Washington Post – Watergate (10/17/2013)

This week I evaluated The Washington Post again. However, this time I focused on The Post’s page that is dedicated to the 40th anniversary of the Watergate Scandal. The page puts a modern twist to the news that came out of the Watergate Scandal. With videos, tweets, and a Facebook page all dedicated to the telling of Watergate. Along with the modern social media The Post also included a large amount of articles that detail the happenings of Watergate and give background information on it as well.

One of these articles entitled Watergate: The long shadow of a scandal talked about how Watergate effected Americans and American politics. This article discusses how the older generations during the scandal were shocked and in disbelief that a president would lie, and how the younger generations grew up only knowing that the President of the United States lies. Watergate not only altered the perception of the president but also altered how Americans look at politicians and the government as a whole. All of a sudden the government was being scrutinized for everything that it did. Also Republicans and Democrats began to stop working together and seemed to put party before country due to their fear of the media. This article was very informative to me as all I knew of Watergate was that it was a presidential scandal that caused a president to resign. This article gives a little bit of background as to the events and more importantly in my opinion how the scandal has filtered through time and how it affected America as a whole.

Another article that is on The Post is The Post investigates. This article focused on The Post’s investigation into Watergate and the news that came out of The Post. It goes from how Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward began their work in the journalistic investigation on the Watergate Scandal the the events surrounding it such as the arrest of the burglars, the White House denouncing  The Post and other aspects. I found this article to be very interesting and enlightening to what went on during Watergate for those who knew very little about it or nothing at all.

Another article is Deep throat revealed. This article focused on the revelation and role of Deep Throat, the FBI correspondence for Woodward during The Post’s reporting. Mark Felt ,came out at Deep Throat in 2005, more than 30 years after the Watergate scandal. Woodward confirmed Felt’s revelation and also said that he believes that Felt’s contribution and role is being overstated and overshadowing the other events that took place during The Post’s reporting. This article did a good job on doing a short brief explanation of who Deep Throat is and what role he had in the overall scheme of The Post’s reporting on Watergate.

This page that The Post has on Watergate is interesting and very informative. In my opinion it does a good job of trying to reach out to today’s generation and try to relate to them the story of Watergate. I however disliked many of the social media news attempts at explaining Watergate since ,as someone who knew next to nothing on it, the Facebook posts and tweets made me more confused as to what happened. This forced me to have to read all of the other articles to finally appreciate the Facebook page and understand fully what was being talked about. Overall though I liked how The Post treated adapting Watergate to today’s news meta.