From Mark Felt to Karl Rove

Reporter-source relationships are complicated affairs, as Woodward makes clear in his new book "The Secret Man." He and Felt had contentious dealings, and to this day Woodward says he is not sure whether his informant was outraged by Nixon White House corruption or also trying to protect the turf of what had been J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Felt even signed a find-the-leakers memo denigrating the stories by Woodward and Carl Bernstein as containing "much fiction and half truths."

Woodward's career skyrocketed after the Watergate book and movie in which Deep Throat was a key character, while Felt's declined. He was convicted (and later pardoned) of authorizing break-ins and had to live with his betrayal of his colleagues, albeit for a just cause. Woodward admits he didn't always behave admirably, even lying to a colleague, Post columnist Richard Cohen, in an effort to protect Felt's identity.

Whatever mixed motives Felt may have had, he was helping a newspaper expose criminal wrongdoing. But in the intervening 33 years, journalists have so badly overused unnamed sources on routine stories that they have come to be seen as too cozy with political insiders. And sometimes, as in Newsweek's retracted story about U.S. prison guards abusing the Koran, a single source is just wrong (although other instances of Koran desecration were later confirmed).

As more journalists have been fired for plagiarism and fabrication, and as television has often been consumed by accused celebrities, runaway brides and missing white women, the profession has seemed demoralized. The reports of Judith Miller sleeping on a foam mattress on a jailhouse floor have added to that sense of depression.

When a 91-year-old man came forward as Deep Throat a few weeks ago, many journalists took one last wallow in the era when they were seen as ferreting out wrongdoing. Now, as they try to protect the secret sources who outed Valerie Plame, journalists themselves are often being depicted as the wrongdoers.

On Wednesday morning, after Scott McClellan's morning "gaggle" with White House reporters, CBS's John Roberts taped a little piece on how Karl Rove had become a distraction and the administration needed something else to say beyond no comment.

Roberts's words weren't meant for the evening news but for CBSNews.com. The Web site is launching a "Public Eye" blog, to be supervised by Hotline editor Vaughn Ververs, that is being touted as "a candid and robust dialogue" with the public.

Cable anchors, such as Fox's Greta Van Susteren and MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews, have become regular bloggers, and now CBS -- which is offering plenty of free video online, matching a recent move by CNN -- is trying to get in on the action.

Roberts says he will "probably use a lot more edge than in writing for a television audience, but you have to walk the line between reporting analysis and opinion." For his White House colleague Mark Knoller, the greatest advantage is speed: "If it's 8:20 in the morning, I won't have to wait until the 9 o'clock radio spot."

The Rove story, meanwhile, has clearly become Washington's summer scandal, with cover stories in Newsweek and Time, which features the firsthand Cooper account. Cooper begins: "It was my first interview with the President, and I expected a simple 'Hello' when I walked into the Oval Office last December. Instead, George W. Bush joked, 'Cooper! I thought you'd be in jail by now.'"

An accompanying Time cover piece says: "In the long and lively mythology of Karl Rove, whom Republicans see as a fearless gladiator and Democrats view as the kind of operative who would put a tarantula under an opponent's pillow, it is entirely plausible that he would try to discredit an adversary by any means necessary. But outing a spy? Compromising national security in wartime?"

My story on Cooper's piece, along with Ken Mehlman demanding that Democrats apologize for smearing Rove, is here, and there are similar pieces in in the New York Times, Boston Globe, and USA Today. For those who can't get enough, here are weekend pieces I wrote or co-wrote on Judy Miller facing the possibility of criminal contempt, how Matt Cooper got Rove to provide a get-out-of-jail card, and a WashPost tick-tock on the whole sprawling mess.