Watergate’s Victims
Watergate destroyed the presidency of Richard M. Nixon. It may also have done a similar job on modern journalism.
Watergate destroyed the presidency of Richard M. Nixon. It may also have done a similar job on modern journalism.
Prior to Watergate, journalism was mostly a procedural affair. Journalists were a delivery system between things that happened and people learning about those things. After Watergate – as noble as was the cause pursued by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein – matters shifted. Journalism made things happen.
In Watergate’s specific case, they made a US president resign after his various crooked antics were exposed. Quite why Nixon went to such lengths to crush his Democrat opponents remains something of a mystery; after all, Nixon prevailed in the 1972 election by forty-nine states to one. The Democrats weren’t exactly putting up much of a fight.
In any case, Watergate and the subsequent celebration of Woodward and Bernstein led to a shift in journalistic aims. We still see the result of that shift today. Journalism courses in the US, UK and Australia focus on causes, struggles and Speaking Truth to Power. As opposed, I guess, to the previous model of simply Speaking Truth.
This probably wouldn’t have been such a negative outcome if post-Watergate journalism hadn’t demanded its adherents follow the original Watergate design. To qualify as genuine Watergate-level truth-telling, the target must fit the Nixon template: white, conservative, Western and presumed evil. Problem is, not too many Western conservative leaders who followed Nixon offered his level of criminal qualities.
So left-leaning journalists of recent decades perform a cute little two-step. First they demonise their targeted white conservative as a wicked Nixon figure, and then they commence what they imagine to be an honourable Watergate-style destruction of that target.
(Please read on.)