A Story About the Collapse of American Journalism, Part 9

I have a knack for getting into things right as they are dying.

And so it was that I walked into a local newsroom in January of 2001 to start a journalism career. The forces had already been set in motion. The die had already been cast. The industry was already on the decline. The bottom was already falling out.

But I was 25-years-old with a reporter’s notebook, a camera full of film, and a head full of rum and idealism.

So I didn’t notice any of that shit.

Actually, that’s not exactly true. I definitely noticed, I just took for granted that, whatever changes were coming, the practice of journalism, the existence of that independent check on the government now protected by Sullivan, would remain. It might look different in the digital age, but the foundation was strong and its importance to a functioning democracy was obvious.

Even if sometimes it pointed out uncomfortable truths or just kind of annoyed people.

Like the local principal who fired a popular coach over a personality conflict and never forgave me when my coverage led to the principal relenting and the coach being rehired. 

Like the Bishop of the local diocese, who was surprised one day to answer his personal line and find me on the other end, asking about a molester priest the Bishop had quietly moved from parish to parish over the years.

Like the fraud who wore the fake Medal of Honor on our front page, a few months before he found my story exposing him as the impostor he was in the same space.

Man, it was beautiful when it worked. Even when it was underfunded and imperfect, when it worked, it made our communities better.

Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1787 that “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”[1]

Me too, Tommy, me too.

American journalism was at its best from roughly the mid-20th century through the early 2000s.[2] The model’s potential was fully realized. Sustainable watchdog infrastructure existed to cover every level of government because owners and publishers understood the importance of the work and dedicated the resources to get it done right. Someone was always watching, and that someone operated by a set of professional journalism standards designed to parse bullshit from truth. Because the standards were high, the end product was trustworthy, and that allowed editors and owners to stand by the reporting even in the face of pressure from advertisers or those wielding political power. It sounds quaint now, but in those days it truly meant something to take your time, knowing that it was better to be right than to be first, and that you had the luxury to double-check things because everyone up the chain thought so too.[3]

When ownership gave journalists the time and resources to do the job properly, journalists gave editors and publishers the kind of work that could stand up to the scrutiny of the powerful people it covered. And even in a small newsroom like ours - maybe especially - that cohesiveness of mission made beautiful music.

This week, we’re going to look at a few big-time examples of this accountability model working. It’s important to note that these few stories are stand-ins for the thousands of smaller local accountability stories that never made national news, but were equally important to the communities they served.

While you are reading these keep in mind what they have in common. None of them could have happened without the right conditions existing. To see the light of day, each story also required experienced reporters, institutional backing, editorial independence, financial stability, and time. Nobody had to do anything heroic, well, except for the sources and victims who came forward to expose things. They just had to be professional journalists working in institutions that gave them the resources and support they needed to do their jobs.

Oh, and one other thing to keep in mind since we’re in the new age of government attempts to censor a free press: in each case, the powerful institution being exposed tried to use the law, political pressure, or social pressure to stop the reporting, and in each case the rat bastards failed because the press was strong enough to resist.

That strength came from the model. When the model collapsed, did that strength go with it?

THE PENTAGON PAPERS (1971)

The Press Wins the Biggest Prior Restraint[4] Fight in American History

I like to hear from the lawyers after a case is over. You get good insight by talking to someone who was on the inside. So, in that spirit, and before we launch into the explanation of the whole thing, I’d like to plant this seed for you.

When the government tried to stop the publication of the Pentagon Papers it did so, as it often does in these situations, by arguing there was a threat to national security if the articles were published. That’s the standard the government has to prove to engage in the prior restraint of free expression. 

So let’s hear from one of the government lawyers who argued to suppress the Pentagon Papers. Interviewed a couple of decades after the fact, Whitney North Seymour Jr., admitted that there was “no trace of a threat to national security from the publication.”

No trace. This was a government effort to control the press from day one. 

So, how did we get there?

In 1967, US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara began to doubt whether the Vietnam War was a viable endeavor. He commissioned a classified study to review US activity and decision-making in Vietnam since 1945. Eventually, this became a 47-volume, 7,000-page, Top Secret, report-wrapped-in-a-hand-grenade to the US government. Maybe they saw it coming, as only 15 copies were even produced.

Daniel Ellsberg wasn’t exactly what you might consider a 1970s radical. He was a Marine-trained Defense Department analyst and a Harvard-educated smart guy who worked for the corporation that was commissioned to author the Pentagon Papers study. Apparently, he was also a curious sort, because one day he decided to read the full document and was appalled to find that, basically, four successive presidential administrations — Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson — had systematically misled the American public and Congress about our involvement and prospects in Vietnam.

Some highlights:

• The Truman administration gave military aid to France in its fight against the Viet Minh. As it has done often throughout history, the government publicly pretended the assistance was for something else. In this case, to support the French resistance to communist aggression. So, Truman and the rest lied to the public about their actions in Vietnam.
• The 1954 Geneva Accords provided for nationwide elections in Vietnam, but the Eisenhower administration committed to doing what was necessary, even undermining those elections, to prevent the communist party from winning.
• The Kennedy administration had a direct role in the 1963 coup that overthrew and killed South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, though publicly denied involvement.
• Most damning for the Johnson administration: the study showed that Johnson had privately concluded by 1965 that the war could not be won militarily — while publicly escalating it and telling the American people the opposite. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, used to justify the dramatic escalation of U.S. involvement, was shown to have been misrepresented to Congress. A second “attack” on U.S. ships — the one that triggered the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution — almost certainly did not occur.

Basically, the documents showed that U.S. officials had been conducting a war they privately believed was unwinnable, at an enormous human cost that many are still paying in 2026, while lying about it to the American people for years.

Yeah. Fuck those dudes.

Anyway, sometime in 1969 Ellsberg read the whole study, didn’t like what he saw, and began making copies in secret. It took him years, working at night on a machine at a friend’s advertising agency, but eventually he had a full copy.

Importantly, before going to the press, Ellsberg offered the materials to several members of Congress in hopes they would do something with it. This shows that he wasn’t seeking attention or fame. He likely knew he had committed a crime and risked his own freedom. I don’t think he set out for fame or to expose the government as much as to get the materials to legislative leaders who might be able to do something about it.

But this is the US Congress we’re talking about, so nobody did shit.

So Ellsberg turns to the media, and on June 13, 1971, the New York Times publishes the first installment of the series, called “Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing US Involvement.”

And boy does the shit hit the fan.

After the Times publishes the third installment in the series on June 15, the Nixon administration goes full authoritarian and heads to court to seek an injunction to stop any further publication.[5] The request went to Judge Murray Gurfein, who had been appointed to the bench by — wait for it — Nixon himself only a few days earlier. The judge granted Nixon a temporary restraining order enjoining the paper from publishing any more stories related to the study.

For the first time in American history, the federal government successfully stopped a major newspaper’s publication in advance. Prior restraint, recognized by courts as probably the most severe form of censorship, had arrived.

But Ellsberg wasn’t to be deterred, so he tucked his Bad Motherfucker wallet into his pants and delivered a second copy of the document to the Washington Post, who immediately began publishing. The government sought a second injunction in Washington, DC, but was denied by Judge Gerard Gesell, who presumably had not been appointed to the bench by Nixon the day before.

So, yeah, this was going to be a legal mess. Ellsberg was smart enough to give copies to 17 different news outlets in total, meaning Nixon and his henchmen would have to play whack-a-mole to enjoin all of them across the country. So while the cases against the New York Times and Washington Post moved through the federal courts, the outlets halted publication, which didn’t matter that much because the other 15 newspapers across the country began to publish excerpts.[6] Nixon and his cronies, in a fit of pure hubristic arrogance, tried to enjoin all of them.

The US Supreme Court realized the mess that was starting and agreed to hear both cases on an expedited basis. That is extremely fast by the Court’s standards. It means they took the question immediately without first requiring it to take the winding path through the federal district, circuit, and appellate courts. This is a sign that the Court understood the gravity of what it was dealing with.

And it dealt with it. On June 30, 1971 - just 17 days after the first article was published in the Times - SCOTUS ruled 6-3 that the government had not met the “heavy burden” required to justify prior restraint, the injunctions were dissolved, and both the Times and Post were free to publish.

But, man, it wasn’t very clean. The decision was released “per curiam,” which means it was under the signature of the full Court rather than an individual justice. Instead, each of the nine justices on the Court wrote their own opinions.[7]

The three dissenting justices argued that the case had moved so fast that the government had not been given enough time to make its case. They felt the injunctions should remain while the case made its way through the court system. The majority recognized this for what it was, itself a form of prior restraint, and rejected the dissenters’ views.

In any case, from July 1971 onward, newspapers were free to print the contents of the Pentagon Papers and the American public was finally allowed to know the truth about what its government had lied about for all those years.

That’s the press working as it should.

The government wasn’t finished with Ellsberg, though. He would be indicted for theft, conspiracy, and espionage and spend the next two years fighting the case until, in 1973, the Nixon administration burglarized Ellsberg’s psychiatrist's office in search of dirt to use against Ellsberg. The case was dismissed, and Ellsberg would spend the next 50 years as a prominent anti-war and whistleblower activist, before dying in 2023 at age 92.

So, does any of that sound familiar? Isn’t this basically just Andrew Hamilton’s argument from 1735? A printer published something powerful people didn’t want published. The government tried to use the courts to stop it from getting out. The press argued the public had a right to know, and the courts agreed.

But none of that happens without certain conditions in place. In this case, that meant the New York Times using the necessary resources to spend months reviewing all 7,000 classified pages before it published anything. It had lawyers to fight the government, and a publisher and editor who were willing to take on that fight and support publication in the face of huge political and legal pressure. Independently, the Washington Post, through publisher Katharine Graham and editor Ben Bradlee, made the same decisions under the same pressure. The 1964 Sullivan ruling protected them in the event they made a mistake, and that protection allowed the newspapers to stand up to attempts by the government to continue to lie to the population. 

WATERGATE (1972-1974)

Two Reporters Follow a Police Blotter Story to a Presidential Resignation

Can I save myself an hour or two, and you guys 1,500 words or so, and assume that we all know what Watergate[8] was all about? Nixon, Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), break-in at Democratic HQ, a couple young police reporters who happen to cover the arraignment for the burglars, FBI, political espionage, political sabotage, lies, newspaper stories, government attempts to discredit the press, a re-election, burglary convictions, tapes, Saturday Night Massacre, more tapes, a gap in the tapes, more lies, more newspaper stories, a Supreme Court order, CIA obstruction of the FBI investigation, articles of impeachment, a “smoking-gun” tape, Nixon’s resignation, and, for some reason, a fucking pardon.

End of the day, 69 people were charged with crimes connected to Watergate, and 48 were convicted, including former Attorney General John Mitchell and White House aides Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman.

All because a couple of police beat reporters, I’m just saying, bothered to attend an arraignment one day.

There are a few things to highlight about Watergate for our purposes. First, the institutional courage displayed by the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee, second, the attempts by Nixon and Pat Buchanan to discredit the press and subvert the truth, and third, another illustration of the mid-20th Century journalism model working the way it was supposed to, just like in the Pentagon Papers story.

Everyone knows reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. However, the Watergate coverage and its consequences did not happen without editor Ben Bradlee and publisher Katharine Graham. The duo no doubt learned from the Pentagon Papers that journalism done properly could stand up to pressure from the executive branch.

Bradlee provided stalwart editorial leadership. He backed the young Woodward and Bernstein against threats to their work both from the government, and from those at the Post who felt that, once the story became a thing, veteran reporters should take it over. When the White House was calling their stories politically motivated lies, Bradlee stood between his reporters and the criticism. Perhaps most importantly, he set a “two-source” rule for information that would reveal a person’s identity in the stories. If someone were going to be named, Bradlee required independent verification from two different sources.

The professional standards meant the model was solid, and allowed Bradlee to stand on them when trouble came knocking.

Graham was the publisher of the Post when Watergate began, and by 1973 when the crisis was at its height she was chairman and CEO. While it began as a police beat story, it spread to the Oval Office almost exclusively because of information provided by a single, well-placed, source, who you all know as, of course, Chatty McChatsalot.

Wait, no, that’s Deep Throat. He went by Deep Throat.

It took some serious guts on Graham’s part to run a story that the administration was trying to sell as a burglary attempt, but that actually reached all the way to the president. She had to trust that her reporters were doing a thorough job, her editor’s judgment was pristine, and that the journalistic model - including the protections of Sullivan - would produce unassailable truth. Or at least liability protection.

The pressure she faced from Nixon and his wrecking crew was quick and severe. The administration went directly after television stations owned by the Washington Post Company and the tens of millions of dollars they produced. Nixon aides were directed to make business difficult for Post advertisers, to cut off access to White House officials for Post reporters, and in some cases to target Graham personally.

But Graham should get a wallet too, because she never backed down. Not once. She trusted her editors and reporters, she trusted that the model would produce quality, defensible work, and she trusted that if all else failed the First Amendment would protect her and the newspaper.

The result? A corrupt administration was brought down by the inevitable wave of truth.

Isn’t that precious.

Watergate also represented the beginning of a strategy that we see so often from today’s politicians when they don’t like their coverage. Nixon drafted the playbook that today’s politicians run in their sleep.

Nixon's communications director, Pat Buchanan, and Vice President Spiro Agnew ran a systematic campaign to discredit the press. They figured that if they couldn’t stop the truth from being reported, the next best thing was to convince the public that the press couldn’t be trusted because it was elitist, biased, and politically motivated. Agnew called the media "nattering nabobs of negativism” which, besides being adorably alliterative, is the direct precursor to today’s politicians’ favorite line, “enemy of the people.”

Unfortunately for those of us living through today’s bullshit, this strategy works a lot better in 2026 than it did in 1973. The Washington Post had the institutional strength and resources to absorb it, refute it, and still tell the truth. I don’t know that we can say the same today about an industry that has lost three-quarters of its workforce since its heyday.

Finally, the Watergate story is one more example of the journalism model working as it should. Professional standards, resources to pursue the story, and ownership with the institutional courage to stand up to political pressure again carried the day.

Woodward and Bernstein had mostly a single source who steered them toward the truth. The reporters knew their source could be trusted, but Bradlee’s insistence on multiple sources and verification ensured that the investigation was conducted to the highest standards.

Graham, meanwhile, made sure that the editorial team had the resources it needed to pursue the story, and maintained the courage to publish it even in the face of immense pressure from the government.

The Pentagon Papers and Watergate affairs show that the model produced not just talented reporters but owners, publishers, and editors who understood what the institution was capable of when accountability was put before profit. The last time we would see that model work at its peak, would be the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team in the early 2000s.

SPOTLIGHT AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH (2001-2002)

The Local Model at Its Absolute Best — and the Last Time We'd See It

Kristen Lombardi of The Boston Phoenix broke the story. Let’s say that directly. The Spotlight team at The Boston Globe had the resources and ability to fight for documents and break it wide, but without Lombardi’s March 23, 2001 story detailing abuse allegations against Father John Geoghan the Globe might never have even been on the scent. 

Professional journalism, from a small outlet, triggering a giant story. The Phoenix cracked open the door, and the Globe’s Spotlight team, an investigative unit assigned to long-term accountability reporting, kicked that mofo in.

I told you, it’s beautiful when it works.

In July 2001, Globe editor Martin Baron, who was, crucially, an outsider in this story in every sense of the word,[9]asked the Spotlight team to look into whether the Catholic Church’s cover-up was systematic or limited to the Geoghan case.[10]

Like the Watergate story, the rest of this one is pretty well known by now. In the summer of 2001 the Spotlight team - editor Walter V. Robinson, reporters Sacha Pfeiffer, Michael Rezendes, and Matt Carroll - began investigating the scope of both the abuse and the institutional cover-up perpetrated by the church.

On January 6, 2002, The Globe published the first of what would be more than 600 stories it would publish throughout the year, documenting a decades-long, systematic institutional cover-up at the highest levels of the Catholic Church. The Globe’s work identified 87 priests accused of abuse in the Boston Archdiocese alone. It triggered an investigation by the US Conference of Bishops, who would report in 2004 that the total number of accused priests nationwide was more than 4,000, and the total number of victims was more than 10,000.

And you know what? This seems like a good time for a brief interlude because one of those priests was right under my own damn nose.

You know what else happened in 2002? A young man walked into our newsroom in July and told another reporter and me that he had settled with the diocese after being groped as a young adult by the local priest. He told us he reported it to the police and they investigated. At one point they even rigged him with a recording device and sent him back in to talk to the priest. He said the case against the priest stalled when the local prosecutor decided he couldn’t get a conviction. County officials instead turned the matter over to the bishop so it could be handled internally by the church.

He eventually sued the church, and settled for a sum of money when the parties entered into a confidential agreement. He produced a copy of the settlement agreement and check he received in a lawsuit. He was coming forward now, he said, because he’d heard the priest told the church that he was leaving the parish to get treatment for cancer out of state.

We confirmed most of what he told us. Similar to Boston, we discovered that this priest had been moved from parish to parish in the past when allegations against him surfaced. We talked to lawyers, the police, and the prosecutor. We tracked the priest down to a state out west and sent him questions via certified mail so he’d have a chance to respond. At one point, I even came across a random phone number, tried it, and ended up ringing right to the bishop’s desk.

He was not pleased.

And when our story never made it to print, neither was I.

The police and prosecutor determined during their investigation that our source had credibility issues. That was why they decided not to pursue criminal charges. Our publisher - who I don’t believe ever wanted to run the story, especially in a small, rural area with a high population of church-going newspaper readers, subscribers, and advertisers - seized on that and decided those credibility issues undermined the story enough that it couldn’t run. Never mind that we had information detailing similar abuse by the same priest at his previous stop, or that the source, whatever his issues, came to us and agreed to use his name in this story knowing it would blow up his confidentiality settlement agreement and likely get him sued.

The point is, the model didn’t work at my paper. We had a similar story and we had similar reporting on it, but we didn’t have the institutional courage to run it. This past June, the Michigan Attorney General’s office released the results of an investigation into clergy sex abuse in the local diocese and almost 50 pages were dedicated to our priest. He had allegations going back to 1968.[11] We were right, but like The Boston Phoenix, we didn’t have what we needed to get all the way to the full truth.

But the Spotlight team did, so they’re a good example of what happens when you have the same story, but different resources. When it was all said and done, the Spotlight team won a Pulitzer, Cardinal Law was forced to resign as Archbishop of Boston, and one of the biggest institutions in the world was brought to bear witness to the power of a free press.

The church didn’t give it to them willingly. The road was not easy because, it turns out, when an institution has been systematically covering up sexual abuse by its members it isn’t really keen to start uncovering that sexual abuse. Church leaders worked hard to keep these allegations in-house, aided at times by friendly politicians and faith leaders in the community.

Yeah. Fuck those dudes, too.

The Spotlight team, however, had some things that our little paper didn’t, like a dedicated investigative unit for long-form work, an editor in Baron who filed motions in court to unseal Church documents, the legal team to fight for the access they needed, and people calling the shots who weren’t embedded in the community itself.[12] We had a couple of reporters with receipts and a publisher who had to go to church on Sunday.

And that’s not me knocking the publisher all these years later. It’s just the model producing predictable results when under stress. The Globe was a huge paper, in a big city, with an outsider at the helm. They SHOULD have been able to produce this story. Our paper was small, in a small community, where everyone knows everyone else. The pressure was different and it produced different results.

The Globe proved that the model could work even in the modern age. Their Spotlight team built the whole thing from scratch, starting with nothing more than Lombardi’s reporting, a colleague’s column, and a curious editor. The model of journalism that existed then allowed them to spend the time and resources to dig into civil lawsuits and personnel records, to interview survivors, and to keep going until they uncovered the full, unvarnished truth.

Spotlight is the local model at its best. A local paper in one American city, going after the most powerful institution in its community, with the time and resources to do it the right way.

They were riding high, journalism was riding high, but six years later the economic model that made it all possible was effectively gone, right as the Spotlight team was showing why it still mattered. By 2008, The Globe itself was fighting for survival and though the Spotlight team still existed, the model and economic conditions that made its most meaningful work possible had disappeared.

In the end, the Catholic Church was able to cover up systematic abuse for decades partly because nobody was watching. Bishops transferred priests because they knew that in most communities, nobody was paying attention or writing it down. The press was one of the things that finally broke it open. And then the press stopped being able to watch.

And so did I, officially, as I left for law school in 2006 and observed from afar as it all came apart.

Sadly, as we sit here in 2026, the conditions that allowed these three stories to exist are gone - maybe not at every newspaper, but certainly at most. And that’s where we’ll wrap this series up in Part 10. The press that Sullivan was designed to protect, the press that published the Pentagon Papers and brought down Nixon and exposed the Catholic Church, is in no condition to fight back. Come back next week to find out what happened to it, and whether there’s anything we can do to get it back.

FOOTNOTES:

1. Of course, Jefferson was speaking specifically here about a free and honest press. Later in life, when partisan media attacks had taken a toll on him, he said “…nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle,” and, Friends, if that isn’t the best description of what would become Fox News and the like all these years later then I don’t know what is. The bigger point though, is that for maybe the 3rd or 4th time in this series we see that there is nothing the good guys can create that the bad guys can’t co-opt and abuse to meet their bad-faith ends. If there has ever been an argument for the diligent defense of our democratic institutions, I think this is it.↩︎
2. If you’ve been following along, first, bless you, and second, you know that’s about the era of the muckrakers and the Sullivan decision, to about the era of corporate consolidation, mass layoffs, and social media slop. All things we’ll talk about in more detail next week.↩︎
3. It was best to be right AND first, though.↩︎
4. I won’t belabor it in the narrative - I can feel this article getting too long already - but, in brief, prior restraint is exactly what it sounds like. The government attempts to prohibit speech or expression before it takes place. In this case, it was the government attempting to use court injunctions to prevent the publication of news stories. The law frowns on prior restraint, especially, and prefers to let speech happen and punish harmful speech after it occurs.↩︎
5. There’s a great scene in the first Star Wars movie where Darth Vader is interrogating Princess Leia and Leia tells him that the tighter he tries to grip the galaxy the more planets will slip through his fingers and that’s pretty much what was destined to happen here. Nixon and his Evil Horde could try all they wanted to suppress this speech but it was never going to matter. Once that first article hit the story was out there. That toothpaste was not going back into the tube.↩︎
6. The planets were slipping through Darth Nixon’s fingers.↩︎
7. It has to be noted that the decision was narrow and fact-specific. It did not aim to establish a bright-line rule about what conditions COULD justify prior restraint, but ruled that in this case, on this record and evidence, the government had not met its burden.↩︎
8. If you haven’t ever, or if you just haven’t in a while, read or watch “All the President’s Men” and you will have a really good understanding of Watergate. At least good enough for what we’re talking about here to make sense.↩︎
9. Jewish, not Catholic. Not from Boston. Still relatively new in town and not yet intertwined with the old guard institutions of the city. That kind of thing.↩︎
10. The Globe’s Eileen McNamara had been following court proceedings and reported that Cardinal Bernard Law had admitted in court to knowing about Geoghan’s abuses as far back as 1984, and also to moving Geoghan around parishes rather than reporting or dismissing him.↩︎
11. You’ve noticed, by now, that I’m not naming names here. There are a couple of reasons for that. First, my work on that case is over 20 years old. If I were going to put people’s names in a piece like this I would have to do some updated reporting, but that isn’t necessary because, second, the priest has already been exposed and investigated. We aren’t breaking any news to run through it again. The AG’s office took care of that when it released the diocese’s investigation. Finally, the person I wanted to write about the most back then was the bishop who had clearly been enabling this behavior for decades by moving this priest and, I assumed, others like him, from parish to parish to keep their misdeeds hidden. He died in 2004, so at this point putting names here is just sensationalism without accountability and that’s not exactly what we’re after around here.↩︎
12. Also, I presume, chairs that had both of their arms and spun like they were supposed to.↩︎