I followed a link today to the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) web site. IRE is (in its own words): "...a grassroots nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the quality of investigative reporting."

 Who should be featured in an article about Accountability Reporting and Digging Deep? None other than Leonard Downie, Jr,  Executive Editor of the wapo until September 2008, and Bob Woodward. The irony hit me like a blast of hot desert air and almost took my breath away, or possibly just made me snort.  Here sat these two do-nothings on an Accountability  Reporting discussion panel while the best Accountability journalist at the wapo had just been fired.

Woodward is still riding on his Watergate laurels of course and says his "aggressiveness" failed him on the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, but neither of these men knows exactly why they didn't dig deeper.  (A little fuzzy logic and a few memos from the bushies is my guess.) 

 Woodward said, "Obviously, when you're going to war you want the evidence to be hard." Had Post reporters gotten together with Downie "to figure out what questions aren't answered," though, the editor "would have said, 'Get on that; let's mobilize.' We failed to mobilize on that."

And what did Downie have to say about it? "Downie responded by citing the complexity of the story judgments that were required to weed out all the inaccurate reports emerging in the days following the terrorist attacks."   TRANSLATION:  If we want to keep those WH memos coming, we'll  have to take the neocons' word for it.

 The Post didn't mobilized on the invasion issue, the torture issue, the warrantless spying issue, or the habeas corpus issue or...hmmm.  Anyone remember what issue they did mobilize on?  Ah, they broke the Walter Reed story, I believe.  But too many of the horrors of the last eight years were, apparently, too *complicated* for the paper to tackle. 

 Downie and Woodward and their fellow journalists are the grassroots of the MSM, they claim. The pillars of the press.  The defenders of freedom. But there seems to be trouble brewing in rootsville.  Downie says "We're not talking about the survival of newspapers; we're talking about the survival of news."   

 Downie, who appears to be a drama queen in addition to defender,  is hardly in a position to help the American press save itself since he and his former colleagues  at the wapo and elsewhere are part of the problem.  Frankly, I would call it roots rot.  They're looking everywhere in their root cellar for a cure when it can only be found by dragging their own actions out into the sunlight for some serious scrutiny.  Firing one of their critics is just digging a deeper hole for themselves, not "digging deep"  for the news.