Swallow This, Deep Throat

What we get instead is 60 Minutes and the blatant sob-sisterism of Beltway insider Bob Woodward, who, in promoting Plan of Attack, his new book on the “run-up to the war,” spoke of the moment when Bush declared war on Iraq: “People who were there said there were tears in his eyes, not coming down his cheeks but in his eyes.”

Very Joan Crawford.

Maybe we’re supposed to be impressed that even though 60 Minutes won’t name those interviewed, the show’s producers tell us that Woodward permitted them “to listen to tapes he recorded of his most important interviews, to read the transcripts, and to verify that the quotes he uses are based on recollections from participants in the key meetings.”

But besides Bush’s butch blubbering, what’s in the book? Petty gossip about Dick Cheney and Colin Powell disliking each other, and the disclosure that CIA head George Tenet assured Bush that it was a “slam-dunk case” regarding Saddam Hussein’s mythical Weapons of Mass Destruction. So Woodward gets his story, Bush gets his fall guy, and all the sources, except for Bush himself, are as silent as the graves of thousands of Iraqis we slaughtered in “Show and Awe.”

“The public has lost its trust in journalism, and I’m not entirely convinced it isn’t justified,” says Okrent. He, like Michael Getler, the “ombudsman” of the Washington Post, and David Shaw, the “media critic” of the Los Angeles Times (who declined to be interviewed for this article), has clearly been mandated to restore standards in the wake of the incessantly discussed Jayson Blair, whose fabrication of fairly trivial stories, replete with invented sources, led to his firing and the resignation of top New York Times editor Howell Raines and ceaseless breast-beating elsewhere in the fourth estate about the supposed peril of “affirmative action” — Blair being black and therefore suspect a priori. But to many observers Blair is beside the point when it comes to the Times “turning a new leaf.”

“It’s all PR,” scoffs Nation scribe and author Eric Alterman, who, on tour for his most recent work (The Book on Bush), speaks excitedly of a public attuned to Bush administration outrages and eager to hear from a press involved in something other than perpetual fealty to the powers that be. “The Times has apologized for Jayson Blair, but it hasn’t apologized for Judith Miller!” says Alterman. “That I’d like to see!”

Miller, a Pulitzer Prize winner of until recently no small journalistic repute has long been considered a large feather in the Times’ cap. But her reporting on Iraq, in which claims concerning Saddam Hussein’s apparently mythical weapons of mass destruction were made through her by both a clearly identified Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress and an unidentified man in a baseball cap “standing off in the distance,” who military “sources” had told Miller had told them about them has been widely — and deservedly — criticized. So much so that a recent Times profile of Chalabi (“Chalabi, Nimble Exile, Searches for Role in Iraq,” March 26) was assigned to a less-than-completely-impressed Dexter Filkins. (Miller did not respond to an e-mail seeking her side of the story.)

“[Jayson] Blair and [Judith] Miller have more in common than you might think,” Alterman’s Nation colleague Russ Baker pointed out in a recent column. “Both are in trouble for giving readers dubious information. While Miller’s alleged improprieties are of a more subtle nature, and she comes into this rough patch with an estimable reputation built over the course of a long and distinguished career, her case reveals a great deal about the state of today’s news media.”

And the most revealing thing, as author Michael Massing discloses in a much-discussed New York Review of Books article (“Now They Tell Us,” February 26, 2004) vetted by Miller herself, was that “Not until September 29, 2003, for instance, did The New York Timesget around to informing readers about the controversy over Chalabi and the defectors associated with him.”

“I’ve always felt that the use of unnamed sources should be restricted to those who are providing valuable, credible information at considerable risk to themselves,” Baker writes. “That is, they are revealing something that powerful people, including perhaps their own bosses or sponsors, wish to suppress. Miller and others like her have twisted the concept badly. Under their formula, powerful people get to float self-serving material. Basically, the Miller formula is a lazy and dishonest way of doing journalism. It goes like this: Promise the bosses at your paper that you will get scoops, then cut deals with highly placed individuals to serve as their conduit to the front pages. Not the kind of shoe-leather reporting I learned in journalism school.”

But “shoe leather” isn’t greatly prized in a “Beltway” culture. “Today’s top-drawer Washington news people,” veteran New York Times humor columnist Russell Baker notes, “are members of a highly educated, upper-middle-class elite; they belong to the culture for which the American system works exceedingly well. Which is to say, they are, in the pure sense of the word, extremely conservative. When I started out as a police reporter, I lived next door to a cop. Reporters don’t come out of those neighborhoods nowadays. We’ve all moved uptown.”