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Chris Matthews seems to think that bloggers don’t do any fact checking, and that we’re going to lose that if the newspaper industry goes out of business. While it’s true that beat reporters and those doing the footwork out there are sorely needed, to say that bloggers don’t fact check is just a cheap shot at the on line community that he and his ilk have such disdain for, probably because we’re the main ones fact checking the likes of him.

What Matthews fails to note here is why the industry is in such bad shape. The Economist lays out some of the problems in their article Who Killed the Newspaper.

Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned papers and papers have shunned what was in stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it will surely survive the decline to come.

That is partly because a few titles that invest in the kind of investigative stories which often benefit society the most are in a good position to survive, as long as their owners do a competent job of adjusting to changing circumstances. Publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal should be able to put up the price of their journalism to compensate for advertising revenues lost to the internet—especially as they cater to a more global readership. As with many industries, it is those in the middle—neither highbrow, nor entertainingly populist—that are likeliest to fall by the wayside.

The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account—trying them in the court of public opinion. The internet has expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national papers or, worse, their local city paper. News-aggregation sites such as Google News draw together sources from around the world. The website of Britain's Guardian now has nearly half as many readers in America as it does at home.

In addition, a new force of “citizen” journalists and bloggers is itching to hold politicians to account. The web has opened the closed world of professional editors and reporters to anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection. Several companies have been chastened by amateur postings—of flames erupting from Dell's laptops or of cable-TV repairmen asleep on the sofa. Each blogger is capable of bias and slander, but, taken as a group, bloggers offer the searcher after truth boundless material to chew over. Of course, the internet panders to closed minds; but so has much of the press.

Ironically we see Bob Woodward saying journalism lives on after playing stenographer for the Bush crowd to get some books sold rather than reporting on what he found out. And he holds up Tina Brown’s operation at The Daily Beast as a business model for making money on line and some hope for journalism's future.

Just how different would this conversation have been with a completely different panel? The viewers might have learned something had it been our own Dave Neiwert and Susie Madrak who’ve worked in the newspaper industry and turned to blogging instead, and Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo and Eric Boehlert from Media Matters, who’s sites look more like the future of journalism to me.

When the fourth estate doesn't do its job, people are going to turn to other sources that will. Something that seems to completely elude Chris Matthews and his panel here.

Another thing Matthews fails to note is that most bloggers who use other people’s reporting link back to that material and allow their readers to evaluate their assertions for themselves. We are not just taking stenography from press releases or other people’s reporting. And when we get something wrong, there’s generally a swift retraction. Something you cannot say for too many in our “mainstream media” who tend to circle the wagons rather than admit mistakes. And while Joe Klein is claiming that his commenters “fact check” him, just how many of those comments does he actually read?

Transcript below the fold.

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The Villagers were up in arms Sunday morning over on the set of ABC's This Week about the possibility that Eric Holder might appoint a special someone to look into the Bush/Cheney torture practices. Watch in awe and see how the Villagers feel about trying to get accountability from the Bush years.

Why, an investigation would just trash the place. Oh, the bitterness in D.C. would be too much to handle, all because those other people (that is, non-Villagers) would like to get to the truth.

Bob Woodward, who's trying to be the next David Broder by living off his long-degraded rep as the man who uncovered Watergate, wonders how we will ever be able to keep secrets again if there is some inspection. Um, isn't that what the Bob Woodwardses are supposed to do? Uncover stuff? Nope, not anymore. He's appalled that there might be a frakking investigation.

And he was all a-giggle with the thought that the CIA could actually lie. What a joke. I didn't hear him open his mouth when Newt Gingrich went all whiggy on Nancy Pelosi.

Cokie goes "Cokie" on us for a while and then after much trepidation comes down on the rule of law. Good for her, but she better take some R&R if it happens.

ROBERTS: I must say, I have very mixed minds about this. Because on the one hand, the whole idea of a prosecution gets Washington into that kind of horrible slog where everybody hates each other and the poison just gets very thick.

DONALDSON: Unlike at the moment, right?

ROBERTS: Well, no, it hasn’t been as bad lately as it was in the last 16 years.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And it seems like they’re trying to avoid at least in the design of this, criminalizing of policy.

ROBERTS: And just the whole atmosphere of getting that way again. On the other hand, the rule of law is terribly important. And we have to have it -- you know, we cannot operate in this country without the rule of law.

DONALDSON: So which hand do you come down on?

ROBERTS: I’d probably come down on the rule of law.

Digby writes much more:

Stephanopoulos reported on This Week that the possible Holder investigation is going to be very narrow and will not pursue policy makers or anyone who took orders directly from the policymakers. He's going after "rogue interrogators" who inflicted more torture than was strictly allowed.

The Village roundtable all gasped in horror anyway because who knows where such an investigation might lead and as Cokie complained, it would mean that the whole town would be mad at each other again and nobody wants that! "Everybody hates each other and the poison gets very thick." She did finally come down on the side of following the rule of law even though it would make her uncomfortable at cocktail parties, but it was a close thing.

Bob Woodward was very upset at the idea that the government can't keep secrets because "we need them!" Besides, Holder shouldn't be like Janet Reno and just initiate investigations willy nilly. (He seems to think that Reno authorizing independent counsels to investigate her own president for trivial political reasons is the same thing as investigating whether the previous administration tortured prisoners.) They all chuckled at the notion that Holder was really independent and if he is, that means he's a rogue interrogator himself.

George Will thought it was all just a bunch of balderdash because nothing bad ever happened during the Bush administration. Sam Donaldson said that reporters should probably pursue stories and Donna Brazile added that these things were coming out anyway so they might as well be investigated.

They all snorted and giggled and laughed throughout the whole segment about how silly it was to be upset that the CIA lied because well, that's what it does. And they all thought it was a ripping good joke that Cheney kept everything secret because well, everyone knows that's what he does. Hahahahaha.

Full transcript below the fold.

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"At least Bush kept us safe," is the war cry from conservatives whenever they try to find something good to say about the Bush Administration and their eight disastrous years of rule. They forget about everything that came before Sept. 11th apparently. That's not supposed to count. It's true that it's difficult to keep a nation completely safe and it's hard to assign blame, but let's not forget that George Tenet seemed to know a little about who the hijackers were after we found out who hit us.

According to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, on the morning of 9/11, as aides rushed over to George Tenet’s table at the St. Regis Hotel restaurant to tell him the news of the World Trade Center strike, the CIA director was overheard to say: “I wonder if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training.”

That being said, the media is very afraid to ever bring the facts up that Richard Clarke pointed it out in the Washington Post in a column called: The Trauma of 9/11 Is No Excuse

Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defense.

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The panel of Bob Woodward, Kelly O'Donnell, Anne Kornblut and Howard Fineman making excuses for the Obama administration and Congress if there are no prosecutions for torture committed by the Bush administration.

Matthews: How do you read that...what he just said?

Woodward: No. In other words he's not going to, he doesn't want investigations. I mean if, first of all in some of these things, it's so ambiguous and uh, he has got to get beyond the past. He does not want to create the feeling, which in a sense this week he did create by saying he's going to close Guantanamo, that the war on terror is over. It is not over. What he said is some of the tactics, namely torture and harsh interrogation tactics are gone but the war continues and if there is a, some sort of perpetual investigation of these things the message will be we're going soft and I tell you those in the intelligence world and the military and I think Obama himself doesn't want to send that message.

Matthews: Well let's talk about the Republicans on the Hill. What are they worried, aren't they trying to hold Eric Holder's feet to the fire and say "Promise you won't launch an investigation as our new Attorney General".

O'Donnell: Well one of the problems is if they do dig back into all of these things you do lose some of the Republicans support and President Obama's trying to reach out. You also reinforce what detractors of the Bush/Cheney years already think. So there's very little political upside. And so Eric Holder has been certainly tested and they definitely, Republicans definitely want to be able to feel like they can stick with their strong principle of defense without having to worry about digging back into some of those things.

Matthews: Yeah. Anne obviously the people on the left, the netroots people, John Conyers up on the Hill, they want action. They want some kind of at least an extra-legal kind of truth and reconciliation commission like you had in South Africa that doesn't prosecute but does investigate.

Kornblut: And yet we haven't heard any signal from Obama or the White House itself that they would authorize that, encourage it. Even something that would be as sort of as benign as a truth and reconciliation commission, every indication is they want to leave that to reporters, historians. They want to move on, you know the Hill can do what the Hill can do, but they're not behind it.

Matthews: Well why did we prosecute people at Abu Ghraib for abusing prisoners if we're not going to prosecute people who may have authorized that kind of treatment?

Fineman: It is an issue. But Obama has to run the country and he and the leaders of the Democratic Party on the Hill have said "It's not worth the cost". I mean I know that Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate wants no parts of this. Whatever John Conyers is going to do on the House side, he's going to do and you'll hear a lot of noise from him and maybe some investigations. But it's not going to be backed up by the Democratic leadership in Congress. It just isn't.

(crosstalk)

Woodward: Well who would you investigate and prosecute? I mean the people who did these interrogations and so forth believed with good reason they had authority from the President.

Matthews: They had orders.

Woodward: Now you know it's too late to impeach Bush. It's over.

He was the first major whistleblower of our time, and speculation on his identity was the topic of numerous books and articles until 2005, when his family revealed his part in the major political drama of the Sixties:

W. Mark Felt Sr., the associate director of the FBI during the Watergate scandal who, better known as "Deep Throat," became the most famous anonymous source in American history, died yesterday. He was 95.

Felt died at 12:45 p.m. at a hospice near his home in Santa Rosa, Calif., where he had been living since August.

Felt "was fine this morning" and was "joking with his caregiver," according to his daughter, Joan Felt. She said in a phone interview that her father ate a big breakfast before remarking that he was tired and going to sleep.

"He slipped away," she said.

As the second-highest official in the FBI under longtime director J. Edgar Hoover and interim director L. Patrick Gray, Felt detested the Nixon administration's attempt to subvert the bureau's investigation into the complex of crimes and coverups known as the Watergate scandal that ultimately led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.

He secretly guided Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward as he and his colleague Carl Bernstein pursued the story of the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate office buildings and later revelations of the Nixon administration's campaign of spying and sabotage against its perceived political enemies.

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This is truly a sad statement on the state of journalism in the US today. That the question "How is Obama different from Bush?" even needs to be posed -- much less discussed -- is truly insulting to the intelligence of the waning viewers that these guys get.

Hmmm....let me count the ways: One's a divisive ideologue who has risen to undeserved levels of status given his personal mediocrity and intellectual laziness due to his connections versus one who believes in a post-partisan government that gets things done who has had to overcome many personal obstacles to achieve great levels based on intelligence, charisma and hard work. I can totally see why the public would need this clarified.

The thing that continues to be so frustrating is the continued post facto admissions by the Villagers as to the deficits that we've had over the last eight years with Bush. Sure, now that he is two months away from walking out of the White House for the last time, we can admit that the world hates us and doesn't want to work with Bush, as Katty Kay does, or that he is stupid (to put a more honest term to Woodward and Borger's "intellectually incurious) and finds the whole "understanding other people's points of view" boring.

But where were they for the last four years? Where was their outrage and coverage of this then? How many soldiers' lives could we have saved if the media had been more honest about Bush? How many poor Iraqi civilian lives? Time and time again, the media abdicates their role in presenting context and in this case, their acceptance of the catapulted propaganda has led the country to the brink of ruin. And yet they feel no culpability. Instead, they treat us to these faux-hard hitting dialogues comparing and contrasting Obama to Bush. Brilliant.

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Bill Maher asks Bob Woodward if "our best days are ahead of us" and Woodward replies with a Presidential anecdote.

Shorter Woodward: "The times ahead will be tough, but at least we won't have George Bush as President."

Bob Woodward's latest book, The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008, has just hit the shelves and as usual, contains some incredible new facts about President Bush's style of "leadership" and decision-making. On 60 Minutes Sunday, Woodward sat down with Scott Pelley and dropped the bombshell that the idea of the surge came from the White House and was vehemently opposed by the top military brass.

"What does General Casey, sitting in Baghdad, think of having additional troops?" Pelley asked.

"He thinks that Baghdad is a troop sump-a place you can put endless numbers of troops in. And he does not want to add force," Woodward said.

"The president, who has said in public, endless times, that he relies on his generals to tell him what they need, is actually going his own way here," Pelley remarked.

"That's right," Woodward agreed. "The records of the joint chiefs show that the idea of five brigades came from the White House, not from anybody except the White House." 

So much for listening to the Generals on the ground.

And then there's this from the Washington Post:

In response to a question about how the White House settled on a troop surge of five brigades after the military leadership in Washington had reluctantly said it could provide two, Bush said: "Okay, I don't know this. I'm not in these meetings, you'll be happy to hear, because I got other things to do." 

There's Bush presidential leadership in a nutshell for you: In perhaps the most important decision of his entire presidency - the decision to double down on a failed war, putting the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis  at risk -- Bush, by his own admission, has "other things to do."

I wonder if Cheney is gonna call Woodward and curse him out again.