Abracadabrah<br><br><i> I create as I speak</i>: The Press, Mythologizing Itself.

Tuesday, May 31, 2005

The Press, Mythologizing Itself.

Powerline links to an amazingly prescient article by Edward Jay Epstein, originally published in Commentary, speculating about the identity of Deep Throat in 1974.

He was able to surmise from the chain of evidence leading to the prosecutions of Liddy, Hunt, and the five burglars led back to the FBI. What Epstein complains about, however, is the cloud of obscurantism surrounding the mythologization of the breaking of Watergate as broken by the Press, in the corporeal form of Woodward and Bernstein.

The natural tendency of journalists to magnify the role of the press in great scandals is perhaps best illustrated by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's autobiographical account of how they "revealed" the Watergate scandals. The dust jacket and national advertisements, very much in the bravado spirit of the book itself, declare: "All America knows about Watergate. Here, for the first time, is the story of how we know.... In what must be the most devastating political detective story of the century, the two young Washington Post reporters whose brilliant investigative journalism smashed the Watergate scandal wide open tell the whole behind-the-scenes drama the way it happened." In keeping with the mythic view of journalism, however, the book never describes the "behind-the-scenes" investigations which actually "smashed the Watergate scandal wide open"-namely the investigations conducted by the FBI, the federal prosecutors, the grand jury, and the Congressional committees. The work of almost all those institutions, which unearthed and developed all the actual evidence and disclosures of Watergate, is systematically ignored or minimized by Bernstein and Woodward. Instead, they simply focus on those parts of the prosecutors' case, the grand-jury investigation, and the FBI reports that were leaked to them.

...Perhaps the most perplexing mystery in Bernstein and Woodward's book is why they fail to understand the role of the institutions and investigators who were supplying them and other reporters with leaks. This blind spot, endemic to journalists, proceeds from an unwillingness to see the complexity of bureaucratic in-fighting and of politics within the government itself. If the government is considered monolithic, journalists can report its activities, in simply comprehended and coherent terms, as an adversary out of touch with popular sentiments. On the other hand, if governmental activity is viewed as the product of diverse and competing agencies, all with different bases of power and interests, journalism becomes a much more difficult affair.

In am event. the fact remains that it was not the press, which exposed Watergate; it was agencies of government itself. So long as journalists maintain their blind spot toward the inner conflicts and workings of the institution, of government, they will no doubt continue to peak of Watergate in terms of the David and Goliath myth, with Bernstein and Woodward as David and the government as Goliath.

Now we saw just this sort of blindness to the inner conflicts of bureaucrats and journalists last year during the Presidential election, when the Press were assiduous in refusing to cover these conflicts whenever a former member of the FBI or the CIA broke cover in order to indict the President. In point of fact, most of these conflicts had to do diverse and competing agencies and agendas. But the Press refused to deal with those aspects of the story, because it would have complicated its simplistic narrative, indicting George W. Bush's so-called errors in handling the War on Terrorism.

As we recently learned, Watergate was the decisive moment in the affirmation of anonymous sourcing in the modern journalistic approach. It's interesting as well, because the approach tends to glorify the Press. As well as granting them even more power of narrative framing.

Moreover, isn't it interesting that The Washington Post reports:

Felt himself had hopes that he would be the next FBI director, but Nixon instead appointed an administration insider, assistant attorney general L. Patrick Gray, to the post.

It's written neutrally, but considering that Bernstein is the source, it makes you wonder game he was playing, and whether he felt annoyed at Felt, for revealing this little factoid. It certainly isn't very complimentary to Felt.