Media Coverage and a Federal Grand Jury

decline as the nation’s leading muckraker while a new generation of
younger investigative reporters took over the field. 84
Still, Anderson’s flagrant defiance of grand jury secrecy was a
symbol of just how much the relationship between the press and the
Nixon administration had changed as a result of Watergate. Just a
year after the media’s major setback in the Supreme Court’s Branzburg
v. Hayes decision, which forced reporters under certain circumstances
to reveal confidential sources to the government, Anderson’s
unapologetic publication of secret grand jury transcripts in some
ways reversed the power dynamic. While Branzburg affirmed the
government’s ability to use the grand jury system to investigate reporters’
sources, Anderson managed to use the grand jury system to
investigate the government itself. Where once journalists had been
hunted by the Nixon administration, now they were the hunters; and
it was the White House, not the media, that had become the prey.
Although the Watergate leaks to Jack Anderson and other reporters
understandably disturbed judges charged with protecting
grand jury secrecy, they also provided a vital independent journalistic
check on grand jury abuses. In so doing, they did not resolve
the old conflict between the First and Sixth Amendments. Just the
opposite: in the aftermath of Watergate, media coverage of secret
grand jury proceedings would become increasingly common—leading
to ongoing conflicts between the press and the courts over grand
jury secrecy that continue to the present day. 85
Endnotes
1 Michael Schudson, Watergate in American Memory: How We Remember,
Forget, and Reconstruct the Past (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 104.
2 Stanley I. Kutler, The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon
(New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1990), 226, 255, 271, 615, vii-vii; Gladys
Engel Lang and Kurt Lang, The Battle for Public Opinion: The President,
the Press, and the Polls During Watergate (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1983), 302-04; Edward Jay Epstein, Between Fact and Fiction: The
Problem of Journalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 21-32; and Mark
Feldstein, “Watergate Revisited,” American Journalism Review, v. 26, no.
4 (Aug./Sept. 2004), 60-67.
3 Literature about columnist Jack Anderson’s publication of Watergate
grand jury transcripts has been spotty, mentioned only briefly in news accounts
of the time and a handful of subsequent books: Jack Anderson and
Daryl Gibson, Peace, War, and Politics: An Eyewitness Account (New York:
Forge, 1999), 257-62; Brit Hume, Inside Story (Garden City, New York:
Doubleday, 1974), 284-96; James H. Dygert, The Investigative Journalist:
Folk Heroes of a New Era (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall,
22 • American Journalism —