The Public Discourse

...involve no established malfeasance, and it isn't even clear that anything more than politics-at-its-more-disreputable-as-usual was involved, the sort of politics that practically every candidate and office-holder practices routinely...

...For the Nixon campaign organization, the Watergate affair was a serious threat to its goal of re-electing the President...

...Presumably there are people who are legally innocent, but who bear some moral or symbolic responsibility for the deliberate commission of a crime as a part of a presidential campaign...

...the McGovern campaign could have chosen the way of understatement rather than hyberbole...

...Their reportage has followed the classic pattern of this particular journalistic formula...

...The Nixon Administration will have to confront this fact, for if there is not a symbolic "house cleaning" in the near future, then its legitimacy and respectability over the coming four years will suffer serious and permanent damage...

...Where the Nixon campaign minimized the extent to which Watergate implicated high officials, McGovern presented it as direct evidence of Nixon's personal immorality and unfit-ness...

...We can deplore such shady dealings, and we can hold the sort of men who practice them in contempt...

...The answer, it seems to me, is to be found in the fact that the three institutions which have been primarily responsible for sustaining the dialogue on Watergate - the Nixon campaign organization, the McGovern campaign organization, and the news media - share in common a characteristic that sociologists call "functional specialization...

...First, they could have handled it in an understated way, by letting the facts speak more or less for themselves, by focusing only on the one established incident, by asserting it to be no more than what at a minimum it unquestionably is - an authentic scandal - and by emphasizing the gravity of the affair by treating it with exaggerated sobriety, restraint, and precision...

...First, there has been an effort to minimize the seriousness of the scandal by treating it as a simple crime, one which is sufficiently dealt with in the courts and which requires no further action or discussion...

...Whereas the Nixon campaign presented the affair as a "mere" crime, an isolated aberration, McGovern treated it as a symbol of what he asserted to be the corrupt, immoral essence of all Nixon governance...

...had they used this traditional journalistic formula, they would have printed stories in which one side makes a charge and the other side answers...

...Yet the point remains: in the decisive respect - as a question of what response should be made to the affair - the meaning of Watergate is no clearer now than it was at the beginning...

...That sort of scandal always involves malfeasance in office, usually in exchange for money...

...The emphasis has been on new facts which seem to deepen, broaden, ramify, and magnify the original event...

...The result of such coverage has not encouraged a sober, careful assessment by citizens of the extent and character of the Watergate scandal...

...For instance, there is no reason to think that had the Nixon Administration made a clean breast of things, the issue of Watergate would have died...

...Of course it was this latter, "hy-berbolic" approach which McGovern eventually adopted...

...Since the break-in was an established and undeniable fact, the Nixon campaign had only two general options...

...In contrast to this confessional" approach, there was a second option: admit only that which is undeniably a part of the public record, and to do everything possible to minimize its significance...

...But beyond that, I submit, there is nothing else we can say for sure...

...Indeed, the Watergate affair, though a scandal, is not even the sort of scandal for which we have traditionally thrown rascals out of office...

...What accounts for this paradoxical situation, in which huge increments of attention and information seem to produce no increment in public understanding and only modest increments in public concern...

...Somehow, the millions of words that have been uttered by the media and the candidates in the interim have added almost nothing to our understanding...

...Second, there has been an effort to minimize the connection between the break-in and the Administration by saying that it was unauthorized, by denying awareness of it at high levels, etc...

...This is of course another traditional journalistic formula, one which casts the news organization in the most active, most sensational, and least neutral of all the roles it characteristically plays...

...The only thing both sides had in common was an unwillingness to treat the event for what it so plainly was on its surface - an authentic scandal in its own right, requiring serious public attention and appropriate corrective action...

...Paul H. Weaver The Public Discourse The Meaning of Watergate After more than four months' sustained public discussion of the Watergate affair, only two conclusions can be ventured with any degree of confidence...

...One was to make a clean breast of the matter: to explain in every detail how and why the break-in took place, who was involved in the decision-making, where the money came from, how it was disbursed - in short, to tell everything, and then to fire all those involved, to repent publicly, and to promise to mend their ways, in the hope that this would defuse the entire issue and that their transgressions would be forgiven and forgotten...

...What it means is that, in the decisive respect, we don't know any more about Watergate today than we did last June when the story first broke...

...And for the media, which have traditionally had a strong preference for the "scandal" mode of handling events as opposed to the "controversy" formula where both are possible, there was no reason not to choose the "scandal" approach, which after all does maximize its distinctive journalistic goals and values better than the "controversy" formula...

...It clearly is serious enough to demand decisive action by the Second Nixon Administration to clear its name and reputation...

...And third there has been an effort to minimize it informationally, by volunteering no information about it, by resisting the efforts of others to get information about it, and by denying new information (and misinformation) turned up by others...

...Whereas the Nixon campaign was constantly asserting Watergate to represent less than the established facts showed it to be, McGovern continually asserted Watergate to be far more than the known facts indicated...

...This sort of coverage relegates the media to a more or less passive role, and places the burden of finding facts and drawing conclusions on the parties to the dispute...

...The tendency in the media has been more to raise questions and suspicions than to answer them with evidence...

...on the contrary, the probability is that full disclosure would only have further fueled the fire of popular indignation and revulsion that has attended Watergate and that, if allowed to grow, could well have blasted the President out of office...

...As a result, nearly everything printed and said about Watergate these past months has been more or less beside the point...

...It's also true that, political morality being the murky subject it is, no amount of information could suffice to lay to rest every conceivable question about the affair...

...The first is that Watergate is an authentic scandal, a breach of legal and ethical standards which is intolerable in a democracy and which demands punishment and atonement...

...We do not really know...

...But these things do not even come close to adding up to evidence of a systematically corrupt and immoral administration...

...One might think that the news media would have corrected for both candidates' failing...

...The result has been a flood of data and talk that is highly relevant to the organizations' concerns- but sadly irrelevant to the distinctive concern of the citizen, which in this case is to ascertain the degree of wrongdoing and the location of blame...

...To be sure, there are more than a few suspicions and sinister allegations floating about, but these are not the same thing as real knowledge - and in the absence of such knowledge, we have no way of knowing what a truly just or proper resolution of the entire squalid affair would involve...

...For there were two different ways in which the media might have handled the Watergate affair...

...Unquestionably they have brought many details and bits of background to light, but the reliability of this information is still uncertain, and in any event "more detail" is not the same as "better understanding...

...The other "scandals" to which Watergate has been linked - ITT, milk, wheat, department of dirty tricks, etc...

...the media could have treated the affair as a controversy rather than as a scandal to be exposed...

...After the Eagleton affair, McGovem was not in a position to make the Watergate issue work for him by being understated: his own credibility was too uncertain, and he was too far behind in the polls...

...In fact they did not, although to some extent it was within their ability to do so...

...Information which does not illustrate ever more shocking events or which contradicts the hypothesis of deepening scandal has been de-emphasized or ignored altogether...

...Why, then, did they adopt the other course in each instance...

...Except, perhaps, that the entire episode dramatically illustrates the American system of public discussion at its best (in raising the Watergate question and in keeping it before the public) and at something like its worst (in failing abysmally to illuminate this matter from the citizen's point of view) - and in doing so shows how readily functional specialization is capable of distorting the public discourse.ng the public discourse...

...In contrast to this "understated" approach, there was a second option: to overstate the case, to magnify the facts, to treat an event that was damning in itself primarily as a symbol of a larger and more disgraceful general pattern of deceit, corruption, and immorality, by assimilating Watergate to other questionable events as evidence of a much broader and more serious phenomenon...

...It has been primarily as a "scandal gradually exposed" rather than as a "controversy between candidates" that the news media have treated the Watergate affair...

...The answer is simple: the "calm" approach to Watergate was less likely to maximize the distinctive goals and values of each organization than the more "combative" approach...

...It is this disjunction between the organizations' goals and the citizen's goals that explains why four months of incessant publicity have succeeded in raising an important issue but have failed to clarify it...

...Where the Nixon campaign sought to dissociate the Watergate break-in from all other events and actions, McGovern sought to associate it with a long series of incidents in the Nixon Administration itself and in Nixon's personal political history as far back as 1948 and 1950...

...The Nixon campaign could have taken the "confessional" approach...

...It was this second option, of course, that the Nixon campaign adopted...

...The theme of each story has been that of a serious breach of public ethics and of the law being progressively uncovered, and the information presented has been gathered with a view toward illustrating that theme...

...For the McGovern campaign organization, by contrast, Watergate, far from being a threat, was a golden opportunity to discredit the Nixon Administration and to improve its candidate's chances...

...The discourse of the Nixon campaign has clearly failed to zero in on the important questions...

...And now to the point: each of these three institutions had open to it the option of discussing Watergate calmly, rationally, and honestly, with a view toward what the evidence did and did not show...

...Each of these three organizations has distinctive and specialized goals: for the campaign organizations, it is the election of their candidates...

...The strategy of minimizing Watergate has proceeded on three fronts...

...On the other hand, there is no reason to believe at this time that Watergate is, as the news exposes suggest and as Senator McGovern insists, only an incidental symbol of some systematic pattern of immorality, corruption, and malfeasance in office...

...The second is that what kind of a scandal it is, involving what degree of Wrongdoing, and demanding what sort of corrective response are matters about which we still know next to nothing...

...But there was a second possibility for the media, and that was to treat this as a scandal which the media themselves, by means of investigative reporting, would uncover bit by bit, day by day...

...The most shocking facts have been given the most prominent play, and the facts themselves have not always been attributed to named, reliable sources...

...So the news media and McGovern have not truly illuminated this question either...

...Now this, I submit, is a curious state of affairs...

...it is a true scandal, and as such cannot be left to the courts alone...

...Here, too, there were at least two strategies they could have adopted in discussing the affair...

...Then what is the meaning of Watergate...

...Each has treated Watergate accordingly, from the standpoint of its distinctive concerns and aims...

...It should go without saying that Watergate is something more than a mere crime, a mysterious aberration from the normal routines of the Nixon campaign...

...for the news media, it is finding and telling the news...

...They could have defined it primarily as a controversy between the two candidates...