I WAS just a kid, but I’m old enough to remember Watergate. As I grew older, I learned more details. Here’s my Watergate takeaway, which I think is the accepted ‘narrative’ on this historic event:
Watergate was the biggest political scandal of the 20th century. The fallout caused President Nixon to resign from office and sent several ‘conspirators’ to prison. It also made Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post the most famous journalists of all time.
Few people had heard of these reporters when they began compiling facts about the original Watergate crime and obligatory cover-up, but this changed over the span of about two years. Based in part on these two journalists doing their jobs, Congressional officials decided to do their jobs and before you knew it, most of the sordid story was known to the world.
Woodward and Bernstein really cashed in with the publication of their best-selling book All the President’s Men, which was adapted into an Academy Award-winning movie starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, two of the biggest stars of our era.
They also acquired the reputation that allowed them to play leading roles in future investigations that resulted in even more best-selling books, while the Washington Post was renowned as the newspaper that did more than any other to expose Watergate.
Which leads to the question: Why doesn’t any journalist, editor or publisher want to be the next Woodward and Bernstein when it comes to Covid-19?
The Covid scandals that could be exposed by enterprising journalists are vastly larger and more important than those involving Watergate.
To cite one difference: nobody died in Watergate. In comparison, Covid and all the calamitous responses to it must have killed and injured 10, 20, 50 million (a billion?) people by now. These casualty figures are still growing.
Nor did Watergate cripple the economy nor lead to rampant inflation.
Nor did it lead to mass censorship and the evisceration of civil liberties.
Also, the Watergate conspiracies and cover-ups included only a small group of Nixon loyalists in the White House, plus a few people who did the ‘dirty tricks’. It takes no Woodward and Bernstein for the Man on the Street to realise that Covid crimes and cover-ups must have involved practically every agency in government by now.
NIH, NIAID, CDC, FDA, the Pentagon, the FBI, the CIA, the White House, the Department of Homeland Defense, Congress, the Justice Department, the courts , judges, governors, mayors, OSHA, the Departments of Transportation, Commerce, Labor, HHS, local police departments, all the state and local health agencies, colleges, school boards: almost all of these agencies went ‘all in’ on the bogus Covid narratives and requisite cover-ups.
Then we have all of the private sector cronies and conspirators. In Watergate, at least that I am aware of, Big Pharma was not implicated. With Watergate, none of the world’s major corporations signed on to the programme. With Covid, as far as I can tell, every big company endorsed the CDC’s policy guidebook and did their patriotic best to make sure the conspiracy went off without a hitch.
When you think about it, there’s no way a Woodward and Bernstein could tell the story of the Covid Scandal. There are simply too many scandals that would have to be exposed. It would take an army of Woodwards and Bernsteins to break the pieces down into individual components.
Still, the journalists who provided the public with a few key answers to what really happened and why, journalists who told the world the names of the people who committed the biggest crimes and cover-ups, would surely go down in as the greatest in history, and Woodward and Bernstein would have to move down to second place. Which isn’t their fault, but compared with Covid, Watergate seems like fixing a few parking tickets.
Yet not one mainstream journalist nor one mainstream news organisation has shown any interest in exposing any parts of the scandal of all time. How does one explain such a surreal reality?
If saving lives and exposing corrupt (I’d say evil) officials doesn’t motivate today’s journalists, one would think that the All-American values of wanting to become rich and famous would get their adrenaline flowing.
But, no.
Why doesn’t any journalist want to expose the myriad Covid scandals? The only possible answer I can come up with ias that the watchdog press must be part of the conspiracy. The conspiracy must be that vast. The reason Woodward and Bernstein were able to tell the the world that Nixon’s White House was full of crooks is because the Washington Post wasn’t part of that conspiracy.
But skip forward 50 years to Covid times and we see that the scales of journalism have completely flipped.
The lesson here is a big one: If you want to get away with ‘crimes against humanity’, you had better make sure you’ve fully captured the watchdog press. How the Bad Guys were able to capture and control approximately 40,000 mainstream journalists in the US alone would itself be one heck of a story. But who’s going to tell it? Don’t laugh, but I guess it will end up being someone like me.
In the past, I would never have considered that some small-time freelance journalist could break some big, historic scoop. I mean, I can’t even get one government official to return my calls or emails (‘Dr Fauci, Bill Rice, Jr on the phone . . .’) Nor do I have a partner like Woodward helping me with any digging.
But, I’ll say this: I’m not like today’s other 40,000 mainstream journalists. Becoming rich and famous wouldn’t bother me. If I could save a few lives and help put a few diabolical crooks into prison, this would check my “I did something meaningful with my life” box.
Plus, I’ve had this thought: Nobody else is really on the case.
Even Woodward and Bernstein, who are still alive and cranking out stories, don’t care about Covid scandals. With some research help from the Washington Post’s army of interns they could expose some of these scandals in three weeks.
Breaking this scandal would make them even richer and more famous, but it would also prove all the conspiracy ‘kooks’ were right all along. The embarrassment and professional stigma would be too great for them to bear. The mean tweets from former colleagues (‘Why did you go and do that? You’re not in our club any more!’) wouldn’t be worth the cost.
As it turns out, the amateurs on Substack have been granted complete monopoly rights to investigate the Biggest Story of All Time. What the heck. If the Big Leaguers don’t want play, I say, ‘Put me in, Coach!’ In 2023, Covid’s version of Deep Throat would be wasting his breath to call anyone at the Washington Post. But every real journalist at Substack would take that call and run with it.
This article appeared in the Brownstone Institute on January 8, 2023, and is republished by kind permission. https://brownstone.org/articles/woodward-and-bernstein-of-covid-scandals/
