All the President's Blogs

I'm in the middle of reading Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men, now almost 32 years old. I lived through the Watergate era, but was very young (I was seven in 1972) and didn't understand quite what was happening -- except that my parents had never had a high opinion of Nixon (we were small-town Democrats) and this seemed to confirm their opinion. I also never saw the movie version of the book, directed by Alan Pakula; but reading the book, I can see how it would make a crackerjack movie. The book is written in novel format, in the third person, complete with character analyses of Woodward's and Bernstein's flaws.

One important aspect of the book is how much work W & B put into confirming every lead they received with at least one other source -- besides contacting the subjects of their stories before publication and giving the subjects a chance to respond. (I just read the scene where Bernstein call John Mitchell late at night to confirm that he controlled the CRP secret fund while still Attorney General; and Mitchell explodes, "JEEEEEZUS!", followed by a graphic threat against the newspaper's female publisher.)

These days many opine that blog reporting will supplant the newspaper and television media as the source for news. But I wonder how many blog reporters are so careful to ascertain facts before publishing them.

You can find the actual Washington Post articles about Watergate (including the one quoting Mitchell's threats, albeit with a slang term for a portion of the female anatomy edited out) archived at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/politics/specials/watergate/articles/