[Mb-hair] NYTimes.com Article: Will We Need a New ' All the President' s Men' ?

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Will We Need a New 'All the President's Men'?

October 17, 2004
 


 

SUCH is the power of movies that the first image
"Watergate" brings to mind three decades later is not
Richard Nixon so much as the golden duo of Redford and
Hoffman riding to the nation's rescue in "All the
President's Men." But if our current presidency is now
showing symptoms of a precancerous Watergate syndrome - as
it is, daily - we have not yet reached that denouement
immortalized by Hollywood, in which our scrappy heroes
finally bring Nixon to heel in his second term. No, we're
back instead in the earlier reels of his first term, before
the criminality of the Watergate break-in, when no one had
heard of Woodward and Bernstein. Back then an arrogant and
secretive White House, furious at the bad press fueled by
an unpopular and mismanaged war, was still flying high as
it kneecapped with impunity any reporter or news
organization that challenged its tightly enforced message
of victory at hand. 

It was then that the vice president, Spiro Agnew, scripted
by the speechwriter Pat Buchanan, tried to discredit the
press as an elite - or, as he spelled it out, "a tiny,
enclosed fraternity of privileged men." It was then that
the attorney general, John Mitchell, under the pretext of
national security, countenanced wiretaps of Hedrick Smith
of The Times and Marvin Kalb of CBS News, as well as a full
F.B.I. investigation of CBS's Daniel Schorr. Today it's
John Ashcroft's Justice Department, also invoking "national
security," that hopes to seize the phone records of Judith
Miller and Philip Shenon of The Times, claiming that what
amounts to a virtual wiretap is warranted by articles about
Islamic charities and terrorism published nearly three
years ago. 

"The fundamental right of Americans, through our free
press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our
government is under attack as never before," wrote William
Safire last month. When an alumnus of the Nixon White House
says our free press is being attacked as "never before,"
you listen. What alarms him now are the efforts of Patrick
Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the Valerie
Plame-Robert Novak affair, to threaten reporters at The
Times and Time magazine with jail if they don't reveal
their sources. Given that the Times reporter in question
(Judith Miller again) didn't even write an article on the
subject under investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald overreaches so
far that he's created a sci-fi plot twist out of Steven
Spielberg's "Minority Report." 

It's all the scarier for being only one piece in a pattern
of media intimidation that's been building for months now.
Once Woodward and Bernstein did start investigating
Watergate, Nixon plotted to take economic revenge by
siccing the Federal Communications Commission on TV
stations owned by The Washington Post's parent company. The
current White House has been practicing pre-emptive media
intimidation to match its policy of pre-emptive war. Its
F.C.C. chairman, using Janet Jackson's breast and Howard
Stern's mouth as pretexts, has sufficiently rattled Viacom,
which broadcast both of these entertainers' infractions
against "decency," that its chairman, the self-described
"liberal Democrat" Sumner Redstone, abruptly announced his
support for the re-election of George W. Bush last month.
"I vote for what's good for Viacom," he explained, and he
meant it. He took this loyalty oath just days after the "60
Minutes" fiasco prompted a full-fledged political witch
hunt on Viacom's CBS News, another Republican target since
the Nixon years. Representative Joe Barton, Republican of
Texas, has threatened to seek Congressional "safeguards"
regulating TV news content and, depending what happens Nov.
2, he may well have the political means to do it. 

Viacom is hardly the only media giant cowed by the prospect
that this White House might threaten its corporate
interests if it gets out of line. Disney's refusal to
release Michael Moore's partisan "Fahrenheit 9/11" in an
election year would smell less if the company applied the
same principle to its ABC radio stations, where the equally
partisan polemics of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are
heard every day. Even a low-profile film project in
conflict with Bush dogma has spooked the world's largest
media company, Time Warner, proprietor of CNN. Its Warner
Brothers, about to release a special DVD of "Three Kings,"
David O. Russell's 1999 movie criticizing the first gulf
war, suddenly canceled a planned extra feature, a new
Russell documentary criticizing the current war. Whether
any of these increasingly craven media combines will stand
up to the Bush administration in a constitutional pinch, as
Katharine Graham and her Post Company bravely did to the
Nixon administration during Watergate, is a proposition
that hasn't been remotely tested yet. 

To understand what kind of journalism the Bush
administration expects from these companies, you need only
look at those that are already its collaborators. Fox News
speaks loudly for itself, to the point of posting on its
Web site an article by its chief political correspondent
containing fictional John Kerry quotes. (After an outcry,
it was retracted as "written in jest.") But Fox is just the
tip of the Rupert Murdoch empire. When The New York Post
covered the release of the report by the C.I.A.'s chief
weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, it played the story on
page 8 and didn't get to the clause "while no stockpiles of
W.M.D. were found in Iraq" until the 16th paragraph. This
would be an Onion parody were it not deadly serious. 

It's hard to imagine an operation more insidious than Mr.
Murdoch's, but the Sinclair Broadcast Group may be it. The
owner or operator of 62 TV stations nationwide, including
affiliates of all four major broadcast networks, this
company gets little press scrutiny because it is invisible
in New York City, Washington and Los Angeles, where it has
no stations. But Sinclair, whose top executives have maxed
out as Bush contributors, was first smoked out of the
shadows last spring when John McCain called it
"unpatriotic" for ordering its eight ABC stations not to
broadcast the "Nightline" in which Ted Koppel read the
names of the then 721 American casualties in Iraq. This was
the day after Paul Wolfowitz had also downsized American
casualties by testifying before Congress that they numbered
only about 500. 

Thanks to Elizabeth Jensen of The Los Angeles Times, who
first broke the story last weekend, we now know that
Sinclair has grander ambitions for the election. It has
ordered all its stations, whose most powerful reach is in
swing states like Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, to
broadcast a "news" special featuring a film, "Stolen
Honor," that trashes Mr. Kerry along the lines of the Swift
Boat Veterans for Truth ads. The film's creator is a man
who spent nearly eight years in the employ of Tom Ridge.
Sinclair has ordered that it be run in prime time during a
specific four nights in late October, when it is likely to
be sandwiched in with network hits like "CSI," "The
Apprentice" and "Desperate Housewives." Democrats are
screaming, but don't expect the Bush apparatchiks at
federal agencies to pursue their complaints as if they were
as serious as a "wardrobe malfunction." A more likely
outcome is that Sinclair, which already reaches 24 percent
of American viewers, will reap the regulatory favors it is
seeking to expand that audience in a second Bush term. 

Like the Nixon administration before it, the Bush
administration arrived at the White House already obsessed
with news management and secrecy. Nixon gave fewer press
conferences than any president since Hoover; Mr. Bush has
given fewer than any in history. Early in the Nixon years,
a special National Press Club study concluded that the
president had instituted "an unprecedented, government-wide
effort to control, restrict and conceal information." Sound
familiar? The current president has seen to it that even
future historians won't get access to papers he wants to
hide; he quietly gutted the Presidential Records Act of
1978, the very reform enacted by Congress as a
post-Watergate antidote to pathological Nixonian secrecy. 

The path of the Bush White House as it has moved from
Agnew-style press baiting to outright assault has also
followed its antecedent. The Nixon administration's first
legal attack on the press, a year before the Watergate
break-in, was its attempt to stop The Times and The
Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers, the
leaked internal Defense Department history of our failure
in Vietnam. Though 9/11 prompted Ari Fleischer's first
effort to warn the media to "watch what they say," it's
failure in Iraq that has pushed the Bush administration
over the edge. It was when Operation Iraqi Freedom was
bogged down early on that it spun the fictional saga of
Jessica Lynch. It's when the percentage of Americans who
felt it was worth going to war in Iraq fell to 50 percent
in the Sept. 2003 Gallup poll, down from 73 that April,
that identically worded letters "signed" by different
soldiers mysteriously materialized in 11 American
newspapers, testifying that security for Iraq's citizens
had been "largely restored." (As David Greenberg writes in
his invaluable "Nixon's Shadow," phony letters to news
outlets were also a favorite Nixon tactic.) The legal
harassment of the press, like the Republican party's
Web-driven efforts to discredit specific journalists even
at non-CBS networks, has escalated in direct ratio to the
war's decline in support. 

"What you're seeing on your TV screens," the president said
when minimizing the Iraq insurgency in May, are "the
desperate tactics of a hateful few." Maybe that's the sunny
news that can be found on a Sinclair station. Now, with our
election less than three weeks away, the bad news coming
out of Iraq everywhere else is a torrent. Reporters at
virtually every news organization describe a downward
spiral so dangerous that they can't venture anywhere in
Iraq without risking their lives. Last weekend marines
spoke openly and by name to Steve Fainaru of The Washington
Post about the quagmire they're witnessing firsthand and
its irrelevance to battling Al Qaeda, whose 9/11 attack
motivated many of them to enlist in the first place. "Every
day you read the articles in the States where it's like,
'Oh, it's getting better and better," said Lance Cpl.
Jonathan Snyder of Gettysburg, Pa. "But when you're here,
you know it's worse every day." Another marine, Lance Cpl.
Alexander Jones of Ball Ground, Ga., told Mr. Fainaru:
"We're basically proving out that the government is wrong.
We're catching them in a lie." Asked if he was concerned
that he and his buddies might be punished for speaking out,
Cpl. Brandon Autin of New Iberia, La., responded: "What are
they going to do - send us to Iraq?" 

What "they" can do is try to intimidate, harass, discredit
and prosecute news organizations that report stories like
this. If history is any guide, and the hubris of
re-election is tossed into the mix, that harrowing drama
can go on for a long time before we get to the feel-good
final act of "All the President's Men." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/arts/17rich.html?ex=1098779080&ei=1&en=09ae0afa23353ca8


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