Jay Rosen: 'Murray Waas is Our Woodward Now'

PressThink's Jay Rosen heaps well-deserved accolades on the National Journal's Murray Waas in an April 9, 2006 post headlined "Murray Waas is Our Woodward Now." In Rosen's estimation, Waas has surpassed Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward as the nation's top investigative reporter. He wrote:

It should be obvious from the work who Woodward Now is. And if it isn't obvious Greg Sargent can explain it to you over at the American Prospect.

The guys name is Murray Waas; he's an independent journalist who recently went to work as a staff writer for the National Journal and the Atlantic Media Company, which owns the Atlantic Monthly, the Journal, and other titles. Waas has been in the game since he was 18, when he started working for the columnist Jack Anderson.

By Woodward Now I mean the reporter who is actually doing what Woodward has a reputation for doing: finding, tracking, breaking into reportable parts and then publishing the biggest story in town. Hes also putting those parts together for us.

Based on Waas' body of work, I have to agree with Rosen. The New Yorker's formidable Seymour M. Hersh is the only other reporter I can think of who has consistently exposed the lies, deceptions and excesses of the Bush Administrations as it prepared to invade Iraq under false pretenses. As a group, one has to place Knight Ridder's Washington Bureau in that category.

In his younger days, Woodward would have owned what Rosen calls "The Biggest Story in Town (almost a term of art in political Washington)." He said, "the biggest story in town is the one that would cause the biggest earthquake if the facts sealed inside it started coming out now. Today the biggest story in town is what really went down as the Bush team drove deceptively to war, and later tried to conceal how bad the deception and decision-making had been."

"We are still in that story today, as is the press (deeply in it) and so a lot rides on what comes out," Rosen opined.

In what appears to be a requiem for a journalist who has morphed into the Bush Administration's war policy historian, Rosen said, "Not only is Woodward not in the hunt, but he is slowly turning into the hunted. Part of what remains to be uncovered is how Woodward was played by the Bush team, and what they thought they were doing by leaking to him, as well as what he did with the dubious information he got especially since, as the Washington Post reported on April 9, evidence leaked by Scooter Libby to Woodward on June 27, 2003 had been disproved months before."