All the President's Men
Investigation and report of the burglary at the Watergate Hotel that culminated with President Richard Nixon's resignation from office.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
5mentions
5people
2016–2025years
40% recommend60% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Night Watch is really dark. Also, The Monstrous Regiment. But the books I love the most are the ones with an "Alistair MacLean vibe" to them: Thud! (MacLean's Fear is the Key) and The Truth (Discworld version of All the President's Men?).
- Style and subject: Ghost in the Wires, Kevin Mitnick
Subject: Worm, Mark Bowden Countdown to Zero Day, Kim Zetter
Style: The Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder All the President's Men, Woodward & Bernstein
- These are heuristics. They will of course produce false negatives. Given the huge volume of available books relative to available reading time in a human life, the most important thing is to minimize false positives.
Whether the particular books you refer to are false negatives on these heuristics is of course a matter of opinion. I don't know Woodward and Bernstein's book on constitutional law; their most famous book, All the President's Men, would surely fall under a similar exception to biography/memoir, since it is an account of their own investigation.
- What is your take on "single topic" investigative journalism books? Like "The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks"[0] or Bob Woodward's "All the president's men"
I'd love to recommend "Abusado", by brazilian journalist Caco Barcellos, but unfortunately it does not seem to be available in English
[0](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_Life_of_Henriet...)
- You hit the proverbial "nail on the head." Before 24/7 news channels and online access, the rush to "scoop" another newspaper still had a 16-hour cycle due to daily print runs. The infamous incorrect front page presidential election result made editors back up and double check things before rushing a story, but it didn't last long. Many years later, Dan Rather lost his job for not fact checking before reporting something he wanted to believe.
When television news first appeared in the US, some claimed the death unfiltered information, which was already filtered, while others claimed the death of newspapers. The first didn't change much and the second barely changed.
24/7 cable news was already in vogue before Dan Rather's incident, who I believe claimed the high road, which helped remove Dan Rather. All that changed when the revenue sources changed.
What I personally find hypocritical is the different standard for "breaking" news versus "regularly scheduled" news. Bryan Williams was excoriated for honoring veterans and having a normal, human memory. Breaking news and special updates are blatantly suspect and misleading, feeling line "spray and pray", with minimal or no fact or source checking, and there appears to be no consequence. I believe the Rather case was egregious and the Williams case trivial.
I have a link to a study I need to find and post relating to the amount of international news viewing by country. More international news generally means more sources, purportedly meaning more viewpoints and balance.
It feels like P. T. Barnum is running much of today's media outlets. Sensationalism combined with instant gratification gets more views = more ad revenue. "Always follow the money." as told to Bob Woodward in _All The President's Men_.
