Yale students came up during a Tuesday talk with Bob Woodward ’65 and Carl Bernstein, two journalists famed for digging up the Watergate Scandal for The Washington Post — and it wasn’t for their great wit.
The talk, titled “Watergate 4.0: How Would the Story Unfold in the Digital Age?”, focused on whether web-savvy youths could uncover a scandal like Watergate via the Internet. During the talk, Woodward mentioned an experience with a Yale journalism class in which students had to write a 1-page paper on what coverage of a Watergate scandal would look like today. (Brill’s class, anyone?) The professor sent the papers to Woodward. The results weren’t pretty. Woodward said he “came as close as I ever have to having an aneurysm” because one of the students wrote “‘Oh, you would just use the Internet and you’d go to ‘Nixon’s secret fund’ and it would be there.’”
Apparently, a “small ballroom” filled with journalists “chuckled or scoffed,” at the scenario. We can only imagine.