Inscribed on the façade of the National Archives is Shakespeare’s timeless line “What’s past is prologue.” There is no more fitting application of this wisdom than the Watergate journalism of the Washington Post, but not for the triumph of truth it claimed to have achieved.
Fifty years ago, during the Senate Watergate hearings inspired by Post reporting, our country united, sadly for many, in the consensus that Richard M. Nixon must resign his Presidency.
This highly effective messaging, however, was knowingly false in its dominant overall narrative, the template for today’s deliberately deceptive mainstream journalism. Given the wealth, power and prestige it thereby gained, the Post has fought behind the scenes, largely successfully, any revision to its fictitious narrative of truthful journalism prevailing over thoroughgoing Presidential corruption.
Unfortunately, there is no incentive for other mainstream media outlets to bust the Post claims to preeminent truth-telling. To do so would be to discredit their own self-aggrandized participation in partisan hackery disguised as courageous watchdogging.
The inevitable result is not just false stories but, more troubling, widespread censorship of any idea challenging the Progressive orthodoxies around which the leftish sector unites.
So, rather than promoting classic American principles of free speech, per the great liberal John Stuart Mill, one wishing to debate meaningful topics will be canceled by media outlets who take full advantage of the First Amendment, using their privilege to deny these rights to the proletariat citizenry.
Accordingly, one wishing to discuss the gaping lack of evidence of “amplification” of carbon dioxide’s acknowledged, modest lukewarming, that is, a massive, unlikely, positive feedback needed to support alarmist claims, is now derided by scientifically ignorant journalists as a “climate denier.”
An attentive citizen, knowing the presence of two artificial CGG genetic patches on the coronavirus, would intelligently assess the strong likelihood of a laboratory-engineered virus. But such engaged individuals have been pilloried by the media as China-hating, chauvinist ignoramuses. A parent who believes that elementary reading, writing and arithmetic should be the main subjects taught to grades first through third, is accused of harboring a Neanderthalic “Don’t say gay” philosophy.
Faculty members and corporate officers routinely lose their jobs for incorrectly expressed views, shamed by hostile media reports, trashing any notion of free expression.
Those wishing more robust voting safeguards, of course, are “election deniers,” perhaps white supremacists.
But what was so patently false about the Washington Post Watergate journalism? From the first days of the burglary arrests of June 17, 1972, the Post knew facts strongly showing that this had not been a White House campaign operation but, rather, was a small part of a widespread, long-lasting CIA program of surveilling prostitutes and their Johns. Inveigling seeming White House approval from lower aides, the CIA hoped to gain a get out-of-jail-free card if later exposed.
But revealing these clear truths would also have harmed the Post’s twin (sharing the same general counsel), the DNC, while making Nixon a sympathetic victim of silly CIA undercover escapades.
Lucky for the Post, its heralded source Mark Felt, a/k/a Deep Throat, was the FBI’s second-in-command and frustrated by the Bureau’s inability to examine before the Grand Jury whether the White House “dirty tricks” campaign included the burglary. It didn’t, as it eventuated, but Felt wanted public pressure to allow the FBI to do its job.
What was, then, an investigative hypothesis, eventually falsified by further investigation, gave the Washington Post its dominant, but knowingly false, overall narrative. The Post knew, and the evidence is robust, that the Watergate burglary had nothing to do with the presidential campaign. Yet today, the Post doubles down on this canard, while doing its best to cancel truth-tellers, including the revisionist bombshell Postgate.
While throughout today’s journalism schools the Washington Post’s takedown of a conservative President is touted as their founding credential, in fact it should be confessed as its original sin. In sum and substance, then, modern “investigative” journalism is not about free speech at all. It is about false, partisan narratives, enforced by cancel culture, masquerading as pricipled truth-telling.
These ideological narratives are directed at destroying our society’s wisest underpinnings, including, yes, its democratic traditions of free speech.
And in so doing, it is constantly battling to reverse our country’s commonsensical shared narratives, to wit: fossil fuels, which gave us unprecedented human flourishing, must be eliminated; a fundamentally sound education system should be dismembered, with our children ill-equipped to compete in a global economy; crime must not be punished and deterred; the government should intervene as much as possible in the functioning of what would be, with sensible, but not ideological, regulation, a robust economy; our foreign policy should not be constant and firm, but corrupt and fecklessly political; the family as the main unit of society must be secondary to ideological manipulation. All these foolish narratives come from a media gone to the dark side of political power and elite leftist privilege.
Watergate journalism was indeed, as promoted, a groundbreaking, society-altering phenomenon. But not in the ways it represented itself, as it served as the prologue, not to the era of truth it advertised, but to the toxic, divided society in which we are all mired.
John D. O’Connor is a former federal prosecutor and the San Francisco attorney who represented W. Mark Felt during his revelation as Deep Throat in 2005. O’Connor is the author of the books, Postgate: How the Washington Post Betrayed Deep Throat, Covered Up Watergate and Began Today’s Partisan Advocacy Journalism and The Mysteries of Watergate: What Really Happened.