NRJ Book Review: Watergate's Legacy and the Press: The Investigative Impulse

Abstract

Jon Marshall, Watergate's Legacy and the Press: The Investigative Impulse (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2011). 313 pages, $24.95 (paperback).Review by Steve HallockThe U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has wasted millions of dollars on stalled or abandoned projects and routinely failed to crack down on derelict developers or the local housing agencies that funded them, The Washington Post reported in mid-May of this year. Nationwide, the story continued, 700 projects awarded $400 million for housing for the poor have been idling for years.These findings were the result of a year-long investigation by The Post, whose report on the squandered taxpayer money stands as a welcome, but rare, example of the sort of investigative reporting that is the focus of Northwestern University lecturer Jon Marshall's road map to the history-and current state-of investigative reporting in the United States. And therein lies the primary value of this book. It offers a detailed, lavishly sourced chronological account of investigative reporting before and after the Watergate scandal, which Marshall offers up as the gold standard of investigative journalism.The title of the book is somewhat of a misnomer. The so-called legacy of the Watergate scandal reporting that brought down the Nixon administration in the early 1970s-a scandal to which Marshall devotes way too many pages detailing the events and reporting of a story that has been retold many times-doesn't even begin until well past the midway point of the book. This leads to one little problem: Just what is the legacy of this famed political scandal and its effect on the press? Was it the increased use of anonymous sources by a reporting corps eager to emulate the methods of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein? Was it the rise of investigative journalism that gave the national press the reputation of a take-no-prisoners arrogance that offended and drove away readers? Was it a boon to investigative techniques that led to a watchdog journalism that benefited the democracy? Or was it a neglect of journalistic duties in response to doubling down by government officials and presidential administrations on secrecy and the erection of impediments to the free flow of information? We get a hint that this last element was Marshall's aim early on, when he writes that each successive presidential administration following Watergate has looked for ways to better shield itself from prying reporters. Like the Nixon administration, the White House of George W. Bush strengthened the power of the executive branch as it responded to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and prepared for war in Iraq. Like Nixon Bush displayed open disdain toward the press and shrouded the workings of government in a veil of secrecy. In contrast with the Watergate era, however, the press response during much of Bush's time in office was more impotent than heroic.The legacy of this book is a bit of all of the above, actually, but the focus blurs somewhat in Marshall's methodical, impressive and ultimately successful attempt to provide a thorough accounting of the nation's long and impressive history of muckraking and enterprise reporting. But that also is this book's strength. It is a compilation-to the point nearly of annotated bibliography at times-of investigative enterprise that any student or instructor of journalism and its important watchdog role in this nation will find valuable and instructive. …