Retrospective: All the President's Men (Patreon)

A few years after the Church Committee and Watergate, the U.S. Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which required law enforcement and intelligence agencies to require authorization to do the sort of things that sank Nixon's presidency. The result wasn't so much a rebuke of Watergate as a legitimization of the crooks behind it. You could spy on your enemies; you just had to get permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to do so — and these days, thanks to the FISA Amendments Act Section 28, you only have to get FISC to approve all your espionage techniques for a year instead of telling them who you're spying on. Watergate exposed an entire surveillance state rather rather than a single burglary. That surveillance state wasn't then abolished; it just got a legal makeover.

The same thing happened with the Patriot Act. Bush illegally spied on people; Congress retroactively sanctioned his espionage with the Patriot Act. The surveillance state is a bipartisan institution; Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff voted against a majority of their party to keep warrantless surveillance alive. Trump reauthorized elements of Section 28, only to be enraged when the Intelligence Community performed warrantless surveillance against him. You can probably draw a straight line from this to Trump's second administration kidnapping its enemies off the streets and sweeping them into camps. Trump's actions lack anything resembling legality, but one gets the impression from historical precedent that it's only a matter of time before America's fascist death camps become legal.

You'll never hear any of this in an America newsroom, and you'll rarely see much of it said in the pages of The New York Times or The Washington Post. Despite the revelations of Watergate counting among American journalism's rare triumphs, the press has simply not learned from it. We haven't consistently kept tabs on the surveillance state, and when we've tried to, our publishers have throttled our coverage. Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden may not be hailed as heroes by our industry, but the people who grant us access to the upper echelons of power are gods to us.

I think that's part of why All the President's Men wouldn't get made today, apart from the fact that everyone would say "hey, we've seen this movie! This is just All the President's Men!" But it's so staggering to watch a movie where journalists fight the press. The movie ends with Woodstein reporting on Watergate as Nixon is reelected. We're not rewarded for doing our jobs. Nor does our reporting lead to seismic changes. We just change minds for a minute so Americans can feel open-minded for a minute before returning to the same old crimes.