Yesterday in class we started learning about the Watergate scandal from 1972-1974. It started with the robbery of the democratic national committee, at the Watergate complex, by 5 burglars, who were all ex White House aides. The biggest part of the scandal was that then, Nixon became very involved of the cover-up of the burglary, therefore obstructing justice, which made him viable to be impeached. Nixon recorded his private conversations in his office, the purpose of which to protect him from false accusations of what he said, but those recordings ended up backfiring and being used as evidence for his illegal activity. He resisted for a while, but finally admitted guilt and resigned before he could be impeached.
I found an interesting pattern between this and the other events we've studied, which is the growing role of the media in influencing the public and creating justice. In the documentary, someone said that the media kept prying into the issue and continuing to keep it alive. Without the persistence of the media, the scandal would not have erupted to the scale it did and perhaps would have died down without any repercussions for Nixon or the burglars. Therefore, the media allowed for justice, just as it did in the Civil Rights Movement. These two events, the Civil Rights Movement and the Watergate scandal, foreshadow the immense influence the media has today.
I would argue that although the media can have extremely positive impacts promoting political and social justice in America, it can also have fairly negative effects depending on how you look at them. While Nixon was in office, he became one of America's strongest leaders as he took charge of foreign politics in order to try and resolve tensions between the US and the USSR and helped put an end to the Vietnam War in a logical, realistic way. However, when the Watergate Scandal ended up being constantly blasted on the media in order to shock Americans and discredit Nixon for covering up information relating to the robbery, people all over the nation suddenly hated him. Even though Nixon had been such a beneficial and strong leader for the country, people were only focused on this scandal that was getting blown out of proportion to a certain extent, which led to his resignation. Although I'm not justifying what Nixon did or saying that he shouldn't have been vilified for breaking the law, I think that the media's influence on the public ended up distorting how they saw Nixon to the point where the Watergate Scandal escalated the witch-hunting of him. These media impacts can also be seen through the 2016 election, during which the Republicans and news organizations made Hilary Clinton's email scandal one of the main issues of the election itself, which helped Trump become president. In this situation, liberals were extremely shocked and didn't believe that Clinton should have been vilified for not following government regulations regarding classified information, showing how her defeat (which was heavily influenced by this scandal) didn't represent justice to them. Meanwhile, Republicans and moderates agreed with Clinton's loss because they saw her as corrupt and incompetent for handling classified information in such a poor manner, which made the media's influence promoting this scandal seem like justice to them. So overall, I don't necessarily think that the media's political influence is inherently positive since this term is pretty subjective depending on how this influence benefits or hurts you as an individual.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the media can help create justice. However, I also think that the media is not always completely just and may be misleading. They can twist or leave information out. I do think that media is a good thing though since the people deserve to know what is going on.
ReplyDeleteI believe that if the media only strives to giving the public verified information about current events than it is very beneficial. Sadly the media often tries to find the most interesting stories and twists the reality of what really happens.
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