Do polls show declining trust in news outlets because the public thinks they’re bad? Absolutely. But fluctuations in those polls suggest that appraising news coverage in not a cold calculation. It’s emotional. Take one of journalism’s finest hours: Watergate. Some people are still angry about it. They say it eroded respect for our basic institutions. What it really eroded was respect for people in those institutions.
P.39, The Influencing Machine
Introduction
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Watergate was a political scandal in the 1970s that eventually lead to president Richard Nixon’s resignation. The Nixon administration attempted to cover-up its involvement in the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. Nixon was the only president to resign from office. As a result of the scandal, 43 people were indicted, tried, convicted, and incarcerated, including many top Nixon administration officials.
Evidence mounted against the president’s staff, and a tape-recording system was discovered in Nixon’s office. The recordings implicated the president, and showed that he attempted to cover up the break-in. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled that the president had to give the tapes to government investigators. Facing likely impeachment, Nixon resigned the presidency on August 9, 1974.
Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, played an integral role in the Watergate scandal by breaking the story. The two became some of the most famous journalists in America by investigating the burglary at Watergate and eventually uncovering a system of political crimes committed by the Nixon administration.
Prior to Watergate:
- The authority of the president wasn’t questioned as much (pg. 103, The Influencing Machine).
- Government and media have similar goals of consensus and lack of controversy (pg. 103, The Influencing Machine).
After Watergate:
- Increased distrust of government (pg. 39, The Influencing Machine)
- First the press was spat upon, and then it was celebrated (pg. 39, The Influencing Machine)
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Between 1972 and 1976, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein emerged as two of the most famous journalists in America and became forever identified as the reporters who broke the biggest story in American politics. Beginning with the investigation of a "third-rate burglary" of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex, Woodward and Bernstein uncovered a system of political "dirty tricks" and crimes that eventually led to indictments of forty White House and administration
Visit WebsiteThese are tumultuous times in America. We're at war against terrorism and in Iraq. The nation is deeply divided over those issues and the coming presidential election.
Visit WebsiteSo today's budding college news hounds--or at least those taking Steven Brill's journalism class at Yale--are too reliant on the web. Point well taken. But are those same students really that wrong to argue that a Watergate-type scandal would play out differently in the age of the Internet?
Visit WebsiteAs the Watergate scandal fades from memory to myth, a central question about the scarring chapter in U.S. history lingers: Did Richard M. Nixon’s misdeeds and downfall strip the nation of its innocence or affirm the resilience of the American system?
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