The trope offers reassurance to contemporary journalists that their reporting, too, might one day result in powerful effects. It’s a question not infrequently considered at Media Myth Alert - a question also taken up in my media- mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong.Īs I wrote in Getting It Wrong, the heroic-journalist interpretation of the Watergate scandal - “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” - is endlessly appealing. What intrigues Media Myth Alert is not Woodward’s take on Trump but the inclination of journalists to dust off and invoke the mythical effects of Woodward’s Watergate reporting nearly 50 years ago.Īnd why are they so inclined to embrace so blithely what long ago has been debunked as a media myth? And the claim about Woodward having brought down a president seems irresistible, for Zeffman returns to and reiterates that point deeper in his review, calling Woodward “a reporter who felled a president.” The bit about Washington’s “self-regarding journalistic elite” is true enough. “Woodward is the doyen of Washington’s sober and self-regarding journalistic elite, and I am wary of criticizing someone who has won two Pulitzer prizes and brought down a president.” The Guardian of London asserted in its review that Nixon was “the president Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought down with their reporting on Watergate nearly a half-century ago.”Īmong the more reverential if complex characterizations of Woodward and his Watergate work came the other day from Henry Zeffman, a reviewer for the Times of London, who wrote:
The Toronto Sun likewise asserted that the Woodward and Bernstein‘s “1970s Watergate reporting … brought down Richard Nixon.” The New York Post, in reporting last week that Trump found Rage “very boring,” referred to Woodward and his Watergate reporting partner at the Washington Post, Carl Bernstein, and declared they had “brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon.” Sure enough, news outlets in the United States and abroad summoned the mythical trope - a trope that even Woodward has tried, occasionally, to dampen as absurd.Īn editorial in the Detroit Free Press, for example, described Woodward as “famed for having brought down former President Richard Nixon.”
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