Extraordinary Journalism

Quote of the day:
“Love’s a fire, but whether it’s going to warm your heart or burn down your house, you can never tell.”
--Joan Crawford

Quote of the day no. 2:
“ What they discovered, in a year of work that reveals more about the inner workings of this White House than any previous reporting, is a vice president who used the broad authority given him by a complaisant chief executive to bend the decision-making process to his own ends and purposes, often overriding Cabinet officers and other executive branch officials along the way.”
--David Broder

Broder is referring to a detailed, in-depth, meticulously reported story in The Washington Post by Barton Gellman and Jo Becker. It carefully describes from behind the scenes how Dick Cheney has amassed his unprecedented power, and how he is using it.

Gellman and Becker’s four-part story is here:
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/cheney/
It is long, but it’s very much worth your time, for three reasons.

First, it is well-written, interesting and involving. In places it reads like a political thriller, and I bet it’s much better than most of the political fiction at Barnes and Noble.

Second, it is a lucid behind-the-scenes account of how power can be (and has been) used, misused, manipulated and abused. Maybe we will face no long-lasting negative consequences from Cheney’s terms as vice president. But we all share responsibility for his presence in this position, and we may not be so fortunate if we allow this again.

Third, this kind of reporting, while still very much present in a few news organizations, is being displaced in our consciousness by shallow and repetitive press-release-based news conference and events coverage. Gellman and Becker worked on this story for a full year--interviewing, researching documents, following up leads, verifying facts, writing, rewriting.

They and the Post deserve our thanks for reminding us of the potential positive power of the press.

If you honestly don’t have the time or patience to read the Post story, I strongly recommend Hendrik Hertzberg’s summary in The New Yorker. You can find it here:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2007/07/09/070709taco_talk_hertzberg