June 8, 2006
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The Press' New Paradigm
Ask any veteran reporter or editor what journalism looks (looked?) like when it was at its best, and chances are you’ll get the same answer: Watergate. Our finest hour. Cynical, tough-minded, cigar-chewing editors have teared up at the sight of Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford knocking on door after door, never giving up.
Woodward and Bernstein changed the game of journalism. Exposing cover-ups became the highest calling of the press. Since the fall of Nixon, reporters have dreamed of putting their byline on the story that told you what they didn’t want you to know.
But Watergate also changed America, in ways that journalism hasn’t evolved to handle. In the three-and-a-half decades since Woodstein’s stories first began appearing in The Washington Post, while journalists have been busy honing their ability to uncover hidden information, the world has become a place where the scarcity of info isn’t the biggest problem. Its proliferation is. And by and large, journalism organizations don’t have the skills or tools to sort through all the data.
Whether journalists know it or not, we’ve entered a new paradigm while we’ve been clinging to our old ideals. Like Watergate, this paradigm is founded on a national scandal. Unlike Watergate, historians will judge our performance during this scandal to be a failure, not a success.
Welcome to the age of Enron.
In the aftermath of Watergate, Congress significantly strengthened the Freedom of Information Act, ushering in the idea that agencies doing the public’s business should be fully open and accountable to the public. Everything is assumed to be on the record, Congress said. And it should be easy for individuals to acquire that record.
Twenty-five years after Watergate, all the information necessary to realize something was very fishy about Enron’s accounting practices was freely available. But the information was also much more complicated than journalists were equipped to deal with. From Tim Rutten’s L.A. Times column on the matter:
The American press failed badly and generally not only on the Enron story, but also on those of WorldCom, Tyco, Rite Aid, Adelphia, HealthSouth and most of the corporate debacles that followed on the heels of the Houston energy trader’s bankruptcy. …Why