Then and Now

When the Watergate scandal captured America's attention in the early nineteen seventies, I was in fifth grade. I remember hearing "Watergate" everywhere and knowing that it was something bad, but not understanding anything about it. Someone asked our teacher, Miss Bender, what Watergate was, and she told us it had something to do with phones. That explanation didn't really clarify things for me then, although now I realize that she was talking about the phones in the DNC office being bugged. Last week Henry and I watched All the President's Men, the Robert Redford/Dustin Hoffman 1976 movie that told the story of Woodward and Bernstein, the two young Washington Post journalists who blew the Watergate story wide open, and I have a little better grasp of the events.

It was fascinating to see how much technology has changed things since the nineteen seventies: the way we gather information, the way we communicate, the whole purpose of news reporting. Early in the investigation, after several men had been arrested for burglary in the DNC office, Woodward and Bernstein were collecting names, trying to figure out who people were, what they did, how they might be connected to each other. While I watched them make phone calls, frantically trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together, I thought how much easier their task would have been if they had Google search. If they could have done searches on the names they had, they would have found out quickly the relationships these people had to Nixon administration personnel like John Dean and Chuck Colson.

In another scene, Dustin Hoffman had flown to Florida to speak with an attorney. Even though he had called ahead and made arrangements to meet with the attorney, he was left sitting in the waiting room all day while the receptionist made excuses about why the attorney couldn't see him. Finally, at the end of the day, the receptionist told him he'd have to come back tomorrow. Frustrated, Hoffman left the office. Seconds later, the phone rang, and the audience could hear what was clearly Hoffman's voice instructing the receptionist to come to another office to pick something up. When she left, Hoffman snuck in to meet with the attorney. And how much easier would all of that have been if Hoffman had had a cell phone and hadn't had to track down a phone booth?

The newsroom scenes themselves were fascinating. There were no computers on desks--only typewriters. And while there were a few women reporters in the newsroom, a meeting showing the newspaper's editors hashing out which stories would be told on what page included no women at all. I'm wondering if there are any major newspaper editorial staffs today that have no women among their editors.

It struck me how journalism itself has changed in my lifetime. Woodward and Bernstein were committed to exposing the truth--for the benefit of the nation. As they worked together, they frequently reminded each other to make sure that the conclusions they were drawing were based on the facts. They were constantly verifying their sources, making sure that what they reported was fair. But they were committed to telling the story, even when their lives were threatened and no one else even believed they had a story worth telling.

Today, journalists (with a few exceptions) aren't interested in exposing the truth; rather, they want to create the truth. There's an agenda, and only those facts that support the agenda are told. Sometimes the facts are twisted a little if they don't further the agenda. If a story doesn't promote the truth that journalists are creating, they don't tell it. An interesting example: The media ridicules the "birthers," those who are taking the issue of the president's citizenship to court, demanding to see a valid birth certificate. How ridiculous! Of course the president is a legal citizen, they say. And yet, where's the valid birth certificate? If only there were a Woodward and Bernstein team out there on this story now.

In her column last week, Peggy Noonan wrote about how, as a culture, we are losing our privacy, largely because of all the new technologies that make information about anyone available to anyone.  She points out that unlike the past, today there is no place to hide:

If you, complicated little pirate that you are, find yourself caught in the middle of a big messy scandal in America right now, you can't go to another continent to hide out or ride out the storm. Earlier generations did exactly that, but you can't, because you've been on the front page of every website, the lead on every newscast. You'll be spotted in South Africa and Googled in Gdansk. Two hundred years ago, or even 100, when you got yourself in a big fat bit of trouble in Paris, you could run to the docks and take the first ship to America, arrive unknown, and start over. You changed your name, or didn't even bother. It would be years before anyone caught up with you.


She's right. And in theory, it should be much harder to commit a Watergate crime--or to engage in scandalous behavior for that matter-- today than it was back in 1972. And yet how long did it take journalists--and even then it was the National Inquirer-- to reveal that John Edwards was having an affair that resulted in the birth of his illegitimate child? It may be impossible to hide in the twenty-first century, but I get the feeling that today's journalists just aren't looking.