"Murray Waas is Our Woodward Now"

[DeepModem Mom]

PressThink: Murray Waas is Our Woodward Now
By Jay Rosen, Associate Professor, NYU School of Journalism

....The guy’s name is Murray Waas; he’s an independent journalist who recently went to work as a staff writer for the National Journal and the Atlantic Media Company, which owns the Atlantic Monthly, the Journal, and other titles. Waas has been in the game since he was 18, when he started working for the columnist Jack Anderson.

By Woodward Now I mean the reporter who is actually doing what Woodward has a reputation for doing: finding, tracking, breaking into reportable parts—and then publishing—the biggest story in town. He’s also putting those parts together for us.

The Biggest Story in Town (almost a term of art in political Washington) is the one that would cause the biggest earthquake if the facts sealed inside it started coming out now. Today the biggest story in town is what really went down as the Bush team drove deceptively to war, and later tried to conceal how bad the deception—and decision-making—had been.

We are still “in” that story today, as is the press (deeply in it) and so a lot rides on what comes out.

Not only is Woodward not in the hunt, but he is slowly turning into the hunted. Part of what remains to be uncovered is how Woodward was played by the Bush team, and what they thought they were doing by leaking to him, as well as what he did with the dubious information he got— especially since, as the Washington Post reported on April 9, evidence leaked by Scooter Libby to Woodward on June 27, 2003 “had been disproved months before.”...

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/

[BlooInBloo]

1. Hm. I woulda said it was Hersch.