Reply #1: This has EVERYTHING to do with the culture of FEAR at WAPO

[MADem]

And our old pal, Eminence Gris Bob Woodward, who had WAAAAAAY too much clout for his status over there. He was one of the lunatics running the damn asylum.

This piece is long, and is a study of PLAMEGATE, but it illustrates the climate over there, and elsewhere: http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/printables...

I. THE SCRIMSHAW ARTISTS
March 15, 2003, Washington
"I have doubts," Walter Pincus told Bob Woodward in the newsroom of The Washington Post that Saturday. "I am hearing they may not exist."


Pincus braced himself for the invariable Woodward response when he was about to disagree with a friend: I would be careful with that. His tone was often custodial, and he could sound condescending, as if he alone were in possession of all the facts. At 59, Woodward, the son of a judge, had the decency of a Dodsworth, but he often behaved as if he were surrounded by stones. His conversation carried the implication of inside information.

All winter long, Pincus, who knew more about weapons and defense systems than almost any other reporter in the capital, and Woodward, his longtime colleague, had been going around and around with each other on the subject of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, or W.M.D. In the 70s, Woodward and Carl Bernstein had helped topple the Nixon presidency, and since then Woodward had reached the stage of importance where his sources often came to him. But as Washington prepared for war, Pincus and Woodward were sifting and resifting what they heard from their sources at the State Department, the Pentagon, the White House, and the C.I.A. It was a time when reporters were chasing shadows on a screen. Both men would soon come to know more about the overarching power of the White House Iraq Group, the president's policies to sell the war, and the machinery behind the campaign to inflate Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress.

Now Pincus had written the first draft of a story that stated in the strongest terms he was capable of that the W.M.D. claim was not supported by any real evidence. He spent that Saturday making a desperate attempt to convince an editor on the national desk of the rightness of the article and trying to persuade him to push it into the Sunday edition.

"I have a piece that casts doubt on this whole thing," Pincus told Woodward.
"What whole thing?"
"The weapons. I am picking up all over the place that there are no weapons," Pincus said, and girded himself for the usual Woodward response.
But Woodward startled him. "I am picking that up, too," he said.
"You are?"
"Yes," Woodward said. "There seem to be real doubts now. Let me see what you have written and let's see if we can get it into the paper."

........Pincus at 71 retained the lean and hungry look he had had as a young man, but he radiated a sense of gloom. He taught a seminar on public policy at Stanford in Washington, and he had been devoting 20 minutes of each session to the inevitability of the coming war. Pincus often talked to his class about the decline in news standards and how Rupert Murdoch and deregulation had changed everything, resulting in the 24-7 news cycle and the Fox propaganda machine. Many of his students worked on the Hill or in government. Future podcasters, they absorbed much of their information from the growing mass of bloggers and other Web sites. It was obvious to them that the news business was undergoing a seismic transformation: newspapers were being hammered; young readers were falling away. Pincus had just discovered Jon Stewart, the satirical-news phenomenon, but blogs and the folkways of digital natives were a dim and secondary arena for him. He knew that Washington had changed since the 1970s, and that his kind of reporting, no matter how crucial, was no longer central to the news game. In a way, he and Woodward had become as antiquated as scrimshaw artists..........."You'll see," Woodward had been telling Pincus. "They are moving stuff around at night in Iraq. The W.M.D. will all be found.".....