BY DANIEL JUPP

On February 22nd 2017 (following an even earlier debut on Snapchat) a small but significant addition was made to the website of The Washington Post. On that day, beneath the banner of the newspaper, the following words were added:

Democracy dies in darkness.”

After 140 years without one, The Washington Post had adopted a slogan. A week later, it was added to the print copies of the paper, where it remains to this day.

The phrase comes originally, according to the post, from a 2007 article from Bob Woodward criticizing government secrecy. Woodward of course is famous as one of the investigative reporters involved in breaking the Watergate scandal which resulted in the resignation of Richard Nixon. In 2015, Jeff Bezos, the current owner of the venerable newspaper, attended a lecture by Woodward in which he again used the phrase. It clearly struck a strong chord.

All the President’s Men was released as a book in 1974, and as a film starring Robert Redford as Woodford just two years later. The image of Nixon in both is a paranoid, criminal President, a man who secretly recorded people and then ordered or encouraged further crimes to retrieve evidence against him, was taken down by brave, tenacious journalists acting solely as defenders of truth.

The 1976 film really established how mainstream media likes to see itself, the self-image that floats around in the back of the head of every hack from the most obscure regional pamphlet up to the hallowed halls of The Washington Post itself.

All of them like to think of themselves as brave and diligent. All of them like the image presented of what serious journalism looks like. It looks like Robert Redford. It’s very, very handsome. And it takes risks. It exposes the powerful. It meets with mysterious figures like Deepthroat. It’s courageously immune to the possibility that the powerful figures being exposed might offer violent means of silencing their plucky and determined critics. It can’t be deterred by threats, dangers, or bribes.

This is a heroic self image that is extraordinarily attractive and which, in the many years since, probably helped some journalists decide that this was the way they wanted to earn their living. And that psychological appeal is probably more, not less, powerful even for those who were more realistically writing short descriptions of a turnip festival in a hick town, or at best dashing out tabloid celebrity features about which film star is fucking which model.

It’s easy to imagine how even billionaires see a bit of glamour in real hard-hitting investigative journalism. After all, it wins Pulitzer Prizes and topples Presidents, which was no doubt all the more appealing when faced with a Presidency, by 2017, you personally despised.

So such a slogan from such a source is a mythic blast of self-regard. It sounds so great, doesn’t it? You don’t have to be a reader of The Washington Post for it to appeal, just a little bit. The incredibly vain declaration about the self that the slogan represents is also something that all of us would rather like from journalism. We would all like it to shine a light on the crimes of the powerful. We all like the idea of nobody being able to escape scrutiny for their actions, and of a bold, free press acting as the guardians of our democracy (or as the righteous progressives today declare, with far more possessiveness and far more hypocrisy, ‘Our Democracy’).

So whatever your politics are, whatever side of the fence you are on, there’s very few people who don’t wish, to an extent, that this self-image on the part of journalists was more than a boast. Ask any average citizen if crimes should be exposed no matter how powerful the person committing them is, and if the law should apply equally thereafter, and everyone will agree that yes, the crimes need exposure and yes they need punishment. They will probably likewise all agree that this is what a free press is for.

That ‘real journalism’ is about getting out the truths that pour light on the crimes.

The problem for mainstream media is not that people who oppose them don’t want journalists who pour light on the crimes of the powerful, who shine a torch in the darkness. It’s that more and more people believe that this is precisely what modern journalists don’t do. That they are selective with the crimes they will expose, and the crimes they won’t. That they don’t actually talk truth to power, but spread lies to the people on behalf of the powerful. And people who feel like this will be all the more embittered and disappointed by the modern media if they, too, remember what it claimed to be. A broken promise is more upsetting than one that is never offered at all.

A modern audience looks at the lies the media tell, and the orthodoxy they impose, and sees any claim by those organisations to be rebellious truth-tellers laughable. The repeated lies and the cover-ups say otherwise. You can’t suppress truthful stories like that regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop, and also advance absolute lies like claims of Russian collusion from Trump, and then expect those you have lied to and deceived to regard you as the champion of democracy. Nor can you have an incredibly close, dependent, entangled relationship with the richest people on the planet, and really expect anyone to believe that you aren’t purchased and owned by those people, owned in more ways than by just a pay check.

Nobody thinks of mainstream media anymore as handsome, diligent and brave. Most people realize that they aren’t even objective, factual or accurate.

The sad thing is that the archetypal image of the crusading journalist might itself be based on a stunning lie. This was why in January 2023 Tucker Carlson returned to the issue of Watergate. What we had always considered investigative journalism’s greatest triumph, might actually have been as grubby and sordid as the journalistic practices we see today. Tucker advanced the notion that two time Pulitzer winner Bob Woodward was not even a journalist, saying this:

“Who exactly was Bob Woodward? Well, he wasn’t a journalist. Bob Woodward had no background whatsoever in the news business. Instead, Bob Woodward came directly from the classified areas of the federal government. Shortly before Watergate, Woodward was a naval officer at the Pentagon.”

Woodward’s known military record is accompanied by alleged connections with the US intelligence services and the CIA. Carlson seems to accept that these did exist. It’s legitimate to disagree or ask for further evidence, but these connections are pretty important ones to unpack given that Woodward’s actions as a ‘journalist’ not only brought down a President but also supplied a heroic vision of journalism itself that the industry still references as proof of integrity and honesty.

Was the fall of Nixon a triumph of democracy, as we have long been told, brought about by the trusty media exposing nefarious crimes? Or was it the opposite of that, a defeat for democracy, as an intelligence agency asset embedded in the media orchestrated a string of negative stories that turned a man elected by a very comfortable margin and with widespread popularity into a figure of hatred and derision forced to resign in disgrace?

The swift rise of Bob Woodward from a person with no journalistic experience to a person leading the takedown of a President is a suspicious one. Woodward applied to The Washington Post direct from the Navy. He was then sent off on a year’s apprenticeship with a regional paper before to The Post. The Watergate articles immediately followed that.

In a 2013 article titled Bob Woodward’s Intelligence Credentials & Assassination Politics of the Nixon Era, Alex Constantine claims that Woodward was an intelligence analyst working under Alexander Haig, that he had top secret clearance, and that his role was not only to bring down Nixon (as Carlson claims) but actually to steer investigations away from more damning and illegal activities that involved the intelligence agencies.

Constantine, too, coming from an anti Nixon angle, reaches the same conclusion as Carlson, and considers Watergate the opposite of its general depiction and of the accepted historical record. He states:

“Everything known about the Nixon administration was planted in the Post by ranking intelligence officers.”

All such speculations or assertions will inevitably face the eye-rolling, trained reaction of ‘conspiracy theories’. But what’s more interesting than going back and forth about ancient crimes is to note current parallels, particularly in regard to the role of the media. It matters whether the media is genuinely a voice of truth, exposing crimes, or whether it is just a tool of propaganda, expressing lies. And it seems almost impossible today to look on that idea of heroic investigative journalism as the essence of mainstream media, an idea based on Watergate, with anything but a jaundiced eye.

It’s interesting that another former great hero of the profession, whose career peaked at roughly similar points to that of Bob Woodward, shows a very different path to that taken by those who give lectures to Bezos or who today work at The Washington Post writing articles on why it’s white supremacism to like cookies and milk. Seymour Hersh seems to be talking truth to power and exposing the crimes of the powerful regardless of who is currently in power. The light that really wants to dispel darkness is an even one.

Yet the people who once lauded Hersh now describe him as a conspiracy theorist. I venture to suggest that the politics of Hersh and those of Tucker Carlson are not identical, but both are dismissed in the same way for the same issue. They are questioning things mainstream media insists are settled and fixed (one might be tempted to say, ‘rigged’).

These days one must shine one’s own light in the darkness for Democracy to stand a chance in hell.

Daniel Jupp is the author of A Gift for Treason: The Cultural Marxist Assault on Western Civilisation, which was published in 2019. He has had previous articles published by Spiked, The Spectator and Politicalite, and is a married father of two from Essex.