A thought I keep having after listening to the second episode of Slow Burn, the new Slate podcast about Watergate slate.com/articles/slate…
There's a line of press criticism in the Trump era, mostly on the right, but also found on the left, that the coverage of the Russia story has been error-prone, hysterical and sloppy
I don't think that's true when considered as a whole, though there are definitely quite a few instances of stories that were wrong, sometimes embarassingly so.
But what's so striking listening to Watergate was the degree to which the press bias then was on the other side: this kind of inertial desire to not think it was all that big a deal.
Now, there were lots of people *before* the election of 1972, right after the break-in, saying "this is fishy as hell." Wright Patman had congressional hearings about it, and was stonewalled. But it's crazy it took as long as it did to come out!
Today, it's simply impossible to judge the totality of the Russias coverage until we actually know what the full truth is about what actually happened.
But I do think it's entirely possible that when we *do* know the full truth about the Russia story, the bulk of the coverage, like much of the Watergate coverage, will look quite slow-footed.
