The media loves to self-mythologise. It sees itself as the body crucially responsible for “speaking truth to power”. This self-image crystallised in the aftermath of Watergate; in it, the press served as bold, brave, fearless, and non-partisan defenders of truth and the ordinary man. Now, if that self-image were created via the successful take down of one American president, it has been undone by a kind of anti-Watergate: the recent, failed effort to keep another one in post.
When did the Biden cover-up begin? Last week, Axios published audio files from the 2023 investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents, in which Biden is questioned about his recollections. The recordings are both pitiful and shocking. Never mind America’s nuclear codes — in them Biden sounds like he might struggle with the TV remote.
The audio was released just ahead of reports that Biden, now 82, is suffering from aggressive prostate cancer. I wish him a speedy recovery — but this is unlikely to be aided by publication this week of Original Sin, a new book by CNN political anchor Jake Tapper. The book documents Biden’s physical and cognitive decline during his presidency — along with concerted effort by aides and sympathetic media to smooth over this decline, allowing Biden to continue in office. Amid this slew of revelations as to Biden’s frailty, and the extent of the cover-up, both allies and enemies are asking: how did this happen?
Watergate was long mythologised as a foundational moment in modern American politics. Its scandalous impact, coverage, and the eventual resignation of Nixon in 1974 were so profoundly formative of an age, in fact, that these events spawned perhaps the quintessential political-scandal suffix. Appended to any noun, “-gate” has come to denote a political brouhaha that generates so much media noise it triggers major change, such as a leader’s resignation: such as, recently, the “Partygate” that scotched Boris Johnson in 2023.
The original Watergate turned on a break-in at the building where the Democratic National Convention had its offices. It transpired that the burglars were working on behalf of Richard Nixon, then Republican President, and were trying to gather information on his political rivals. The administration sought to cover up the burglary; this was discovered; Nixon was impeached, and press coverage of the trial became a galvanising national event, eventually leading to Nixon’s resignation.
At the time, this was hailed as a victory for the American system of checks and balances. On taking power, Gerald Ford declared: “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men.” And in this sense of affirming “a government of laws and not of men”, Nathan Pinkoski recently argued, Watergate had a permanent impact on public consensus concerning the extent of presidential power: one that has boiled to the surface again in the Trump era.
The central issue sounds abstruse, but cuts to the heart of what the president’s role should be: so-called “impoundment”, which is to say whether or not a president has the right to curtail funds that have been granted by Congress, but not spent. Impoundment grants the president a partial veto power over programmes he doesn’t like, a tool used extensively by Nixon. In turn, the events of Watergate played a key role in restricting it, via the 1974 Impoundment Control Act.
The current administration wants to take back that control. Trump-aligned impoundment enthusiasts, such as OMB’s Russ Vought, argue that without returning this power to the president, the American state will remain helplessly in the grip of unaccountable patronage systems, stuffed with Left-wing partisans. A key aim of the Trumpist project, then — so Pinkoski has argued — is succeeding where Nixon failed: in restoring the power of the elected president, by curtailing the growth of bureaucratic fiefdoms and their financial patronage networks. Several of changes brought in by the Trump administration’s shortly after inauguration, such as shuttering USAID, were achieved using impoundment.
Nixon looms large for the opposing consensus, too. When, in February, five former Treasury chiefs published a statement protesting Trump’s DOGE initiative, it included a shocked reference to Nixon’s use of impoundment. Meanwhile, the publication of this protest in the New York Times points to Watergate’s second, related long-term impact: crystallising the 20th-century mass media’s self-image, as a force holding power to account.
It was the press that uncovered the Watergate story, and as the investigation proceeded further, details were leaked on an ongoing basis: a symbiotic relation between officials and public reporting that has remained a feature of media and politics ever since. As Nixon’s trial unfolded on television, and in press discussion, it became a mass-participation event, that itself came to be understood as a new type of democracy. Writing in 1973, the essayist Mary McCarthy framed this public engagement with the trial as a kind of nationwide townhall meeting: “The story was being told, democratically, to the entire population, which was discussing it, democratically, as if at a town meeting […] in every city I arrived at, the local papers were full of Watergate.”
Turbocharged by the new, digitally-mediated pace of political debate, Trump’s first election was accompanied by a fragmenting and increasingly partisan and polarised media landscape. In tandem, many once at least formally neutral outlets grew increasingly partisan, seeing themselves as activists as much as reporters. “Democracy Dies in Darkness”, the Washington Post’s slogan, was adopted in 2017 during the furious early years of press #Resistance to the first Trump presidency.
But being an active participant can cut both ways. Two years into the Biden presidency, the 2022 MediaFest conference invited veteran Watergate journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to give a keynote, in which they reiterated how reporters must “Always dig deeper”. Watergate, they suggested, proved how the press was key institution of American democracy, alongside the courts, the legislative branch, the executive branch, and Justice Department, ready to spring into action to restore normal functioning when faced with a “criminal president”. Woodward and Bernstein made explicit the parallel they were drawing, between Nixon and Trump: “Not just that [Trump] was a criminal president,” Bernstein said, “but that he was the first seditious president in our history.”
“So was the Right right about Watergate all along?”
Meanwhile, ordinary Democrats could see what the press refused to acknowledge. Two weeks after MediaFest’s celebration of digging deeper in the name of democracy, Democrat activists launched a campaign headed Don’t Run Joe. Norman Solomon, its campaign director, told Tapper: “It was not rocket science or political science to know that Biden should not run again. It was hidden in plain sight.” But a press still boastful of its Watergate legacy was determined not to dig deeper.
These stark facts will doubtless amplify the murmur of Watergate revisionism already discernible on the Right. The scandal used to be held as proof of the need for strong institutional curbs on presidential power, and of the crucial role played by the press in holding power to account on behalf of the people. Democracy, in this reading, comprised a kind of continual plebiscite, convened via TV and newspapers, mediating between rulers and ruled. Revisionist accounts, on the other hand, depict Nixon as unjustly framed, victim of a deep-state coup enabled by federal bureaucrats desperate to thwart his efforts to reassert presidential power. In this telling, Nixon was brought down because he was using federal impoundment as a policy tool to regain control of the federal bureaucracy, and in particular posed a threat to the power and vested interests of the foreign policy Blob. Building on these arguments, some today argue that the Right should not just revisit Watergate — but view Nixon as the blueprint for Right-wing revolution.
Meanwhile, it goes without saying that those for whom “democracy” requires sharp curbs on presidential power, and an activist press shaping public debate, are not keen. But however they feel about the prospect, these institutions are themselves on the cusp of their own Watergate. We have a press that was happy enough, in the Seventies, to challenge a president deemed too powerful — but which didn’t lift a finger, in our era, to challenge one who wasn’t powerful enough. Who was, in fact, a mere senile figurehead for who knows what agenda, or whose interests. It is a staggering scandal. It has perhaps only remained relatively muted so far, because so few in the media want to think about the mirror it holds up to that industry’s role in public life.
So was the Right right about Watergate all along? I dare say history, or perhaps just more shouting, will eventually settle that matter. In the meantime, though, lest anyone is still labouring under the misapprehension that the result of this reckoning will be more truth or journalistic integrity: don’t bet on it.
The 20th-century mass media may be facing a reckoning, as agents of democracy. That reckoning can’t be separated from the digital revolution that first fractured the media landscape, creating the first Trumpquake in 2016, then brought him back in 2024, the first “podcast election”. Bluntly: there is no longer any such thing as a nationwide democratic townhall of the kind imagined by Mary McCarthy to have been conjured by Nixon’s televised trial.
Some imagine that this change can only be for the better; and certainly events to date suggest it has critically damaged the mass-media machine with which consensus was once formed, but which failed to defy gravity in the case of poor, ailing Biden. But I would not bet on it. In the aftermath of the consensus machine, the 21st-century’s increasingly AI-enhanced digital public discourse grows more hallucinatory by the day. I see nothing less partisan, or more truthful, waiting in the wings.
