Hersh, Woodward are still the best in the business

Both Sy Hersh and Bob Woodward made their first major national impact as scruffy outsiders -- Hersh in 1969, when he broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, Woodward in 1972, when he and Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate story.

Hersh is still a scruffy outsider. Woodward is neither. But both are now back in the news -- and influencing the news -- in a big way.

Hersh wrote a story for the May 10 issue of the New Yorker, disclosing for the first time the existence and the contents of a report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba detailing “numerous instances of ‘sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses’ at Abu Ghraib,” the U.S. military prison outside Baghdad. Hersh followed up last week with a compelling account of “how the Department of Defense mishandled the disaster at Abu Ghraib.”

These stories are but the latest in a series of powerful, exclusive stories Hersh has written for the New Yorker since Sept. 11, stories that this month earned him a National Magazine Award for public interest reporting. Hersh, the judges said, “gave New Yorker readers an early sense of the intelligence-gathering miscues so widely debated in recent months.”

Woodward has just published his 12th book, “Plan of Attack,” a fly-on-the-wall look at what the Bush administration was saying and doing during the run-up to war in Iraq. One thing they were saying and doing was moving more quickly toward bombing Baghdad than they were willing to admit at the time.

Inside moves

In the years since Watergate, Woodward has inexorably become the consummate Washington insider -- smooth, well-mannered, seemingly on a first-name basis with every power broker in the capital. A couple of his recent books have been so flattering to certain members of Washington’s chattering class that many critics have accused him of selling out. President Bush was apparently so grateful for Woodward’s treatment of him as a decisive, fearless leader in his previous book, “Bush at War,” that he not only made himself available for 3 1/2 hours of extraordinary, on-the-record interviews before the bombing began in Baghdad, he also told more than 75 members of his administration to cooperate with Woodward as well.

No one would ever call Sy Hersh smooth or well-mannered. He screams, bellows, snarls, curses and often ends even the friendliest of conversations by abruptly slamming the phone down so hard that the person at the other end risks a perforated ear drum. And the idea that the president -- any president -- would invite Hersh in for hours of cozy tete-a-tete, well, let’s just say Michael Moore would be a more likely White House parlor guest.

But their divergent styles notwithstanding, both Hersh and Woodward continue to lead the journalistic pack. They are, quite simply, the best and most influential reporters of their generation.

They are not alone, of course, in doing excellent work. Many reporters came of age at a time when journalism was seen as a calling and an obligation, not a steppingstone to fame and fortune. But the work of Hersh and Woodward stands out, all the more so in a media climate that has spawned of late not only the three notorious serial liars -- Jayson Blair at the New York Times, Stephen Glass at the New Republic and Jack Kelley at USA Today -- but many more journalists whose sins are misdemeanors, not felonies, sins of omission rather than commission.

When I got my first reporting job 40 years ago, the two mantras that I heard repeatedly about the journalist’s role in society were:

1. Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable (attributed to Finley Peter Dunne, who wrote the nationally syndicated “Mr. Dooley” columns in the late 19th and early 20th centuries).

2. “Speak truth to power.” (attributed to I.F. Stone, the fearless, pioneering investigative journalist who published his own weekly newspaper from 1953 until his death in 1989).

But today, in an era of lucrative speaking engagements and book contracts -- not to mention ego-gratifying appearances on television chat shows and at Georgetown cocktail parties -- too many journalists seem more interested in being both comfortable and powerful themselves than in confronting their fellow-celebrity sources or comforting the less fortunate.

Desperate tactics

Too many young journalists today want to take shortcuts to fame and fortune, and that leads not only to the shameful fabrications but to the less-noticed, everyday shortcomings of inadequate reporting, overly imaginative writing and opinion masquerading as fact, posturing masquerading as analysis.

Unfortunately, virtually all the major media are struggling to retain their audiences as sources of information multiply and traditional news venues -- newspapers and network television in particular -- continue to lose market share. This leads the people who run many of these organizations to demand more, faster, not better, more carefully.

And what they want more of is scandal and sensationalism, celebrity and superficiality -- the kinds of quick-hit, attention-grabbing stories that are presumed to attract viewers and readers. These stories -- from Michael Jackson to Martha Stewart-- are also exactly the kinds of stories that encourage, indeed exacerbate the temptations and tendencies of some individual journalists.

They just don’t see -- or are too impatient to work for -- the long-term rewards that ultimately come to the most serious journalists and news organizations and, more important, to society as a whole from the kinds of persistent, hard-slogging, source-building reportage that both Hersh and Woodward have made careers of.

Don’t get me wrong: Hersh and Woodward are not perfect. Long before the Blair/Glass/Kelley scandals raised anew the issue of unnamed sources, I -- and others -- voiced concerns about how heavily both Hersh and Woodward have long relied on such sources.

I’ve interviewed both men on this subject and both stoutly defend their methods as the only way to bring truly important information to the public.

I’m a little more disturbed by Woodward’s sourcing than Hersh’s, for two reasons. One is that Hersh reports primarily in the nether world of intelligence gathering, and as he once told me, “Inside the intelligence community, if you give up a name, you’re dead.”

Woodward functions in the almost equally paranoid world of politics, but what concerns me the most about his books is the way in which he re-creates, verbatim, all these conversations he did not personally participate in. He says he bases these re-creations on the memory of as many participants as possible and on the contemporaneous note-taking, if there was any.

“Where thoughts, judgments or feelings are attributed to participants, I have obtained these from the person directly, a colleague with firsthand knowledge or the written record,” he says in “Plan of Attack.”

But as the childhood game Telephone has taught us all, even the most honest among us will not necessarily report accurately what we just said and/or heard. Consciously or not, we may embellish or forget certain words and phrases, either because of faulty memory or a desire to make ourselves look better (or someone else look worse) or because we were pre-disposed to hear (or to think we said) something in a certain way.

Still, Woodward, like Hersh, has strengths that far outweigh his weaknesses. Hersh’s work alone is enough to keep me subscribing to the New Yorker, and I’ll continue to buy and read every book Woodward writes. We, as Americans, are lucky to have them both still doggedly plying their trade.

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David Shaw can be reached at [email protected]. To read his previous “Media Matters” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-media.