America's Untold Stories digs in to Watergate
America's Untold Stories with Eric Hunley and Mark Grouber, does in-depth research regarding various notable events in America's history. Their latest video, Who Really is Bob Woodward?, is the first in a series regarding Watergate and opens with, as the title suggests, Bob Woodward of the famous Woodward and Bernstein duo. The pair are famous for their reporting on the Watergate Hotel break-in which was portrayed in the 1976 movie, All the President's Men, starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford.
All the President's Men is a 1976 American biographical political thriller film about the Watergate scandal that brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon. Directed by Alan J. Pakula, with a screenplay by William Goldman, it is based on the 1974 non-fiction book of the same name by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the two journalists investigating the scandal for The Washington Post.
This history is not something i thought would interest me, however i watched the video and found it to be very intriguing. There are a few cannon balls delivered in the first episode of their Watergate series, one being that the break-in was an operation used to oust President Nixon and was intended to be exposed, and another being that Bob Woodward is not the ethical figure or great journalist he pretends to be, not even close.
After being discharged as a lieutenant in August 1970, Woodward was admitted to Harvard Law School but elected not to attend. Instead, he applied for a job as a reporter for The Washington Post while taking graduate courses in Shakespeare and international relations at George Washington University. Harry M. Rosenfeld, the Post's metropolitan editor, gave him a two-week trial but did not hire him because of his lack of journalistic experience. After a year at the Montgomery Sentinel, a weekly newspaper in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, Woodward was hired as a Post reporter in 1971.
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Woodward often uses unnamed sources in his reporting for the Post and in his books.
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Joan Didion published a comprehensive criticism of Woodward in a lengthy September 1996 essay in The New York Review of Books. Though "Woodward is a widely trusted reporter, even an American icon", she says that he assembles reams of often irrelevant detail, fails to draw conclusions, and make judgments. "Measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent" from his books after Watergate from 1979 to 1996, she said. She said the books are notable for "a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured." She ridicules "fairness" as "a familiar newsroom piety, the excuse in practice for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking." All this focus on what people said and thought-their "decent intentions"-circumscribes "possible discussion or speculation", resulting in what she called "political pornography".
In other words, Woodward is a lousy writer who possessed virtually no experience as an investigative journalist when he was hired at the Post, yet he was assigned to the biggest story of the time, one which would force a sitting President to resign. This was not an accident.