Let's consider some of the famous icons of the journalism profession. Bob Woodward stopped being a journalist, even an advocacy journalist, some time ago. His agenda is about what he perceives to be power and how the powerful act. It is a sycophantic narrative that Woodward provides and is largely a harmful exercise, almost a contrajournalism.

Consider what Halberstam wrote about "a journalist being loved" by his subject:

One of the things I learned, the easiest of lessons, was that the better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be. (So, if you seek popularity, this is probably not the profession for you.) . . . . Probably the moment I am proudest of in my career is this: By the fall of 1963, I was one of a small group of reporters in Saigon -- we had enraged Washington and Saigon by filing pessimistic dispatches on the war. In particular, my young colleague, Neil Sheehan, and I were considered the enemy. The president of the United States, JFK, had already asked the publisher to pull me.

That the powerful provide a journalist "access" is a blot really on that journalist. If that journalist were doing his job, the powerful would not want to grant him access. Woodward is a classic case in point.

This is not to say that just because the powerful dislike you that a journalist is doing his job in the classic sense. Take Sy Hersh and his work on Iraq and Iran. Sy Hersh is, for all intent and purposes, an advocacy journalist now. But Sy Hersh is true to the facts as he reports them. But that is not the whole story. Hersh also chooses not to seek facts that are contra to his narrative. His Iran scare journalism this year was, imo, not particularly credible, even though Hersh did not report any falsehoods. Hersh was advocating a position, not providing objective reporting on the likelihood of a strike on Iran.

My two favorite reporters working today are Ed Wong, who reports from Iraq for the New York Times, and Dana Priest, who generally covers the intelligence community, though she is likely to win another Pulitzer for her work on the Walter Reed scandal.

I would say that Priest is better known than Wong, but obviously less well known than Woodward, Hersh and Halberstam. She is not bigger than the story.

And at bottom, that seems to me to have been Halberstam's point - when journalists' punditry, predictions, fame, etc. become bigger than the story, then the journalist is no longer a good journalist.

Case in point - the Beltway Media, almost entirely. The McLaughlin Group was the precusrsor to all the bad things that fame can do to reporters. The culmination was Imus.