He bases it - as do the editors who publish his stuff and that of other reporters - on interviews he has conducted. In this case 60 in number.
No different from any other journalist and remote from the inference which the irritating article asks us, mistakenly, to draw.
It seems to me that some other print journalists do not reach the level of sourcing that Woodward does and that they envy him (at least in the US).
Incidentally I, in common with all the world, thought we owed a considerable debt to Woodward and Bernstein for their persistence over Watergate. But I have changed my mind since. Hardly a journalist exists who does not yearn to earn undying fame by exposing some poor soul through the wonders of "investigative journalism". Which means in practice that the only place you get any actual reporting of facts is in the sports pages or when the local paper sends someone to the flower show. Elsewhere there is just cheap, slanted, head hunting junk.
However, I must admit again that I don't find the American print press as objectionable as Brit print press (excluding the FT, which seems on the whole to be a notch above the others). Reporting, analysis, commentary, and editorial is labeled as such. The reporting over here doesn't seem to be political, although the conclusions drawn do have bias -- sometimes more obvious than others.
Maybe you're right that all of these sophisticated structures don't amount to anything in the long run. Maybe the move away from print press as political party organ has made the reporting no less of a lie. Maybe I'm just having smoke blown up my ass. Sometimes I wonder which intelligence services are paying these reporters to write the things they do...
I've also come to lose a lot of faith in the human rights groups and the protest movement over Iraq. You add the press into the mix with these groups and it's one big circle-jerk.
I'll have to think about your point about Watergate more.
Comment