Ever wonder whether social media would have changed journalism during the Watergate era? At a recent
Hillsborough County Bar Association Law & Liberty Dinner, I asked Washington Post investigative journalist
Bob Woodward a version of that question.
His answer: “No. You can’t make sense of a story in an afternoon. You have to excavate a story. Could you imagine me tweeting from a garage, ‘Talking to Deep Throat’?”
Then he asked the moderator, WFLA-TV’s Keith Cate, if we should take a “tweet break.”
Later, Woodward went on to say that “democracy dies in darkness.” He may not have realized it, but he was making a case for using social media. Transparency is one of the journalistic values that social media supports. The more people are tweeting, uploading photos or videos and posting information about the world around them, the more we can shed light on people, ideas and actions that might otherwise stay in the shadows.
Think of the video posted to YouTube last summer of
Neda’s death during protests in Iran. Think of The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof noting that it’s harder now to hide facts from the public, saying, “
Modern information technologies raise the cost of repression.”
After the event, Woodward asked me if he was right — that social media would not be helpful for investigative journalism. I told him I still find value in the investigative journalism that Watergate represents, but at the same time social media helps storytellers fill a need that people have for instant information from trusted sources.
Sometimes, though, Woodward shared, you can’t trust your own experiences. Earlier in the evening, he described his initial impressions when he learned President Gerald Ford had pardoned former President Richard Nixon.
He first learned of the pardon when his colleague Carl Bernstein woke him up with a phone call one morning to say, “The sonofbitch pardoned the sonofabitch.” Woodward immediately knew what Bernstein meant and believed this was a shady deal that Ford and Nixon must have worked out.
But after his presidency ended, Woodward asked Ford directly why he pardoned Nixon. Ford said he wanted his own presidency, and the longer the Watergate scandal continued, the longer that it would distract him, the nation and the American people from looking at the bigger issues facing them, mainly the economy.
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Woodward said he learned from this that “you have to discount your own experiences sometimes.” I agree.
Suspending judgment is an important element of critical thinking, whether you’re considering sources or tweets.
