LAT: Tim Rutten
Regarding Media
Woodward joins a decadent dance
....Woodward's disclosure was motivated not by a sudden pang of conscience, as it turns out, but by the sudden necessity of testifying under oath before a federal grand jury. Along the way, he incidentally revealed not only that he had concealed this information from his editors and readers for fear of subpoena, but also that he had in the interim gone on several television shows to trash the special prosecutor investigating the affair. Moreover, it now emerges, the reporting that went into his last best-selling book, "Plan of Attack," involved the submission of written questions in advance to Vice President Dick Cheney, a fact he never bothered to share with the book's readers.
There is something singularly appropriate about the fact that the Plame affair should involve Woodward, whose skillful and courageous use of the ur-voice among confidential sources virtually created a whole genre of Washington reporting. It's a journalistic strategy style dependent on the cultivation of access to well-placed officials greased by promises of "confidentiality." It's a way of doing journalism that still serves its practitioners' career interests, but less and less often their readers or viewers because it's a game the powerful and well-connected have learned to play to their own advantage.
Whatever its self-righteous pretensions, it's a style of journalism whose signature sound is less the blowing of whistles than it is the spinning of tops.
That's why the Washington press corps, whose ranks include so many alleged commentators that you can't spit without hitting one, steadfastly refuses to put the Plame affair and its participants in the context that explains the event. That context is the Bush administration's unprecedented — and largely successful — effort to bend Washington-based news coverage to its ends. The Washington press corps doesn't want to talk about this because it basically puts some of its most admired members in a line of venal patsies....Placed in this context, Woodward, Miller, Time magazine's Matthew Cooper and NBC's Tim Russert are less tragic figures in a grand journalistic drama than they are sad — but willing — bit players in somebody else's rather sorry little charade....
***
It still may call itself investigative journalism — and so it once was — but now it's really just a glittering and carefully choreographed waltz in which all the dancers share the unspoken agreement that the one unpardonable faux pas is to ask who's calling the tune.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/cl-et-rutten19nov19,0,2580451.column?track=hpmostemailedlink 
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