From Bob Woodward to Judith Miller: the country's most reviled reporter is a direct descendant of its most beloved.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: Column

A CONTROVERSIAL REPORTER for one of the nation's leading newspapers stumbles onto what at first looks like a routine Washington story but eventually, after two years of mounting federal inquiry, becomes a wide-reaching scandal that rocks the very foundations of the White House, kneecapping the second presidential term of a big-government Republican hell-bent on expanding executive power. The reporter at the center of it all--captivated by power, obsessed with high-level access, addicted to anonymous sources--acts as a pawn in an intragovernmental turf war, becoming in the process a lightning rod for critics of journalistic comportment.

I'm talking about New York Times scribe Judith Miller, of course. But the description also applies to The Washington Post's Bob Woodward, the most revered reporter of journalism's most self-adoring generation.

There is one crucial difference between the two.

Woodward, with help from his partner, Carl Bernstein, published the damning information that helped expose the Watergate scandal and bring down the Nixon administration. Miller only reluctantly disclosed her information after being coerced by a federal prosecutor and spending 85 days in jail. But the similarities vastly outweigh the disparities, and they pose uncomfortable questions not just for little "Miss Run Amok"--Miller's apt nickname for herself--but for Woodward.

Consider one more Woodward/Miller parallel: their autonomy. Even after her 2001-03 reporting on Iraq's purported weapons of mass destruction was discredited by her own boss in an extraordinary May 2004 apology, Miller "operated with a degree of autonomy rare at The Times," the paper reported on October 16 in a remarkable 6,000-word article that, coupled with Miller's own belated and tortured explanation of her testimony to special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, scorched what was left of her reputation.

Woodward, despite his "managing editor" title, famously starves his primary employer of the bombshells he acquires in the course of interviewing administration officials for his bestselling books. He even allowed the Post to get scooped by Vanity Fair on the May 2005 disclosure that his "Deep Throat" source was former FBI Official W. Mark Felt. Woodward's reputation is such that he covers whatever he wants whenever he wants to and pontificates blandly on Larry King Live even though his boss is one of journalism's loudest critics of talking-head punditry. No other newspaper reporter in the...