The Fourth Estate now a Gated Community

I recently asked why the mainstream media hasn't been more aggressive in exploring the apparent power struggle between the CIA's Counterproliferation Division (in which Valeria Plame was an operative) and Dick Cheney (whose former company, Halliburton, was doing business with an Iranian nuclear energy negotiator and diplomatic specialist.). I wondered, where is my generation's Bernstein and Woodward to expose the admininstrations's lies and stratagems?

Turns out, the actual Woodward is now so embedded with Cheney he hasn't changed the sheets since the first inaugural, and Bernstein is making clucking-hen type excuses for him.

Washing ton Post, November 17, 2005; 1:45 AM:

Bob Woodward apologized to The Washington Post yesterday for failing to reveal for more than two years that a senior Bush administration official had told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame, even as an investigation of who disclosed her identity mushroomed into a national scandal.

"I apologized because I should have told him about this much sooner," Woodward, who testified in the CIA leak investigation Monday, said in an interview. "I explained in detail that I was trying to protect my sources. That's job number one in a case like this. . . . "I hunkered down. I'm in the habit of keeping secrets. I didn't want anything out there that was going to get me subpoenaed."

Editor and Publisher, November 16:

Watergate legend Carl Bernstein warned critics to back off heir attacks on his former partner Bob Woodward following this week’s disclosures that Woodward had testified in the Valerie Plame case, and had failed to inform Washington Post editors for two years about a confidential
conversation he’d had with a White House official. “I think there is an awful lot of piling on,” Bernstein told E&P. “It’s outrageous to question Bob’s integrity as some seem to be doing. Anyone who looks at the record knows that it is the most distinguished journalistic record of our time.”