All The President's Men

Responses to All the President's Men

Question 1
Lisa Steffen
Jeremy Shapiro
David Freund
The New York Times was their biggest competition. It forced them to find information that The New York Times didn’t already have. They worked harder and faster to get the better, more complete story. The Washington Post used the other paper to decide where the story was going and act as a guide as to what they would cover next. Yes because Ben Bradlee was worried about Woodward and Bernstein being wrong while Howard Simons tried to convince Bradlee that they were good even to write accurate stories. Bradlee wanted them to cut the stories and Simons didn’t want them to give up.

Question 2
Keri Althoff
Quinn Pettifer
Erin Wilderson
Feb 21, 2001
Sources included anyone they felt was involved. Deep Throat was their primary source along with Salone, Segretti, the FBI source, Committee to Re-Elect members (especially with woman who worked closely with the finances), and the ex-boyfriend of the reporter they worked with.
Sources were determined by first looking in the phone book for names that were on check stubs uncovered from the Committee to Re-Elect the President. They looked up the names of people that surfaced from other sources in different reference books like “Who’s Who in America.” Eventually sources came about by being named by other sources. Most of them would not go on record, but they would confirm what Woodward and Bernstein had already discovered.
Their interviewing and questioning techniques were legal, but ethics were questionable at times--Bernstein especially with tricking secretaries and pushing himself into the home of the women associated with the Finance Committee for the Committee to Re-Elect the President. The events preceding the story loosing credibility due to the White House denying everything were rooted in a miscommunication between Bernstein and a source (counting on the phone to 10 to confirm or “hang up” to not confirm).
Because the whole subject was dirty politics and government conspiracy, most sources did not want to incriminate themselves so they did not speak on the record. The conspiracy was so closely knit that if one person talked, they were all in trouble, including the leak.
Deep Throat is an interesting topic concerning sources. He originally started as a source, so he did not have that name or character in the beginning. Deep Throat’s identity is still not revealed, but he has to be someone who was very powerful and deep on the inside because he knew so much. Woodward and Bernstein had the frustrating task of getting the story with the knowledge from Deep Throat, but no confirmation of that knowledge.

Question 3

Question 4
Chad Austin, Lindsey McCune, Aaron Roussel
The story would develop differently because any updates would be constantly put on the web. People reading the story would not have to wait until the morning paper came to find out about new developments. Coverage would probably change forms as well. For instance, organizations like CNN would have all day coverage and regular updates on the story.
There would definitely be more organizations chasing the story. There are much more major news outlets today and many of those are not necessarily in print form. One can assume that television organizations would be involved in breaking the story, at least some aspects of it. Current news organizations today are more likely to reproduce news from other organizations and call that news. For example, there would probably be headlines saying that the Post reports, and so on. As far as chasing sources, today‚s reporting of the story would probably be quite similar. Much of the information uncovered would still require face to face interviews and old-fashioned investigative work. None of the things that were uncovered could be found on the Internet or in public record. However, certain conveniences like laptops, cell phones and email would make getting stories turned in and communicating with editors easier.
Today, there would be the possibility of Matt Drudge types trying to crack the story. This might push individual organizations to not hold on to stories until proper sources had been acquired. The element of reputation would be different as well. With the proliferation of individual reporters and the accessibility of the Internet, people rely on news from more than just standard, well-respected organizations like the New York Times or Washington Post. There is also a general distrust of these standard organizations today

Question 5