Watergate opened floodgates for “Woodstein” wannabes

The primary contribution of the Watergate scandal to the American political landscape was skepticism. Not to say that scandal did not exist before Nixon’s Plumbers broke into the Watergate Hotel, but the reaction to it was less severe, less destabilizing. The assumption that political leaders were essentially trustworthy was washed away, giving ground to a theory of “guilty until proven innocent.”

“We expect politicians to be less than forthcoming,” said Social Studies department chair Jason Myers. “They don’t tell us everything that they do or everything that they know. So that makes the American voter more jaded.”

That new attitude was a direct result of the magnitude of the Watergate cover-up. “Nixon had turned his White House,” Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein recollect, “to a remarkable extent, into a criminal enterprise.” If the highest executive officer in the land was complicit in a “third-rate burglary,” than anyone–senators, governors, mayors, anyone–could be (to use Nixon’s terminology) “a crook.”

The corollary: if anyone could be a crook, than anyone could expose a crook.    

In a 40-year anniversary retrospective for the Post, Leonard Downie Jr. credits Woodward and Bernstein with making investigative reporting “entrenched in American journalism” and inspiring “generations of young journalists [who] have entered the profession to become investigative reporters.” The two young, chain-smoking, hard-boiled reporters portrayed in All the President’s Men were to journalists what Indiana Jones would later be for archaeologists. They cast a sort of glamour upon the job, paving skeptical reporting  into an avenue for notoriety, fame, and respect.

“Bob Woodward is still making money off of [Watergate],” says Myers. “That’s the model: everyone wants to be Bob Woodward.”

Woodward probably deserves to coast on breaking the scandal of the 20th century, but the mythologizing of the Post’s Watergate coverage has allowed modern news media to justify turning a news story into their story. Viewers who tune into Fox News and MSNBC  are going to get entirely different stories spun from the same event, stories often centered on a panel of pundits finding “the truth”–whatever that is.

Despite the problems this approach can create, Myers finds living in a world where the post-Watergate passion for muckraking fills hours and pages of news a net positive.

“Is there excess? Of course. But I’d rather know than not know.”