I want to join the debate about whether Bart's picture of Cheney is negative or objective (or, if you find "objective" too problematic a term, let's say fair, impartial, unbiased, or some other similar word). I think it's both.

First a little background: I think it's a good thing that we have news media outlets in this country that aspire to be objective and non-partisan, and it's good that the journalists who work for them strive to keep their personal political opinions from influencing their duty to report the news without fear or favor. For all the heat that the Washington Post and the New York Times take from the left and the right, they are national treasures. You might find bias in a gossipy story about a picked-over issue like Hillary Clinton's possible appointment at State (the Times recently used the occasion to flog a long-dead story about a speech Bill Clinton once gave in Kazakhstan), but when Lehman Brothers collapses or war ravages the Congo, we turn desperately to these papers--implicitly acknowledging their indispensable role as disinterested providers of news. And when Bart and Jo Becker, or James Risen, or Dana Priest, or Charlie Savage any number of the other superb reporters at these (and other) papers disclose valuable information to the public about lawless, duplicitous, or improper actions about the Bush administration, they are not acting from any liberal or anti-Bush bias. They are acting from a sense of professional duty.

All of which is a long way of saying that I can see why Bart wants to protect his reputation as not having it in for Cheney. And I don't think anyone reading Angler could conclude that he has it in for Cheney. Too often in the past eight years, we've seen the armies of the right seek to discredit a messenger because they don't like the message--Richard Clarke and Joe Wilson come to mind as victims of this sort of attack--and reporters have not been spared. Bart has taken pains to write a well reported, fact-heavy, closely argued account of some of the most shocking cases of Cheney's use of power from his vice presidential perch. He avoids cheap shots, invective, and even explicit political and moral judgments. It's not "prosecutorial," and I didn't mean to imply that I thought it was. I imagine Angler has found many readers not just among confirmed Cheney haters but also on the right. Future historians will rely on it.

But I don't think anyone can deny that it is, in the end, a negative portrait of Cheney--based not on bias but on the accumulation of material that can only reflect ill on Cheney overall. I agree with Jacob's post that in the course of writing a book like this, your selection of material itself is a choice that influences the tone of the book. I don't see this as a criticism--and when I said that Bart's praise for Cheney's skills as an infighter amounted to a form of damnation, that wasn't meant critically either. To say the Cheney that emerges from this book is a menacing or malign figure is not to call the book a hit job or to impugn Bart's objectivity as a reporter.

Our journalism these days is filled with circular and unproductive debates about bias and objectivity. Most of it fails to reckon with something that many of the muckrakers of Lincoln Steffens' and Ray Stannard Baker's era knew: that reporting in the service of exposing high-level wrongdoing could be both "objective," in that the facts stood up to independent verification from any angle, and "adversarial" in that it revealed unflattering or even appalling aspects of government officials (or any other subject). So I think Bart has clearly given us a "negative" portrait of Cheney, but only because that it what his fair-minded reporting has unearthed.