The controversy over the Washington Post‘s Bob Woodward rages on. Is it isolated, personal, or does it mark the end of a kind of journalism and journalism sourcing?
OUR VIEW: When Bernstein and Woodward wrote “All The President’s Men” and did their “investigative journalism” series of award-winning Watergate stories for the Post, those stories didn’t really rely on “access journalism.” But, in the post-Watergate era, when Woodward became a lofty journalist presence — above the peons who toiled on the daily, boilerplate stories — he shifted to a now-it-can-be-told journalism that seemingly relied less on wear-out-the-shoes reporting and cultivating key sources to a journalism that relied on becoming a fly-on-the-wall.
The problem: how can you become a fly-on-the-wall unless you somehow get into the room?
So it all comes back to: How did he gain the cooperation and access?
That isn’t to say it was unethical, or that access was gained by brownie points. But, once he gained that access, did it lead to a common journalistic dilemma?
If you have X sources who cooperate and give you info, and Y who don’t give you info, when you write it, who will look better? If the Y sources don’t, X will look better. And do you tend to give the benefit of the doubt more to people who cooperate with you?
Yours truly has read many of Woodward’s books and they are often detailed, well-crafted and at times not totally engrossing. But they are packed with inside accounts of what happened and the thoughts of some of those involved.
Here? The stakes are so high on Plamegate that it has brought into focus (with a slam as hard as being slammed against a police car and being handcuffed) the dilemma and journalistic ethics questions involved in “access reporting.” Does access journalism by its nature compromise its practitioner? Can a journalist who relies so heavily on it be detached enough not go give those from whom he got cooperation the benefit of the doubt…no matter what?
UPDATE: And John Amato has some questions for journalist David Corn.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.