“Stories that couldn’t be more different—Bob Woodward’s
new book and the Mark Foley sex scandal—are examples of
the difference between get-it-in-the-paper-now journalism
and how-did-it-really-happen journalism.” Or so wrote
Deborah Howell, ombudsman of the Washington Post, last
month. “Readers questioned both,” she added. In fact, the
two stories were practically the same, since both were
non-events that the Post, for whatever reason, was trying to
blow up into scandals. What Mr. Woodward’s book, or at least
the publicity surrounding it, boiled down to was the
less than earth-shaking revelation that presidents receive
conflicting advice and intelligence in advance of almost
every decision they make and that, therefore, no
matter what
they do, someone’s advice and intelligence will have been
rejected. The rest was hype. Because the decisions President
Bush made about going to war in Iraq look in retrospect like
bad ones, all the would-be scandal-monger has to do is to go
back and find the rejected advice—and there is never any
shortage of those wishing to be wise after the event who are
prepared to claim it as their own—and suggest by
repetition and by the detail with which it is recreated
that it was so obviously the right advice at the time that
it amounts to a scandal for the President to have rejected
it.

The problem for Mr. Woodward in trying to sell his scandal
was that we know, if we think about it at all, that this
cannot be true. If it were,