Nixon quits
The claims for the Watergate reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein seldom are very modest. The mythical notion that their reporting brought down President Richard Nixon in 1974 is among the most cherished — and extravagant — tales in American journalism.
But the assertions posted yesterday at the online site of a Texas alternative newspaper were extraordinary in their lavishness.
The newspaper, the Austin Chronicle, declared:
“In the summer of 1972, when the unlikely duo of Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein stumbled onto what would turn out to be the most important hard news story of the century, investigative journalism and the gritty and laborious, but ultimately necessary, processes it entailed reached a zenith.
“Public people in positions of great – and presumably unassailable – power went to prison as a result of Woodward and Bernstein’s dogged determination not to allow what was initially perceived as a nonstory to die out. They stuck to their guns, their guts, and their deadlines. And in the end, President Richard Milhous Nixon, facing impeachment and charges of high crimes and misdemeanors, was forced out of office by genuine, bipartisan outrage. Absolute hubris corrupted absolutely. It was a brief, shining moment when American journalism not only shook the pillars of power but also very nearly toppled them.”
There’s a lot of exaggeration to unpack there, so let’s focus on key claims:
- Woodward and Bernstein “stumbled onto what would turn out to be the most important hard news story of the century.”
- “Public people” went to prison because of their Watergate reporting.
- Woodward and Bernstein’s work on Watergate was a moment when “American journalism … shook the pillars of power.”
This is not to quibble with word choice, but Woodward and Bernstein certainly did not stumble onto the Watergate scandal. They were assigned by editors at the Washington Post to dig into the highly suspicious breakin in June 1972 at the headquarters of the Democratic national committee.
As Edward Jay Epstein pointed out in his brilliant 1974 essay, the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein was highly derivative, sustained by leaks from federal investigations into the crimes of Watergate.
And I note in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, that “Woodward and Bernstein did not uncover defining and decisive elements of the Watergate scandal” — the White House attempt to cover-up crimes associated with the breakin and the payment of hush money to the Watergate burglars.
Those aspects of the scandal, Woodward was quoted as saying in 1973, were “held too close. Too few people knew. We couldn’t get that high.”
As for the claim that Woodward and Bernstein sent “public people” to jail: Well, who were they?
This is not a claim that Woodward and Bernstein are known to make publicly. And it’s not a claim that appears in their book, All the President’s Men, which describes their reporting on Watergate.
A case might be made that their reporting about the “dirty tricks” organized by Donald Segretti, a minor figure in the Watergate scandal, led to his imprisonment. Segretti pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor charges of distributing illegal campaign materials during the 1972 Democratic primaries and spent 4 1/2 months in prison.
But as Epstein noted in his essay, “neither the prosecutors, the grand jury, nor the Watergate Committee … found any evidence to support the Bernstein-Woodward thesis that Watergate was part of the Segretti operation.” Segretti’s dirty tricks were a sideshow, not central elements of the Watergate scandal.
Nor can it be accurately said that Woodward and Bernstein’s work on Watergate represented a moment when “American journalism … shook the pillars of power.”
Those pillars were shaken by an unprecedented constitutional crisis caused not by investigative journalism but by the illegal conduct of Nixon, his senior aides, and officials in reelection campaign.
Nixon resigned the presidency in August 1974 following release of audiotapes he secretly made; the content of the tapes showed he had approved an attempt to divert the FBI from investigating the crimes of Watergate. The incriminating tapes were surrendered only after the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the president must turn them over to federal prosecutors.
Nixon, then, was forced from office only after the disclosure of unequivocal proof that he had obstructed justice in the investigation of the crimes of Watergate. The Washington Post had nothing to do with those disclosures.
As Ben Bradlee, the Post’s executive editor during the Watergate period has said: It “must be remembered that Nixon got Nixon. The Post didn’t get Nixon.”
Or as Woodward put it in an interview in 2004:
“To say the press brought down Nixon, that’s horseshit.”
That’s earthy but telling perspective. And it represents a useful antidote to breathtaking and lavish claims about the effects of newspaper reporting.
Recent and related:
- Watergate and revolutions: Indulging in media power myths
- Mythmaking in Moscow: Biden says WaPo brought down Nixon
- A trope that knows few bounds: The hero-journalist myth
- Pumping up Watergate’s heroic-journalist myth
- Didn’t: A Watergate primer
- Fact-checking Watergate advice that ‘worked’
- ‘Follow the money,’ again and again
- Newsman tells ‘a simple truth,’ changes history: Sure he did
- On media myths and the ‘golden age’ fallacy
- ‘So the Speak’ about ‘Getting It Wrong’
- ‘Getting It Wrong’ plays the Tattered Cover
Media Myth Alert 
[…] has it that the scandal’s disclosure pivoted on Woodward and Bernstein’s dogged reporting for the Post, that they exposed the crimes of Watergate and forced Nixon’s […]
[…] More mythical claims for WaPo’s Watergate reporting […]
[…] a fine one to talk, anyway: It’s not as if his reporting on Watergate for the Washington Post — the reporting that won him lasting acclaim — was free of […]
[…] Post did so April 3, 2003, in a sensational front-page article that appeared beneath the […]
[…] More mythical claims for WaPo’s Watergate reporting […]
[…] this dramatic story, the Post ran the headline: “‘She was fighting to the […]
[…] More mythical claims for WaPo’s Watergate reporting […]
[…] More mythical claims for WaPo’s Watergate reporting […]
[…] More mythical claims for WaPo’s Watergate reporting […]
[…] other topics, Kustra and I discussed the hero-journalist myth of Watergate (the notion that the dogged reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for the Washington Post […]
[…] heroic-journalist myth lives on because it’s such a reassuring narrative for the news media — a tale that […]
[…] news outlets commenting about the marker, it has been occasion to assert hyperbolic claims that the Post’s reporting on Watergate brought down Richard Nixon’s scandal-riddled […]
[…] declared over the weekend that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, in their reporting for the Washington Post, “unraveled the Watergate […]
[…] know that from Barry Sussman, the Post’s lead editor on Watergate, who wrote in […]
[…] at the Post often have said that the newspaper’s reporting kept the Watergate story alive during the summer and fall of 1972, a time when few other news organizations seemed interested in […]
[…] More mythical claims for WaPo’s Watergate reporting […]
[…] A hagiographic treatment of the “Cronkite Moment” (posted May 31): Few media-driven myths are as tenacious and desperately held as the so-called “Cronkite Moment” of 1968, when […]
[…] is, after all, a prominent conservative commentator and the “Cronkite Moment” and the Watergate myth center around journalists and news organizations commonly associated with liberal […]
[…] wanted the FBI top job after the death in May 1972 of the agency’s director, J. Edgar Hoover. Leaking to Woodward (Felt never met Bernstein during Watergate) was a way to pursue those ambitions — and to […]
[…] myth has it that the Post’s dogged reporting on Watergate forced Richard M. Nixon to resign the […]
[…] More mythical claims for WaPo’s Watergate reporting […]
[…] heroic-journalist narrative of Watergate — the mythical and simplistic notion that the reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for the Washington Post […]
[…] trope, Watergate’s dominant popular narrative, which rests on the notion that dogged reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post exposed Nixon’s criminal […]
[…] Graham was right. But the constitutional-processes interpretation of Watergate is far less dramatic, and far more intricate, than the narrative about two ambitious journalists and their earnest reporting. […]
[…] a mild mystery, and even Media Myth Alert — no friend of the mythical claim that Bernstein and Woodward’s reporting brought down Nixon — finds it hard to believe […]
[…] a mild mystery, and Media Myth Alert — no friend of the notion that Bernstein and Woodward’s reporting brought down Nixon — doesn’t believe the Post […]