The 40th anniversary of the debut of the Watergate scandal falls in two months and we’re certain read many effusive tributes to the Washington Post’s reporters who often — but wrongly — are said to have exposed the scandal and brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency.
It’s a safe bet that many of the tributes to the Post and its Watergate reporting team of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein will be exaggerated and erroneous.
Take, for example, this passage, which appeared over the weekend in a column in the Toronto Sun:
“The only superstars newspapers ever produced were Woodward and Bernstein, the Washington Post investigative team who broke the Watergate story that led to the downfall of U.S. president Richard Nixon.”
Maybe they were the only superstars of newspaperdom, although that claim might provoke an argument from the committee at New York University that recently selected 100 outstanding U.S. journalists of the past 100 years. (The list included several dubious entries, such as the self-important Christiane Amanpour of CNN; photojournalist and probable fraud Robert Capa; mythmaking writer David Halberstam, and broadcast journalism’s flawed saint, Edward R. Murrow.)
Woodward and Bernstein made NYU’s rather predictable list, too.
If they are newspapering’s lone superstars, their self-promotion had a lot to do with it. Woodward and Bernstein’s book about their Watergate reporting, All the President’s Men, came out in June 1974, about two months before Nixon’s resignation.
The book, a months-long best-seller, had been written with the movies in mind; the cinematic version of All the President’s Men came out in April 1976 and starred Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein.
But more important than Woodward and Bernstein’s superstar status is the claim in the Sun’s column that they “broke the Watergate story.”
They did no such thing.
The signal crime of Watergate — the June 1972 burglary at Democratic National Committee headquarters — wasn’t broken by the Post. The break-in was interrupted by police and within hours, news was circulating of the arrest of five burglars at the Watergate complex.
The story in the Post about the break-in appeared beneath the byline of Alfred E. Lewis, a veteran police reporter, and its opening paragraph made quite clear that details were from investigators:
“Five men, one of whom said he is a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, were arrested at 2:30 a.m. yesterday in what authorities described as an elaborate plot to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee here.”
Watergate reporting by the Post did not expose the cover-up of crimes linked to the break-in or the payment of hush money to the burglars, either.
As I note in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, which includes a chapter about the media myths of Watergate, Woodward was quoted in 1973 as saying that those crucial aspects of the scandal were “held too close. Too few people knew. We couldn’t get that high.”
Woodward: 'held too close'
Nor did Woodward and Bernstein uncover or disclose the existence of the White House audiotaping system, which was decisive to the outcome of Watergate.
The tapes secretly made by President Richard Nixon captured him approving a plan in June 1972 intended to thwart the FBI’s investigation of the Watergate break-in.
That contents of that tape — the so-called “smoking gun” of Watergate — sealed Nixon’s fate and directly led to his resignation in August 1974.
The White House taping system had been disclosed 11 months before, not by Woodward and Bernstein but by investigators of the Senate select committee on Watergate.
As I point out in Getting It Wrong, Woodward and Bernstein later claimed to have had a solid lead about the taping system.
In All the President’s Men, the book, Woodward recalled having spoken with Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee about the lead.
Bradlee advised:
“I wouldn’t bust one” in checking it out.
Had they followed the lead, Woodward and Bernstein may well have broken a pivotal story about Watergate.
But they didn’t.
Recent and related:
- Who, or what, brought down Nixon?
- ‘You might bring down a government’: Sure, that happens
- The journos who saved us
- Did Watergate’s ‘Deep Throat’ know he was ‘Deep Throat’?
- Carl Bernstein, at it again
- Woodward’s reporting ‘changed course of American history’?
- One paragraph, three myths
- Movies about journalists: Another list, another myth
- Fox News misremembers Watergate and ‘follow the money’
- Jon Krakauer rolls back claims about WaPo ‘source’ in Jessica Lynch case
- On bra-burning, Erica Jong is wrong
- A debunker’s work is never done
- ‘Getting It Wrong’ goes on Q-and-A
Media Myth Alert 
[…] Woodward and Bernstein: The ‘only superstars newspapers ever produced’? […]
[…] Woodward and Bernstein: The ‘only superstars newspapers ever produced’? […]
[…] they, Woodward and Bernstein may well have broken a pivotal story about the […]
[…] Woodward and Bernstein already were on the money […]
[…] Woodward and Bernstein wrote in All the President’s Men that they “conferred on street corners, passed notes in the office, avoided telephone conversations.” […]
[…] alluring and heroic were the depictions of Woodward and Bernstein as they, ahem, toppled a corrupt president that young adult Americans in the 1970s thronged to […]
[…] Nixon’s corrupt presidency — was propelled and solidified by the cinematic treatment of Woodward and Bernstein‘s 1974 book, All the President’s […]
[…] Unless, that is, you embrace the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate, which has it that Woodward and Bernstein’s dogged reporting exposed the crimes that forced Nixon’s resignation in […]
[…] I discuss in my media mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting did not bring down Nixon. They didn’t uncover the scandal, […]
[…] did Woodward and Bernstein disclose the payment of hush money to operatives arrested in the burglary — a key development […]
[…] movie, which starred Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, idealized Woodward and Bernstein, identifying their reporting as central to uncovering the scandal that toppled Richard […]
[…] Watergate reporting for the Washington Post — and was central to the rise of the myth that Woodward and Bernstein brought down the corrupt presidency of Richard […]
[…] the President’s Men was revealing in other ways about the work and conduct of Woodward and Bernstein. Media critic Jack Shafer, in a column in 2004, revisited a number of reporting flaws and ethical […]
[…] Woodward and Bernstein: The ‘only superstars newspapers ever produced’? […]
[…] Blasio credited Bernstein and Woodward, the Washington Post’s lead reporters on the scandal, for having “framed and, you know, […]
[…] why, for example, the Watergate myth — that the reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for the Washington Post brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency — is so hardy. […]
[…] why, some observers might ask, do Watergate, and Woodward and Bernstein, still matter after 40 years? Why does anyone much […]
[…] Woodward and Bernstein chased Nixon out of office? […]
[…] to assert that “Nixon would have stayed in office” if not for Woodward and Bernstein is to be decidedly in error — and to indulge in a powerful myth of American […]
[…] this year marks the 40th anniversary of the movie’s release and the notion that Woodward and Bernstein toppled Nixon remains the principal way Watergate is understood, a version that disregards and […]
[…] the movie’s significant contributions to the mythology of Watergate, notably the notion that Woodward and Bernstein‘s reporting — the movie’s centerpiece — brought down the corrupt presidency […]
[…] not long ago — not even the Post’s Watergate-era principals bought into the notion that Woodward and/or Bernstein brought down […]
[…] article about Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, at which Woodward and Bernstein spoke about the importance of unfettered […]
[…] obstruction most certainly was not “uncovered” by Woodward and Bernstein. It was disclosed not long before Nixon resigned, in the release of a previously secret White House […]
[…] Woodward and Bernstein most certainly did not uncover Nixon’s obstruction. That was revealed in 1974, not long before Nixon resigned, in the release of a previously secret White House tape on which the president can be heard approving a scheme to divert the FBI’s investigation into the burglary at Democratic National Committee headquarters — the signal crime of Watergate. […]
[…] really, it isn’t picky, because to credit Woodward and Bernstein with unraveling the coverup is to distort and exaggerate their marginal overall contributions to […]
[…] forcing Nixon’s resignation in Watergate wasn’t the work of Woodward and Bernstein. Or of any journalist or news […]
[…] century to the dominant narrative of the Watergate scandal, that exposés by two Washington Post reporters brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt […]
[…] Toronto Sun likewise asserted that the Woodward and Bernstein‘s “1970s Watergate reporting … brought down Richard […]
[…] Toronto Sun likewise asserted that the Woodward and Bernstein‘s “1970s Watergate reporting … brought down Richard […]
[…] of Nixon’s tapes was pivotal in the Watergate saga — and it was a disclosure not by Bernstein and Woodward or by “Deep Throat,” but by a former Nixon aide in testimony before a U.S. Senate […]
[…] important reason is that the claim feeds the notion that Woodward and Bernstein were singularly enterprising reporters who defied conventional wisdom and relentlessly pursued […]
[…] even Media Myth Alert — no friend of the mythical claim that Bernstein and Woodward’s reporting brought down Nixon — finds it hard to believe the Post intentionally entered a false […]
[…] all, Woodward and Bernstein had plenty of company in reporting on the emerging scandal in the summer and fall of 1972. They […]
[…] Woodward and Bernstein had plenty of company in reporting on the unfolding Watergate scandal in the summer and fall of 1972. […]