One of the day’s big stories is the outing of Deep Throat.
It’s all kind of amazing, when you stop to think about it. How many people do you know who can keep a secret of that magnitude for 30 years?
The whole thing has engendered a mood of nostalgia for me.
A lot of people would call me a Baby Boomer, but I’m not. I’m a Joneser, a member of that generation that grew up during the ’60s but was too young to participate in all the upheaval and had to just watch. We came of age during the 1970s and one of the formative collective experiences of our generation was the whole Watergate scandal and the subsequent Nixon resignation.
I was 15 years old when Nixon resigned, and the whole series of events was ultimately to have a profound impact on me and my view of the world. It meant different things to different people at the time, of course, but the Watergate scandal gave me the first heroes I had as a teenager — Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
As I got older, I learned a lot about journalism by becoming better acquainted with the story behind the Watergate story. Much of what I learned informs what I do for a living today.
For me, Woodward and Bernstein’s work on the Watergate story became a standard of principled, ethical reporting and a kind of professional courage that is rarely required of people who work in offices but is all the more admirable for that very reason.
The whole saga seemed to me to personify everything that a free press in these United States was supposed to be about: investigating and reporting and being the means through which people can find out what they need to know in order to hold their publicly elected officials accountable for what they do.
And right now, when reporters are being maligned and discredited everywhere you turn, it is good for us all to remember what Watergate taught us about how terribly crucial it is to have a free press that does its job of holding powerful people accountable for what they do.
And, at a time when people seem to think that the press is about apologists and propagandists of the left or the right, we should all remember that reporters aren’t here to help one side or the other to win political brownie points and we aren’t here to be puppets for anybody’s political gain.
We journalists are neither rock stars nor political operatives. We are of the people and we serve the people. Any of us who lay claim to the mantle of journalist and who does not remember that is unworthy of the title.
It is a noble profession and one that is an essential element of the freedom so many Americans take for granted.
[This post was simultaneously posted to The MicroEnterprise Journal’s The Journal Blog.]
About Dawn Rivers Baker
