No Longer Ready For His Closeup

Could there be a more striking, ironic and almost surreal microcosm of the deterioration of journalism over the past few years than this? One would have been hard-pressed to even make this one up. It's almost Shakespearean. I've often wondered why Woodward so adamantly and so strangely dismissed the importance of Plamegate, and now we know. Honest question: does someone like Woodward realize what he's become? Or is he like Norma Desmond, surrounded by yellowing three decades-old press clippings of Watergate and convinced he's still got game? Maybe that's a question about journalism in general; do caricatures, water-carriers, shills and sell-outs (of which there is no shortage these days, as we've seen recently) realize what they are, or have they managed to deceive themselves? If it's the former, it must be horrible to put on the mask of intellectual dishonesty every day just to pay the mortgage, tuition, and kids' orthodontist bills. I realize many people do that---not just journalists. But when journalists do it, it happens in plain sight. And when journalists who once redefined their profession do it, it's tragic.

You can put this story in the "reasons why newspapers are seeing dramatic declines in circulation" file. Jayson Blair, Judy Miller, Bob Woodward---the hits keep coming. Just when I think I can't get any more outraged about how a chummy media clique in Georgetown and on the Upper West Side passed around the Plame story like some secret plaything before the hapless public finally got clued in, we get another revelation and another instance of how media insiders showed utter disdain for their readers/viewers and unwarranted and inappropriate respect for their "sources."

A few nights ago, I had dinner with a friend of mine who used to be a reporter at a big city daily and has since moved on to another line of work. He said he recently visited his former colleagues at the paper and that it was like returning to the salt mines: malaise and despair was the mood there, with everyone looking for a way out. On one hand, I say screw 'em---in large measure, they've done it to themselves by putting the reader at the bottom of the totem pole (one reason why, beyond Gretchen Morgenson, I rarely read the New York Times now after doing so daily and obsessively for many years). But I also think the deterioration in both journalistic standards and the industry's financial viability is incredibly dangerous. Now more than ever, we desperately need the type of reporter Bob Woodward was thirty years ago when---instead of becoming venture capitalists or investment bankers---the smartest and most ambitious students wanted to be journalists. We seem to be in a "tweener" period for the news media; the old guard has gone insider and abdicated for the veneer of personal and professional stability provided by corporate ownership, but nothing has quite stepped up to fill the role that is absolutely crucial to any democracy. Are blogs part of the answer?