Picture this: it’s 1972 and Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein get wind of a failed break-in at the Democratic National Committee office at the Watergate Complex. They get a steady stream of information from someone high in the Executive Branch that this failed burglary was the work of operatives at the behest of the President of the United States, that the bungled operation was covered up, and that records were being destroyed.
Now you have these relatively young reporters who see this story of intrigue and political chicanery and abuse of power and you’d think that the first thing they’d want to do is take it to their editor. The world’s got to know, right? These are downright crimes being committed on behalf of the President of the United States!
But in this case, they say… nope. They’ll put this all in a book and have it published after President Richard Nixon leaves office and make so much money off it.
Thankfully they didn’t do that. Thankfully they brought it out in the pages of their paper with the help of their anonymous source and that led to investigations and convictions and the resignation of a sitting president before he could be impeached.
But imagine how things would have been so different if Woodward and Bernstein behaved like some of today’s beltway reporters and chose a book deal over exposing the truth.
There’s been this idea that I’ve been jogging around for a while now, and that is that maybe it’s time for the air-fluffed ego-driven media that have infested the political cesspool to go home. You have all these people who serve as “White House correspondents” and members of the “press pool” in Washington who pretty much operate in their own little world. They don’t really report as much as they regurgitate press statements and try to get a quick quote or soundbite.
Some conservative goes in front of the camera and says that whatever government spending idea is up for consideration will supposedly create inflation, and the press just passes it on like it’s the truth. They don’t mention that our current global inflation is not caused by spending money on fixing bridges or on giving aid to struggling families, but because of supply chain issues following a global pandemic, because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and because of corporate profiteering. Nope. The media doesn’t correct the conservative talking point. They just regurgitate the lie and treat it as a truth.
The beltway media is guilty of eternally passing the myth of “both sides”, spreading this asinine notion that no matter what one dominant political party does, that somehow the other party did something just as bad if not worse at some point in the past. They can’t tell you when, but they claim that it exists nonetheless. This “both-sides” mindset validates the worst of political activities, giving extremists a green light to do whatever they want and say whatever they want.
The beltway media is certainly guilty of creating the political monstrosity called Donald John Trump; giving him nonstop coverage from the moment he descended from the Trump Tower escalator in 2015 and continues even to this article’s posting, long after he left the White House and now seeks to regain it for 2024. He received more coverage from the media than any candidate for the past two presidential elections, not to mention the midterms in between. They essentially made him, even more so than the rest of the media did in the decades before that point.
And now the newest thing for some of these reporters is to do a book about all of the things that went on concerning “that Florida Guy”, and here we learn some of the things that went on that were not previously revealed. And perhaps there would be some things that we should have known about while the narcissist was still in the White House. Too bad they had to keep those to themselves until after that certain person was no longer in office.
Yes, I get that Bob Woodward still does interviews and publishes books and he’s come out with some real zingers too. But understand that he’s not doing that as a reporter like he did in his days with the Washington Post. He can take the time and interview people and publish books because that is what he is today. He is an editor and an interviewer and an author, not an investigative reporter. And it actually surprises me that certain people – aka “that Florida Guy” – are able to be as candid as they are with Woodward knowing that what they tell him will be in his next book.
You look at the media’s fixation with eternal polls and polling, with so-called “experts” claiming to know what voters are thinking, and then acting all surprised when those same experts and those same polls are all wrong after each election. And then they sit on their talk shows and pontificate about being wrong and why do they even bother with polls and what should be done about it – ignoring the obvious solution of firing all the pollsters for their continual incompetence. If a financial advisor was this wrong on Wall Street as pollsters are in politics, they’d be out of a job already.
It seems like the beltway media, more so than the rest of the air-fluffed ego-driven institution, are treating this all like a game. Politics have real consequences for people, but these guys just act like it’s fantasy.
Let’s get brutally honest here… I think it is time to send them all home. All of the “pool” reporters. All of the “Washington correspondents”. The whole beltway crew. Close up the offices and send them back home.
Let these folks cover tractor pulls and dog shows. Let them cover town hall and city hall and county commissioner meetings. Let them talk with actual people who work hard for a living and aren’t getting helped by special interest groups. Let them work in a world where being wrong has consequences and they can’t just “both-sides” it.
And in their place, bring in a new group of reporters to cover the cesspool of politics. People who are hungry and determined to find the truth and to report the truth, regardless of political faction. Like Woodward and Bernstein used to be in the 1970’s. Looking to get the truth out instead of getting a book published.
Newspapers love to give themselves little slogans like “All the news that’s fit to print” and “Democracy dies in darkness”. But the truth is that the business of reporting the news is lost when the media treats the news like a game. And it’s not done in darkness. It’s being done in broad daylight. That has certainly the case when it comes to reporting on politics, and that needs to end.
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