Ideology

1. Selective Perception: Creating our own meaning of events around us. For example: Throughout the film all the men involved in CREEP, the committee to reelect the president, attempt to cover up everything that the Washington Post writes about them. They create their own meaning of what they are being portrayed as to keep the American people in the dark about what is really going on.
    
2. Gatekeeping: Elements that make constant decisions about what info is or isn't important enough to pass on. For example: Ben Bradley wouldn't let the reporters put in the information that led all the way up to Nixon until they had three sources. The editors of the The Washington Post felt that everything they could get a source on and had as solid fact was extremely important. Carl Bernstein especially had the gut feeling that the American people needed to know everything that was going on but Bob Woodward always reminded him that it needed to be solid fact before they published it.

3. Cultivation Theory: The images and topics serve to cultivate in all of us a certain impression of the world, long term exposure to media may affect how we perceive the world.  During a Discovery Channel video on revisiting our film Robert Redford, the actor who portrayed Bob Woodward, stated that he was so cultivated by the Watergate Scandal and the articles written about it that after only reading the third article published by Woodward and Bernstein he called them asking if he could make a movie about the events, Bernstein said they were too busy but not long after the scandal was put to rest the film, All The President's Men was created. After all of the exposure of Watergate, the American people and Republican parties made President Nixon resign in light of what had been presented of him.
"I can't believe that that guy was president of the United States; Because he is just branded in our national memory as a crook." - Rachel Maddow, of The Rachel Maddow Show

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzXL7C0JQDM