By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 23, 2006; 9:12 AM

When FBI agents conducted raids last week while investigating whether Rep. Curt Weldon improperly tried to help his daughter win lobbying work, the Pennsylvania Republican blamed prominent Democrats and a watchdog group for what he called a politically motivated probe.

But it was actually three Los Angeles Times reporters, in a 2004 exposé, who disclosed how Weldon repeatedly intervened for two Russian companies and a wealthy Serbian family that were paying nearly $1 million a year to the firm of his daughter, then an inexperienced, 29-year-old lobbyist.

It's striking how many of the major probes involving members of Congress were launched because of news accounts, which have become the first line of defense against public corruption. While journalists may lack subpoena power and eavesdropping authority, they often crack these cases ahead of the cops.

But will that change? Times Publisher Jeffrey Johnson was ousted this month when he refused demands by the paper's parent, Tribune Co., to cut the newsroom staff from 940 to about 800. Five years ago, the staff numbered 1,200. And anyone who thinks investigative projects are unaffected by such corporate slashing doesn't understand the business.

ABC's Brian Ross broke the news last month that Rep. Mark Foley was sending sexually graphic messages to former House pages, prompting the Florida Republican to resign. But the networks, too, are under financial pressure to trim their sails, as underscored by NBC's announcement last week that it is cutting 5 percent of its workforce. Although NBC's major news programs are in first place, a weak prime-time schedule means that the news operation, as well as MSNBC and CNBC, will bear some of the brunt.

Real investigative reporting, as opposed to the what-happened-yesterday stuff, is time-consuming, risky and expensive. And as one news organization after another sheds staff in this tough financial climate, it's worth considering what aggressive journalism has produced lately.

The Associated Press broke the story 10 days ago that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid had collected $1.1 million on a Las Vegas land sale, even though he had transferred the property three years earlier to a corporation he partially owned, and failed to fully disclose the transactions on federal forms. The Nevada Democrat has agreed to revise his disclosure statements.

The San Diego Union-Tribune disclosed last year that a defense contractor had bought the home of Rep. Randy Cunningham for $700,000 more than its market value after the California Republican supported him in seeking Pentagon contracts. The congressman pleaded guilty in March to accepting $2.5 million in bribes and is now in prison.

The Washington Post, beginning in 2004, broke news of questionable lobbying by Jack Abramoff and his links to two House Republicans, Tom DeLay and Bob Ney, along with various staffers. Abramoff pleaded guilty in January to fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to commit bribery. DeLay, the former majority leader, resigned in June after being indicted in a Texas fundraising case. Ney pleaded guilty this month to conspiracy and making false statements.

But with newspaper circulation and network news viewership declining, how long can such organizations sustain this level of investigative reporting?

In recent months, executives have announced staff cutbacks of 19 percent at the Dallas Morning News and 17 percent at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The new owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer -- which cut its newsroom by 15 percent last year -- told his staff Friday that further layoffs are "unavoidable" because of plunging revenues. At The Washington Post, 8 percent of the newsroom staff recently took early retirement offers. All of which means fewer bodies to pore over records at City Hall, the statehouse or federal agencies.

Newspapers and networks face the same dilemma: too many people doing other things with their time, from Web-surfing to podcast listening, or simply losing interest in news altogether. Some of these customers are consuming the companies' wares online, which is great for exposure but doesn't produce the revenue needed to support long-form reporting. If this erosion continues, it would be bad news for serious journalism, and good news for corrupt politicians.

Matt Taibbi doesn't believe in understatement.

In his latest article, he calls the 109th Congress "the most shameful, corrupt and incompetent period in the history of the American legislative branch." And he doesn't stop there. Congress is "a historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of Nero or Caligula--a stable of thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable."

Taibbi writes for Rolling Stone, which has been re-energized this year in mixing political coverage with its covers on Justin Timberlake, Bob Dylan, Christina Aguilera and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Owner Jann Wenner has been heavily involved in packaging pieces that -- no great shock here -- savage President Bush and the Republicans.{dagger}

"We feel a much greater sense of urgency to cover this stuff," says Managing Editor Will Dana. "With Bush and conservative control of Congress, the values the magazine has always stood for are under assault. We feel the need to sound the alarms pretty loudly."

A May cover story by historian Sean Wilentz -- "The Worst President in History?" -- sold surprisingly well, Dana says. In June, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s piece on alleged voting irregularities in Ohio -- "Did Bush Steal the 2004 Election?" -- generated considerable media buzz. James Bamford won a National Magazine Award for a story last fall on the selling of the Iraq war.

The most over-the-top writer by far is Taibbi, 36, the son of NBC correspondent Mike Taibbi. The younger Taibbi's style is such that he often seems to be channeling the late Hunter Thompson. "I used to do a lot of drugs, and I'm a humorist," Taibbi says in acknowledging the comparison.

In a piece on Tom DeLay, he wrote: "Like our current president, he's an ex-drunk (he claims he used to suck down twelve martinis a night) given to preposterous rhetorical excesses (he once compared the Audubon Society to the Klan), making him a sort of cartoon version of a shameless, pig-hearted right-wing hypocrite."

And Taibbi had this to say about the Connecticut Senate race between Joe Lieberman and Ned Lamont: "If you believe the propaganda emanating from Lieberman and his coterie of whore-cronies in the Democratic Leadership Council, Lamont is a dangerous, pillar-crushing revolutionary, a preppy, tanned mixture of Lenin and the Ayatollah."

Sometimes he goes too far, as with a piece last year for the New York Press on the ailing John Paul II, titled "The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope." Taibbi left soon afterward, as did the paper's editor.

"It was something I wrote in the middle of the night," Taibbi says. "Something like 10 different congressmen denounced it. It was a nightmare."

Despite his GOP-bashing, Taibbi is no fan of the Democrats, whom he depicts as addicted to special-interest money. He sees campaigns -- and political coverage -- as a farce, "with these clowns getting up and saying the same thing over and over again, and the press corps treats these people like they're Nobel Prize winners.

"News outlets are interested in selling news as a battle between two fierce ideological opposites. You get conservative journalists who do nothing but hit the liberals, and liberal journalists who do nothing but demonize George Bush. They hate George Bush so much they don't bother to criticize Democrats for supporting the Iraq war. And it's totally uninteresting."

ABC's Bob Woodruff and his wife, Lee, have agreed to write a book about their experiences after he was badly wounded in a January attack in Iraq. The former "World News" co-anchor will also report on the same subject for a prime-time special next spring.

Moving right along . . .

Shades of Billy Carter! This is interesting:

"A company headed by President Bush's brother and partly owned by his parents is benefiting from Republican connections and federal dollars targeted for economically disadvantaged students under the No Child Left Behind Act," says the L.A. Times . "With investments from his parents, George H.W. and Barbara Bush, and other backers, Neil Bush's company, Ignite! Learning, has placed its products in 40 U.S. school districts and now plans to market internationally. "At least 13 U.S. school districts have used federal funds available through the president's signature education reform, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, to buy Ignite's portable learning centers at $3,800 apiece."

Did Mitt Romney engage in a modified limited hangout?

"Despite repeated denials by the Mormon Church and Governor Mitt Romney's advisers, e-mails from a key Romney consultant state that the leader of the worldwide church was consulted on an effort to build Mormon support for the governor's potential presidential bid and that a key church leader has been involved in mapping out the plan. One e-mail also describes Romney's personal involvement in the planning," reports the Boston Globe .

Speaking of 2008, this guy isn't just showing a little leg, he's lifting his skirt:

"Sen. Barack Obama acknowledged Sunday he was considering a run for president in 2008, backing off previous statements that he would not do so."

And the NYT conclusion is that this could hurt Hillary :

"Should he run, Democrats said, his decision would pose a major complication to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, who is widely viewed as the dominant figure in the field of potential candidates.

Mr. Obama opposes the war in Iraq and thus could provide an alternative for Democrats who have expressed strong concern about Mrs. Clinton's support of the war effort. In addition, Mr. Obama, who is African-American, would almost surely cut deeply into Mrs. Clinton's own political base, black voters, which could be particularly significant because the Democratic Party has decided to move the South Carolina primary to the front of the 2008 presidential nominating process."

Newsweek's Jonathan Alter apparently didn't get the memo that the media must incessantly predict a Democratic victory:

"Striking national polling numbers like the ones we are seeing won't necessarily translate into a huge victory for Democrats. True, the party out of power has historically made great gains in the sixth year of a two-term presidency. But while the odds now strongly favor the Democrats' taking the 15 seats necessary to win control of the House, caution is still advisable on a blowout."

Power Line's John Hinderaker looks at the (possible) anatomy of a leak:

"One of the Democrats' several September Surprises was the highly selective, and highly misleading, leak of a small portion of the recently-completed National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. The Associated Press reported that House Intelligence Committee chairman Peter Hoekstra has suspended a Democratic committee staffer and denied him or her access to classified information, pending an investigation into whether that staffer was the source of the NIE leak.

"As far as the AP's report indicates, the only evidence against the staffer is the fact that he or she 'requested the document from National Intelligence Director John Negroponte three days before a Sept. 23 story by the Times on its conclusions.' That could be a coincidence, of course; on the other hand, there may be more evidence of which we are unaware.

"If a Democratic committee staffer was responsible for the misleading and presumaably illegal leak, there could be political consequences. In a broader sense, though, I don't think it makes much difference. Historically, the Democrats haven't had to rely on committee staffers for leaks, because there are plenty of loyal, committed Democrats embedded in the intelligence agencies who willingly leak to loyal, committed Democrats who work for the New York Times, Washington Post and other media outlets."

I wish the learned Mr. Hinderaker would get off this "committed Democrats" in the MSM line. Want to charge liberal bias, be my guest. But the supposedly committed Dems at the NYT and WP sure managed to savage Bill Clinton.

That Kuo book is still making news, as the New Republic's Michael Crowley blogs:

"I hadn't seen this great anecdote from David Kuo's juicy book, Tempting Faith, an insider's account of the Bush White House's corrupt 'faith-based' policymaking. It deals with a controversial December 2002 Esquire piece in which Bush's former faith-based czar, John DiIulio, was quoted trashing Bush's policy operation as hollow and Bush's overall 'compassionate conservative' agenda as having accomplished nothing. After the article appeared, writes Kuo:

" A West Wing friend called to say the president heard about the article as he walked from the Oval office of the OEOB. He was angry. 'Well,' he yelled through the stairwell, 'is he right or isn't he? Have we done compassion or haven't we? I wanna know.'An hour later we got the first and only call from the deputy chief of staff Josh Bolton's office requesting an urgent 'compassion meeting.' In the two years since the transition, it was the first time the president's senior staff fully engaged in the compassion agenda . . . The president's question first needed to be answered. He wanted to know how much we had spent on compassion programs in his first two years in office. We made some calls and did some calculations and discovered that if we applied his definition of compassion to federal social [services] programs, we were actually spending about $20 million a year less on them than before he had taken office. That number never actually made it to the president. The question was deemed, 'still in process of being accounted for .'

"Remember, Bush's entire 2000 campaign was organized around the 'compassionate conservative' theme. Yet midway through his first term, Bush had no idea whether he was living up to his label--and his aides wouldn't even tell him the truth was quite the opposite."

The somewhat nasty debate about outing gay Republicans produces this thoughtful Salon piece by Alex Koppelman :

"In 2003, the Washington Blade was preparing a story on the sexual orientation of Florida congressman Mark Foley. By then, Foley's homosexuality was an open secret -- he had been outed by journalist Kurt Wolfe on a New York radio show in 1996.

"What was not widely known was that Kirk Fordham, Foley's then-chief of staff, was also gay. The Blade knew it, however, and so editor Chris Crain asked Fordham how, and whether, he wanted his sexual orientation identified in the paper. Fordham's response was that he was 'out in the community but not in the press,' and so the Blade refrained, for a time, from printing anything about Fordham's life as an openly gay man.

"This situation is one now faced on a regular basis by reporters and editors in Washington, forcing them to ask questions about how and when they should report on sexual orientation. In an era in which the closet is no longer what it once was, when supposedly closeted individuals may be out to nearly everyone in their life, is it the media's responsibility to help public figures hide the truth from voters? And in the wake of the Foley scandal, does the press need to reevaluate how it deals with the issue?

"Complicating matters for many journalists is Washington's unique and complicated version of 'out.' Some of D.C.'s public figures intentionally cultivate vagueness when it comes to just how out of the closet they are. Fordham was far from the only political operative or official to consider himself out in some situations and not in others. Some 'closeted' staffers live active lives inside Washington's gay community, patronizing local gay bars and cohabiting openly with same-sex partners. Some are out to their bosses, even bosses who are ultraconservative Republicans -- Robert Traynham, the director of communications for Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., was reportedly out to his boss before being outed in the press. Still, D.C.'s political class maintains a special distinction between living as openly gay in Washington's gay community and being identified as such in the press, where word might get back to the home congressional district."