Stuff Journalists Like – #79 Naming Everything Something-Gate

In 1972, two Washington Post reporters wrote up a little story about a break-in at a Washington D.C. hotel named Watergate. Yeah, yeah, the coverage that followed led to the resignation of President Nixon but it also gave way to something that plagues newsrooms to this very day – journalists’ incept need to name every other news story after Watergate.

Whether it’s Nipplegate, Antennagate, Monicagate, Troopergate,  #Weinergate, or Lunchgate (the last one involves the theft of a particular bagged lunch in a Northern Colorado newsroom), journalists can’t help end the name of every scandal with -gate. While most journalists realize this is a stupid and self-deprecating habit, they can’t help themselves. Even with the most mundane controversy, journalists are in newsrooms thinking of a –gate name for their story.  Journalists do this so often that there’s a Wikipedia page dedicated to stores with the –gate suffix. The constant naming of stories after Watergate makes journalists wish that the break-in had happened at a Hilton or Foggy Bottom apartment instead of Watergate building.

The need to do this probably is due to the void journalists feel. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s reporting led to a thousand and one journalism careers and save for a scandal here and there, most journalists don’t have the opportunity to put their byline on a history-changing story like Watergate. So to make up for this disappointment, journalists try to take the story they’re working on and blow it out of proportion.

The need to also name something–gate also comes from the need from journalists to give every story a quick, witty slug. Instead of calling the story about the middle school boy who fought back the bullies who then got suspended the middle-school-boy-who-fought-back-bullies-then-got-suspended story, journalists will slug it bullygate, thinking they have made a positive contribution to the world of journalism and they hopefully hope the moniker catches on and people on the street will go “Hey, there’s that brilliant reporter who wrote the bullygate story.” But like most journalists’ dreams, it is smashed when the next –gate story comes out, probably involving a MEMBER of Congress (get it? It’s a penis joke).

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