A leading preservation group in Washington, DC, has quietly decided against seeking landmark status for the Washington Post building, saying the structure isnâ??t distinctive enough, architecturally.
And thatâ??s a good call.
I had suspected that landmark status would be proposed for the building because of the newspaperâ??s reporting of the Watergate scandal, which over the years has become a subject of a towering media myth.
The myth has it that the Postâ??s dogged reporting on Watergate forced Richard M. Nixon to resign the presidency.
That, of course, is a simplistic and superficial interpretation of Watergate â?? an interpretation not even embraced by the sometimes-arrogant Post. One of the newspaperâ??s lead reporters on Watergate, Bob Woodward, has declared, for example:
â??To say that the press brought down Nixon, thatâ??s horseshit.â?
Had the Post building been designated a landmark, a likely upshot would have to deepen the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate. Landmark status could have further entrenched the erroneous notion that the Post was the place where Woodward and his colleague Carl Bernstein wrote the stories that exposed and ended a corrupt presidency.
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