Reportage Medialog

The CJR daily blog makes an interesting comment on the way the revelation of Deep Throat has been covered in the blogsphere:

Comment on the story in the ’sphere is, well, lackluster overall — perhaps not a surprise given that it happened before 2001, which seems about the outer limit of many bloggers’ institutional memory. The Don Wood Files sticks close to the big, fat yawn meme by commenting that “Hal Holbrooke played Deep Throat in the great movie ‘All the President’s Men,’” and noting that both Holbrooke and Felt had “great hair.”

However there has been some excitement amongst the younger generation. The Washington Post reported on a very excited 17 year old who lives in Mark Felt’s street who was very excited:

“I was, like, ahhh! I just screamed. I don’t know, it’s just something I’m excited about. People think I’m crazy. I am into music and movies, but, I mean, history is my thing.”

And here it is, “history!,” right on Redford Place, just a few blocks from her home. She wanted Felt’s autograph in her copy of “All the President’s Men.” She would knock on the door and say, “Hi. My name is Laci Moore. I’m an AP student from Piner High School and I’ve been studying Watergate.”

And she did it, though to no avail. Felt’s grandson told her to come back after all of the hullabaloo had died down.

David Brooks on the NYT op-ed page has a very strange self-helpish approach to the whole story focusing on the Woodward’s account of his first meeting with Felt and reading it as: nervous young man overcomes shyness to achieve great things.

For that is the purpose of Watergate in today’s culture. It isn’t about Nixon and the cover-up anymore. It’s about Woodward and Bernstein. Watergate has become a modern Horatio Alger story, a real-life fairy tale, an inspiring ode for mediacentric college types - about the two young men who found exciting and challenging jobs, who slew the dragon, who became rich and famous by doing good and who were played by Redford and Hoffman in the movie version.

Woodward was nervous once, like you.

I think older people and journocentric media junkies overestimate the way the myth plays today. I showed some scenes from All the President’s Men in a recent class of journalism students and only a handful of them had ever seen the film in spite of its supposed importance and ready availability on DVD.

I think there is a lot still to unpack about the Watergate myth. It is definitely still a touchstone moment that students bring up in class from time to time. Sometimes it is alluded to as part of a why-journalism-matters discussion but more often it is used in defense of anonymous sources. When talking about sources students usually have no idea about the relatively rigorous way anonymous sourcing was confirmed by the Post.

Michael Schudson’s analysis in Watergate and American Memory is still one of the best. He argues that there is a myth off Watergate in journalism and a myth of journalism in Watergate. He convincingly critiques the myth of journalism created by Watergate. He asks three critical questions:

• Did the press as a whole act courageously to keep power in check?
• Was the press unaided in its campaign against the evils of Watergate?
• Was the press unbiased and driven only by the public good?

His answer to each of these questions is a reasonably convincing no: The Post and a few other papers largely acted alone; it was really the courts and Senate that brought Nixon down and there were plenty of other motivations such as a general climate of press antagonism to Nixon and rivalry between the Post and the Times which at least in part motivated the reporting.

However he concludes that this in some sense doesn’t matter:

It does not matter because the Watergate myth is sustaining. It survives to a large extent impervious to critique. It offers journalism a charter, a reason for being large enough to justify the constitutional protections that journalism enjoys…While a tradition of muckraking precedes Watergate, Watergate gave it flesh and blood (Woodward and Bernstein) as well as an unforgettable knock-out-punch triumph (Nixon’s resignation) however unfairly attributed to journalism…Watergate, at least retrospectively, could be widely accepted as a triumph not only of American journalism but of the American system of a free press.

Schudson wrote this in 1993, and in the light of other mythical events in journalism post September 11 Schudson’s strident tone seems questionable. The power of the myth has been blunted by recent events such as the weapon’s of mass destruction fiasco and the constitutional protections of American journalism seem less and less secure.