What Happened to Watergate?
commondreams.org
<<... Not so long ago, two investigative reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, did a bit of investigating and brought down a president. Watergate had a profound effect on journalism. J-schools were flooded. Investigative reporters became stars and competed with each other for stories. Quite a bit of government corruption and deception was exposed. Many officials straightened up and flew right (for a while), afraid of being exposed.
It's different today. George Bush and Dick Cheney are scary individuals. With one eye firmly on Watergate, they want to discredit the press before their own dirty tricks are exposed. To that end, they have bribed columnists to create propaganda, lied their way to war, strong-armed media owners with threats and bluster, and buried as much real news as they could - for example, the public is still not allowed to see photographs of coffins coming back from Iraq.
Their corruption is pleading to be exposed. But at a time when "follow the money" means reporting on the wholesale looting of the American treasury, journalism has lost its way. Take Dan Rather, who just received a Peabody Award for journalistic excellence for his reporting on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. He got in trouble with a story about Bush's Vietnam-era National Guard duty. Everyone knows that Bush received special privileges and was often MIA. Everyone knows that he is, like most of his Administration, a chickenhawk - someone who dodged the actual fighting in Vietnam yet freely sends other people's children to their deaths in Iraq.
Even if Rather's report contained a faulty document, the meat of the story has been public knowledge for years. Yet CBS did not defend its reporters and tell the Bush Administration to go to hell. Instead, Rather resigned and his producers were fired...>> |
