Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] RM Nixon and GW Bush

[Vern Green <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Yeah... I guess... if you say so.

On 6/22/05, Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> 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
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> 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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-- 
Thanks
F Vernon Green

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