Watergate backstory: Tracing the origin of the heroic-journalist myth

The Watergate scandal has been grandiloquently called ‘the most daring and exciting story in the history of American journalism’. The popular narrative about the scandal is that the press – notably two young and tireless reporters for The Washington Post – exposed the wrongdoing that brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency. That interpretation has maintained impressive appeal among journalists in the more than 50 years since Nixon’s resignation. It is nonetheless an interpretation steeped in mythology, one that reinforces a simplistic and misleading notion of news media power in democratic politics. As this article discusses, the evidence is strikingly thin to support the interpretation that Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein decisively exposed Nixon’s misconduct. Their reporting included some notable breakthroughs but was far from an unbroken series of bombshell revelations. A little more than four months after the seminal crime of Watergate – the burglary at Democratic National headquarters in Washington, DC, months before the 1972 presidential election – Woodward and Bernstein had run ‘out of gas’ on Watergate, according to their editor, Barry Sussman. It likewise is important to note that Woodward and Bernstein missed crucial developments as the scandal unfolded, including revelations about Nixon’s secret White House audiotapes, the contents of which were pivotal to Watergate’s outcome. This article addresses those and other elements of the Post ’s reporting while tracing the emergence of the popular ‘heroic-journalist’ myth of Watergate to a lengthy, effusive article in the Columbia Journalism Review published more than a year before Nixon’s resignation. The article, which carried a headline likening Woodward and Bernstein to ‘Davids’ who ‘slew Goliath’, was the ur-text of what, more than fifty years on, has become an enduring popular celebration of the two journalists and the presumed impact of their reporting.