DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

It's never the articles you expect that cause a fuss.

Last week I wrote and my newspaper published, an article on the way local officials were playing games with language and numbers to misrepresent critics of state and local water policies in Nevada. I expected to get a lot of backlash.

In the same edition, we ran a transcript of an interview I conducted with Washington Post assistant editor Bob Woodward, who was in Nevada to speak at a scholarship dinner. It didn't really strike me as a newsworthy piece.

After it was published, the Woodward piece was posted on a Pointer Foundation Web site where some journalists read about each other (our business is very self-centered). Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor and Publisher magazine (a trade publication) ran a column about it. The Mitchell column was posted on the Huffington Post, pushing it from journalism sites onto a more mainstream site.

I spoke with Woodward about three or four things, but the thing that seemed to push some peoples' buttons was the war in Iraq. Any idea that people have come to accept the way we got into the war is contradicted by the anger that is still out there.

At one point, I asked Woodward why his newspaper did not learn before we went to war what the Knight Ridder newspapers learned and reported -- that there were substantial questions within U.S. intelligence about whether there were weapons of mass destruction, whether Iraq was able to obtain nuclear fuel, and so on. Because the Knight Ridder papers did not have the visibility (and thus the impact) in the nation's capital that the Post and New York Times have, their findings had no impact on official actions, but if the Post had found the same sources, it might well have stopped the war.

Woodward said, "And I fault myself mightily for not being aggressive enough on that. But I had sources who told me the evidence on WMD is skimpier than they say and we were going to do a big story about it, and I went back to the sources and I said, 'Okay, the evidence is skimpier, but do you still believe that there is WMD in Iraq?' 'Oh, yes.' They all -- all the sources believed it. They didn't say it didn't exist, they said the evidence is skimpier. Now. And I ran a story before the war on the front page of the Washington Post saying there's no smoking gun evidence of WMD. Now, I should have known, if there's no smoking gun, you don't have it. Should have been more aggressive. But how do you penetrate that without going to Iraq under Saddam, knock on -- you know, and say, 'Hey, I'd like to investigate your WMD.' Not going to get very far."

Mitchell, in his column, was harshly critical of Woodward (for not using U.S. inspectors more, for one thing), but he didn't get personal. I was taken aback, as I often am, by the public's comments posted about the Woodward interview:

"Woodward, whatever he was before, turned into a vile cheerleader for the current admin. He once wrote a multi week essay for the Post portraying Bush as the cowboy Gipper. Pure propaganda tripe. I think I just threw up a little in my mouth.

"In my opinion, Woodward is either complicit or was played like a cheap fiddle.

"He has won accolades for reporting hard truths before, and if he has to bite it for being a crummy, seemingly paid-off reporter now, well, that's what he's done for himself."

"Bob Woodward basically turned himself into a Bush courtesan."

This is one of the failings of internet comment. From behind fake names, people pour vitriol over figures they have never met and will never have to face. It contributes little to a productive dialogue on public issues.

While the Woodward interview may seem on paper to have been adversarial (anyone interested in reading it will find it at www.newsreview.com/reno/Content?oid=666699), in fact it was not. Woodward, who did not have to submit himself to questioning, was entirely courteous and congenial in responding and I was genuinely interested in the impact of celebrity on a journalist's newsgathering. I wonder if Woodward had been as hungry in 2003 -- or as detached from the establishment -- as he was in 1972, he would have had more success in finding out the truth about Iraq. He may well have been right about the difficulty of digging out some information. But he admitted error, which is something George Bush and Hillary Clinton and plenty of others in both journalism and politics have yet to do.