Veep-Hunting

Angler

The Cheney Vice Presidency

by Barton Gellman

Penguin, 384 pp., $27.95

Anyone still interested in the sorry state of mainstream journalism should have a good, long look at Barton Gellman's blistering portrait of Dick Cheney. Despite some labored huffing and puffing over Cheney's behind-the-scenes role on everything from surveillance techniques to global warming, Gellman adds very little that is new to the historic record. What Angler is most notable for is its obvious animus and its disregard for the traditional newsman's separation of church (editorial opinion) and state (fact-based reporting).

Gellman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories in the Washington Post on which this book is based, is a prime exemplar of the new kind of journalism that conflates reportage and opinion in ways that, not long ago, would have outraged news editors. But not only are some of today's senior editors tolerant of such front-page editorializing, they are critical of reporters who don't provide it.

In an astonishing recent review of Bob Woodward's latest book on the Bush administration, Jill Abramson, the New York Times "managing editor for news," had this to say about that:

What is most consequential .  .  . is the evolutionary shift it marks for the author. Woodward is famous for his flat, just-the-facts-ma'am style, if one can call it that. It is the old fashioned newspaperman's credo of show, don't tell. He rarely pauses in his narratives to synthesize or analyze, let alone judge his powerful subjects, especially those who have been his sources. .  .  . In contrast to his other Bush volumes [this] does provide interstitial analysis and judgments throughout. It also renders an extremely harsh, final appraisal of President Bush.