In which Howie Kurtz shows why he’s da bomb

Tim Russert cemented his reputation as the Bruce Strauss of Washington journalism during his testimony at the Scooter Libby trial. During Sunday’s episode of Meet the Press, he gave other, lesser journalistic lights the opportunity to demean the profession each in their own imitable ways.

The Politico’s Roger Simon grabbed most of the attention from bloggers with his assertion that perjury and obstruction of justice are not crimes, and hence the Libby prosecution amounts to nothing more than a “show trial.” (Simon is making the rounds again on account of his publicly announced schoolgirl crush on GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney). But it was Howard Kurtz who came up with perhaps the best line of the day when he asserted that the damage inflicted upon his profession by the trial is entirely a matter of misperception on the part of casual observers.

“I think that the people out there who don’t follow this all that closely think that we have become part of the club, too much the insiders,” said Kurtz. The obvious implication is that those who do pay detailed attention to the incestuous relationship between the Bush administration and the kow-towing Washington press community know that when Russert testifies under oath that his habit is to regard all conversations with top administration officials as off the record unless they specify otherwise, he’s describing the honorable practice of holding their official feet to the hottest flames of adversarial journalism. They quake each time they call him to get a slot on the show when things aren’t going well but they take the risk of subjecting themselves to his terrifying inquisitions because they know that if they come out alive, the viewing public will understand that their positions have withstood the ultimate test.

The other journalists on the show — Gwen Ifill from PBS and Kurtz’s Washington Post colleague, David Broder — were equally fretful, with Broder, who is as close to the center of the government-press nexus as anyone, going so far as to acknowledge that there may be legitimate and not just perceptual concerns about the state of the Washington press.

MR. RUSSERT: David Broder, Judy Miller, Matt Cooper and myself, and now Bob Woodward, Andrea Mitchell, Walter Pincus—you’re going to have a significant number of journalists going before a court, which will be all covered. What does that do to journalism?

MR. BRODER: Well, it hurts. And it hurts because I think it opens up something that has been worrisome, I think, to many of us in the press, which is the way in which relationships between reporters and government officials can be used by those government officials to plant stories, in effect, that are damaging to their political enemies using the reporters, in effect, to carry out their political mission. And that’s different from cultivating a source to get information that’s of value to you as a journalist. Here you are being used by the government official to carry out their political work.

Yes, indeed. Broder has over the years shown himself to be particularly sensitive to the perils of serving as an administration hatchet man, at least on those occasions when the hatchet is loaned out by Democrats rather than the GOP. That he’s unaware of his own vacuity and gullibility, and that Kurtz is of the opinion that the problem with the press is the audience perception of them, is fairly clear evidence that these people possess a level of self-awareness akin to that of a toad.

Ifill’s concern was not with perception or cooptation, but process.

Well, you know, the journalists I talked to are having sort, sort of a collective nervous breakdown about this. We watch you testify, we watch Judy Miller and Matt Cooper and whoever else we end up seeing before this trial is over, and we think, “Well, could my bad handwriting now be part of a, a court trial. Or could my misremembered conversation now make me liable—a person who lies?” And then I think to myself that, in the end, I don’t know where this is going to shake out for us. You’re right, it’s—Roger’s right, in some ways it’s kind of an inside story in that we’re all talking to each other and we’re very crazed about it. And I don’t know that Americans around the world are really worrying about that. But I do know that at some level it’s going to affect the way we do our jobs. On the “NewsHour” this week, one of my colleagues interviewed Tim Rutten from the L.A. Times, and he said he routinely destroys all his notes now. He doesn’t keep anything, and that’s his way of protecting himself against the possibility that someone might want to subpoena notes. Now, I’ve heard reporters say, “Oh, that—from now on I’m just throwing my notes away,” but I’d never heard of someone who’s actually doing that. And I don’t know what kind of implication that has for the business, what kind of implication that even has, not to make it too big a point, but for history books.

One has to think that if history is to be written by the likes of Russert, Kurtz, Broder and Ifill, we’d be better off without it. Consider Bob Woodward’s tomes on the Bush administration, which paint two entirely disparate portraits of the president and his advisors, and so tell us a great deal more about Woodward’s methods and pathology than they do about his subjects.

Ifill does have a point about the perils of subpoenas, but the problem is far from insoluble. Reporters need to rethink the terms under which they grant anonymity, the conditions under which they will defend it and the ways in which they use it. Yet another Washington Post writer, Dan Froomkin, examines the behavior of the press through the lens of the Libby trial and neatly sums up the frustrations and expectations of many press critics, including this one.

Neither Libby nor Cheney have made themselves widely available to the press — and when they have, reporters have usually let them set their own ground rules and pursue their own agendas. Certainly, Cheney made sure he was always in control of the message. (i.e. “Meet the Press.”)

As long as journalists fear appearing too prosecutorial with people like Libby or Cheney — or President Bush — they’ll never get them to go beyond their talking points.

So some of us journalists had high hopes for the prosecutor.

In the end, however, the Libby defense team obviously realized that putting their star witnesses in a position where their every assertion would be aggressively and expertly challenged — rather than just accepted and broadcast — would hurt them more than it could possibly help.

That there is a journalist frustrated that the Libby prosecutor won’t get an opportunity to do the job that the Washington press has failed to do during the past six years. That there is sad.