somedaybitch

an interesting article at pressthink.

If you don't ask journalists but just people who lived through it and paid attention, what they remember about Watergate was watching the Senate hearings on television and figuring it out. They don't talk about Woodward and Bernstein, but about Sam Ervin and Howard Baker and John Dean, the stars of the hearings. Charles Taylor, a film critic for Salon, pulls the camera back a few feet (June 17, 2002):

Watching Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodward and Bernstein putting the pieces of the story together became a metaphor for how Americans put the story together. Mary McCarthy wrote about people reading three or four newspapers, plus national newsweeklies, rearranging their schedules to watch the daily broadcast hearings of the Senate subcommittee headed by Senator Sam Ervin. She was describing the thrill of feeling yourself a participant in the fate of the republic.

Feeling yourself a participant.... Yes, exactly.

In the fate of the republic... Actually, yes. Watergate was a real life Constitutional test. (Why do we appoint Supreme Court Justices for life? See Saturday Night Massacre.)

emphasis mine.

"feeling yourself a participant" implies, however, that the public is fully informed by the press - not browbeaten or, for all intents and purposes, brainwashed into how to think - in order to facilitate the public's ability to reach its own conclusions. that would then preclude actions like the LAT editing a Reuters wire piece to give a different "spin" to the piece. an action that was, you know, noticed, by millions when the other papers, and that wacky internet, ran the Reuters piece untouched.