James Stollman

James Stollman is a political blogger at mymdd.coma and also at daily kos. He has also worked as consultant on two national political campaigns.

Jay has a superb piece on how Murray Waas is a much more important and useful journalist today than Bob Woodward. Rosen even goes so far as to dance around the claim that Woodward isn't really a journalist anymore, but an insider.

I don't hobnob with Bob Woodward or his ilk, and I mostly spend time with journalists and operatives with much less clout. What I've noticed is that there is this weird phenomenon in DC, where some political journalists like to consider themselves both closet strategists and independent truth-tellers without an ax to grind. That attitude just doesn't hold water. What Waas does strikes me as structurally different; he pores through documents, learns everything there is to know, and works sources to find out how decisions are made. He's relentless, and he's focused on the big picture. And eRiposte and Firedoglake are right there chewing through the reporting with him, a kind of adjunct institutional memoryedia. To us, Bob Woodward is not credible, because his sympathies seem to lie with insiders rather than the public. Murray Waas represents the public.