In the Washington Post, Leonard Downie Jr. looks back on the Post‘s glory days of Watergate and wonders how the same story would play out today. He says the basics of investigative reporting haven’t changed much, but media certainly have.
Then, Woodward and Bernstein worked alone for several months before the story became the center public attention. “Nixon was re-elected five months after the burglary in 1972,” Downie writes, “and Watergate was not much of an issue during the campaign. That would not happen today.”
As Downie says, everything happens faster today.
Now, from day one, the story would be all over the Internet, and hordes of reporters and bloggers would immediately join the chase. The story would become fodder for around-the-clock argument among the blowhards on cable television and the Internet. Opinion polls would be constantly stirring up and measuring the public’s reaction.
However, all manner of travesties have come out of the Bush Administration that make Watergate seem almost petty. Iraq intelligence manipulation, war profiteering by corporations connected to the Vice President, the U.S. Attorney scandal, torture, etc. etc. etc. And yet Bush hasn’t suffered the public humiliation that Nixon did (yet).
I think that if Watergate had happened five years ago, the Right-Wing Noise Machine would have drowned out whatever Woodward and Bernstein found, and both reporters would have been swift-boated into resigning. They might have written a book that made a little splash, but by now they’d be out of journalism altogether.
Now, I think the story would be getting more respect, and the Right would be less able to crush Woodward and Bernstein and destroy their careers. We still haven’t gotten to a point that a news story about wrongdoing in the White House has the impact it ought to have, however.
In 1973, I had the sense that people realized Nixon had done something wrong, but the average person might not have been able to articulate exactly what it was. Right-wingers today, of course, brush off Watergate as a simple burglary — no big deal — utterly ignoring the implications of what the burglars were up to and the other shenanigans, such as money laundering, that were traced back to the White House.
And today, for example, they refuse to acknowledge what the U.S. Attorney scandal actually is about. They huff that a President has the authority to fire attorneys, and of course he does, but that isn’t the issue. And you can explain the issue to them until you are purple, but it will do no good. It’s like talking to a wall.
But does the rest of the public really understand why the U.S. Attorney firings are significant? Has anyone sat them down and said “This is a big deal, because the Bush White House corrupted the Justice Department and the U.S. justice system in order to help Republicans win elections”? I doubt most people fully understand that.
Some things have changed; some things are the same.
Tonite is the first night of Chanukah and here in our half-Jewish descent, half-Christian descent and all-Atheist household we are getting ready to have a daughter and grandsons over for first night dinner. It’s interesting how we align ourselves with the holidays in order to maintain gift-giving and food celebration traditions.
It started me thinking about belief in general and, watching CBS News Sunday Morning as they did a piece on Angels, I heard that 65% of Americans believe that angels exist as messengers from heaven. Many believe they have spoken with angels. And, of course, they substantiate the basic belief in Heaven (and Hell) that an ABC poll of a couple of years ago said 85% of Americans share.
Searching the web for background on the belief in Heaven, I found a list at ReligiousTolerance.org that pulled some quotes from a variety of sources:
There are more quotes on the list, but you get the drift.
In a 2004 Gallop poll we learn that 81% of Americans believe in heaven and 70% believe in hell. A previous Poll said 77% of Americans felt they would make it to heaven – very few saw themselves as going to hell.
continued at Under The LobsterScope
There is also the story of top “senior officials” involvement in the top-down ordering of torture, for which many would like to see Bush held accountable, not to mention those already shown to be guilty of war crimes. Yes, so much has happened, and somehow Clinton’s zipper caused more public outrage than messing with the judicial system and torturing innocent people. Why was 1973 different? And what about the media? I distinctly remember Watergate as an extended narrative form, and the last time I saw anything that felt like it I was watching “senior officials” making their case for war, with all kinds of expert testimony, truly a mock trial. I think one of the things that has occurred is that media now carries with it an aura of deceit that people simply live with, and allow themselves to be incapacitated by, and that this is easily manipulatable. Imagine Fox covering these trials, imagine the experts. It’s just embarrassing, the thought of it.
Since Watergate, right wing ideology has poisoned both politics and the media. Their politicians have a take-no-prisoners attitude and have no problem at all bullying this country to serve their own interests and none other. Their noise machine keeps the public focused on trivia and shrugs off any substance that challenges their position.
Fortunately their extreme ideology hit the wall electorially last month, but not before causing a mountain of damage to this country.
One of the more annoying consequences of Watergate, is that every acknowledged, easily comprehendible scandal since is tagged fill-in-the-blank–gate. It must drive people who were too young for Watergate crazy. By contrast there are those scandals so massive and so insidious and far reaching – any of those commited during the last eight years will do – these slip by the media’s enfeebled radar and get no such recognition or naming at all.
I wouldn’t know how to measure it, but I think we’re way more cynical now than we were in 1973. I know I am.
I remember sitting transfixed by the Watergate Hearings. That’s one difference between then and now – I don’t know what transpired behind the scenes between the heavy allegations by the Post and the start of the hearings, but at least congress was willing and capable of even holding hearings. And I recall that they felt “fair and balanced” given Ervin’s and Baker’s stewardship; I think everyone with a clue was fairly shocked by Watergate and wanted to get to the bottom of it. I don’t remember anybody saying, “well, Nixon SHOULD have been able to break into DNC headquarters; there was an election on!”
Today, I suspect hearings be a partisan sideshow, if you were even able to hold them at all. There’s little shock and outrage. And I have heard people say, “well, Bush SHOULD be able to spy on Americans; there’s a[n unnecessary] war on!” Totally different attitude.
Isn’t congress supposed to check the powers of the executive branch?
btchakir – it was the same Aquinas who said near the end of his life that everything he had written was pure drivel. (Given the sheer size and weight of his ‘Theologica,’ that makes for a lot of ‘drivel.’) Perhaps today’s self-anointed spokesmen for God will soon have a similar awakening?
Maha, I think part of today’s media inattention to the important may be a result of too much news. Sort of like a story breaks almost immediately followed by another ‘story’ so the previous one is dropped or put on the back burner where it stays. (I recently heard a tv blowhard declare the Blago story the “soap opera of the century.” How’s that for sucking the air out of things like attorney firings, torture, subversion of the Constitution etc. etc.)
A whole lot of Americans were willing & eager to look the other way after 9/11. The administration realized there was rage that went along with the sight of Americans throwiwing themselves out of the Twin Towers because the heat was unenduarable. This rage became a get-out-of-jail card for all sorts of domestic spying and international torture. Democrats are still unwilling to call what the administration actions criminal.
You ought to be able to shoot your own dog if he turns rabid. If you can’t do it, then hand the gun to your neighbor before anyone gets bitten. We need to cooperate with an international court if we can’t do the job. In most cases, crimes by Americans were committed outside the US, often against citizens of a 3rd nation. In the case of rendition, the crime involved torture by other nations noorious for human rights violations. So let’s cooperate with an intnational court to determine what happened & who authorized it and have them tried in a global court.
felicity ..Aquinas didn’t have to admit that all his writings were drivel… Just reading his works made that point apparent. I read his treatise on Angelic authority ( the pecking order) and realised he was completely off his rocker. The guy didn’t even know that Seraphim can’t act independently of the heavenly host….I mean, that’s just basic stuff.. right?
Having lived through Watergate and having read almost every book written about Watergate (I even have my own copy of the Senate Hearings transcripts), the difference between now and then is the Bob Woodward of 1972. He didn’t exist in 2001. I personally think the real Bob Woodward died and was replaced by a Republican clone. Remember his first book on Bush and the Iraq war. It was a book written by a Bush toady and was a publishing disgrace. The Washington Post presently is just a shadow (if that) of the great paper it was in the 70s under a woman publisher. I canceled my subscription to it in July 2004 because it was primarily propaganda for the Bush administration by then.
Woodward and Bernstein were young and hungry investigative reporters waiting for their first big story in 1972. Watergate was it. In 2001, young and hungry investigative reporters had to become bloggers or freelance just to have the freedom to write something critical about the Bush regime. Bernstein wrote a few things about that fiasco of an election in 2000; but, I don’t remember him making any effort to expose any wrongdoing by Bush, et al. He was too rich and too comfortable to make waves.
FYI, the only book I refused to read was the Gordon Liddy book. To this day, Liddy is unrepentant for his crimes and says he would do it all over again if asked. He was convicted and served time for his crimes. Some of the more crazy schemes were the brain children of Liddy. Yet, when David Letterman asked McCain about his relationship with Liddy, McCain said he was proud to be his friend. None of the media wrote about McCain palling around with terrorists (which Liddy is).
Swami – and of course Aquinas did carry around the epithet of The Dumb Ox for his entire adult life. (In truth, a lot of his writing was right out of Aristotle {who was probably not a monotheist} but was big on effects having to have causes so Aquinas seized the opportunity to make God first cause.)
Anyway, you’ll have to admit that it would take a heap of humbleness to admit in public that your whole life was spent in the pursuit of drivel.
felicity – I don’t think the problem today is too much news. Rather the news has turned into whatever titilates the public, and ever more stimulation is needed to keep eyeballs from wandering. Any subject not fitting into a tiny soundbite is either glossed over or not covered at all. Our attention spans collectively have shrunk.
Howard Zinn has a great explanation, based on this idea, of why TV news never covers anything truly significant or novel. It’s why no new ideas can break into a news cycle – it takes too long to explain, and so it doesn’t fit the TV format.
Since Obama has been elected I notice that on news shows, finance shows, analysis etc there are more black men who seem to not be picked for their ideological bent but perhaps for their ability. I’ve just been noticing new and intelligent faces. Makes you wonder where they have been toiling up to now.
moonbat – I think it’s both too much news and our short attention spans/convenient tv formats. Somebody is arguing – in fact may have written a book around the subject – that the remote control sitting next to us is the culprit directly leading to and continuing to cause our short attention spans. I can dig it.
And because we have the remote, television is formatted to keep our interest by running little if anything for more than a few minutes – or less – which only in turn guarantees that our attention span will stay short.
Watergate would never happen today because today’s Washington Post would be on the side of Nixon.