The myth of the heroic journalist

I just saw the film "All the President's Men" (1976) for the first time. In case you don't know, it's a retelling of the first months of the investigation by the Washington Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein into the Watergate scandal that ultimately led to President Nixon's resignation.

I didn't like it, but I'm not sure if it's the movie I didn't like or if I didn't like the story. If the movie is overall accurate in how it portrays what Woodward and Bernstein did and how they did it, it raises serious questions about what journalists do (or used to do). We see them using anonymous sources and doing what seems to amount to tricking some people into making statements they don't want to make. The reporters don't seem to care whose lives are ruined as long as they get there story.

The movie does acknowledges these difficulties. In one scene, the reporters talk to the wife of a potential informant and they say something like (I forget the exact wording), "we're just here to help you." The woman says, "no, you're not." Woodward admits it, saying, "no, we're." They seem to agree that the woman's husband is only a means to an end. The reporters are using him. The movie wants us to believe they're using him for a greater TRUTH what for to save the republic. Someone can be excused for thinking they're using him to advance their professional notoriety.

The movie also acknowledges problems with the type of anonymous sourcing Woodward and Bernstein engage in. Sometimes the reporters' questionable tactics backfire on them. At one point, the reporters' sources seem to troll them into prematurely making a claim about the involvement of H. R. Haldeman, White House Chief of Staff, in coordinating the break in.

Of course, the grizzled editor, played by Jason Robards, stands by the story anyway. Something something first amendment and democracy something. And what do you know, the reporters are eventually proven right.


But I left the film thinking the Watergate story might have been a Hail Mary touchdown pass. If a hundred reporting teams make up just any story once a week, no matter how wild, one or two of the stories are bound to be true eventually.

That's probably not the real tale of what Woodward and Bernstein accomplished. They probably were and are legitimate professionals who sincerely sought and seek the truth. But their tactics, at least as the movie portrayed them, seemed questionable.

In our current moment in 2019, we're supposed to admire "intrepid" (a word you see quite a lot) journalists. Look at "Spotlight," the 2015 film about the Boston Globe's expose of the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal, or "The Post," the 2017 movie about Mr. Trump's refusal to give the Washington Post the respect it deserves by denying its reporters access the controversy over the Pentagon Papers case. Both movies have their instances of introspection about their profession. In the first, we find that the Globe had access to the story much earlier but didn't pursue it. In the second, Meryl Streep's character recalls the cozy relationship she and her reporters had with the Kennedy's, the implication being that perhaps the closeness of that relationship ma have influenced the Post's editorial decisions.

But both films seem to settle on a nostalgia for "journalism as it used to be," where the pro's, like the reporters in "All the President's Men," know what they're doing and shouldn't let much get in the way of truth. Maybe we do in fact need more of that. Maybe the Beck-Hannity-Olberman-Maddow approach to "journalism" serves us poorly. Maybe FOX's "fair and balanced" approach gives a little too much legitimacy to certain viewpoints by assuming that every story has at least two sides that need equal air time.

Maybe. But the golden age of journalism wasn't so golden. No golden age was.