Bushies v. Downie
The Washingtonian
To the outside world, Post executive editor Leonard Downie is a mild-mannered working stiff who will never be Ben Bradlee. Inside the Bush White House, he’s a journo-terrorist.
One senior administration official called him “Osama bin Downie” and said the Post was “leading a jihad against the Bush administration.”
Downie says the “senior administration official” was Anna Perez, spokesperson for the National Security Council. “Anna’s my friend,” says Downie. “I’m sure she said it in a joking manner.”
But in most jokes there’s some truth, and the Bush team does see the Post as the most implacable enemy amid a hostile press corps.
“Enemy is way, way too strong,” says Perez. “We don’t have enemies in the press.”
But she adds: “We expect skepticism—but the Post has skipped skepticism and moved to cynicism—do not pass go.”
The White House has reason to wince at Post coverage. Walter Pincus, with Dana Priest and Karen DeYoung, forced President Bush to eat his 16 words claiming that Iraq had tried to acquire nuclear material from Africa. The Post has been dogged in its investigation of who leaked the name of CIA spy Valerie Plame.
Much of the toughest scrutiny of Iraq policy has come from Barton Gellman and Tom Ricks. Glenn Kessler often reports stories that question Bush foreign policy.
“We do the accountability thing pretty seriously,” says White House reporter Dana Milbank. “It’s not just this White House. Did they forget who broke the Monica Lewinsky story?”
It’s inevitable that the Post is compared with the New York Times; Post writers see themselves as “tougher than Brand X,” in the words of one reporter. But the senior official who branded Downie says, “The Post has a bad case of New York Times envy in foreign-policy coverage.”
But for Downie, who lives in the shadow of Ben Bradlee’s mythic role as leader of the Post during Watergate, the “Osama bin Downie” brand might give him the chance to play the role of tough editor leading reporters into battle.
“I’m not aware of any pattern of thought in this White House about the Washington Post,” he says. “I find things fairly normal.”
—HARRY JAFFE
washingtonian.com |
