Deep Throat Cover Blown; Washington Post Still Sucks

[progressoid]

I've been gagging all morning on the Washington Post's self-congratulatory preening about its glory days of the Watergate investigation.

Think about it. It's been 33 years since cub reporters Woodward and Bernstein pulled down the pants of the Nixon operation and exposed its tie-in to the Watergate burglary. That marks a third of a century since the Washington Post has broken a major investigative story. I got a hint of why the long, dry spell when I met Mark Hosenball, "investigative" reporter for the Washington Post's magazine, Newsweek.

It was in the summer of 2001. A few months earlier, for the Guardian papers of Britain, I'd discovered that Katherine Harris and Governor Jeb Bush of Florida had removed tens of thousands of African-Americans from voter registries before the 2000 election, thereby fixing the race for George Bush. Hosenball said the Post-Newsweek team "looked into it and couldn't find anything."....


MORE: http://www.gregpalast.com/

[autorank]

1. Oh How I Love Washington Post Bashing!!! Thanks progressoid!

They are the very worst because they ALL know better.

Make this mandatory reading in all journalism schools. :rofl:

[napi21]

2. You might not like the WP, but it's still the best paper quoted on

cspan every morning. I listen all the time, and the best articles come from them.

[Inland]

3. All our institutions living in the (happier) legendary past.

Cheney uses WWII as proof that Americans are sacrificing for freedom when we send our troops abroad, Watergate reporting is used as proof our press still works, the congress pretends to be representing the people but isn't.

It's like the middle aged guy whose self image is still the college kid with a full set of hair and thirty fewer pounds.

[progressoid]

5. Hey - I'm only 20 pounds heavier now.

Oh, sorry. I took that personally.

It is interesting that this is THE story after over 3 decades. The press has been riding this wave for quite a long time.

[Inland]

12. Are you sure?

Can you stand up to a good hard look?

The press sure can't. All the press can do now is put on cable TV those felons from the bygone days and show "both sides of the story", the side for uncovering corruption that was worked from the Oval Office to the very mechanics of elections, and the side who thought the real crime was that it was uncovered and people punished for it.

I used to say that I was a democrat because the repubs had to go back to Lincoln to find a president they were proud of, and the dems only had to go back to FDR. The press has to go back to 1973, without so much as a passing note on what's been lost. Not even a bit of nostalgia. Disgusting and pathetic.

[OldLeftieLawyer]

4. Wouldn't Katharine Graham be proud?

Her golden boy, Ben Bradlee, and his creations, Woodstein, scooped by Vanity Fair, which had passed on the story a year earlier, choosing not to pay for the story. Ha!

Then Felt's lawyer and daughter tried shopping the story to publishers, hoping to get a book deal, but got bupkes. So they went back to Vanity Fair, which went for it the second time around, still not paying a cent.

I think Felt's daughter has pulled a fast one on Woodstein and everyone else. He's senile, so he's untouchable; she's looking to make some money, as she says in the VF article, to "help pay some of these bills." Her sons have tuition bills, among other things, or so it seems.

I think Woodstein made up the notion of "Deep Throat," denied all these years that it was a composite, and now have had their glory stolen by Felt and his daughter and grandson because they absolutely cannot call him a liar without giving away that their story was bogus, and that there never was one "Deep Throat."

There's a bizarre Felt family history that's very quickly glossed over in the VF article, too, and the Post stayed miles away from it. As an old neighbor of W. Mark Felt, I find that more interesting than the Deep Throat stuff.

[ClintonTyree]

6. Say what you like....

but it's got the Moonie Times beat all to hell. Don't get me wrong, I'm NOT a big fan of the Post, but the "reverend" moon can kiss my ever loving ass.

[progressoid]

9. Yeah

I can't immagine what a sorry state we would be in if we only had Moon's paper in DC.

Palast has a bit of a grudge against the media. During the Clinton years, his investigative reporting was reviled by the Clinton WH. He doesn't pull any punches. And I think he has a utopian view of his profession that the media have never met.

[EVDebs]

7. Here's my favorite part of Palast's article !

"Today, Bob Woodward, rules as the Post's Managing Editor. And how is he "managing" the news? After the September 11 attack, when we needed an independent press to keep us from hysteria-driven fascism, Woodward was given "access" to the president, writing Bush at War,a fawning, puke-making fairy tale of a take-charge president brilliantly leading the war against Terror.

Woodward's news-oid story is a symptom of a disease epidemic in US journalism. The illness is called, "access." In return for a supposedly "inside" connection to the powers that be, the journalists in fact become conduits for disinformation sewerage.

And woe to any journalist who annoys the politicians and loses "access." Career-wise, they're DOA."

Bob Woodward is what he is: a former (?) Naval Intelligence officer who uses his connections to advance stories that just so happen to advance his higher-ups needs.

Just read
www.webcom.com/ctka/pr196-woodward.html
his biography and Jim Hougan's book Secret Agenda. And Robert Bennett should get some credit as a "deep throat" source too. Pity that the MSM won't even speak to him about it.

[otohara]

8. Oh This Is Rich - Mr. Bush & The Press WP Editorial

Bush figured finally figured out having more press conferences was no big deal. After all, they never ask him any hard questions.


Mr. Bush and the Press


Wednesday, June 1, 2005; Page A18

ONE OF THE unattractive distinctions of President Bush's first term was his inaccessibility to reporters. Through his reelection last November, Mr. Bush met the press for full-scale, solo news conferences just 15 times. During one journalistic dry spell in 2003, the president went five months without holding a solo news conference. White House officials argued that Mr. Bush disdained the formal news conference, with its self-promoting reporters and "gotcha" mentality, and they said he was available to reporters in other venues, answering news-of-the-day questions in quick encounters or holding mini-news conferences. But these are inadequate, watered-down alternatives -- Question Time Lite -- and in any event these sessions, too, were often scarce.

We write, though, not to criticize Mr. Bush's performance during his first term but to praise that of his second. Yesterday the president held his seventh news conference in as many months (and that doesn't count a session with newspaper editors in April at which Mr. Bush answered questions).


The scoffers will say that these once-a-month events haven't yielded much in the way of news: One news service led its account of yesterday's session by quoting Mr. Bush as saying, "I feel comfortable in my role"; another had him saying the Iraqi government was "plenty capable" of defeating the insurgents; a third touted Mr. Bush's assessment that the U.S. economy is thriving. The scoffers will say, too, that Mr. Bush is making himself available only because -- take your pick -- he no longer has to worry about being reelected, or he finds his agenda floundering so badly he has no choice but to submit to the indignity of a news conference.

To be honest, we don't care. Neither Mr. Bush's motives nor the headlines he generates matters much. The point is that in a democratic society, leaders ought to make themselves regularly available for sustained questioning. On that score, Mr. Bush doesn't approach the performance of his father, who held 83 solo news conferences in his single term. But the second Bush term represents a dramatic improvement from the first in terms of presidential accessibility. That, in itself, may be the headline.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/31/AR2005053101598.html

[progressoid]

10. Oh, jeez.

That's just pathetic.

[Jack Rabbit]

11. This is revealing of how the MSM works

During the Clinton years, the Washington Post and Newsweek allowed reporter Mike Isikoff to sniff at the President's zipper and write about our Commander-in-Chief's Lewinsky. But when it came to a big story about dirty energy industry money for Clinton's campaigns, Mike told me his editors didn't "give a sh--" and so he passed the material for me to print in England.

Palast doesn't make it sound like Isikoff is happy about the situation. And Palast, a true patriot, would have preferred to see that news in US publications where they belong rather than given to him for publication in Britain.

[Karenina]

13. Kick!

:kick: