There’s no doubt Hollywood is an important reason why Watergate’s dominant narrative has it that Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and the Washington Post toppled Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

Not the Post’s doing

It is a heroic narrative that found mention today’s New York Times, in an article discussing two movies about journalists that could be contenders this year for Academy Awards.

One of them is Truth, a perversely titled film that celebrates former CBS News anchor Dan Rather and producer Marla Mapes who in 2004 used bogus documents to claim President George W. Bush dodged wartime service in Vietnam. No way does that movie deserve Oscar consideration. The other contender-film is titled Spotlight.

But what most interests Media Myth Alert is the Times article’s blithe and mistaken reference to “the investigation by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that led to Richard M. Nixon’s resignation.”

Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate reporting for the Post had no such effect, however much the cinematic version of their book, All the President’s Men, encouraged that notion. As I noted in my 2010 book, Getting It Wrong, the movie promotes an “unmistakable assertion of the power and centrality of the press in Nixon’s fall.

“All the President’s Men allows no other interpretation: It was the work Woodward and Bernstein that set in motion far-reaching effects that brought about the first-ever resignation of a U.S. president. And it is a message that has endured.”

Indeed, 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 diminishes the far more accurate interpretation of what led to Nixon’s fall in August 1974.

To roll up a scandal of Watergate’s dimensions, I wrote in Getting It Wrong, “required the collective if not always the coordinated forces of special prosecutors, federal judges, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.

“Even then, Nixon likely would have served out his term if not for the audiotape recordings he secretly made of most conversations in the Oval Office of the White House. Only when compelled by the Supreme Court did Nixon surrender those recordings, which captured him plotting the cover-up” of the burglary in June 1972 that was Watergate’s seminal crime.

Principals at the Post have, over the years, rejected the simplistic notion that the newspaper’s reporting led Nixon to resign.

Katharine Graham, the Post’s publisher during Watergate, said in 1997, for example:

“Sometimes people accuse us of bringing down a president, which of course we didn’t do. The processes that caused [Nixon’s] resignation were constitutional.”

In 2005, Michael Getler, then the Post’s ombudsman, or in-house critic, wrote:

“Ultimately, it was not The Post, but the FBI, a Congress acting in bipartisan fashion and the courts that brought down the Nixon administration. They saw Watergate and the attempt to cover it up as a vast abuse of power and attempted corruption of U.S. institutions.”

Not even Woodward has embraced the heroic-journalist myth. He once told an interviewer for American Journalism Review:

“To say the press brought down Nixon, that’s horse shit.”

And in an interview with the PBS “Frontline” program, Woodward said “the mythologizing of our role in Watergate has gone to the point of absurdity, where journalists write … that I, single-handedly, brought down Richard Nixon. Totally absurd.”

Today’s article wasn’t the first time the Times has turned to the mythical claim about the Post’s Watergate reporting.

In a cover article in 2014, the Times Sunday magazine mentioned Woodward and Bernstein, saying they “actually managed to take down a mendacious American president, and in doing so they came to symbolize the hope and heroism of a new generation.”

And in 2008,in an article about Woodward’s finally introducing his high-level Watergate source to Bernstein, the Times referred to the “two young Washington Post reporters [who] cracked the Watergate scandal and brought down President Richard M. Nixon.”

WJC

More from Media Myth Alert:

• NYTimes Mag and the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate
• Two myths and today’s New York Times
• A sort-of correction from the New York Times
• The hero-journalist trope: Watergate’s go-to mythical narrative
• WaPo move to new quarters stirs retelling of hero-journalist myth
• Inflating the exploits of WaPo’s Watergate reporters
• The ‘newsroom where two reporters took down a president’? Sure it was
• Mythmaking in Moscow: Biden says WaPo brought down Nixon
• The Nixon tapes: A pivotal Watergate story that WaPo missed
• Talking ethics and the ‘golden days’ of Watergate
• The Watergate myth: Why debunking matters
• Taking stock: Top mythbusting posts of 2015