All Blog Posts from Public Eye

The ever-prolific Joe Strupp of Editor and Publisher today takes his column to commemorate Father’s Day, admit that he’s 41 years old, and note that he thinks – given this Sunday’s 35th anniversary of the Watergate burglary – that the Watergate story would be broken if it happened today. But there would be a few more hiccups.

Strupp writes that the constant news cycle would lead to mistakes, that a cell phone camera might have gotten a snapshot of Deep Throat in the garage, and that the pressures against keeping his identity secret would have been ratcheted up dramatically. But at the end of the day, he writes, the truth would come out.

Careful reviews and triple-checking of facts are often not done in time. During their award-winning reporting, much of it done over days and weeks, the Watergate reporters had their share of goofs and mistakes, but far fewer than the scoops and revelations that made such coverage valuable, and able to stand up to the scrutiny of those who regularly sought to criticize it.

Strupp is on far more than he’s off-base, but I have to take serious issue with this. On the commemorative DVD re-release of “All The President’s Men” a few years ago, Jonathan Alter observed “If Watergate happened today, for several reasons, it probably wouldn't be exposed … which is kind of scary."

Read full post…