woodward: vichy journalist

more on woodward

Woodward also spoke with Libby on June 23. Yet the punctilious investigative reporter, who maintains a special vault to house all his tapes and notes, claims he can't find his notes from that conversation.
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Woodward, for his part, met at least twice with Libby during the same frenetic month as Miller, whom he angrily defends as a victim of Fitzgerald's "junkyard-dog" tactics. He and Libby and his boss Cheney go way back. Woodward is so compromised by his friendship with the powerful men that he agreed to submit written questions in advance to Cheney, giving the evil warmonger license to spin – something he doesn't bother to disclose to readers in his exclusive, "behind-the-scenes" book on Iraq. The list of questions ran 18 pages long. That's not journalism. That's collaboration.
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Woodward proves that access doesn't necessarily translate into truth in Washington. Woodward was used by this White House to help justify its corrupt war in Iraq in the middle of a war on al-Qaeda. Why else does he think a "very closed and secretive White House," as Woodward himself has described it, would suddenly open up "all" its notes to meetings over the war and grant him a three-hour interview with a president who refuses to admit he's wrong about anything? C'mon, does he really think they gave him anything other than what they wanted him to have? Of course, they were sly enough to slip him controversies and conflicts to make it all look credulous.