Oh the irony.
Back there in the stone age of the 1970’s, two young, talented rising stars at The Washington Post- Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein by name - rose to fame and fortune investigating the unraveling Nixon White House. And what was eventually labeled the “Watergate" scandal.
So named in honor of the massive office and apartment complex in Washington that housed the Democratic National Committee. Which, in June of 1972, was where operatives from then-President Nixon’s re-election campaign were caught burglarizing the DNC and salting some listening devices around the place.
Woodward and Bernstein, assigned as young newcomer journalists to investigate, wound up following and detailing all manner of bad business which was soon being published regularly in The Post. The rest, as they say, is history. The Woodward and Bernstein investigation uncovered more and more and more, and eventually, swamped in legal prosecutions and massive seriously bad publicity, the President was forced to resign. And The Washington Post and its suddenly star young reporters was covered in honors and awards for its journalism. The aftermath also included this particular Woodward and Bernstein bestseller: The Final Days.
And now. As said, oh the irony.
This minute The Post is getting headlines like this:
- The Federal: From Watergate to mass layoffs: Washington Post’s 8 biggest controversies
- CBS News: Washington Post begins sweeping layoffs as it scales back news coverage
- FOX News: Washington Post closes sports department as part of sweeping layoffs
- CNBC: Washington Post begins widespread layoffs, sharply shrinking storied newspaper’s reach
- NPR: Bezos orders deep job cuts at 'Washington Post’
- PBS: Sweeping layoffs at The Washington Post will do 'enormous damage,' former editor says
The PBS story reports this:
The Washington Post is laying off a third of its work force across both the newsroom and its business operations, a massive blow at a storied newspaper that has struggled in recent years to stay profitable and retain subscribers. The cuts reportedly affect more than 300 of the approximately 800 journalists in the newsroom and include eliminating its sports desk and books section entirely.
In fact, this kind of reporting from PBS is more than representative of the current reporting all around the Internet on the current state and internal goings on at The Post.
It is also, curiously, coming out in the same time period in which another major newspaper’s struggle story was reported in this space. That headline:
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Shuts Down: A Local Journalistic Icon Calls It a Day
The obvious question with all this is the obvious: Why? And what in the world is going on with these two major city newspapers that one would shutter for good while the other, this one the major paper of the nation’s capital, would find itself in a major struggle to survive?
There are the usual answers about these papers leaning so far left that their readers simply stopped reading them. Not to mention that in the 21st century era, there is the arrival of the Internet and the ability to get news and information from anywhere on the globe instead of once stable old time newspapers.
To recall Watergate again, once concluded with Nixon gone from the White House, well aside from Woodward and Bernstein, there was soon a flood of books from ex-Nixon White House insiders, slowly peeling back the onion of inside stories centered around the fall of their President.
It takes no imagination to believe that as this column is written there are journalists at The Washington Post and The Pittsburgh Post Gazette who are already writing notes for a future book about the rise and fall of their respective journalistic homes.
It is, though, very safe to say that something is afoot at both papers. One, in Pittsburgh, has already announced its closing. The other, in Washington, is so far merely awash in the leaks of serious internal damage.
Will there be more bad news to come from The Washington Post? Will it soon join The Pittsburgh Post Gazette in the heavenly journalistic here-after of famous, powerful newspapers that could no longer survive?
No idea. But in terms of The Washington Post, one can only imagine that somewhere former President Nixon is chuckling.
