[MLUG - DISCUSSION] RM Nixon and GW Bush

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

This is a great article that reviews the recent media coverage of the Deep 
Throat revelation.  It focuses more on how our news media seem happy to do 
whatever Bush and his team want them to do.  It's easy to see how they're 
manipulating NPR and PBS.  It makes my blood boil!  --Mike

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/opinion/12rich.html

N.Y. Times
June 12, 2005

Don't Follow the Money

By FRANK RICH

THE morning the Deep Throat story broke, the voice on my answering machine 
was as raspy as Hal Holbrook's. "I just want you to remember that I wrote 
'Follow the money,' " said my caller. "I want to know if anybody will give 
me credit. Watch for the accuracy of the media!"

The voice belonged to my friend William Goldman, who wrote the movie "All 
the President's Men." His words proved more than a little prescient. As if 
on cue, journalists everywhere - from The New York Times to The Economist 
to The Washington Post itself - would soon start attributing this classic 
line of dialogue to the newly unmasked Deep Throat, W. Mark Felt. But the 
line was not in Woodward and Bernstein's book or in The Post's Watergate 
reportage or in Bob Woodward's contemporaneous notes. It was the invention 
of the author of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "Marathon Man" and 
"The Princess Bride."

This confusion of Hollywood's version of history with the genuine article 
would quickly prove symptomatic of the overall unreality of the Deep 
Throat coverage. Was Mr. Felt a hero or a villain? Should he "follow the 
money" into a book deal, and if so, how would a 91-year-old showing signs 
of dementia either write a book or schmooze about it with Larry King? How 
did Vanity Fair scoop The Post? How does Robert Redford feel about it all? 
Such were the questions that killed time for a nation awaiting the 
much-heralded feature mediathon, the Michael Jackson verdict.

Richard Nixon and Watergate itself, meanwhile, were often reduced to 
footnotes. Three years ago, on Watergate's 30th anniversary, an ABC News 
poll found that two-thirds of Americans couldn't explain what the scandal 
was, and no one was racing to enlighten them this time around. Vanity Fair 
may have taken the trouble to remind us that Watergate was a web of crime 
yielding the convictions and guilty pleas of more than 30 White House and 
Nixon campaign officials, but few others did. Watergate has gone back to 
being the "third-rate burglary" of Nixon administration spin. It is once 
again being covered up.

Not without reason. Had the scandal been vividly resuscitated as the long 
national nightmare it actually was, it would dampen all the Felt fun by 
casting harsh light on our own present nightmare. "The fundamental right 
of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the 
workings of our government is under attack as never before" was how the 
former Nixon speech writer William Safire put it on this page almost nine 
months ago. The current administration, a second-term imperial presidency 
that outstrips Nixon's in hubris by the day, leads the attack, trying to 
intimidate and snuff out any Woodwards or Bernsteins that might challenge 
it, any media proprietor like Katharine Graham or editor like Ben Bradlee 
who might support them and any anonymous source like Deep Throat who might 
enable them to find what Carl Bernstein calls "the best obtainable version 
of the truth."

The attacks continue to be so successful that even now, long after many 
news organizations, including The Times, have been found guilty of failing 
to puncture the administration's prewar W.M.D. hype, new details on that 
same story are still being ignored or left uninvestigated. The July 2002 
"Downing Street memo," the minutes of a meeting in which Tony Blair and 
his advisers learned of a White House effort to fix "the intelligence and 
facts" to justify the war in Iraq, was [3]published by The London Sunday 
Times on May 1. Yet in the 19 daily Scott McClellan briefings that 
followed, the memo was the subject of only 2 out of the approximately 940 
questions asked by the White House press corps, [4]according to Eric 
Boehlert of Salon.

This is the kind of lapdog news media the Nixon White House cherished. To 
foster it, Nixon's special counsel, Charles W. Colson, embarked on a 
ruthless program of intimidation that included threatening antitrust 
action against the networks if they didn't run pro-Nixon stories. 
Watergate tapes and memos make Mr. Colson, who boasted of "destroying the 
old establishment," sound like the founding father of today's blogging 
lynch mobs. He exulted in bullying CBS to cut back its Watergate reports 
before the '72 election. He enlisted NBC in pro-administration propaganda 
by browbeating it to repackage 10-day-old coverage of Tricia Nixon's 
wedding as a prime-time special.  It was the Colson office as well that 
compiled a White House enemies list that included journalists who had the 
audacity to question administration policies.

Such is the equivalently supine state of much of the news media today that 
Mr. Colson was repeatedly trotted out, without irony, to pass moral 
judgment on Mr. Felt - and not just on Fox News, the cable channel that is 
actually run by the former Nixon media maven, Roger Ailes. "I want kids to 
look up to heroes," Mr. Colson said, oh so sorrowfully, on NBC's "Today" 
show, condemning Mr. Felt for dishonoring "the confidence of the president 
of the United States."  Never mind that Mr. Colson dishonored the law, 
proposed bombing the Brookings Institution and went to prison for his role 
in the break-in to steal the psychiatric records of The Times's Deep 
Throat on Vietnam, Daniel Ellsberg. The "Today" host, Matt Lauer, didn't 
mention any of this - or even that his guest had done jail time. None of 
the other TV anchors who interviewed Mr. Colson - and he was ubiquitous - 
ever specified his criminal actions in the Nixon years. Some identified 
him onscreen only as a "former White House counsel."

Had anyone been so rude (or professional) as to recount Mr. Colson's 
sordid past, or to raise the question of whether he was a hero or a 
traitor, the genealogical line between his Watergate-era machinations and 
those of his present-day successors would have been all too painfully 
clear. The main difference is that in the Nixon White House, the 
president's men plotted behind closed doors. The current administration is 
now so brazen it does its dirty work in plain sight.

In the most recent example, all the president's men slimed and intimidated 
Newsweek by accusing it of being an accessory to 17 deaths for its errant 
Koran story; led by Scott McClellan, they said it was unthinkable that any 
American guard could be disrespectful of Islam's holy book. These 
neo-Colsons easily drowned out Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the 
Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, both of 
whom said that the riots that led to the 17 deaths were unrelated to 
Newsweek. Then came the pièce de résistance of Nixon mimicry: a Pentagon 
report certifying desecrations of the Koran by American guards was 
released two weeks after the Newsweek imbroglio, at 7:15 p.m. on a Friday, 
to assure it would miss the evening newscasts and be buried in the 
Memorial Day weekend's little-read papers.

At other times the new Colsons top the old one. Though Nixon aspired to 
punish public broadcasting by cutting its funding, he never imagined that 
his apparatchiks could seize the top executive positions at the 
Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Nor did he come up with the brilliant 
ideas of putting journalists covertly on the administration payroll and of 
hiring an outside P.R. firm (Ketchum) to codify an enemies list by ranking 
news organizations and individual reporters on the basis of how favorably 
they cover a specific administration policy (No Child Left Behind). 
President Bush has even succeeded in emasculating the post-Watergate 
reform that was supposed to help curb Nixonian secrecy, the Presidential 
Records Act of 1978.

THE journalists who do note the resonances of now with then rarely get to 
connect those dots on the news media's center stage of television. You are 
more likely to hear instead of how Watergate inspired too much "gotcha" 
journalism. That's a rather absurd premise given that no "gotcha" 
journalist got the goods on the biggest story of our time: the false 
intimations of incipient mushroom clouds peddled by American officials to 
sell a war that now threatens to match the unpopularity and marathon 
length of Vietnam.

Only once during the Deep Throat rollout did I see a palpable, if perhaps 
unconscious, effort to link the White House of 1972 with that of 2005. It 
occurred at the start, when ABC News, with the first comprehensive report 
on Vanity Fair's scoop, interrupted President Bush's post-Memorial Day 
Rose Garden news conference to break the story. Suddenly the image of the 
current president blathering on about how hunky-dory everything is in Iraq 
was usurped by repeated showings of the scene in which the newly resigned 
Nixon walked across the adjacent White House lawn to the helicopter that 
would carry him into exile.

But in the days that followed, Nixon and his history and the long shadows 
they cast largely vanished from the TV screen. In their place were 
constant nostalgic replays of young Redford and flinty Holbrook. Follow 
the bait-and-switch.


Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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