From watchdog to lap dog Bob Woodward's "Plamegate" blunder showed the world what many knew for years: we need a bunch of new Bob Woodwards BY MARK JURKOWITZ

It was a moment both remarkable and uncomfortable. There, on the night of November 21, was Bob Woodward looking nervous and dry-mouthed, trying to defend his hard-earned legacy to — of all people — a suddenly aggressive and sharp-elbowed Larry King.

"So it’s quid pro quo," said the cable schmooze-meister to his old pal Woodward, snappily summing up the reporter’s symbiotic relationships with his high-powered sources. When Woodward countered that he was able to wring three and a half hours of interviews out of President George Bush for his 2004 book Plan of Attack, King retorted: "Doesn’t that give him an edge with you?"

There was a great deal of finger-pointing aimed at Woodward in the wake of the November 15 revelation that he remained silent about his conversation with an administration official about CIA operative Valerie Plame, as the "Plamegate" scandal exploded into a high-level indictment and a journalist’s jail term. But none is more damning than the charge that the reporter who once helped topple a president had turned from fearless outsider to cozy insider, from White House watchdog to Beltway house pet.

"It just looks really bad," said Rolling Stone contributing editor Eric Boehlert in an interview with Woodward’s paper, the Washington Post. "It looks like what people have been saying about Bob Woodward for the past five years, that he’s become a stenographer for the Bush White House."

"I wish I were wrong, but to me Woodward sounds as if he has come a long way from those shoe-leather [Watergate] days — and maybe on a path that does not become him," declared Village Voice media critic Sydney Schanberg, in a column written more in sorrow than in anger.

This burst of somber but serious criticism of Woodward — a genuine journalistic icon for three decades and a symbol of the power and prestige of the mainstream media — may mark the closing of a distinct and important chapter in American journalism.

Woodward’s Watergate exploits inspired a generation of starstruck baby boomers to flock to the news business and yielded a movie starring two of Hollywood’s leading men, Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford. But the tarnishing of his reputation comes at a time when the media business is so desperate for heroes, that it has had to reach back half a century to find one: CBS’s chain-smoking, crusading Edward R. Murrow, the protagonist of George Clooney’s new film Good Night, and Good Luck.

The demythologizing of Woodward is occurring during a period when the kind of investigative reporting that built his legend faces a constellation of daunting obstacles, including declining newsroom resources, a secrecy-obsessed administration, and prosecutors and judges using subpoenas to poison the relationship between journalists and their confidential sources.

The mounting critique of Woodward as access-seeking insider also corresponds to the growth of public skepticism about the mainstream media’s methods and motives. Citizens frequently see journalists as biased, unaccountable and — perhaps most of all — part of a privileged power elite rather than a populist voice fighting for their rights and interests.

In the end, playing into that corrosive public perception of the media as a cadre of elites may prove to be Woodward’s biggest sin.

"Gradually, as [Woodward] moved higher and higher in the stratosphere, he became a kind of princeling of American journalism," says Danny Schechter, editor of Mediachannel.org and author of the new book, The Death of Media (Melville House). "I feel he basically abandoned investigative journalism and basically became an emissary from the powerful to the media."

WE SAW IT COMING

You had the sense that it wasn’t going to be a great year for Woodward when on May 31, Vanity Fair magazine unveiled a stunning story identifying former FBI official W. Mark Felt as "Deep Throat," Woodward’s famous Watergate source whose identity he had scrupulously kept secret for 30 years. Apparently caught flatfooted, Woodward was left to confirm Felt’s identity only after the story had been fodder for nonstop cable-news coverage.

Then, in mid November, the Washington Post revealed that in June 2003 Woodward had what he characterized as a casual conversation in which a senior administration official told him that Valerie Plame was a CIA analyst working on WMD; that Woodward had just testified about that before special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald; and that he had failed to mention the conversation to his Post bosses until October 2005.

Compounding Woodward’s trouble was a late-October appearance on Larry King’s CNN show — on the eve of Fitzgerald’s indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby — in which he downplayed that investigation and denied that he was sitting on a "bombshell" or even a "firecracker" concerning the Plame case.

Woodward’s secretive behavior and his decision to keep the Plame conversation to himself subsequently earned him a round of loud reprimands.

In an interview with Post media writer Howard Kurtz, executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. said Woodward had "made a mistake" in not revealing what he knew to his editors. The paper’s ombudsman, Deborah Howell, weighed in with a disapproving column in which she described Woodward as someone who "comes and goes as he pleases, mostly writing his best-selling books on what happens behind the doors of power.... He is allowed to keep juicy stories to himself until his latest book is unveiled on the front page of the Post."

Woodward’s unique role at the Post reflects the perils of the star system that prevails in some newsrooms. (The New York Times’ lengthy postmortem on Judy Miller’s role in the Plame affair made it clear that she too was a high-profile employee who operated by different rules and standards from her colleagues.) In an interview several years ago, former Atlanta Journal-Constitution editor Bill Kovach said the "star system" was becoming a reality in a business "in which the economic imperative is to brand the product."

Jill Geisler, who heads the leadership programs at the Poynter Institute, says the media star culture "can be a problem if the person’s journalistic skills and character ... are somehow compromised by the fame that accrues to them.... There are a number of management challenges. It’s morale. It’s opportunities for other people. It’s communication."

Woodward, who has apologized to the Post for keeping mum about Plame, may repair his relationship with the paper. The bigger challenge to his reputation comes from the perception that as the chronicler of official Washington, he’s lost his reportorial bite and independence.

It’s no surprise that whoever chatted with Woodward about Plame was a source for Plan of Attack, his book about the war in Iraq, or that he’s now at work on another book about Bush’s second term. He has, according to Wikipedia, written or co-written more national nonfiction bestsellers, than any other modern American writer. And it’s the allegation that he has paid a price for the access to the politically powerful — unparalleled in our own time — that dogs his career.