The Woodward Bernstein Effect
Is “holding power to account” the correct framing of journalism's mission?
The Woodward-Bernstein Effect. I just made that up. I think it’s real. I think it’s a problem. I think we should give it a thought.
During the height of the Watergate scandal in 1973 and 1974, I was a lowly assistant to the vice president of programming at the Public Broadcasting Service in Washington. PBS had taken on the considerable expense of broadcasting gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Watergate hearings. Putting the dirty linen of the Nixon White House on full display to the country did not please Nixon or his supporters on the Hill. They weren’t quiet about it. They made clear that federal support for public broadcasting would be at risk if PBS and its stations insisted on doing programming they deemed controversial and biased. These were dramatic times.
On the evening of August 8, 1974, I walked from my small efficiency apartment in Dupont Circle down 16th Street toward the White House. I was joined by dozens, then hundreds, and ultimately several thousand who gathered around the White House and packed Lafayette Park. The crowd was in parts somber, stunned, relieved. There were pockets of spite and vengefulness. Some carried signs demanding “Jail to the Chief”. Hundreds carried portable radios creating a flash mob of a sound system that allowed everyone to hear the voice and words of Richard Nixon as he slipped into history.
The next morning, I joined my PBS colleagues in the office of the vice president of programming on the fourth floor of their headquarters in L’Enfant Plaza. We watched the television coverage as Nixon stepped onto the helicopter, extending his arms in his classic wide victory salute, seemingly without irony. The helicopter lifted off from the White House lawn and veered down the Potomac toward Andrews Air Force Base. From my boss’s office, we turned from the television to the windows and watched Nixon’s helicopter pass by at eye level, just a few hundred feet away.
Watergate was the biggest story in decades, leaving a lasting impact on our politics and culture, including a significant boost to the perceived value of the press.
One morning in 1975, I awoke to noise outside the ground floor window of my Massachusetts Avenue apartment. My ordinarily dull view of the alley had transformed into a bustling movie set. A crew was wrangling cameras, lights, and tangles of cables and gear. Across the alley was merely the angled rear-view of a nondescript apartment building, each with a small balcony. After a few questions, I learned the crew was working on the rumored Watergate movie, directed by Alan J. Pakula, based on Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men. It starred the era’s biggest names, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. I discovered that Woodward had lived in the building across the way, on the sixth floor, apartment 618, a place of intrigue. That balcony was where Woodward placed a flower pot to signal his source, Deep Throat.
Woodward and Bernstein became stars. Their role, and the press’s role in breaking the Watergate story, profoundly impacted public perception of journalism and significantly influenced its practice. An entire generation of journalists became journalists because of Woodward and Bernstein. They wanted to be what they were. They too, wanted to hold truth to power. They wanted to take down the high-minded politician who did bad things. There was heroic grandeur in that.
The American press benefited from an influx of new talent, individuals committed to pursuing the truth wherever it led, using that truth to hold power to account. “Holding truth to power” became synonymous with the mission of journalism, at least in the eyes of journalists themselves. If you ask a journalist about the mission of journalism, they will most likely respond with those very words. This reinforced the press’s role as a watchdog, spawned the concept of the celebrity journalist, and fostered a more adversarial and cynical relationship between the press and government.
That, to me, is the Woodward-Bernstein Effect. I find it problematic. There is no question that “holding power to account” is a crucial objective of the press, arguably its most important. However, I fear it has supplanted our understanding of the broader mission of journalism—what I believe should be its mission.
The mission of the press should be to provide our societies with the information they need to understand their communities and the world outside of their communities, thereby enabling them to be informed citizens. This includes not just the major stories, but also the smaller, everyday narratives. Journalism should help us understand our communities, enjoy them, and strengthen them. It should help us appreciate the differences across communities and find value in those distinctions. It should celebrate a community’s hopes and dreams, not merely focus on what has gone wrong.
Perhaps then, and only then, can we earn and continually re-earn the trust of the societies we serve. Perhaps then, and only then, can we help our communities forge a sense of shared reality. Perhaps then, they can see us as part of them, and them as part of us. Without that larger mission, journalism is too easily perceived as the “town scold,” the arrogant know-it-all who dictates what we’re doing wrong, even on matters the “scold” may know little about.
The Woodward-Bernstein Effect has become particularly apparent to me as I’ve delved deeply into reinventing local news. In seeking to craft sustainable solutions, I’ve increasingly recognized the importance of understanding a community’s information needs, rather than solely relying on my own assumptions. I’ve come to value what is termed “service journalism”—journalism that aims to provide practical, useful information to help readers navigate their lives. When will the potholes on Main Street be filled? Will last night’s snowstorm close the schools? What’s happening at the community park this weekend? Can anyone help the elderly citizen find her long-lost love? Who in the community passed away last week? Did I know them?
Working with Village Media, an organization that has long emphasized service journalism, has reinforced this perspective. Village refers to it as “cohesion” journalism. It builds shared reality by satisfying the information needs communities explicitly communicate. The community reinforces this understanding of their needs with their clicks. In the communities where Village has operated the longest, an impressive 25% of the population visits nearly every day!
Critically, this broad approach fosters trust. Critically, this high level of engagement allows local merchant advertising to be effective in growing businesses and the local economy. Critically, it exposes that far larger audience to the serious and necessary accountability journalism that is vital to the community’s long-term health.
However, I too often encounter a jaundiced eye from the broader journalism community. “That’s not journalism,” they say. “Really?” I respond. “That’s not ‘big J’ journalism,” they clarify. “Okay, I’ll give you the capital letter,” I concede. “But please cede to me the larger value of engaging with the community on their terms, of serving the community based on their needs, of building the trust necessary to empower the community to strengthen themselves.”
Woodward and Bernstein were heroes. Appropriately so. The work they did, and the work others like them do, is critical to the press’s role in open societies. But if that’s all we do, we risk devolving into irrelevance. We get trapped by our own virtuous, and sometimes arrogant, sense of being the hero. We lose the trust of the very societies we work so hard to serve.
I approach all of this with the conviction that our societies cannot effectively self-govern if their foundational units, our communities, cannot find ways to know and work with each other. This is explicitly non-partisan; it is fundamental to how societies function. All politics is local. If we cannot make it work locally, we cannot make it work at all.
Richard Gingras chairs the board of Village Media and is a co-founder and board member of the global Center for News, Technology, and Innovation. He recently retired from Google after 15 years, serving as the company’s global vice president for news, overseeing various product efforts as well as the Google News Initiative. Gingras also engaged on news-related public policy matters around the world. Gingras serves on the boards of several journalism policy related organizations, including the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the International Center for Journalists, the First Amendment Coalition, the James W Foley Legacy Foundation, the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, and the advisory council of the Frontline documentary series.
The notion of journalism as a "watchdog" is more-or-less a twentieth century invention. For most of the nineteenth century, small-town newspaper editors operated more like political functionaries or local civic leaders - powerful figures with a vested interest in promoting the prosperity of their communities. The notion of reporters taking an adversarial stance towards government and holding power to account really took root with the rise of large urban papers in the late 1800s - and yes, probably reached its apogee with Woodward and Bernstein. What you're suggesting feels something like a return to the communitarian spirit of the older country weeklies, which for all their many failings played a critical role in binding small towns and rural communities together. So yes, I think you may be on to something here ;)
My own view is that there are multiple sorts of journalism, and thus multiple missions. Accountability is critical, especially for what many call investigative journalism— how else to know if it is being effective? But communities, both local and national, surely need more than that, as you point out. And then there is opinion journalism, which seeks to persuade, and should also be evaluated on some sort of measure of effectiveness. All these types of journalism need also be marked, and judged, by fairness. Important not to lose sight of any of these varieties or standards.