromised, the quintessential insider. He is so far inside that he is no longer a reporter but more of a court story teller, even court jester. The fact that he felt comfortable opining on a story that involved him shows us that he has no shame, no sense of responsibility or clarity, no sense of ethical behavior, no sense of the public good. He is only interested in promoting himself and his coterie of Washington insiders with little regard for the public interest.

As one fellow blogger noted, Woodward has been bought and sold. He is what Phillip K Dick would have called, a "Yance" man, part of the ruling elite that keeps the wool pulled over the eyes of the great unwashed masses, in the service of the rich and powerful.

Woodward personifies the ultimate and ugly beltway creed: access coupled with primacy to perpetuate the status quo trumps clarity, accountability and the public good. For a so-called investigative journalist, how sad is that?