Owen Gray Asks Where Are The Woodward And Bernsteins of Today? I Ask IF A Woodward And Bernstein Would’ve Been Able To Succeed AT All Today?

Owen Gray, who blogs at Northern Reflections asks Where are the Woodwards and Bernsteins these days?  Today’s blog post from Owen was in reference from another great column from Lawrence Martin, where he asks if the fourth estate has lost its tenacity.  Owen’s and Lawrence Martin’s questions today remind me of a later episode of “Law and Order”, where the Gen-X assistant DA says to Baby boomer Boss Jack McCoy something like “You’re from the times of Woodward and Bernstein and I grew up with Geraldo Rivera”.  The Gen-Xers started the descent to shorter attention spans; to things that glitter; give me something sexy! Sensationalism sells! It didn’t get better with subsequent generations as technology further evolved.

With the internet, came our newspapers on a computer screen. With that, more media pages. Then social media. Twitter, where you can get much your news for 140 characters or less. Or better still, can get links to full news stories and can click only the links you’re interested in. Convenient, it can be.

If Woodward and Bernstein were active today, and they did find a Deep Throat willing to meet them in dark underground parking garages or toilet stalls of wash rooms of the worst dives in bad parts of town, to cover a political scandal; be it Watergate or another scandal of equal or greater magnitude (Lord knows, there have been enough of ‘em over the years in US and Canada), would they have been able to be as tenacious as they were nearly 40 years ago? Would they have even been as motivated? Better still, would their bosses have allowed them to give whatever the story they were working on the time and effort it deserved? Perhaps with a paper like the Washington Post, and as someone who grows more cynical with each passing day, I’d say that’s a big ‘if’.

I agree with both Gray and Martin that a strong, tenacious and responsible media; one who is not afraid to question the government of the day and call the politicians on their wrong doing is essential in a functional democracy.  Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, with the help of Deep Throat, certainly demonstrated that.  Yes, no doubt, even forty years ago, The Washington Post editors must have caught quite a bit of flack for spending so much time on the story before all was revealed.

However, even with better papers like the Washington Post, would Woodward and Bernstein have been able to succeed? Would their tenacity have been able to continue selling papers or have kept folks glued to their column pages for whatever media outlet they would’ve worked for today?  Twitter feeds (assuming they had Twitter accounts, of course). Would they have had the support of their editors today? It would’ve been increasingly difficult as time goes on for reasons I mentioned above.  Folks, both in the US and Canada, today, have proven that they don’t care about their democracy.  Yes, boys ‘n’ girls, in an increasingly competitive online news media market, it’s all about what sells and democracy and government accountabilty doesn’t sell, sadly. It ain’t sexy.

Oh don’t get me wrong. We do have a few quality journos in Canada who cover Canadian politics like Kady O’Malley, Jennifer Ditchburn, and Greg Weston, who first brought our attention to the G8 “Fake Lake” boondoggles.  I have always suspected that Mr. Weston may have lost his column at Sun Media because of his “Fake Lake” stories.  I suspect many journos have a fear that if they go too far in pursuing a story, particularly one that is too critical of or too heavily pursues the government their employer supports,  their job may be on the chopping block.  That may well be a part of why the fourth estate today isn’t so tenacious.  Lame, I know. Lame and dangerous for democracy to thrive.

Oh yes! Much more could’ve been delved into if more effort were given and more editorial support provided. What about that story about the G8 pork barreling in Tugboat Tony’s riding?  Now that Stevie Spiteful has his majority and Sheila Fraser is on the way out and to be replaced, no doubt, by a pocket dog, we will never find out.  However, I seriously doubt if the will of the people was there to continue to stay tuned to such a story.

What is filling our news pages these days? What is selling? Well, mainly fluff.  What passes for mainstream political journalism these days is the gossipy stylings of Jane Taber.  She has certainly diminished the purpose of the anonymous source. Deep Throat has now been replaced by Super seniory Liberal insiders (although nowadays, she’s been digging into a few Harpercon ones, I believe), yanno, just for some extra dramatic effect.

Shameless columns by pundits who are not necessarily writers or journos by trade, but rather, former political speechwriters or staffers who shill for their former bosses.

Worse yet, is what used to be relegated  to the likes of the National Enquirer and other super market tabloids and such,  now passes for mainstream and actually gets published in mainstream papers. Hello Harold E Camping?

I certainly hope that there are journos out there who really are in search of the truth out there, no matter how unpopular it may make them or how unsexy it may be, and to continue going after it until it is unveiled in its’ entirety.  Journos who are in the business for more altruistic reasons than to just sell papers or please their bosses.  Our democracy depends on it,  now more than ever.

Right now, the closest thing we have are leaked cables from around the world on Wikileaks to tune into.