Howie Kurtz from inside the WP -- pretty good report re. Woodward mystery.

Howie begins his column by reporting on a surreal moment: standing with Bob Woodward, as Post editor Leonard Downie defended him on MSNBC's "Hardball" and answered increasingly uncomfortable questions from Chris Matthews. Howie then reports extensive excerpts from coverage of the Woodward affair from both MSM and blogs. This excerpt from the column is indicative of the mystery and confusion surrounding the whole thing:


....Downie, who was informed by Woodward late last month, said his most famous employee had "made a mistake." Despite Woodward's concerns about his confidential sources, Downie said, "he still should have come forward, which he now admits. We should have had that conversation. . . . I'm concerned that people will get a mis-impression about Bob's value to the newspaper and our readers because of this one instance in which he should have told us sooner."...

***

Shortly after Woodward's conversation with Downie in late October, a federal grand jury indicted Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in the Plame case. Woodward told Fitzgerald that he met with Libby on June 27, 2003, but that he does not recall discussing Plame or her husband, White House critic and former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

Fitzgerald has spent nearly two years investigating whether administration officials illegally leaked Plame's name to the media to discredit Wilson.

Exactly what triggered Woodward's disclosure to Downie remains unclear. Woodward said yesterday that he was "quite aggressively reporting" a story related to the Plame case when he told Downie about his involvement as the term of Fitzgerald's grand jury was set to expire on Oct. 28.

The administration source who originally told Woodward about Plame approached the prosecutor recently to alert him to his 2003 conversation with Woodward. The source had not yet contacted Fitzgerald when Woodward notified Downie about their conversation, Woodward said....

"The Woodward Bombshell"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100587.html

I suspect he got a call from his source just before the source made contact with the special prosecutor. The put Woodward in between a rock and a hard place...he had to come clean and tell the editor.

What bugs me is Woodward's silence about all of this. The timing is very suspect, however as it relates to the source. Either this source knew Karl was going to be singing his name as part of his 'cooperation', or this source wants the topic to stay front and center. The source HAD to know this would be making the newsrounds; that's why he put conditions on his confidentiality waiver with Woodward. I wonder what the motivations were of this source to come forward...

Had to do a modified limited hangout with his editor.

namely conflict of interest. How can the guy be a media reporter and criticize the media on CNN when he writes for the Washington Post? What has happened to our press?

to the highest bidding publicly held corporations. The pressitutes are not in the jobs to serve the public good.

That's one way of putting it. Acted utterly without honor. Lied and decieved. Shilled. Sold out all of his professional credibility...

These are some other ways of putting it. I bet we can think of more.

By withholding information from a criminal investigation? Should he have not come forward? Would that have been illegal?

"Woodward has criticized the Fitzgerald probe in media appearances. He said on MSNBC's "Hardball" in June that in the end "there is going to be nothing to it. And it is a shame. And the special prosecutor in that case, his behavior, in my view, has been disgraceful." In a National Public Radio interview in July, Woodward said that Fitzgerald made "a big mistake" in going after Miller and that "there is not the kind of compelling evidence that there was some crime involved here."

Rieder said it was "kind of disingenuous" for Woodward to have made such comments without disclosing his involvement.

Liberal blogger Josh Marshall wrote: "By becoming a partisan in the context of the leak case without revealing that he was at the center of it, really a party to it, he wasn't being honest with his audience."


Earlier, a critic said he was fully into "access journalism." When you are dependent on sources for very lucrative book deals, you should recuse yourself from any coverage of, or comment on, those sources. In other words, Woodward should not be reporting in any way on the Bush administration when they hold the keys to his next book. He knows this. He knows what book he is working on. It's very simple ethics. I think he's in big trouble, deservedly, and I am getting sick of these guys hiding behind "sources." Both Woodward and Miller had very lucrative book deals; in the old-fashioned world I live in, you take a leave of absence or leave the paper altogether to write books based on your reporting. This is a Church and State issue, and newspapers should just not allow their reporters to serve two masters. It's one thing for Dave Barry to publish humor books; it's quite another to publish a serious book about issues on which you're still reporting about people who you will have to cover again. It leads to dishonest reporting and bad books. Woodward and Miller have written basically worthless books, because if they told everything they knew, access would be cut off instantly.

Howard Kurtz was allowed to report on Schwarzenegger's campaign while his wife was Arnold's press secretary!

The owners and editors of that paper pretty much let anything pass- which is why they have about as much credibility as the WSJ editorial page.

spin. And his behavior writing about Ahhhnold...was unethical given that his wife worked on his Campaign and is a Repug PR Specialist and is probably working on other issues for Repugs while Howie writes and has an hour long show on CNN.

water, imo:

"Booby's story just doesn't make any sense. Why would you grant confidentiality to something which is 'almost gossip' and told to you in an 'offhand manner.' What ethical issue prevented you from telling the world that an administration source had given you that information as you could do so without revealing the identity of the source? Why could you not tell the world about this when you felt free to share the information with Pincus (denied by him)."

It lays bare the deliberate lies Woodward was telling the public while fallaciously acting as a dispassionate observer that it was merely 'gossip'. If he had believed that then there was no confidence to keep.

that's why he finally said something, he had to.

Who turned on Woodward and gave his name to Fitzpatrick?

I could spit, but, so far, I don't think he's been too bad on Woodward's behavior. I'm guessing Woodward at this point is about as popular in the WP newsrooms as Judy Miller is in the halls of the NYT.