Mark Felt was the topic du jour in an honors philosophy class at
Catonsville High School last week, reported the Baltimore
Sun, which noted that “most of the 12 juniors in the class
said it was unethical for Felt to talk to Woodward.” Felt’s job,
said one student, was “to go to his superiors.” Another student
said, “if it was truly to benefit society, he wouldn’t have kept
his name secret.” A student named YinYin Yu, 16, opined daringly
that Felt’s info was beside the point since all politicians behave
badly at some point: “They don’t have ethics. They have
politics….No one acts ethically all the time, and in politics
it’s more effective to act unethically than ethically.”
Only three students defended Felt, and apparently some of the
students didn’t care either way. The teacher, not the students,
ginned up the subject, seeing it as a “teachable moment,” according
to the story. Junior Sierra Harris, who is set to assume editorial
responsibilities at the Catonsville High “Comet” next year, said
with mature resignation to the Sun, “It’s something more
people my age should care about, but you can’t force people.”
This reaction at a Maryland high school to Felt’s revelation is
just a sliver but a telling one: the generations for whom Watergate
isn’t even a memory don’t appear very impressed by the old media’s
nostalgia over nailing Nixon and if roused to an interest in the
subject regard it as a moral wash.
To correct this insufficient interest in their Watergate heroics
and desperate for a shot in the arm after repeated blows to their
credibility, the Dan Rathers and Ben Bradlees are frantically
trying to recapitulate the romantic story line in which they alone
wore the white hats during the Watergate period. Even Tom Brokaw
interrupted his quasi-retirement to regale Chris Matthews last week
with a boring, I-was-on-the-right-side-of-history-too anecdote
about a question he crafted to trip Nixon up at a press conference
but that never got any attention because Dan Rather had famously
sparred with Nixon at it. Brokaw still sounded disappointed that
his cleverness that day wasn’t duly recorded.
The old media seem almost ready to launch a Watergate channel to
compete with the History-Hitler channel. It grates on these
journalists that few Americans are aware of their self-described
heroics. And these journalists are capable of sputtering rage when
they discover that those who bother to examine the details of their
fabled anti-Nixon reporting think that it looks more and more like
the journalistic quiltwork of a Jayson Blair. By the standards of
today — where reporters are getting sacked for fiddling around
with datelines and lifting quotes from other papers — the
Watergate reporting looks quite outre. It was cobbled together
pretty dishonestly, involving corner-cutting and lying that had
moral stakes far higher than an indolent reporter filing a story
from his apartment.
Yet the Columbia Journalism School-style minders, who pride
themselves on being primly hostile to journalistic corner-cutting,
seemed to have gone on summer break last week. Where were the
Bernard Kalbs knitting their brows over the dubious methods and
devices Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein used to advance their
story? The mainstream media that spent the 1990s lecturing
conservatives on the dangers of willy-nilly means, even against
obviously craven and corrupt subjects, all of a sudden accepted
that the noble end of nailing a president did justify low
means.
The media was back to Dan Rather’s “core truth” rationale for
using a forgery against George Bush. Come on, Nixon was an evil
guy, the fashionable attitude went last week. So what if to get at
that core truth required lying and lawbreaking? Carl Bernstein, who
had ludicrously tried to set himself up in the 1990s as a media
ethicist of sorts, allowed himself defenses he never granted
Clinton’s critics. Don’t shoot the messenger just because you don’t
like the means by which the message is delivered, he instructed
Americans last week.
It is no wonder that students studying ethics at Catonsville
High School find all of this to be empty noise or tedious
posturing. Ironically, what the Watergate nostalgia is teaching
them, to the extent they are paying attention, is not so much that
Nixon was a criminal but that crimes were committed in the drive to
prove it. Now when they hear of the “cancer” of Watergate, they ask
which side had it.
