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Watergate: Rights and Responsibilities

The document discusses a group's National History Day project on the Watergate scandal. It explores the topics of government transparency versus national security that were debated during the Wikileaks and NSA controversies. The group's research focused on the timeline of events surrounding Watergate and the Washington Post's investigation led by Woodward and Bernstein. Their findings showed how Watergate marked a turning point in politics and media coverage of political scandals, establishing issues of the public's right to know and the government and media's responsibilities. The group created a website to present their research on Watergate and its impact.

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5 views1 page

Watergate: Rights and Responsibilities

The document discusses a group's National History Day project on the Watergate scandal. It explores the topics of government transparency versus national security that were debated during the Wikileaks and NSA controversies. The group's research focused on the timeline of events surrounding Watergate and the Washington Post's investigation led by Woodward and Bernstein. Their findings showed how Watergate marked a turning point in politics and media coverage of political scandals, establishing issues of the public's right to know and the government and media's responsibilities. The group created a website to present their research on Watergate and its impact.

Uploaded by

AdalinCarthage
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Daebelliehn, Mattson, Waxham, Xiao 1 Process Paper The debates surrounding the recent Wikileaks and the NSA

controversies intrigued us, compelling us to consider the peoples right-to-know and the responsibility of the media to ensure government transparency vs. the age-old arguments for national security. The complicated twist of rights and responsibilities that constituted this topic struck us as perfect for the NHD theme this year and prompted us to look back into history for precedents, leading us to the quintessential example of a government failing to inform its people: Watergate. The Watergate scandal marked a turning point in American politics and ushered in a new era of interaction between the government, the media, and the people. Additionally, it was the beginning of our new -gate to -gate 24/7 hour news media. The Nixon administration's actions and responses to the events surrounding Watergate created an inherent distrust in government that still survives today. Our research on Watergate began with general background information from a variety of sources, though mostly newspaper articles and transcripts of tapes. We used this to compile a timeline of all of the events leading up to and following the break in at the Watergate Hotel. This provided a solid foundation to continue our research on the government and media reactions to the scandal. Our main focus, in the beginning was the Washington Post investigation lead by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. Their notes helped us understand how they pursued the story and eventually got their smoking gun from one of historys most famous whistleblowers, Deep Throat (Mark Felt). We then continued our research with precedents and the impact of Watergate. After we developed our topic and organized our research, it became clear to us that a website was the best way to display our research and findings while making it accessible and coherent. It allowed us the opportunity to not only tell the story of Watergate, but to also explain its impact. That, combined with the strengths of group leaning toward technical rather than artistic, ultimately made a web platform our best choice. The Watergate affair marked a tumultuous time in our government. The convoluted mess of rights and responsibilities still has not been completely unraveled. The medias right to tell the truth aids them in their responsibility of ensuring government transparency. That responsibility stems from the peoples right-to-know. However, ultimately, the media would not even have that arduous responsibility if the government just fulfilled their responsibility to be transparent with their actions. The Nixon administration, for example, did not respect the publics right to government transparency so this lack on the governments part was instead fulfilled by the media, which brought to light many issues like the right of the people to know, the right of the media to investigate, the responsibility of the government to cooperate and the medias responsibility to pursue the story. All of this combined to make the Watergate scandal a quintessential example in American history of rights and responsibilities.

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