Fooled by Washington confidentials

IF one can earn a Pulitzer Prize for a single column (or for a collection, for that matter), Tim Rutten deserves an award for “Woodward Joins a Decadent Dance” [Nov. 19]. Superbly reasoned, superbly written, Rutten carefully documents the patsies many journalists covering the White House and Congress have become in their frantic search for personal celebrity.

Those self-serving co-conspirators who masquerade as reporters not only deprive readers of information that should be rightfully theirs in a functioning democracy but do worse -- they mislead.

MITCHELL TENDLER

San Diego

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IT was the mainstream media that endorsed (and indeed gushed over) the performance of the Bush administration at critical junctures of the war, most notably Secretary of State [Colin L.] Powell’s speech before the United Nations in the winter of 2003 and Bush’s “Mission accomplished” appearance on the deck of an aircraft carrier in May of 2003.

In all these instances, the mainstream media were willing accomplices in the deception of the American public.

In the process, the media completely abandoned their role as an impartial arbitrator of the truth and became instead a propaganda tool of the Bush administration. That Woodward participated in this ignobility is a mere symptom; the disease is embedded in the marrow of the media.

ROB SULLIVAN

Los Angeles

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RUTTEN complains that “the trade in confidentiality and access that has made stars of reporters like Bob Woodward and Judy Miller now is utterly bankrupt” without understanding that it has always been so.

Woodward’s Watergate source, Mark Felt, “Deep Throat,” was getting his own back for being passed up as director of the FBI. Woodward was being used by Felt then just as surely as he and other Washington sources are being used now by their sources.

The leak game as played in Washington is about power. Rutten’s attempts to distinguish this era from earlier ones is simply an exercise in how thin you slice the bologna.

JIM GORTON

Pasadena