How Did We Get here?

Bob Woodward’s Flop Illustrates Overall Media Failure

By William Finucane & Michael Bradley

Washington exploded. It was in the 1970s when it happened. The Vietnam conflict raged. But Watergate showed the world, and this nation, that when it came to winning public trust and finding facts, newspapers were irreplaceable.

Now it is the 2000s, a similar war is raging in Iraq, and Americans are looking to their newspapers for guidance, facts and independent viewpoints. Only this time they aren’t there as they were 30 years ago.

Watergate, for those generations who somehow never learned the whole story, involved the most heinous misdeeds, performed by the highest officials in the United States in order to win an election against Democrat George McGovern and continue the obviously lost Vietnam conflict on their terms. After committing a wide variety of crimes, President Richard Nixon and his minions tried to cover the whole thing up.

Their powers were unmatched.

CIA, FBI, all the sophisticated implements of a sitting president were at Nixon’s fingertips, and he hesitated not at all to use any and all of them. Who could possibly fight this leader? Who could unmask the White House?

This someone, whoever it might be, would have to prove a Nixon-connected group committed a burglary, or some other crime, and that seemed an impossible task until the burglary at the Watergate building, which offered the thread that when pulled led inexorably to the conclusion that Nixon was responsible for unleashing the effort and could be proven culpable for covering it up. This conclusion sounded impossible at the time. It was like one of those exercises in law school where the teachers make up some outlandish situation and ask the students to think of a possible solution. Never were those cases real. Not until Watergate.

Two young reporters blew the Nixon cover-up completely away. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post were the undisputed champions of democracy in Watergate. They grabbed a thread and kept unwinding it until it revealed the whole sordid slime pit. Nixon and his sidekicks had committed crimes. Many went to jail in the final resolution of the case.

Only a pardon from newly sworn in President Gerald (Jerry) Ford saved Nixon from going behind bars.

It is also worth recalling that conservative Republican Congressman Ford, a compromise pick and a former member of the Warren Commission that determined Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in murdering Democratic President John F. Kennedy, was named as Nixon’s vice president shortly after Spiro Agnew resigned the office of Vice President of the United States late in 1973, after pleading no contest to a charge of income tax evasion; he pled nolo contendere in the face of an investigation that threatened to reveal much more about his history.

 Nixon was empowered by the 25th Amendment to appoint a new vice president, and Ford was a good candidate because his career and private life was so conventional and scandal-free that he could be confirmed quickly. Despite the fact Nixon knew Ford as an ally, Ford was put through one of the most thorough background investigations in the history of the FBI up to that time. Ford was named, confirmed and sworn in on December 6, 1973.

Of course when Nixon himself was revealed as a far more serious criminal than Agnew, and resigned to avoid impeachment, Ford became president. And before Nixon could face criminal charges, Ford, the appointed vice president who became president upon Nixon’s resignation, pardoned Nixon for all his actions.

In terms of Nixon, Woodward and Bernstein had – literally – saved America from a soiled and increasingly despotic presidency.

There was subsequently a movie, "All the President’s Men," in which Woodward was portrayed by Robert Redford. Dustin Hoffman played Bernstein. The men that these two actors portrayed were journalistic gods. Now, three decades later, the nation still had two impeccable champions. These were the men who could stop even a presidency from running amok. Many reporters who got into the journalism business before Woodward and Bernstein applauded the pair.

All reporters who got into the business after Watergate were deeply affected by the two superstars. Suddenly, reporters seemed to undergo something of a metamorphosis from working-class journeymen and wordsmiths to saviors of freedom. That is not an exaggeration. Many young people got into the business because of Woodward and Bernstein. They fully expected to find, unearth and report on all manner of misdoings. Some did. Some didn’t. Some should never have been in the business in the first place. But all had the examples of Woodward and Bernstein etched on their brains; this is who they wanted to be.

Also justifiably applauded was the Washington Post and its publishing and editorial core, which backed up Woodward and Bernstein. Without that backing, nothing would have become of the Watergate coverage. No editorial support, no story, no eventual fall of a sitting government, that is the power of the publisher and/or the given newspapers corporate governing board. But the Post, which is still independent and controlled by the Graham family today, stood the test, which was of course also a test of Katherine Graham, who was then the executive in charge, the publisher.

Time passes, things happen, presidents come and go and much of America is getting more than a little leery about believing the television, radio, magazines and even newspapers. Ironically, the worst media, with its either blunt spoken or carefully crafted yet direct point of view, has gained the credibility the mainstream press used to enjoy. It seems clear that this is because people want and expect the media to utilize the freedoms that the founding fathers provided; that is, speak directly and straightforwardly with the information and conclusions that have been drawn from those facts.

This is the way it was always intended to work. It was never assumed that any single news source was an oracle, but that blunt competition among competing news outlets would allow the reader to come to a reasoned conclusion about events, much the same way he or she would after a heated family discussion.

Average Americans in the 1700’s and 1800’s were usually both busy and isolated from events; they expected their news outlets to express not only facts but also conclusions regarding what those facts meant. This didn’t preclude editorials, which were usually brutally frank and often caustic, but it meant that reporters were expected to draw conclusions from what they perceived and knew of the facts at hand. There were often numerous publications even in relatively small communities, and therefore the interested reader could see how other journalists perceived the same facts and enjoy comparing conclusions.

But not anymore. Since Joseph Pulitzer and others developed the concept of ‘objective reporting,’ the mainstream journalist has been increasingly constrained. Currently, he or she must try to let the facts speak for themselves, without even the foundation of context, and if there is a crying need for an opposing or at least a defining point of view, the journalist must seek someone in an official capacity who is, first, capable of challenging or refuting the statements and conclusions of fact delivered by another official, and second, willing to do so in a charged political environment.

As a result, many people get the distinct feeling that the news suddenly follows new and erratic winds, and is either passive and hard to make sense of, or is blunt and dramatic; the latter is almost always the province of the right-wing, which through an increasing domination of the media – Fox News, The Wall Street Journal Editorial Pages, The New York Post, The Boston Herald, etc., etc. – is able to turn even ‘objective reporting’ on its head, and spew a radical conservative point of view as though it is breaking through the bland mish-mash of mainstream news and telling the real truth.

Of course it is not, but since the rest of the media is still chained by ‘objectivism,’ there is no counterpoint.

The sad result is that great public lies and dramatic distortions of truth and reality are allowed to play out in the media, and only the media is to blame! There is a tendency to blame the public for succumbing to twisted points-of-view, but when there is no counterpoint the public's choice of a media that does present conclusions should not be surprising. 

People are even more challenged for time then their antecedents in the nation’s earlier years, and a case can be made that they are as isolated, only in different ways. The major difference, however, is that there is no blunt counterpoint. The right-wing figured this out, and it has exploited it to the point where the term ‘liberal’ has come to imply a political concept that will constrain individual will through regulations, and ‘conservative’ somehow means one will be free. So when the right-wing media not only offers conclusions, but pushes them, it should not be surprising that many hard-working, busy Americans are influenced, and since the mainstream press is constrained to sitting on its hands and hoping that these same people will somehow wade through their bland and largely context free reporting to understand the real story between the lines, this is a fait accompli. 

The bulk of average Americans become more and more influenced by the right-wing press while the educated elite that can wade through the subtleties of the mainstream reporting is more and more isolated, each becoming more and more suspicious of the other. But it is the media that is at fault. The so-called mainstream media has leashed and muzzled itself, and the field is open to the right-wing press, radio and television outlets  that unleash their reporters without restraints just so long as they conform to the predetermined point of view in their stories. 

An upside-down world indeed.

And this is especially so during the presidency of George W. Bush. This Republican dislikes the ‘objective’ press and doesn’t care who knows it. That is because the major  mainstream press - the New York Times, the Washington Post, et al, keeps asking questions without a predisposition toward Mr. Bush and his policies; there are rarely suitable answers for such questions. So Bush creates his own public relations mechanism.

This is common among dictators, and that has been the Bush tactic from the start. Push the honest media out, but feed it carefully controlled and scripted information needed for its daily news schedule, and rely upon the calculatedly dishonest right-wing media – Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and the ideologue felon, G. Gordon Liddy, et al – to provide a backbeat of vitriolic applause for all ultra-right policies, accented by laudatory stories in the reactionary press.

During the campaigns, ‘W’ Bush solved the tough-question problem by screening every single one of the people who attended his rallies. In effect, he and his minions developed cheer leading sections and passed them off as representative of the public at large.

But they also tainted press briefings. A great example is how, for a while, one reporter would be planted in press conferences; if the questions were too pointed, this reporter would be called upon and would serve Bush a nice, easy question and get him off the hook. Naturally, Bush says he knew nothing of this, but it would have continued had it not been exposed.

Bush started using his very own press to offset the real press.

For example, the GOP officials who became involved in overseeing federal support of education went out and bought a number of  'expert' spokespersons and sent them out to praise the administration’s new No Child Left Behind program. They would traipse about the nation gushing about the wonderful initiative. Anyone who heard them would naturally presume they were independently coming to these conclusions.

Only after considerable investigation was it revealed that these were government-paid mouthpieces. Sorry, said the GOP education people, we made a mistake. We will obviously cut these people from the payroll. But the harm had been done.

And that ‘mistake’ was only corrected until the next year came along and with a new budget available – would you believe it – the education people did it again: 'expert' spokesmen paid by the government were again talking about the wonderful No Child Left Behind. Mr. Bush and his GOP supporters are always trying to play games with the press, and therefore with honest information that is due to the public in a free society.

Now there are stories in the American press about how United States officials paid news personnel who write calculatedly good-news stories for regular publishing in various Iraq newspapers. These stories blatantly praise the Americans working there and vilify the insurgents, and some were even written by Pentagon information officers and handed to the paid 'journalists' who could then get them printed with their own bylines in the Iraqi press.

Ahh, now this is an unmasked version of press puppetry, clearly put in place by Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and their fellow radical Republicans. But it wasn’t dreamed up by them; it was borrowed the blueprints afforded by the history of Lenin and Goebbels. The conquering country – America – tells the conquered people, in this case the Iraqis, exactly what they want them to hear.

But supposedly this is not a conquered nation designed to be forever after a vassal of the United States; it is a country the U.S. has repeatedly declared was freed so it could pursue true democracy. How can that happen if America is paying newspapers, etc., to print propaganda. Obviously, it can’t.

One of Bush’s masterpieces came from a group backing him.

This group was in no way connected to Bush. Nor did it get its marching orders from him. Bush made sure everybody knew that; all everyone had to do was believe it.

It was, however, vintage material from Bush’s most important idea man, Karl Rove. He literally created Bush as a presidential candidate. Yes, we are talking about the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, their name alone an incredible misnomer if there ever was one.

The Swifties used Rove’s classic maneuver; attack the enemy’s strengths. Yes, attack the enemy’s strengths.

That way all the news stories had Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, defending his service as an officer in the Navy in Vietnam, where he colleted three Purple Hearts and fought in direct, close contact combat, killing at least one Viet Cong with his M-16 as the enemy soldier held a loaded rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

What breathtaking gumption, to attack that record.

Of course the question should have been, where was Bush during the Vietnam conflict. He had trouble finding time to make his Air Force National Guard duty. Records on his absenteeism were somehow misplaced.

But Swift Boat people weren’t concerned about the wayward pilot who never managed to get out of Texas and Oklahoma to help fight in Vietnam. They were concerned about the officer who did fight in Vietnam, but who came back to the U.S. with a negative view of the war itself.

Rove was brilliant because he knew how the press would react. He fed them what they were accustomed to digesting and they automatically gobbled it up. The classic conqueror’s style is in action here.

The vital point is that Bush totally ignores the concept of free press in any of his dealings with the people of the United States, or with other countries, which shouldn’t be a surprise given his obvious contempt for American principles.

He does not need to be right because he has instead based his presidential power on faith.

Yes, faith is his power.

What Bush has done is historically classic; it is the technique of wooing and aligning the political system with powerful, single-minded and/or unscrupulous businessmen, essentially allowing them to dominate the government systems and therefore gain influence with the vast masses of people for private gain.

Explaining all the mechanics of complicated tax law, medical law, environmental law and the like is impossible, especially since a real explanation would hurt Bush’s positions, which are universally business friendly.

No, that’s no way to win the voters.

Here’s what you do: You grab them by their faith.

Faith can give you quick, one-maybe two-issue, black-and-white, clear-cut positions. Abortion: no debate, faith prevails. Same-sex marriages: no debate, faith prevails. School prayer: no debate, faith prevails. Wider use of school money for religious schools: no debate, faith prevails. Use of public money for religious programs that help people: no debate, faith prevails. There you go.

Now that’s how to put together a winning ticket. Let the voters be holy. It’s so simple, all that is needed is a calculating cynical regime with an affable yet deeply cynical front man like Mr. Bush to make it work. So here we are today with religion and public policy being quite intentionally mixed. By doing so, the hard-core businesspeople can rip Americans up, down and sideways on the commercial issues close to their hearts. Combining their efforts with those of GOP power brokers like Rove, they have people looking at abortion, same-sex marriage and the like, and never looking upwards while they empty the treasury and bankrupt long-established and proven effective middle-class safety net programs such as Social Security and Medicaid.

Beautifully done; this was beautifully done.

Now there was this little problem with the initiation of the Iraq conflict that could have caused some trouble. It was really just a thread to grasp by those seeking to deflect the Bush agenda, which clearly seemed designed to forget Afghanistan as soon as possible in order to attack Iraq.

A fellow named Joe Wilson, a former ambassador, was asked to get information to help the White House hold up its claim that Saddam Hussein had obtained some potentially dangerous materials for making a nuclear bomb. But Wilson came back and told the world that there was no evidence that such material was in Hussein’s hands.

Within weeks, it came out that Wilson was married to Valerie Plame, a Central Intelligence Agency operative. This revelation had a number of consequences.

One thing was that the press grabbed the story immediately.

Another was the ruination of Valerie Plame’s career, and the endangering of her life, plus the compromising of whatever contacts she had throughout the world, and possibly the endangerment of their lives as well.

Some people might say she was a lightweight spy whose loss is no big deal. But those people would tend to be the ones who applauded the leaking of her name to the press in the first place.

Here the Bush presidential press machine was taking a whole new tack; it was making the usually shunned press smell something and go after it. Wilson and Plame, it seemed, were not to be trusted, so naturally Wilson’s pack of information on Hussein must, of course, be suspect, since his wife is a CIA agent and there may be a covert reason for him drawing conclusions that conflict with the Bush/GOP agenda.

Make Bush look good by making his critic look suspicious, and his wife along with him. Untrustworthy, yes, that’s it; they are totally untrustworthy.

What is important about all of this is that it was politically charged from the outset. Everyone who talked about it knew that. No one close to this had any misconception. This went straight to the question of presidential believability.

So when Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, started talking to members of the press and others, as a special counsel investigating a political controversy, it was a big story.

Fitzgerald brought some of those most directly involved behind closed doors to talk with his grand jury. Who, he asked, told the press about Valerie Plame? It is, after all, a crime to reveal the name of a CIA operative; and someone clearly did exactly that.

For the people of the nation, the "outing" of a CIA agent is or should be profoundly disturbing. Someone, it was clear, had decided that – in his or her mind – it was more important to reveal the operative and endanger the whole secret network currently fighting in and out of Iraq against terrorists than it is to keep the information secret.

It was obviously a political decision made to help Bush.

That seemed to be the answer.

But Fitzgerald and his grand jury wanted the case proved and prosecuted and brought to a head in court. All speculation would become irrelevant. Fitzgerald sought convictable evidence. That is much more difficult to gather than offhand political analysis. So he talked to various reporters. He even let New York Times reporter Judith Miller stew for almost three months in a jail because she would not say anything about the now-indicted Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Now she is free and resigned from the Times.

Other reporters were also brought forth.

Columnist Robert Novak, a well-known and recognized reactionary journalist who was clearly sympathetic to the Bush Administration, was first to publish the identity of Plame as a CIA operative. He said his piece before the grand jury. The text of that performance is naturally secret.

But what nobody knew until after the Liddy indictment was that someone told another reporter about the Plame "outing" one month earlier than originally believed.

Bob Woodward was that reporter.

Down from his pedestal and into a court – his first time ever before a court – to talk about this early knowledge he had about Plame. He is the Assistant Managing Editor on the Washington Post. Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. was not told about the interview or the verbal contract assuring confidentiality for that unnamed source.

Wait a minute here, isn’t this THE Bob Woodward who brought down a criminal president with the aid of the "Deep Throat" source and close support from his editor and publisher three decades ago?

Why isn’t Woodward going to his editor?

Well, it was partly because some or all of the interview was connected with a book that Woodward was writing.

Oh, so that’s an explanation.

Bob Woodward the author supplanted Bob Woodward the reporter. So his editor didn’t know. And Woodward never mentioned it, until Fitzgerald pressed. And now Woodward’s information actually changes the assemblage of fact on which Fitzgerald built his case against Libby. What; Woodward’s facts change everything?

So it seems.

So there is the possibility that Libby might walk because of Woodward’s testimony? And if the person Woodward talked with will not give up his confidentiality, what happens next? Woodward himself sounds like a Bush lapdog here.

He says the whole case is not really a big one, no real harm done because Plame is a small character in the overall picture. Oh?

Is that not,  really,  the court’s decision to make?

What Woodward has done is what many men do as they mature; he has changed.

As a young reporter without assets, or valuables or even professional standing to worry about, he could go sneaking around in ill-lighted garages and talk to "Deep Throat," now revealed as the FBI’s former number two man, W. Mark Felt, about developments in the White House, then strive to get a couple more reliable sources to confirm the scenario and then publish the results.

Now Woodward has legal contracts and loads of money from the other books he has written on the same presidential turf. He has become a mature man and has the responsibilities of late middle age, therefore there is a temptation to act partly as a businessman in addition to his traditional professional role as a journalist/editor.

All of that led Woodward down a path where he decided on his own whether confidential information related to a later book in progress, and not to a current news story, which if that was the case did not necessitate a discussion with the senior editor; Woodward seems to have become adept at splitting hairs.

One of those hairs is of course that of a businessman – the book author.

If he is a reporter, his first and most important duty is to let his editor in on the contacts and discuss what questions to ask and what to do with the answers. Even if his editor is kept in the dark on the source’s identity, he has a duty to know what his reporter is doing. Woodward forfeited any immediate journalistic backup when he decided to go it alone with this clandestine mission. This must have been, and it must remain, heartwarming for Bush.

Here Mr. Bush has the reporter who drove Republican Richard Nixon into shame and humility through the revelation of Nixon’s villainy, who is now fouling up the investigation of the Plame leak by drawing into question all the carefully laid plans that U.S. attorney Fitzgerald has put together. How satisfying this must be for Bush, Rove, et al. Of course, Woodward is accomplishing this somewhat inadvertently, because he got so tangled in his multi-professional goals that he could not act as a proper reporter.

So a journalistic icon, Bob Woodward, in the end becomes a pawn in Mr. Bush’s overall game, which clearly seems all along designed for one goal; take the minds of the American people off the real issues and put their focus on something simpler, something easier to handle and less threatening to the GOP agenda.

And what better way to deflate the press than to render Robert Woodward toothless. This will not be a question of fact. No, no, that is not the game here. Bush hasn’t battled over facts, ever. It will be a public opinion joust between the Bush people and the Woodward and Fitzgerald types. It seems clear that Bush will wipe the floor with them. He eschews truth. Tell a big lie, tell it again, have others tell it, and keep on telling it, no matter what is said about it, until it seems like it must either be the truth or have truth to it.

Mr. Bush’s objective is successful business profits, which he assures by keeping government out of the way of businesspeople. Anything that threatens business profit is simply in the way. Facts are handy tools at times, but they aren’t necessary. Paving the way for the rich and powerful is all that matters.

What faces news writers now is a brand new problem, one that will be difficult.

It will be necessary to reject all the governmental "news" from Republicans and Democrats alike, taking no official position as though it is a true take on the facts at hand.

A good start is to recognize that the opposite of Republican is not Democrat. Democrats and Republicans both hide facts to keep government power. The fight between the two parties is far too often sham battles that make citizens think that they are involved in some sort of prize fight, choosing a favorite, as opposed to staking their votes on what candidate and what party best represents democracy and fairness first and public interests immediately thereafter.

It used to be smoke-filled rooms where old political bosses pushed forward candidates and agendas, but those days ironically weren’t so bad compared to today’s world where big money fuels narrow, agenda driven politics through various lobbying and front groups that buy TV and media ad space. Power is wielded by private men who control obscene amounts of money, which can be allocated to media campaigns where truth is only a scant consideration.

Those men always seem to win.

And make no mistake about it; they will control the press as long as the concept of ‘objective reporting’ constrains the so-called ‘responsible’ main-stream media but does not at all restrict the agenda driven right-wing TV, radio and press outlets, who spew their twisted news and class hatreds at millions of Americans every day while hiding behind the innocent belief of so many Americans that if it isn’t true it couldn’t be published or disseminated on the public airwaves.

America, luckily, has Internet, but how effective it will be, given its vast diversity, is open to debate. Pessimistically, it may be too little too late, or optimistically, it may lead to a ground swell of understanding that will undercut the radical right-wing agenda of the Republican Party.