Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush

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http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/235/bush-press.html

Eric Boehlert is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone magazine and regular blogger on the Huffington Post. This is the introduction to his new book, Lapdogs.

It must have been an awkward encounter when Bob Woodward sat down for two hours at his Washington, D.C., attorney's M Street office on November 14, 2005, to answer questions, under oath, posed by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. Woodward, of Watergate and Washington Post fame, was the most famous reporter of his generation, and Fitzpatrick, by the fall of 2005, was the most talked-about investigator in America. Appointed to uncover who inside the Bush administration had leaked the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA operative married to a prominent war critic, Fitzgerald's media-centric investigation had already put one New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, behind bars. His probe had also issued subpoenas to half a dozen influential Beltway reporters as well as most members of Bush's inner circle. Fitzgerald's pursuit had become the most fevered Beltway whodunit of the Bush presidency.

The sit-down between Woodward and Fitzgerald must have been awkward for a variety of reasons. Awkward because Woodward had made a handsome living starring in the role as the capitol's velvet-gloved inquisitor of people in power. For decades the soft-spoken Woodward had asked the questions. Now he was told to answer them. Awkward because Woodward, through his various television appearances during the previous months, had made it quite clear that he thought little of Fitzgerald's investigation, that it was "disgraceful," that Fitzgerald was a "junkyard prosecutor," and that the Plame leak had caused the CIA no harm. And awkward also because just weeks after Fitzgerald issued indictments in the case, targeting Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby for obstructing justice and lying to Fitzgerald's grand jury, a source of Woodward's came forward and told Fitzgerald that he'd actually told the star reporter about Plame's identity long before Libby started chatting up reporters in 2003. In other words, Woodward had been sitting on the scoop for more than two years. Woodward insisted the information he had received about Plame was insignificant; not newsworthy. But if his scoop had been revealed months earlier — let alone years earlier — it would have created enormous political and legal problems for the Bush White House. That Woodward, who in 1972 famously kept digging into a story of White House corruption while much of the mainstream media waved off Watergate as a second-rate burglary, was now serving as the media elite's unofficial ambassador — trying to wave off the Fitzgerald investigation and trying to keep crucial information under wraps — only hinted at the larger ironies in play.

It was ironic that a federal prosecutor was quizzing a journalist, trying to pry out of him sensitive information that was damaging to the Bush White House and information the investigate reporter had refused to share with the public, let alone his editors. The strange truth was that, at least in regards to the Plame investigation, the special prosecutor had supplanted the timid D.C. press corps and become the fact finder of record. It was Fitzgerald and his team of G-men — not journalists — who were running down leads, asking tough questions and, in the end, helping inform the American people about possible criminal activity inside the White House. For two years, the press had shown little interest in that touchy task and if it hadn't been for Fitzgerald's work, the Plame story would have quietly faded away like so many other disturbing suggestions of Bush administration misdeeds. (Lots of frustrated news consumers must have been wondering where was the special prosecutor for Enron, Halliburton, and prewar intelligence?) As conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds noted in the wake of Woodward's embarrassing revelation about his nonaction, "This is Watergate in reverse. The press is engaged in the cover-up here. If everybody in the press simply published everything they knew about this, we would have gotten to the bottom of this in a week instead of dragging it out for two or three years."

Woodward's decision to sit on the Plame scoop seemed to confirm that Beltway access had trumped news reporting. (At the time, Woodward was hard at work on his third Bush book, which required continued entrée to administration sources.) But the puzzling inaction, which could have extended indefinitely had Woodward's source not contacted Fitzgerald himself, highlighted a much more pervasive problem: how the mainstream news media completely lost their bearings during the Bush years and abdicated their Fourth Estate responsibility to report without fear or favor and to ask uncomfortable questions to people in power. And how, most dramatically, the press came to fear the facts and the consequences of reporting them. Morphing into a status quo-loving group, the mainstream media became trapped in a dysfunctional hate/love relationship; the Republican White House hated the press, but the press loved the White House. Or at least feared it. Yes, there were exceptions, and some within the mainstream media during the Bush years produced shining examples of industrious reporting and refused to adopt the telltale timidity. Many of those examples are cited in this book. But taken as a whole, the mainstream media's political reporting during Bush's first five years in office was infected with unfortunate nervousness. The mainstream media filter favored Bush. (For the sake of brevity, mainstream media will hereafter be referred to as MSM.)...

[kurth]

1. Not MSM. It's MLD

for Media Lap Dogs.