ABSTRACT
“New Journalism and the Counterculture: Watchdogs and Watergate” describes how the press in the 1960s and 1970s at times used stylistic techniques in new journalism to popularize the ideas and attitudes of a generation of Americans that expressed both idealism and dissent via mainstream outlets and popular magazines. It features legal precedents that affected reporting, as well as a sample of countercultural journalism, as practiced by Hunter S. Thompson’s style of “gonzo” storytelling; and it juxtaposes new journalism with the relatively traditional yet groundbreaking reporting at the Washington Post that exposed the Watergate scandal. Using materials from this chapter, students should understand how different forms of storytelling serve different purposes. They should have an understanding of how cultural and political issues addressed by the press during the 1960s and 1970s produced a lasting effect on subsequent generations; and they should be able to explain why press historians to this day cite Woodward and Bernstein as exemplary members of the Fourth Estate. Key words, names, and phrases associated with Chapter 13 include: the Living Room War, My Lai, and “Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam”; Times v. Sullivan, the Pentagon Papers, and the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Sixth Amendments; Rolling Stone, Hunter S. Thompson, and gonzo journalism; and Watergate, the Washington Post, and Woodward and Bernstein.
