Remember the end of All the President's Men? As the camera steadily tightens on the Washington Post newsroom, its din refines to the diligent clacking of Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman), until a three-shot comprises the reporters' profiles and that, on the foreground television, of the beaming, freshly reinaugurated Richard Nixon. One of the four 1976 Academy Awards Alan J. Pakula's film won was for sound, and the pulp-smack of type is its sonic signature, bracketing the film from the keystroke that opens it to the teletype barrage of pleadings and sentencings that overwhelms the stately booms of the inaugural cannonade.
Last year was supposed to be the year of the political film, but All the President's Men seems poignantly appropriate to this moment, even if its hard-type leitmotif seems as quaint as robust investigative journalism. The children of Woodstein would do well to reacquaint themselves with the tale of two cubs probing misdeeds of a recently re-elected president, and one who won decisively, at that. It will be argued that the hot-type duo plied their trade in a three-network, blogless world, when ink on paper meant something, with no blathering cable heads and fewer distracting wife-murders. They could build a case incrementally, without having to shout over the clangor or, once heard, to feed hourly the mighty maw.
More to the point, half the Watergate story was the outrage of Congress and the judiciary, two institutions from which we now expect not outrage but outrages, and certainly not their investigation. With no officialdom to pursue a story, and a media climate in which inquiry can be perceived as anything from perfidious to merely biased; when fact is dismissed as propaganda and propaganda accepted as fact, what's a journalist to do?
CBS blowing the Bush-records story didn't make things any easier. That harried producers got carried away is not a ringing affirmation of investigative journalism's vigor. Last week's report on CBS' disaster not only succored those who assert media bias, already chortling about outright liars at several publications. It might have undone years of patient, competent reporting on Bush's lackluster Guard career, impelling many to conclude that it was all wrong.
In a close election, could that bloc who turned to Bush after CBS' blunder have made the difference? It's useful to think in those terms, if only to counter the rapidly solidifying fiction that the election was a landslide and it's all about NASCAR and God. Micro-marketing is a key strategy. Rove had Bush visited churches around the country—quietly, to protect his "moderate" flank—and it worked. That it was done quietly underscores that the election was not about "values." Besides, the Democrats got out their core groups, too. The election turned not on one bloc but many micro-blocs drummed together by the steady cadence of deceitful mongering.
In the New York Review of Books, Mark Danner disputes the value-voters conclusion with some close reporting on the uses of fear. When told, at a Bush rally, that the quote Bush attributed to John Kerry was inaccurate, the woman standing next to Danner shrugged it off:
... a well-educated, worldly woman—a doctor ...— listened to me intently, nodded politely, began to form a question, and then, thinking better of it, looked at me for a moment longer before turning back to the president.
How many abandoned Kerry when told he called terrorists "a nuisance"? In tens and hundred-thousands, Bush harvested the fruits of fear sown since 2001.
In any event, as Danner learned, it's not very encouraging when you report the facts and see them rejected. And it's intimidating when you see journalists threatened with jail time for refusing to name sources in the investigation into a story they did not write. The case of who outed Valerie Plame to Robert Novak to punish her husband is the ultimate demonstration of how effectively venomous the administration has been with dissenters. You have to wonder if the tactics of its investigation are meant to be particularly chilling for a reason. Hmm, a federal crime, possibly high in the flow chart ...
Midway through All the President's Men, Woodward and Bernstein arrive at the townhouse of campaign treasurer Hugh Sloan, whose wife tells them, "No, it's not," when told "it's really for his benefit." Stephen Collins, later of Seventh Heaven, plays Sloan, a tersely polite man not yet at peace with the idea that his conscience will undo him. "Revisiting Watergate" at washingtonpost.com relates that the Sloans left Washington and ran a successful business into comfortable retirement, and good for them. Are there any like them in Washington today?
It's not like we must reprise All the President's Men as a montage of keystrokes, text messages and talking heads unspools the downfall of the Bush administration. It might be enough that millions of people, in varied combines of tens and ten-thousands, would be with us if they knew the truth.
"Fortunately, we have an independent media in this country who would tell us the truth," Michael Moore scoffs in Fahrenheit 9/11. So far, the evidence is that the media post-election is every bit as cowed as before the Iraq War, and it operates in a milieu that dismisses fact as partisan talking points. Nixon had his plumbers, Bush clears the pipes with Fox and Rush. But nearly half the electorate, and perhaps more, wants to know what's really going on. Now more than ever, we need an independent media who will tell us the truth.
Chuck Twardy is a really smart guy who has written for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.