Missing The Story

by digby

This little chat with Len Downie from the Post this morning is far less revealing than the “water-cooler” message board of yesterday, but it’s interesting in one respect. (Check out this excellent analysis of that embarrassing inside look at the WaPo social and professional hierarchy from Glen Greenwald.)

Downie does a great Scott McLellan impression by being robotically unresponsive, but nobody really asks the right question either. Woodward’s public statements were egregious but not because he was stating his personal opinion and breaking the Washington Post’s rules — they were egregious because of the opinions themselves. It’s clear that he’s on the side of the social climbing tut-tutters like that mincing fop Richard Cohen:

COHEN: I‘ve said for a long time—I‘ve agreed with Bob on this. I didn‘t know why Bob was feeling so strongly about it.

But no matter what, it‘s a silly case—it‘s a silly case about nothing much and it‘s doing a lot of damage. I mean, you now have to worry about getting subpoenaed for doing routine reporting, you have to worry about your sources worrying that they‘re going to be revealed. It‘s done nobody any good.

The prosecutor didn‘t bring an indictment relating to the original underlying crime. It‘s an indictment about a cover-up. I mean, it‘s the Martha Stewart thing all over again. It‘s not the crime itself, it‘s not admitting to the crime or the alleged crime or whatever it is…

think in this case—I mean, maybe then I‘m as ignorant as the next guy, but I read that original Novak column and I said so. I didn‘t think a big deal about it. So she was a CIA operative. It didn‘t jump out at me that there was a possible violation of the law.

I think there were a lot of people in Washington, clearly there were a lot of people in Washington and at the White House who were saying, “Hey, if you really want to know why Wilson went to Africa, it was because his wife sent him.”

It seems to me routine dirty politics. It is what Washington does all the time.

Pittsburgh used to do steel; Washington does character assassination.

I’m surprised he didn’t pull out a snuff box and take a big ‘ol snort right there on TV. Not since Leona Helmsley have we seen such bored contempt for bourgeois notions like open government and honest political discourse. (Cohen agrees with his soul mate Karl Rove on that,by the way, who testified before the grand jury that “discrediting” Wilson with a full on character assassination was SOP.)

If politicians and the press want to know why they get no respect from the people, this is why. They openly defend dirty politics, pooh-pooh our outrage against it, and then expect us to look up to them.

Bob Woodward and Richard Cohen think that Fitzgerald is some sort of obsessed Javert chasing down the poor journalists and their sources over a little loaf of DC’s staff of life — the politics of personal destruction. To the rest of us, it’s clear that the law is the only institution left capable of sorting out the truth now that the press and the politicians are so cozy that it literally takes a threat of jail to get journalists to report important stories about our most powerful leaders.

Bob Woodward very likely knew on the day that Novak revealed that Wilson’s wife was CIA that this was a coordinated leak, not idle gossip. He most certainly knew that it was a coordinated leak when he found out that Libby and Rove had both “idly gossipped” about this to other reporters. Yet in his media appearances he made it quite clear that he believes that it was a trivial matter. I think we must take him at his word.

The elite press corps see the Nixonian dirty politics that have completely distorted our political discourse over the last 30 years as social currency. Swift-boating and McCain’s black daughter and Linda Trip’s tapes and Al Gore’s suits are entertainment to them and the dissemination of this entertainment buys them access for what they think are their “serious” stories. We are told to just “get over” partisan impeachments, stolen elections and even lying about nuclear weapons.

Richard Cohen and his ilk believed that dirty politics are what Washington “does” the way that Hollywood makes movies or Detroit makes cars while the rest of us rubes maintained the strange belief that Washington is supposed to serve the people. That’s the heart of this crisis in journalism. The elite press corps have completely missed the biggest political story of the last quarter century because they were having so much fun laughing and cavorting with their Republican sources that they failed to see that a powerful, criminal political machine was built upon the “trivial” acts of character assassination they found so amusing.

Update: I just realized I got a little nod in Howard Kurtz’s column this morning on this point. I guess I won’t be getting any invitations to the Christmas party at the Bradlee’s. (Just the thought of that ever even being considered makes me chuckle.)

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