News, Lies, and Action: Watergate in Editorials

About the Watergate Scandal

In 1972, a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex sparked a scandal that would rock the United States and lead to the downfall of President Richard Nixon. The Watergate scandal is widely regarded as one of the most significant political scandals in American history, and it forever changed the way Americans viewed their government and the media's role in holding politicians accountable. The scandal involved a complex web of illegal activities, including wiretapping, burglary, and a cover-up orchestrated by the highest levels of government. From the initial break-in to Nixon's eventual resignation, the Watergate scandal was a riveting saga that captured the attention of the American public and exposed the dark side of American politics. Let's dive deeper into this infamous chapter in American history and look at the primary sources that covered it all.

Research Questions

• What were the sentiments about the scandal during the investigation?
• What were the prevalent themes in newspaper editorials from this time?
• What are the most common words in the dataset? How do the frequencies of these words change over time?

Navigating the Exhibit

Select a page on the left-hand side to navigate through the pages of the exhibit, or move forward or backward one page from the bottom of the current page.

Click on "About" to view the team members and our weekly work logs, our Project One Pager, and Project Charter.

Click on "Data Curation and Cleaning" to learn how we curated our data and cleaned data overall and for specific analyses.

Click on "Sentiment Analysis" to view the graph and analysis of the sentiment for documents in our content set.

Click on "TimelineJS" to view the interactive timeline visualization of the editorials published by The Washington Post about the Watergate Scandal.

Click on “Topic Modeling” to view the prevalent topics in our content set.

Click on “Voyant” to view how the top words in our dataset changed over time.

Click on "Primary Source Items" to view editorials relating to and about the Watergate Scandal.