NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen discusses the Watergate myth, how it distorts education within journalism schools, and how it contributes to what ails the press today:

By giving the warrant of history, and the mandate of heaven, to the adversarial press, and the Fourth Estate model (where the press is an essential check on government, a modern addition to the balance of powers); by telling each new crop of journalists how to be heroes and how do good; by glamorizing the underworld of confidential sources, the mythos of Watergate had very definite effects in journalism.

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Trying to understand this took me right into the religion of journalism—a belief system and meaning-making kit that is shared across editorial cultures in mainstream newsrooms. Young people are introduced to the religion in J-school, where it also lives, but even if they skip the academies they learn it within a few years on the job.

In the daily religion of the news tribe, ordinary believers do not call themselves believers. (In fact, “true believer” is a casting out term in journlism, an insult.) The Skeptics. That’s who journalists say they are. Of course, they know they believe things in common with their fellow skeptics on the press bus. It’s important to keep this complication in mind: Not that journalists are so skeptical as a rule, but that they will try to stand in relation to you as The Skeptic does.

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Meanwhile, “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” is handed down not as a slogan too clever by half, but as a public service philosophy. Find 100 journalists who know the slogan, perhaps five can tell you the origin. And they don’t know that the author (Finley Peter Dunne) was being sarcastic, either. Is this education?

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Deans of Journalism, scribble a note: Investigative reporting, exposing public corruption, and carrying the mantle of the downtrodden [are taught] not as political acts in themselves—which they are—and not as a continuation of the progressive movement of the 1920s, in which the cleansing light of publicity was a weapon of reform—which they are—but just as a way of being idealistic, a non-political truthteller in the job of journalist. (Which is bunk.)

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In the newsroom faith that I have been describing, Watergate is not just a big, big story with a knock-out ending. It is the great redemptive tale believers learn to tell about the press and what it can do for the American people. It is a story of national salvation: truth their only weapon, journalists save the day. Whether the story can continue to claim enough believers—and connect the humble to the heroic in journalism—is to my mind a big question. Whether it should continue is an even better question.

Life must be satisfying if you fancy yourself a hero. It also becomes rather easy to ignore your mistakes and excuse your motives. You are, after all, a hero, and you can quite easily comfort yourself because you, like Superman, are doing good, caring, important, vital work. This mentality seems obvious and pervasive in today’s news media. The press must first recognize this thinking, or it will never understand its critics, and will always have a reason to dismiss them. Because if you are the hero, anyone who criticizes you must therefore be the villain.