The WaPo Basks in the Glory Days of Woodward & Bernstein Even as Its Reputation Burns – Opinion

Thursday’s Washington Post headlines heavily promote this evening’s televised Jan 6 committee hearings, but the featured story is a surprise – a glowing remembrance of the “masterpiece” film “All the President’s Men.” The 1976 movie starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman and based on the book of the same name by then-WaPo reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, tells the story of how the duo investigated the Watergate scandal and helped bring down the Nixon presidency.

It’s fitting that the Post turns its focus onto its glorious past even as the past few weeks have brought the publication scandal after scandal, humiliation after humiliation. There are the Taylor Lorenz factual inaccuracies, if you can call them that, which prompted multiple corrections; Lorenz’s unethical doxxing of the “Libs of Tik Tok” Twitter account creator (and the paper’s subsequent false denials of the event); the opinion piece by Amber Heard that was found to contain no fewer than three items of defamation in court in the Johnny Depp-Heard trial, and now the suspension of reporter Dave Weigel for retweeting a silly joke. But it’s not over—today news has broken that the Post has just fired reporter Felicia Sonmez for her part in the vicious infighting that overtook the newsroom.

It’s no wonder why the WaPo would want to forget about the last month and instead bask in the days they were considered a newsworthy paper.

They do. The piece is nauseatingly reverential, fawning and glowing to the point it’s hard to read. “All the President’s Men” is a “canonical piece of 20th-century American cinema” and “smart, sophisticated and perfectly crafted,” they write.

Yes, the movie was good (full disclosure I saw it decades ago and don’t remember it that well), but it wasn’t The Godfather. From the Post

But to read Woodward’s marked-up draft of Goldman’s screenplay is to realize that the “All the President’s Men” we know — the lean, flawlessly calibrated thriller that made millions at the box office when it came out in 1976, earned four Oscars and turned Woodward and Bernstein into legends; the movie that’s worshiped by reporters, political junkies and filmmakers alike; the movie that from the moment it opened seemed to fuse seamlessly with private memory and collective myth — that movie came perilously close to being forgettable, along, quite possibly, with Watergate itself.

Oh my God, please give me a tissue. This article continues for about a Six Thousand Words deep-dive into the crafting of the screenplay and the movie’s eventual impact. They seem to be. It is reallyYou will be distracted. But we can learn more about the origins of Jim Acostas.

Redford originally intended to use his fame to raise the quality of investigative journalism. Instead, Redford sparked a new trend in journalists becoming celebrities, which only continued to grow throughout the 1990s and 2000s. “I was naive,” he said in 2005. “My whole focus was on being totally accurate. … I wasn’t prepared for the glamorization of just Dustin and [me] being in it.””

I am curious where Woodward and Bernstein are now, that they’re so important? Is it possible that they are focusing their attention on Biden’s administration, and trying to figure out what has happened in the past year? Nope. They’re most interested in the last administration.

Fifty years ago, Woodward and Bernstein were writing about conspiracies; today they have turned their attention to an attempted coup, the efforts of the spouse of a Supreme Court justice to overturn an election and a seven-hour gap in White House call logs during a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol — an eerie echo of the infamous 18.5-minute gap in Nixon’s taped calls. In a way, the final scene of “All the President’s Men,” with Woodward and Bernstein working intently at their typewriters, never ended. “We thought Watergate was a one-time problem in the presidency,” Woodward says, “and then along came Donald Trump.”

The Washington Post is sinking further into insignificance, and its former stars reporters seem to have lost interest in covering what has been arguably the worst presidency of our time. Instead, they’d rather get Trump.