Tim Russert is interviewing Woodward & Bernstein

[housewolf]

for an hour, reviewing the entire Watergate story, I'm watching it on CNBC. REALLY fun watching these two reminisce and tell their story after all these years. So interesting how all these sychronicities happened to bring the story forward.

What caught my attention was this - the whole story came together in October, 1972. Nixon won by a landslide in November. Carl Bernstein said that the story got NO TRACTION - "even our collegues didn't believe what we were writing." The NY Times didn't cover it, Time Magazine didn't cover it, NONE of the other papers would even touch it until Walter Concrite gave it 15 minutes and then another segement of 7 minutes.

Just imagine, all of the media in 1972 didn't believe the Watergate story and wouldn't cover it!

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

1. What catches my attention

is that Walter Concrite gave it 15 minutes. Can you imagine any of the press giving anything 15 minutes? Sure, tragedies like 9/11 got days, but a story about White House corruption getting that much time in one broadcast? I don't think so.

Even Lewinsky, filegate, travelgate, etc. (bullshit stories all) just got a minute or two every day. Day after day after day, but just a minute or two.

best

[shraby]

4. That was in the days of half-hour to

one-hour news, then nothing until the next day, not 24 hour like now where they have lotza time to cover a story and will only give it 30 seconds to a minute or two. Pretty sad, huh?

[punpirate]

2. Well, with Republicans...

... history does have a tendency to repeat itself. :P

If the Demos in Congress weren't so damned accommodating to Reagan and Bush, Sr., both of them probably would have been impeached, as well, on the evidence.

If we'd had that trifecta, Nixon, Reagan and Bush, Sr., there never would have been a Bush, Jr.

[wookie294]

3. I saw that

People can't believe that their president would lie or act like a criminal, so the Post initially refused to accept that Watergate was real. I remember a caller on C-SPAN who said, "There's no way Bush would lie his way into war." Ahh jeez! Democrats need to talk about Watergate more often like Republicans always talk about Jimmy Carter.

BTW, when Woodward released the address to the parking garage in Rosslyn, VA where he had meetings with Felt, I found out it was only one block from where I used to live back in the 1990s. Freaky!

[tmooses]

5. Somehow I feel that if Cronkite was still an anchor he still would do 15

minutes on Rove. I've heard him speak of Bush-not very kindly.

[Carolab]

7. Well, at least he can still do 15 minutes on AirAmerica. n/t

[RoyGBiv]

6. Been saying this for awhile ...

The MSM not reporting on all this is not really all that new. It took years for the Watergate story to really come together and generate any results, not months. The movie _All the President's Men_ makes this all seem like it happened in a few weeks at most if you don't pay attention to the teletype dates.

I'm not giving the present MSM an out with this. Many media outlets actively work against this story rather than simply ignore it. However, those who expect universal coverage from day one are going to be disappointed. Bernstein in particular had guts to run with this the way he did, and the team was backed up unusually by his editor and publisher. That's not typical.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

8. The other journalists didn't believe it because Woodward only had....

...a year and a half in the newspaper business, and only six months at the Post, when he began breaking the Watergate story.

Maybe some of the other reporters at the Post also had some reservations about Woodward's background in the military. He was, after all, a former Naval officer with a "crypto" clearance who had last worked in the Pentagon as a briefing officer to General Al Haig and other senior officers.

And Woodward had the kind of background that th intelligence world liked...Yale grad, Navy ROTC, and a member of a secret society.

Maybe they didn't believe that Woodward had really left the military and was instead working as an intelligence asset. A lot of that stuff was happening back then.

IMHO, in Woodward's case it was true.

[wakemeupwhenitsover]

9. And I don't think Bernstein was a college grad.

But I do remember the local news giving it a minute or so every day, day after day after day. That was back when the local news was pretty much politics. Not bullshit fluff stories with anchors with perfect hair & perky smiles (both male & female)

[tulsakatz]

10. watergate

yeah, I've been watching that movie a lot lately!! And yes, I am hoping this Rove/Plame thing is going to be another Watergate!!!

What's really surprising is that they began building the story before the election and it ends when Nixon gets sworn in! I was amazed that they were working on the story that far in advance!! I didn't even hear the word Watergate until much later.

There's one part in the film where Bradlee is talking about criticism (from other papers) and he tells them 'you'll see. Just wait until this thing bottoms out' but the truth is I can't figure what what we've got!! Imagine the difficulty of a situation where, even the editor isn't sure of the story!

These guys (Woodward and Bernstein) showed a lot of courage by pursuing this story. Practically no one believed them but they did it anyway!

[housewolf]

11. W&B's stories were being published by the DC Metro pages

It's interesting to hear them say that NOBODY believed their stories! None of the national reporters for the Post believed them, none of the reporters for other papers believed them! It's amazing that Ben Bredlee let them stay on it in spite of the lack of interest everywhere else.

[JohnyCanuck]

12. Woodward "uncannily close to the highest centers of power"

Secret Admirers: The Bushes and the Washington Post Part 2
by Michael Hasty

The most important propaganda stage the Post has built for George W to act the role of "president" upon was, of course, what the corporate media still prefers to portray as the "defining moment" of Junior's reign—the events of September 11. The challenge was made more difficult by Bush's Fredo Corleone performance on the day the attacks occurred. After acting clueless enough to dawdle in front of a classroom of second-graders for nearly a half-hour following the crash of the second plane, he then spent the rest of the day flying erratically around the country ("Just trying to get out of harm's way," as he later told a reporter), and appearing perplexed and too small for his suit as he addressed a national television audience that night.

This was a job for Superman—which the Post provided in the form of its premier Washington insider, presidential chronicler and US Navy Intelligence veteran, the legendary Watergate reporter, Bob Woodward. Along with Post reporter Dan Balz, Woodward employed his impeccable journalistic fellatio in an eight-part, front-page series of articles giving a moment-to-moment White House account of the first days of the "war on terror," inflating the image of a cowardly dauphin into that of a credibly decisive commander-in-chief. The articles became the basis for Woodward's subsequent bestseller, "Bush At War"—which is probably best viewed as a sequel to his book about the first Gulf War, "The Commanders," featuring many of the same characters.

Woodward's relationship to the Bush family is particularly interesting (see Part 1 of this series for more details). For the uninitiated, Woodward fairly successfully inoculated himself from any future suspicion that he might be too close to the subjects of his writing with his historic coverage of the Watergate scandal. In the matrix of the corporate media, Woodward is still portrayed as the archetypal intrepid investigative reporter who, with his scruffy partner, Carl Bernstein, spoke truth to power and brought down a president.

In the real world, Woodward has proven to be uncannily close to the highest centers of power.

http://www.onlinejournal.com/Media/021104Hasty/021104hasty.html

Part 1 at
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Media/020504Hasty/020504hasty.html