Chris Trotter considers whether if all news is political, then all news is also, in the eyes of its intended victims, at least, 'fake'

By Chris Trotter*

It all began with Watergate. History records the exposure of President Richard Nixon’s misdeeds, and his subsequent resignation, as an historic vindication of the American constitution. With the benefit of hindsight, however, it is possible to make the case that Watergate marks the beginning of the end of the American political system’s internal coherence. And since America’s fate inevitably sets the pattern for the rest of the world, the trouble unleashed by Watergate has become our own.

The American news media, which lay at the very heart of the Nixon Presidency’s demise, never fully recovered from its most spectacular triumph. After Watergate, the idea took hold that the news media had become a sort of “fourth branch” of American government – a force entitled to take its place alongside the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches. To the publishers, editors and journalists inspired by the Washington Post’s holy quadrivium of Katherine Graham, Ben Bradlee, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the media’s clear duty, now, was to “hold the government to account”, or, even more grandiosely, to “speak truth to power”.

It was a view of the news media’s role that went all around the world. As a young New Zealander growing up in the 1970s, the exploits of Woodward and Bernstein made a huge impression. Journalism had become heroic and every young reporter was just one “Deep Throat” source away from changing the world. In a culture that was moving steadily away from the collective certainties inspired by the Great Depression and the Second World War, the idea of the heroic journalist possessed an added attraction. It suggested that change could be achieved outside the stifling conventionalities of big business, big unions and big political parties.

Forgotten by all the young idealists who cheered on the demolition of Nixon was the rather important fact that he had just been re-elected by one of the biggest presidential landslides in American political history. Yes, the people who voted for Nixon in 1972 were made to feel very foolish by the astonishing revelations of the Watergate scandal, and few of them wept as the disgraced president’s helicopter departed the White House in 1974. But, among the millions of Republicans relieved that, finally, the Watergate nightmare was over, a small but highly influential number of hard-bitten Republican campaigners was drawing a very different lesson. Clearly, it was now okay for the news media to force from office a popular, democratically-elected President. As Bill Clinton would discover, twenty years later, it was a lesson the Republican Party would take very much to heart.

As the years passed, and as the all-important political and cultural context of the Watergate scandal faded, what had begun heroically gradually morphed into something considerably less salubrious. The thirst for individual journalistic glory remained, as did the notion that in the ruthless pursuit of the “story” anything and everybody was fair game. Gone, however, was the notion that the enormous power of the modern news media should only ever be unleashed against a person, or persons, whose behaviour constitutes a “clear and present danger” to constitutional government. In the end, commissioning the burglary of the opposition party’s offices, and lying about an affair with an intern, occupy opposite ends of the ”Clear And Present Danger” scale.

The other great continuity which links Watergate with the contemporary news media’s “culture of scandal” is the vital importance of strategically-placed sources. It was just as well for Woodward and Bernstein that the identity of their most important source, Deep Throat, only became known 30 years after Nixon’s resignation. Had America known that it was the disgruntled Deputy-Director of the FBI, Mark Felt, who was feeding the Washington Post information guaranteed to harm the President who’d declined to appoint him FBI Director, then the Watergate story may well have taken a very different turn!

Similarly, if the New Zealand public had the slightest inkling of the extent to which the mainstream news media has come to depend upon equally self-interested and/or vengeful informants for the “Gotcha!” stories they prize so highly, a great many interesting questions would be asked.

Rather than the shadowy, chain-smoking patriot made famous in the 1976 movie, All The President’s Men, most of the New Zealand media’s political news sources are either Government or Opposition MPs (or the backroom people working for them) whose motives are much more partisan than patriotic. I well recall the tone of utter disdain in which one of this country’s most distinguished journalists described to me the scenes in which Opposition MPs and their Press Gallery enablers openly plotted their next moves in the ongoing right-wing campaign to drive Winston Peters from Parliament in 2008.

Much has been made of Michael Woodhouse’s chutzpah in publicly chastising the government for the unauthorised release of confidential Covid-19 patient data whilst all along knowing it had been leaked to both himself and fellow National Party MP, Hamish Walker, by former National Party president, Michelle Boag. Considerably less has been vouchsafed, however, about the role of the news media in receiving this forbidden information and protecting its National Party source. When one’s source is a genuine whistle-blower, with valid fears for their future well-being should their unauthorised disclosures be exposed, “protecting one’s sources” is indeed an important professional obligation. More debatable, however, is whether that obligation extends to aiding and abetting an Opposition hit-job!

What makes the so-called “Fourth Estate” do it? Are journalists really that corrupt? Well, as the official UK investigation into the News of the World’s unconscionable privacy violations made clear, some journos are most definitely complete and utter ratbags. Another explanation, however, casts political journalists as “People’s Prosecutors”. Acting in what they sincerely believe to be “the people’s” (whoever they are!) best interests, these journalists subject politicians and bureaucrats to the sort of overbearing cross-examinations once reserved for show-trials in people’s courts. Encounters, it must be said, where notions such as the presumption of innocence are typically more honoured in the breach than in the observance!

The use of such an ideologically loaded terms as “show trial” and “people’s court” is deliberate. It is intended to remind us all that ever since Gutenberg perfected the use of moveable type, the “press” has played a critical role in bolstering the arguments of one collection of political interests against another. Protestant against Catholic; Cavalier against Roundhead; Whig against Tory, Republican against Democrat, Conservative against Liberal; National against Labour: the media, far from holding governments to account, has for centuries been about helping one “side” of politics demolish the other. There’s a good reason why Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes had a good chuckle when they gave their new pro-Republican Fox News Channel the strap-line “Fair and Balanced”.

In referencing Murdoch’s and Ailes’ 1996 creation of Fox News, we return to Watergate and all that it stands for. Ailes was, famously, the man who alerted Nixon to the enormous political power of television. Nixon’s 1972 electoral triumph owed much to Ailes’ unparalleled understanding of the medium. Certainly, the man who made the media magic for Nixon and Reagan never doubted that the underlying political driver of the Watergate scandal was the Democratic Party’s determination to do whatever it took to bring down the man it could not beat at the ballot box. What the liberal media started in 1973-74, Ailes and his imitators finished in 2016. If all news is political, then all news is also, in the eyes of its intended victims, at least, “fake”.

That being the case, the only thing the voter really needs to know is who is faking the news – and for whom?

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.