James Wolcott: Greg Palast Makes Sense

Notably, this:

Journalistic sanitation engineer Greg Palast traces the path of a major pipeline from Karl Rove's mouth into the Beltway's elite stenography pool, landing one of them in the slammer.

"The great poison in the corpus of American journalism is the lust for tidbits of supposedly 'inside' information which is more often than not inside misinformation parading as hot news [or noninformation, such as Elisabeth Bumiller's Pulitzer-courting bombshell about Bush's absorption in Tom Wolfe's wretchedly written I Am Charlotte Simmons].

"And thus we have [Judith] Miller sucking on the steaming sewage pipe of White House lies about Iraq and spitting it out in the pages of The Times as 'investigative reporting,' for which The Times has apologized. Likewise, we had the embarrassment of Bob Woodward's special access to the Oval Office after the September 11 attacks when Woodward reported the exclusive news that the President was a flawless commander in chief in the war on terror -- for which Woodward has yet to apologize.

"While reporting from the Potemkin village of decision-making set up for him at the White House, Woodward missed the real story that, in the words of the Downing Street memo, our leaders were losing track of Osama while they spent their time 'fixing the intelligence' on Iraq. Even if Woodward learned of it, would he have reported it at the risk of losing his access to evil?"