W. Joseph Campbell

Archive for the ‘Washington Post’ Category

, , , , , , , ,

A ‘certain American paper brought down a certain president’

In Debunking, Media myths, Newspapers, Washington Post, Watergate myth on September 29, 2011 at 4:14 am

It’s impressive how strictly American media myths can win such eager embrace in international contexts.

A certain American president leaves office

The heroic-journalist myth of Watergate is a telling example.

India’s leading English-language newspaper, the Hindu, invoked that myth the other day in a commentary that declared:

“More than 30 years ago, a certain American newspaper brought down a certain president by courageously exposing his wrongdoings entirely on the strength of information supplied by an anonymous source. It was not until some quarter of a century later that the real identity of Washington Post’s source for its expose of the Watergate scandal was revealed.”

Alright, let’s unbundle that myth-freighted paragraph:

  • Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency was not brought down by the Washington Post, or by any other American newspaper — a topic I discuss in my media mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong.
  • Nixon’s fall in 1974 had nothing to do with “information supplied by an anonymous source” — a reference to the Post’s stealthy, high-level contact code-named “Deep Throat.” In 2005, a former senior FBI official named W. Mark Felt announced that he had been the Post’s “Deep Throat.”

I note in Getting It Wrong that the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate — “the endlessly appealing notion that the dogged reporting of two young, hungry, and tireless Washington Post journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, brought down Nixon and his corrupt presidency” — has become the dominant narrative of the greatest scandal in American political history.

“But to explain Watergate through the lens of the heroic-journalist is,” I write, “to abridge and misunderstand the scandal and to indulge in a particularly beguiling media-driven myth.”

I point out that the heroic-journalist trope “minimizes the far more decisive forces that unraveled the scandal and forced Nixon from office.”

Those forces, I write, included “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.”

But even then, Nixon likely would have served out his second term as president 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 in July 1974 did Nixon surrender the recordings that captured him plotting to cover up his administration’s ties to the burglary at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington.

I note that the heroic-journalist interpretation “has become the dominant popular narrative of the Watergate scandal for several reasons,” including:

Woodward and Bernstein’s book about their reporting of the unfolding Watergate scandal; the popular cinematic version of their book, All the President’s Men, and the years-long guessing game about the identity of “Deep Throat,” with whom Woodward (but never Bernstein) met periodically in 1972 and 1973, while investigating Watergate.

The role of “Deep Throat,” the reporters wrote in All the President’s Men, was to “confirm information that had been obtained elsewhere and to add some perspective.”

Those factors, I write, “combined to place Woodward and Bernstein at the center of Watergate in popular consciousness” while projecting and reinforcing the erroneous notion that the scandal’s outcome pivoted on disclosures reported by the news media.

WJC

Recent and related:

, , , , , , , ,

The ‘stories that brought down a president’: Sure, they did

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on September 26, 2011 at 3:31 am

The Guardian, one of London’s top newspapers, bought into Watergate’s dominant myth yesterday in a flattering article about Carl Bernstein, who teamed with Bob Woodward to report the scandal for the Washington Post.

Referring to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974 at the height of Watergate, the Guardian asserted that Bernstein and Woodward produced “a string of stories that brought down a president.”

That claim may be the dominant narrative of Watergate. But it’s simplistic, a media-centric misreading of history.

As I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, the heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate — the notion that Bernstein and Woodward’s dogged reporting forced Nixon from office in disgrace — “minimizes the far more decisive forces that unraveled the scandal and forced Nixon from office.”

Bernstein: Didn't bring down Nixon

Those forces included special Watergate prosecutors, federal judges, bipartisan panels of both houses of Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as the Justice Department and the FBI.

To explain Watergate through the lens of the heroic-journalist interpretation, I write in Getting It Wrong, is to short-change and “misunderstand the scandal and to indulge in a particularly beguiling media-driven myth.”

The myth, though, is endlessly appealing – as the Guardian article suggested.

Interestingly, though, not even the Washington Post embraces the heroic-journalist trope.

For example, Michael Getler, then the newspaper’s ombudsman wrote in 2005:

“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.”

And Ben Bradlee, the Post’s executive editor during and after Watergate, said on the Meet the Press interview show in 1997:

[I]t must be remembered that Nixon got Nixon. The Post didn’t get Nixon.”

Even Woodward has dismissed the heroic-journalist interpretation, stating in an interview with American Journalism Review:

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

What brought down Nixon’s presidency was evidence of his guilty role in the crimes of Watergate — evidence captured on audiotapes that he secretly made of his conversations at the White House.

The decisive evidence — known as the “Smoking Gun” tape — revealed that Nixon at a meeting with his top aide, H.R. Haldemann, on June 23, 1972, sought to deflect or derail the FBI investigation into the Watergate burglary.

Bernstein and Woodward didn’t reveal the contents of that tape, which Watergate prosecutors had subpoenaed and which Nixon refused to surrender until ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court to comply.

Nor did Bernstein and Woodward reveal the existence of Nixon’s taping system, which proved so crucial to Watergate’s outcome.

In All the President’s Men, their book about their Watergate reporting, Bernstein and Woodward said they had received a tip about the taping system a few days before its existence was made public in July 1973.

But according to the book, Bradlee, the executive editor, suggested not expending much energy pursuing the tip. And they didn’t.

WJC

Recent and related:

, , , , , , , ,

A counter-narrative: 9/11 did not ‘change everything’

In Anniversaries, Debunking, Media myths, New York Times, Newspapers, Washington Post on September 11, 2011 at 10:26 am

America’s news media have focused for days and more on the 10th anniversary of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. The dominant, inevitable, yet misleading theme of the coverage: 9/11 “changed everything.”

“When Everything Changed,” the Washington Post declares on its front page today.

“The Day Everything Changed,” says the Star-Telegram of Fort Worth, Texas.

“A Decade of Change,” declares the Press of Atlantic City.

“Forever changed?” asks the lead headline in today’s Chattanooga Times Free Press.

That interrogative is inadvertently perceptive, suggesting as it does an important if largely ignored counter-narrative about 9/11:

It is striking how little, fundamentally, has changed in American life because of the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in lower Manhattan, at the Pentagon, and near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Airport check-ins, to be sure, are more imposing, grating, and intrusive than they were 10 years ago — suggestive of a broader if low-level and intermittent preoccupation with security matters.

But the hyperbolic, anniversary-driven coverage notwithstanding, the lives of most Americans seem not to have been dramatically or markedly altered by the vivid terror assaults 10 years ago.

Remember how the attacks were supposed to lead to a surge in patriotic sentiment? To a renewed commitment to religion and the spiritual side of life? To a deeper interest in news of the world? To a constant looking over one’s shoulder in anticipation of the next attack?

Polling data indicate that none of those responses to 9/11 was sustained or profound:

  • In June 2010, 59% of respondents to a Pew Research survey said they displayed the American flag at home, in the office, or on the car. That compares to 75% of the respondents  who said they did so in August 2002.
  • Pew Research data say that 36% of Americans attend religious services at least once a week, down from 42% in mid-November 2001.
  • In 2002, 48% of respondents to a Pew survey said they enjoyed keeping up with the news “a lot.”  In 2010, that response rate had ebbed to 45%.
  • Today’s Washington Post embeds revealing bits of survey data in its 16-page section devoted to the 9/11 anniversary. Particularly revealing was that 83% of residents in metropolitan Washington said no, they have not avoided a public event in recent years “because of concerns about terrorism.”

While the counter-narrative that 9/11 didn’t change everything has been obscure this year, it was somewhat in greater evidence at less-celebrated anniversaries of the attacks.

Two years ago, for example, the New York Times revisited predictions about how 9/11 would forever change Manhattan, and found them mostly empty and unfulfilled.

The Times article, “A Fortress City That Didn’t Come to Be,” recalled the expectations that emerged in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, writing:

“New York would become a fortress city, choked by apprehension and resignation, forever patrolled by soldiers and submarines. Another attack was coming. And soon.

“Tourists? Well, who would ever come again? Work in one of the city’s skyscrapers? Not likely. The Fire Department, gutted by 343 deaths, could never recuperate. …

“Eight years later, those presumptions are cobwebbed memories that never came to pass. Indeed, glimpses into a few aspects of the city help measure the gap between what was predicted and what actually came to be.”

“Cobwebbed memories that never came to pass.” A well-crafted passage, that — and an antidote, in a way, to the clichéd, “everything changed” coverage that has clouded the 10th anniversary of a terrible and infamous day.

After all, as columnist George Will wrote at the fifth anniversary of 9/11:

“Nothing changes everything.”

WJC

Recent and related:

, , , , , , , ,

Talking media myths on ‘Community Voices’

In Debunking, Media myths, Media myths and radio, Newspapers, Washington Post, Watergate myth on September 3, 2011 at 3:14 pm

The exaggerated tales of Watergate, Hurricane Katrina, and crack babies were the principal media myths I discussed the other day in an interview on KPCW Radio in Utah.

The interview focused on those chapters of my latest book, Getting It Wrong, and was conducted by Larry Warren and Linda Gorton on their  “Community Voices” show.

I noted early in the interview that the “animating force” in American journalism is to get the story right and that Getting It Wrong “is associated with that ethos of truth-telling, of seeking to get the story right.”

The interviewers quickly turned to Watergate, asking whether the reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for the Washington Post was what indeed drove President Richard Nixon to resign in 1974.

“That is the dominant narrative of Watergate,” I pointed out, adding that’s also a very simplistic explanation for rolling up what was a complex scandal.

“To unravel the complexity and the intricacy of Watergate,” I said, “took all kinds of forces, most of them subpoena-wielding — federal prosecutors, the FBI, bipartisan panels of both houses of Congress, ultimately Supreme Court, which forced Richard Nixon to surrender the evidence which clearly showed that he had conspired with top aides to try to cover up the investigation into the Watergate break-in, the signal crime of the scandal.

“Against that backdrop, the contributions of Woodward and Bernstein fade into relative insignificance,” I said.

Another reason that Watergate’s dominant narrative focuses so squarely on Woodward, Bernstein, and the Washington Post is, I said, the cinematic version of the reporters’ book, All the President’s Men.

It surely is the most-watched movie ever made about Watergate, and “it really does focus,” I noted, “on the work of Woodward and Bernstein to the exclusion” of the forces and factors that were truly decisive in bringing down Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

“I think we know,” Warren interjected, “that you’re not going to be invited to Mr. Woodward’s for dinner anytime soon.”

“You know,” I replied, Woodward “has said something to the effect of, ‘to say the press brought down Richard Nixon is total nonsense.’ He used earthier terms to make that point.”

The reference to Woodward’s comment in an interview in 2004 with American Journalism Review in which he asserted:

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

I also discussed the notion that news coverage of Hurricane Katrina was superlative, that it supposedly “demonstrated the value and importance of traditional news media, both print and broadcast, at a time of disaster. And Hurricane Katrina was no small storm. It was no [Hurricane] Irene, that’s for sure.”

But I added:

“The coverage of Hurricane Katrina was no high heroic moment in American journalism because, on many important elements of that story, the news media got it badly wrong.”

The hurricane’s death toll was “wildly exaggerated,” I noted, adding that the “apocalyptic reports that the news media put out in the days after Hurricane Katrina’s landfall proved to be largely untrue.

“There were no snipers firing at medical personnel, no snipers firing at [rescue] helicopters. No bodies stacked up like cordwood, no children with their throats slashed. No roving gangs preying on tourists. No sharks plying the flood waters of New Orleans.

“All these reports were out there,” I said, but in the end “none of them was verified or substantiated.”

The erroneous and exaggerated reports of violence in post-Katrina New Orleans in some cases had the effect of delaying the arrival and delivery of aid to the storm-stricken city, I noted.

The social disaster that the news media anticipated in the purported — and widely misreported — “crack baby” epidemic never took place, I pointed out.

More than one news commentator, I said, described as a “bio-underclass” the generation that would come of age after having been exposed to crack cocaine in the womb. These children supposedly would be so mentally and physically deformed as to be forever dependent on the state.

“The news media were spectacularly wrong about the crack baby epidemic,” I said, noting that news reports in the late 1980s and early 1990s “pushed very hard on preliminary evidence suggesting there was a powerful linkage between taking crack during pregnancy and subsequent deformities in children.”

To their discredit, I added, the news media never went back in a sustained and systematic way to undertake to dismantle the crack-baby myth — “even after consensus had taken hold among scientists and biomedical researchers that [prenatal] exposure to crack was not this destructive force that preliminary research had suggested.”

WJC

Recent and related:

, , , , , , , , ,

Woodward, Bernstein toppled Nixon? Think again

In Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on August 27, 2011 at 9:58 am

'Nixon got Nixon'

The passing of time is making the heroic-journalist narrative of Watergate even more heroic.

A commentary yesterday at Huffington Post suggests as much, in extolling — and overstating — the accomplishments of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who covered the scandal.

The commentary, which considers the state of investigative reporting, says Woodward and Bernstein “plugged away for two years at the Watergate story through thick and thin and false leads. They were determined to nail then President Richard Nixon for authori[z]ing a break in at the Democratic Party HQ during his re-election campaign and then organi[z]ing a cover up. They did, with his resignation in August 1974.”

Woah. A lot of overstatement there.

First, there’s no evidence that Nixon authorized or even knew in advance about the burglary in June 1972 at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, the signal crime of Watergate.

Nixon, however, certainly did seek to block the FBI’s investigation of the breakin — and for that obstruction of justice, he was compelled to resign the presidency in disgrace.

But more important is that Woodward and Bernstein didn’t “nail” Nixon on Watergate. As I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, their investigative reporting for the Post certainly didn’t bring down Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

The heroic-journalist interpretation of Watergate, I write in Getting It Wrong, is to “misunderstand the scandal and to indulge in a particularly beguiling media-driven myth.

“The heroic-journalist interpretation,” I add, “minimizes the far more decisive forces that unraveled the scandal and forced Nixon from office.” Those forces included bipartisan panels of both houses of Congress, special federal Watergate prosecutors, federal judges, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the U.S. Supreme Court.

If inelegantly, even Woodward has concurred, declaring in an interview in 2004:

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

What toppled Nixon, what brought down his presidency, was clear evidence of his culpability in the crimes of Watergate — evidence captured on audiotapes that he secretly made of his conversations at the White House.

The decisive evidence — known as the “Smoking Gun” tape — revealed that Nixon at a meeting with his top aide, H.R. Haldemann, on June 23, 1972, sought to deflect or derail the FBI investigation into the Watergate burglary.

Woodward and Bernstein didn’t reveal the contents of that tape, which Watergate prosecutors had subpoenaed and which Nixon had refused to surrender until ordered to do so by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Nor did Woodward and Bernstein disclose the existence of Nixon’s secret taping system. That was revealed in July 1973, during hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Watergate.

In All the President’s Men, their book about their reporting, Woodward and Bernstein said they had received a tip about the taping system a few days before its existence was made public.

According to All the President’s Men, Ben Bradlee, then the Post‘s executive editor, suggested not expending much energy pursuing the tip. And they didn’t.

Interestingly, Bradlee also insisted the Post did not nail Nixon.

Speaking on a Meet the Press interview program at the 25th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, Bradlee declared:

[I]t must be remembered that Nixon got Nixon. The Post didn’t get Nixon.”

WJC

Recent and related:

, , , , , , , , ,

Misreporting Watergate

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on August 20, 2011 at 5:15 am

That new historical marker at the parking garage where Bob Woodward of the Washington Post occasionally met his stealthy “Deep Throat” source has stirred some cheery buzz among journalists — and some breathtaking exaggeration about the consequences of Woodward’ reporting on the Watergate scandal.

Credit: Odestreet.com

The marker titled “Watergate Investigation” went up late last week outside the garage in the Rosslyn section of Arlington, Virginia.

As I’ve noted at Media Myth Alert, the marker errs in stating that information Deep Throat” (who in 2005 was self-revealed to have been W. Mark Felt) provided Woodward “exposed the Nixon administration’s obstruction of the FBI’s Watergate investigation.”

For some 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 presidency.

For example, the widely followed all-news radio station in Washington, WTOP,  said yesterday in its report about the marker:

“Mark ‘Deep Throat’ Felt, passed state secrets to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward for a string of stories that would eventually take down a president — what would come to be known as the Watergate scandal.”

Quite simply not true.

Felt, formerly a top official at the FBI, offered Woodward mostly incremental details about Watergate as the scandal unfolded in 1972 and 1973. And as Woodward noted in the book, All the President’s Men, the role of “Deep Throat” was “only to confirm information that had been obtained elsewhere, and to add some perspective.”

It was hardly the stuff of “state secrets.”

More important, the reporting of Woodward and his Post colleague Carl Bernstein assuredly did not “take down” Nixon’s presidency.

Embracing that interpretation of Watergate, I write my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, “is to abridge and misunderstand the scandal and to indulge in a particularly beguiling media-driven myth.”

It’s an interpretation that not even officials at the Post have endorsed.

For example, Kathryn Graham, the newspaper’s publisher during and after Watergate, said in 1997, at a Newseum program marking the scandal’s 25th anniversary:

“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.”

And Woodward, in earthier terms, has concurred, telling American Journalism Review in 2004:

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

The popular Washington entertainment blog, DCist, offered an even stranger interpretation of “Deep Throat” and his meetings with Woodward in the garage.

DCist, in a brief report about the marker, said yesterday the garage was where  “the informant, the FBI’s Mark ‘Deep Throat’ Felt, fessed up to what would eventually become the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon.”

Huh? The “Deep Throat” source “fessed up to what would eventually become the Watergate scandal”?

“Fessed up”?

Such wording suggests that Felt/”Deep Throat” was a culprit or a suspect in the Watergate scandal.

Which he wasn’t.

Felt in fact wasn’t even around the FBI when the scandal reached its climax with Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.

He had been passed over for the FBI directorship and left the agency in 1973. Felt last conferred with Woodward at the Arlington garage in November that year.

But that’s not to say Felt was beyond reproach.

He really wasn’t such a hero.

In his senior position at the FBI, Felt had authorized illegal burglaries in the early 1970s as part of the agency’s investigations into leftists associated with the radical Weather Underground.

Felt was convicted in 1980 on felony charges related to those break-ins, but pardoned by President Ronald Reagan.

So if it not Felt’s tips to Woodward, what then brought down Nixon?

As I point out in Getting It Wrong, rolling up a scandal of Watergate’s complexity and dimension demanded “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,” I write, “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 the recordings that captured him plotting to cover up the break-in in June 1972, the signal crime of Watergate.

WJC

Recent and related:

, , , , , , , , ,

‘Deep Throat’ garage marker errs about Watergate source disclosures

In Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on August 18, 2011 at 10:16 am

An historical marker went up the other day outside the parking garage in Arlington, Virginia, where Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward periodically met during the Watergate scandal with a stealthy, high-level source code-named “Deep Throat.”

It’s a handsome marker, artfully scalloped at the top.

Felt: Cagey source

But it errs in describing the information Woodward received from “Deep Throat,” who in 2005 revealed himself as W. Mark Felt, formerly the FBI’s second in command.

The marker, which is titled “Watergate Investigation,” says:

“Felt provided Woodward information that exposed the Nixon administration’s obstruction of the FBI’s Watergate investigation.”

Not so.

Such evidence would have been so damaging and explosive that it surely would have forced Nixon to resign the presidency well before he did, in August 1974.

Felt didn’t have that sort of information — or (less likely) didn’t share it with Woodward.

As described in Woodward’s book about Felt, The Secret Man, the FBI official provided or confirmed a good deal of piecemeal evidence about the scandal as it unfolded.

And he could be cagey and evasive in doing so.

Here, for example, is a passage from Secret Man, in which Woodward discussed efforts he and his Post colleague Carl Bernstein had made to identify Nixon’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldemann, as one of five people controlling a secret slush fund:

“I told Felt that we were going to publish a story next week saying that Haldemann was the fifth and final person to control the secret fund.

“‘You’ve got to do it on your own,’ Felt said.

“I said I expected him to warn me if we were wrong.

“Felt said he would.

“So he was essentially confirming Haldemann?

“‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to do it on your own.’

“It was a distinction that didn’t make sense to me. I was tired of this dancing around.

“‘You cannot use me as a source [on that story],’ Felt said. ‘I won’t be a source on a Haldemann story.””

And so it went.

(All the President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein’s book about their Watergate reporting, says Woodward’s conversations with “Deep Throat” were intended “only to confirm information that had been gathered elsewhere and to add some perspective.”)

Woodward met Felt at the garage six times from October 1972 to November 1973, the marker notes. The last meeting at the garage was a few months after Felt had been passed over for the FBI directorship and retired.

Not until late summer 1974 — months after Felt left the FBI — did unequivocal evidence emerge about Nixon’s attempt to thwart the agency’s investigation into Watergate.

That came when Nixon complied with a unanimous Supreme Court ruling and surrendered audiotape recordings he had secretly made of conversations at the White House.

A recording of Nixon’s meeting with Haldemann on June 23, 1972, revealed that the president had sought to deflect or derail the FBI investigation into the burglary six days before at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington.

The recording was called the “Smoking Gun” tape — and that tape, not information Felt gave Woodward, exposed Nixon’s guilt and forced his resignation.

The tape offered stunning and incontrovertible evidence that Nixon “had participated in an obstruction of justice almost from the outset” of the scandal, Stanley I. Kutler, the leading historian of the scandal, wrote in The Wars of Watergate.

As I note in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, had Nixon not recorded his conversations, he likely would have survived the Watergate scandal and served out his second term.

The marker outside the “Deep Throat” garage contains another, smaller error, too.

It says it was “erected in 2008 by Arlington County, Virginia.” But the online news site arlnow .com pointed out that the marker went up late last week — “after a three year delay.”

WJC

Recent and related:

, , , , , , , , ,

Fox News misremembers Watergate and ‘follow the money’

In Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post, Watergate myth on August 16, 2011 at 9:20 am

I’ve referred to “follow the money” as Watergate’s best-known made-up line.

It also can be thought of as Watergate’s best-known misremembered line.

I say that because a Fox News commentary posted yesterday thoroughly misremembered the phrase as having been part of the “media circus” of Watergate in the months before the scandal reached its denouement with Richard Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.

The Fox commentary declared:

“America was transfixed for months by [Watergate-related] televised hearings presided over by the colorful Sen. Sam Ervin. … We learned about the mysterious insider, pornographically code-named ‘Deep Throat’ murmuring intriguing clues like ‘Follow the Money….’ It was a media circus.”

But as I’ve noted at Media Myth Alert, “follow the money” was not part of the vernacular of Watergate. It was never offered as advice — murmured or otherwise — by the stealthy “Deep Throat” source, who met periodically with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post as the scandal unraveled.

(The identity of “Deep Throat” remained a secret for more than 30 years until W. Mark Felt, a former top FBI official, self-identified himself as having been Woodward’s secret source during Watergate.)

What’s more, “follow the money” appeared in no Watergate-related article or editorial in the Post until June 1981.

Nor is the line to be found in All the President’s Men, the book Woodward and his Post colleague, Carl Bernstein, wrote about their Watergate reporting.

The phrase exists only in the movies — in the cinematic version of All the President’s Men, which came out in April 1976.

“Follow the money” was written into the screenplay of All the President’s Men and spoken by the actor Hal Holbrook, who turned in a memorable performance as “Deep Throat.”

Holbrook intoned “follow the money” with such steely assurance that it did indeed seemed to suggest a way — however simplistic — to unravel the scandal.

But even if “Deep Throat”/Felt had counseled Woodward to “follow the money,” the advice would have neither unraveled Watergate nor led the reporter to Nixon.

Nixon quit the presidency not because he misused campaign funds; he resigned in disgrace after it became clear he had sought to obstruct justice by covering up the signal crime of Watergate, the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972.

As I note in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, rolling up a scandal of the dimension and complexity of Watergate 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,” I write, “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” — which cost him the presidency.

WJC

Recent and related:

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Following the money on 37th anniversary of Nixon’s fall

In Anniversaries, Cinematic treatments, Debunking, Media myths, Washington Post on August 9, 2011 at 12:55 am

Nixon resigns, 1974

It’s somehow fitting on this, the 37th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s resignation, to direct attention to the myth and hyperbole that embrace the best-known line of the Watergate scandal, the line that supposedly helped bring him down.

That line, of course, is “follow the money,” which purportedly was crucial advice given the Washington Post by a super-secret, high-level source code-named “Deep Throat.”

“Follow the money” was said to have been so telling and effective that it’s still cited as exemplary guidance applicable in journalism, politics, and finance.

Just yesterday, for example, Barry Nolan, a journalist and contributor to Boston Magazine’s “Boston Daily” blog, invoked the famous phrase, writing:

“Any time you really want to know why a vote happened the way it did, the single best piece of advice ever given came from ‘Deep Throat,’ the shadowy tipster in the Watergate scandal. ‘Follow the money,’ he told the Washington Post reporters.”

It may seem like stellar advice, but it’s guidance that the “Deep Throat” source offered only in the movies.

As I’ve discussed at Media Myth Alert, “follow the money” is Watergate’s most famous made-up line.

The phrase was written into the screenplay of All the President’s Men, the 1976 cinematic version of the book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post.

“Follow the money” appears nowhere in Woodward and Bernstein’s book about their Watergate reporting — reporting that did not, as I discuss in my latest work, Getting It Wrong, take down Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

Nor did “follow the money” appear in any Watergate-related news article or editorial in the Post until June 1981, nearly seven years after Nixon’s resignation.

Nor did “Deep Throat” — who was self-identified in 2005 as W. Mark Felt, formerly the FBI’s second-ranking official — utter the line in his periodic meetings with Woodward. (And Felt/”Deep Throat” didn’t meet Bernstein until 2008.)

“Follow the money” was memorably intoned not by Mark Felt but by Hal Holbrook, the actor who played “Deep Throat” in All the President’s Men.

As I’ve noted, Holbrook turned in a marvelous performance as a tormented, conflicted, and stealthy “Deep Throat.”

Holbrook delivered the “follow the money” line with such conviction and steely assurance, that it seemed for all the world to offer a way through the labyrinth of the Watergate scandal.

But even if Woodward had been counseled to “follow the money,” the advice certainly neither would have unraveled Watergate nor led him to Nixon.

Nixon resigned 37 years ago today not because he misused campaign funds but because he sought to obstruct justice by covering up the signal crime of Watergate, the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in June 1972.

The simplified follow-the-money  interpretation of Watergate effectively deflects attention from the decisive forces that ultimately forced Nixon from office.

As I note in Getting It Wrong, rolling up a scandal of Watergate’s intricacy and dimension 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,” I write, “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” that cost him the presidency.

WJC

Recent and related:

, , , , , , , , , , ,

No ‘rock-em,’ no ‘sock-em’: What ails WaPo

In Debunking, Jessica Lynch, Media myths, Newspapers, Washington Post, Watergate myth on August 7, 2011 at 1:59 am

The ombudsman of the Washington Post, Patrick Pexton, weighs in today with platitudes and hang-wringing about the newspaper. He mostly misses the mark.

Pexton writes in his column that the Post’s “future lies not with the rich; it lies with the citizenry.

“This newspaper must be the one source of high-quality, probing Washington news that readers in this region and across the country can look to for holding their government accountable. This publication must be for all Americans.”

Oh, brother.

But wait: Here’s more vague abstraction:

“The Post,” Pexton writes, “can’t be a liberal publication or a conservative one. It must be hard-hitting, scrappy and questioning — skeptical of all political figures and parties and beholden to no one. It has to be the rock-’em-sock-’em organization that is passionate about the news. It needs to be less bloodless and take more risks when chasing the story and the truth.”

A “rock-’em-sock-’em organization,” eh? Well, that’s useful guidance.

In his five or so months as ombudsman, Pexton hasn’t dared touch the electrified third rail about the Post, which one of his predecessors, Deborah Howell, gamely if belatedly addressed.

That’s a decided lack of intellectual diversity in the Post’s newsroom. In mid-November 2008, shortly after Barack Obama was elected president, Howell wrote in her ombudsman column:

“I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo.”

Howell’s column quoted Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism as saying that “conservatives are right that journalism has too many liberals and not enough conservatives. It’s inconceivable that that is irrelevant.”

In Obama's thrall

The lack of intellectual diversity often shows in the Post’s report. Even casual reading signals that the newspaper remains in the thrall of Obama, despite his clearly failing presidency.

Obama scarcely gets “rock-’em-sock-’em” treatment from the Post.

Last Wednesday, for example, the Post’s once-edgy “Style” section devoted most of its front page to a cheery feature about the meaning of Obama’s turning 50-years-old.

“On Thursday,” the article gushed, “President Obama — one of American history’s most precocious achievers — joins the ranks of Washington 50-somethings ….”

But what ails the Post goes well beyond its routinely tender treatment of Obama.

The Post’s local report is superficial, a diet of eye-rolling, feel-good features. The newspaper carries little staff-produced national coverage. Its international report is undistinguished, especially compared to that of the New York Times.

Moreover, the Post offers few notable cases of investigative journalism any more.

It has won two Pulitzer Prizes for investigative reporting in 25 years, which has to be considered meager for a newspaper that reputedly brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency with its relentless digging into the Watergate scandal.

But as I discuss in my latest book, Getting It Wrong, the Post-Watergate trope, of course, is a powerful media-driven myth.

I’d be remiss were I to fail to note that the Post never has come clean about how it erred so utterly in offering the world the bogus hero-warrior tale about Jessica Lynch in the early days of the Iraq War.

Lynch, the Post reported on its front page on April 3, 2003, “fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed the Army’s 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition, U.S. officials said yesterday.”

But none of the derring-do attributed to Lynch was true, and the Post has never explained who led it so badly astray.

Moreover, the staff cuts and buyouts of recent years left few notable characters on the newspaper’s staff.

Gone are such colorful figures as the erudite and pugnacious Henry Allen, a Pulitzer winner who left the Post after throwing punches at a staff writer who called him a c—sucker.

Now there was “rock-’em-sock-’em,” old school variety.

WJC

Many thanks to Instapundit
Glenn Reynolds for linking to this post.

Recent and related: