Nixon Tape To Reveal Secrets at Last?

jonerik writes: "As part of its inevitable 30th-anniversary-of-Watergate coverage, ABC News has this article on the National Archives' search for someone who can recover part or all of the missing 18 ½ minutes of President Nixon's Oval Office tapes, whose existence had been unknown until the Watergate hearings. The famous tape - recorded on June 20th, 1972, three days after the Watergate break-in - was last examined in 1974, but Nixon tape archivist Karl Weissenbach is hoping that nearly thirty years of technological progress can make the difference this time, saying 'We have decided that the time is right and appropriate to determine whether that conversation can be retrieved or recovered.' Stephen St. Croix, one of several forensic audio experts who is interested in taking on the job, says 'You never completely erase a tape. You think you do, but you really don't.'" There's another article in Wired on this quest as well.

Comments

Watergate still??

[EastCoastSurfer]

I realize the technical merits of the article, but why is the general media still harping on something that happened 30 years ago? Why doesn't the media do aniversaries for things like travelgate, filegate, Vince Foster, etc...? These things are much more current and still have real implications to people in power (not to mention someone is dead).

Re:Watergate still??

[Lysander Luddite]

Maybe because it is attributed to a President resigning his office?

Re:Watergate still??

[Chasuk]

Watergate overshadows all of the other manufactured "scandals" that you mention above. It was easily the biggest scandal of the last 50 years, and will be discussed by historians centuries hence, long after the name "Vince Foster" had faded from memory.

Re:Watergate still??

[Anonymous Coward]

The media is composed of Democrats raised on Watergate. That's why they only care about scandals in Republican administrations.

Uhh.. if that's the case, then why don't i ever hear anyone in the media talking about the scandals of the Reagan years? Ever? Even though it's topical, and it would probably be fascinating to see a media review of "here is what the Eisenhower through Reagan administrations did covertly as foreign policy in the name of fighting Communism, and this is how it affects the current geopolitical climate, which is important becuase the U.S. is currently fighting an open-ended war against a number of nations whose current political situation is a direct result of U.S. actions"?

People keep going back to watergate because it's clear, it's dramatic and theatrical, and it's morally unambiguous. The whole thing is almost a greek epic on the Great Man Corrupted by Power. That's about it. It appeals to people's love of drama without challenging any of their held beliefs or making them understand complicated geopolitical context.

Re:Watergate still??

[startled]

Why doesn't the media cover anything of consequence any more? At least in the American media, it appears the assumption is that we don't care about international events, and we're too stupid to understand anything of consequence domestically.

Travelgate? Filegate? Vince Foster? WTF? Those are barrel-scraping attempts to dumb something down for general consumption. How about no TV coverage of genocide in Yugoslavia for almost two years after they knew it was going on? Hell, domestic current events haven't been covered substantively on TV for a good decade or so, and not in newspapers aside from the NYTimes and Washington Post.

No, the general media nowadays has no respectability. They cover nothing of substance. When's the last time I saw a mention in the paper about a bill going through my state's legislature? I'm lucky to see a mention of a federal bill outside of the budget, Medicare, or "terrorism". Meanwhile, there are giant cover stories on last year's dog mauling.

The media is covering Watergate for two reasons. One, of course, is they think it'll sell. This is a big thing that a lot of their audience lived through.

The other, more interesting, reason is that they're covering a time when they had respectability and impact. When investigative journalist meant something other than Geraldo Rivera. When journalistic careers were made by covering big events in a dangerous foreign country, or uncovering something big in political dealings at home. Now, foreign reporters get 5 minutes a day on CNN. Domestic reporters follow the police scanner to the site of the latest rich white babynapping or Chandra Levy's remains.

Nostalgia, then. Followups on a time when they had a function other than exposing sex scandals. Why would they follow up on something current, if no one cared about it in the first place? Yes, there are still respectable reporters doing significant work. But they're quite fringe, and mostly read by academics, politicians, "experts", and the tiny portion of the population that actually cares enough to read intelligent coverage on what's going on in the world. It's enough to support two newspapers and a handful of magazines.

Theory + practice

[ocie]

You never completely erase a tape. You think you do, but you really don't.

Bull puckey. If you record over a tape enough times you will erase the original information. Otherwise, a length of tape could hole an infinite amount of information.

OTOH, just because you 'can' erase a tape, doesn't mean that it was done in this case.