Ideas Raised From "All The President's Men"

 According to the review by Roger Ebert handed out in class, "All The President's Men" was an extremely accurate vision of what real journalism looked like and for that he praised the movie, but also said that it lacked storytelling elements usually necessary to satisfy moviegoers. Maybe this is true, but I throughly enjoyed the way that they accurately portrayed journalism instead of making it just another flashy, unreal, exciting, Hollywood film. Journalism is not always going to have all the leads or information one needs, and it is not always going to be a glamorous job that receives a lot of recognition for findings. There is real work involved, and real dead ends, and times when the story is not always going the way you expect it to.

I think that "Woodstein's" techniques to get the story on the Watergate scandal were completely ridiculous and unconventional, but given the situation, it was completely necessary. There were so many secrets going around that unless they used all the anonymous sources and semi-confirmations, they were never going to be able to get to the bottom of the story the way that they did. I honestly hope that when I believe a full-fledged journalist one day that I do not have to go through the lengths that they did to get every little tidbit of information that added together to make the story that they were after. I do not know if the public would accept this kind of vagueness in today's society. There are so many people who doubt the validity of the press and all that they have to say and would probably just peg things like that as conspiracy theory. I mean, look at the story of the death of Bin Laden! People already doubt if it happened just because of the lack of evidence in their possession, like the body or a picture of the body. How then would they be able to accept such a vague story with such elusive details and sources as the one that Woodward and Bernstein put out?

Another issue brought up in this class was the fact that President Richard Nixon resigned over the Watergate scandal so that he could avoid impeachment, while President Bill Clinton, the president with the highest approval rating of any other president ever in America's history did not resign and was later impeached. I think that this situation speaks a lot about both the character of Nixon vs Clinton, as well as Congress's response to their given situations. From their different reactions to facing impeachment, it can be deduced that Nixon is the kind of man who cares very much about his pride and his image, while Clinton cares more about standing up for what he has done and taking responsibility for it, as well as facing the controversy head on. Also I think that based on this contrast, we should critique Congress and their decisions. Congress decided that despite the people's love for President Clinton, they could not have someone who committed adultery and lied about it as their president. Personally, I think that it had nothing to do with his ability to lead the country and the decision to impeach him upset a lot of people and was probably not the best for the country. On the other hand, I think that their decision to try to impeach President Nixon was completely valid and it is too bad that he never came them the chance to impeach him.