WaPo's Dobbs stumbles off track

On August 21st, Washington Post staff reporter Michael Dobbs wrote what is easily the best and most serious examination of the SwiftVets' factual allegations about Sen. Kerry's war record by the mainstream media to date.  He barely scratched the surface of those allegations, but he at least made some useful attempts at genuine investigative journalism — something beyond regurgitating the Kerry camp's talking points (although he did that, too).  And Mr. Dobbs figured out, and stated (albeit in a mushy way near the bottom of his piece), the indisputable fact that presidential candidate John F. Kerry is withholding or blocking the release of key documentary evidence which would go a long way to either prove or dispove the SwiftVets' allegations.  It was a good start, but only a start.

Dobbs' new article in Saturday's WaPo is therefore a major disappointment to me and others who'd hoped that he'd continue to dig into the substance of the SwiftVets' charges. 

Although Dobbs interviewed, and quoted, John O'Neill for this new piece, O'Neill is just an emblem and a spokesman for the SwiftVets, not one of its principle fact witnesses (as he himself will be the first to agree).   Instead, in this article, Dobbs' focus is almost entirely upon a presidency that's only of remote historical interest today — Richard Nixon's — and the related, somewhat more topical historical question of whether during his antiwar protester days, young Kerry was a "top downer" who wanted to work within the political process or a "bottom upper" who wanted to challenge it through civil disobedience and violence.

Now, I fancy myself a serious lifelong student of history, and I'm not without interest in these issues.  But Mr. Dobbs' latest effort brings out nothing particularly new or remarkable on them.  In the meantime, WaPo's Mr. Dobbs and the mainstream media that he represents have generally failed in their duty to plumb the SwiftVets' very detailed factual allegations about Sen. Kerry's war-hero record and their factual allegations about his more obscure anti-war activism (the Paris trip or trips to meet with representatives of the North Vietnamese government and Viet Cong, for example). 

The blogosphere can provide, and has provided, punditry galore on the SwiftVets vs. Kerry controversy.  Occasionally it's provided some genuine factual investigation, in addition to its more usual function of collating and commenting upon what's already in the public domain.  But the blogosphere, which is diffuse and highly distributed by definition, lacks the access and concentrated delivery that still, for better or worse (mostly worse), is a monopoly of the mainstream media.  If Glenn Reynolds and Ed Hennisey and Roger Simon and Hugh Hewitt and Mickey Kaus and Jim Garaghty and yours truly all pound our internet pulpits together in rhythm demanding that Sen. Kerry sign Standard Form 180, the Kerry camp can simply stonewall and ignore us. 

A similar drumbeat for a week or so however from, say, WaPo, NYT, and NBC would ramp up the political pressure on Kerry to the point that his ongoing cover-up would become too painfully obvious to the public and, finally, intolerable.  Sen. Kerry's only going to release the bad stuff — and right now, it's legitimate for us to assume it's "bad stuff" or he'd already have released it — when the political costs of not doing so threaten to exceed his estimates of how much damage the bad stuff might do when released.

If Woodward and Bernstein had been similarly lethargic, Richard Nixon would have finished his presidency.

I'll grant that it took Woodward and Bernstein many weeks, in those days of a longer "media cycle," to uncover what they did.  And my hope is that Mr. Dobbs' detour into chortling over Chuck Colson sucking up to Nixon is only a temporary wandering off course.  But it's absolutely critical that Mr. Dobbs — or someone, and hopefully many members of the mainstream media — will use the access and resources of their profession to accomplish the things that the blogosphere can't do as effectively.  The most significant reporting during the past week — that of syndicated columnist Bob Novak and NBC's Lisa Myers on Adm. Bill Schachte and Kerry's first Purple Heart — was the result of Schachte coming to them to break his previous media silence.  That's well and good, but it's nowhere near good enough.