Media Coverage and a Federal Grand Jury: Publication of the Secret Watergate Transcripts (1973)

Abstract

Although scholarship about press coverage of the Watergate scandal has mostly been viewed through a journalistic frame—focused on debate about the true role of investigative reporters in precipitating President Richard Nixon's resignation—a more apt frame may be a legal one involving the clash between the media's First Amendment rights and the judiciary's Sixth Amendment responsibilities. As the Nixon administration attempted to cover up its crimes from the federal grand jury investigating the scandal, journalists tried to expose that wrongdoing by revealing confidential grand jury evidence. This article focuses on the single most extensive leak of secret grand jury information to the press during Watergate: syndicated columnist Jack Anderson s publication of verbatim grand jury transcripts of sworn witness testimony in Spring of 1973. Using oral history interviews and documents released after appeals under the Freedom of Information Act, the author reconstructs and analyzes a little-known but dramatic chapter in journalism history that continues to have relevance today.