Woodward's Dead Scoops

by emptywheel

There's a joke here somewhere:

Q: How do you know if the Washington Post has a really great scoop?
A: It's a great scoop if one of Woodward's sources just died.

That's a disservice to Dana Priest, Walter Pincus, and some others. But still. How many times will Woodward sit on a scoop for two to twenty years and still retain the title of "news" journalist?

The scoop is this: Gerald Ford thought Bush, Cheney, and Rummy were wrong to invade Iraq:

"Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction," Ford said. "And now, I've never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do."

Beyond the fact that Woodward's latest Dead Scoop will make it really hard for Bush and Dick to use Ford's funeral ceremonies as a distraction from their failed Iraq policy (and the Decider's stalling on actually making a plan), this is now little more than a historical footnote, a swan song of the moderate Republican. It is only slightly more interesting than if Poppy admitted what we all know--he, too, thought the Neocons were wrong on Iraq. Though no doubt Woodward is sitting on that scoop, too.

But for the record, can we dispense with Woodward's claim to "journalism" once and for all? Historian, sure. Chronicler, even better for all its sense of the medieval. But news? Isn't that supposed to be, well, new?

Comments

[LabDancer]

Warning - Completely Avoidable Rant Dead Ahead

Like many in my age group, the first I saw of Woodward, he struck me as the best thing that could possibly have happened to those disco-plagued '70's - a cautious guy, thorough, fair, with an abiding desire not to reserve judgment, but nonetheless at all times capable of immediately turning into a sheltered phone booth and emerging as: WOODSTEIN, SEEKER OF TRUTH, relentless pursuer of every 5 p.m. shadows, soft overbellies and nerd haircut throughout that vast secret cesspool of poli sci undergrads and never-really-practices attornies, the liars, the cheaters, through GOD ONLY KNOWS HOW MANY upscale coffee shops, attached parkades to late model federal office buildings and deceptively pristine split levels in that hellhole Georgetown!

The perfect, quintessenially romantic, hero we so desperately needed to purge our memories of all those creepy neoMen in Black, and quell the bile from watching WAL-ter Cron-KITE's night-ly pho-to-op pro-duct of the Biggest Dick of that era, and his seemingly inexhaustible supply of GOP-forsaken demon spawn.

By golly, he looked just like .. Redford!

So - thirty years older, and what of we got?

Here lies Woodward, shorn of 'stein, soooo entre nous with every inhabitant of BushCo ,that is, every draft-dodging, puffed-up, gravitas-faking, IED-from-the-past, bureaucratic in-fighting, deluded, NeoNazi liar who ever got a bachelor degree summa cum slime from University of Dick The One and went on to post-graduate studies at with Dean Dick the Two at the Hillsdale College White House campus, so much so, that he COMPLETELY MISSED "THE" STORY, the one which relegates Watergate back to the status of a third-rate burglary.

Fool that I was, I spent student loan money on All The President's Men, and actual cash on The Brethern and the Veil. This last year, I've avoided spending EVEN ONE THIN DIME on Woodward's seminal crappy trilogy, The Fellowship of the Bling (I make true confession - each one cost me 4 triple espressos while I read on it in those corner comfies at B&N).

So now I'm thinking maybe the OTHER guy, Carl the Greenskeeper, or maybe Bernstein, the guy who looked like Hoffman, sort of, the guy who was actually married to Nora Ephron (an unchallengeable endorsement, notwithstanding divorce), must have done the REAL reporting, you know, the investigating part, the thinking-it-out part, the-putting-it-together part, or else Woodward, who it appears is incapable of doing anything more strenuous than the schmoozing-of-the-poobahs part, would never have turned Bradley's head, and instead of Bob morphing into WaPo's Imbutterfly, he'd be off on his usual beat covering the Semi-Annual Vietnamese Pot Bellied Pig Rally at the East St. Louis campus of Reed's Aesthetics Training and Tire Arts Progam (Go Rattraps!).

Emily Latella-like, sorry all -

LabDancer

[katie Jensen]

I'll never forget watching woodward on Larry King and making the talk show rounds, thinking "what the hell is this guy on." I felt he was lying. Literally lying to the american people about what he knew about plame. And the only reason I can think that a man would do that is for the money. I think though, rather than blame woodward, it's just another example of how money corrupts. How ambition can get tangled in the truth. I have never walked woodwards path, but woodward lost his reputation on this one.

I don't think anyone will be able to see him as a true journalist after the way the Bush regime used him. And use him they did. I believe he fell prey to the myth of the "liberal media" and he was too afraid to recognize that the idea of media as a checks and balances is a "liberal" idea. Of course it's a liberal media, without liberals there would be no constitution, no media, no checks and balances, and probably no democracy. God I wish liberals would take back that word from the steely grasp of Reagan who is long dead and tarnishing nicely through history.

[emptywheel]

Katie

Well, Chris Matthews has claimed that Woodward is not telling the full truth because he's protecting Cheney. But that's for access, not money.

[Stely]

It's really true you have to be a democrat to work for the US government.

Woodward was the key on how to leak and avoid subpeonas. Leak overseas. Woodward prefers Toronto.

[Sara]

Woodward has already published the two bits he gave to Gerald Ford in yesterday's piece, he does it in drips and drabs in "State of Denial" and he sources Scowcroft with the opinions. This the new bit of information would be that Ford agreed with Scowcroft as of a little over two and a half years ago. But if we read Joe Wilson correctly, Scowcroft held these opinions six months before the invasion of Iraq, when he helped to place Joe on think tank panels, and get scheduled for CNN and MSNBC Shout Shows in the run up to the war.

Let's note that Woodward had a four hour interview with Ford in 2004, and the bits and pieces that have come out thusfar are hardly the complete content of a Four Hour Interview. In 2004, Woodward was done with Plan of Attack and just beginning the work on State of Denial. Looking at his interview dates the Ford interview would have been about the same time as Woodward's early interviews with David Kaye, General Garner and General Franks. (Woodward's notes leave much to be desired in pinning anything down. -- yes it is nice to know if people who ultimately agree, agreed at the time the topic was being first researched.)

But I am not so hard on Woodward actually -- you just have to deal with his limitations. He makes these source agreements for the sake of access, and he has made enough of them over the years that he is somewhat trusted -- though in his last book he didn't get Bush and Cheney interviews because they saw no reason to further trust him. But as put above, I'm glad Woodward threw down a marker on what Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld can say at the Funeral -- afterall there are probably 3 hours and 50 minutes more stuff on Woodward's tape.

In many ways I've now come to see this long interval for a Ford Funeral over the New Year's Holiday what with the probable Hanging of Hussain over the weekend, and then the Democrats "finally" coming to town on the 4th (Swearing-in Day actually overlaps with Burial Day)-- really has taken Bush in Crawford away from controling the news cycle. My new Senator and Representative both drove down to DC -- it is a 3 day drive, can be done in two but it is a killer -- Keith Ellison had a send-off parade from one of the local labor halls, and Senator Klobuchar had a rally in her front yard in the University District before taking off in her packed Saturn. They had a friendly snow ball fight.