RICHARD NIXON'S REVENGE

It is amazing to me that conservatives are embracing Nixon again. I am still surprised and a bit amused at how he was invoked by Arnold at the RNC last year.

So the story is that Nixon was just a victim of the free press? Rush Limbaugh and Fox News are the answer?

What a story.

Well if you think about it, Nixon was threatened with impeachment and resigned not because he had anything to do with the Watergate burglery, but because he was accused of knowing about it before he admitted knowing about it. It was the press, ala Bernstein & Woodward et al, that wouldn't leave it alone and exposed this grave sin.

Whatever one thinks about Nixon, compared to sins of former and subsequent presidents, the offense was relatively mild and one that would likely receive condemnation and verbal censure from the press and Congress now, but would not cost a president his position.

It was the first time in history, however, that a conservative president had to deal with a media that had tilted from middle of the road to liberal and zeroed in on an elected official from that perspective. And so it has been for conservative elected officials ever since, much more so than it has been for liberal elected officials.

It is that history that makes the article interesting. It is not intended to be a vindication of Nixon or touting him as any kind of example.

Then your point is?

Im not sure but I havent read anything that excused Rather after the facts were out. His dumass zealotry could have cost Kerry Ohio. One series of lies doesnt wash away the others.

Actually most of the mainstream media did defend Rather or at least refused to condemn him.

most of the mainstream media is conservative and they were on rather from day one. Im talking about the posters on a2k. after the facts were in , everyone was suitably outraged and wanted Rathers head even liberals like me. I dont see Nixon getting any sweet come-uppance from Rather's stupid news tricks. After all, it was the news that brought the entire WAtergate and Agnews Maryland graft mto our attention.
Nixon's legacy shall forever be disgrace and Agnew was a hack who traded favors and cash.
Rather should be drummed out or else CBS will forever wear this incident as a permanent scar.The fact that they are stepping so lightly and that Rather is still around, I find distasteful.
I put CBS in the same partisan pile as Fox and its own blindly conservative views.

Since when is Dan Rather considered a 'liberal'? Peter Jennings, maybe, but Rather? I've always thought of him as somewhat right of center. The fact that he also seems to have no love for George Bush merely shows that his IQ is somewaht higher than I once would have given him credit for. But the anti-Bush gaffe was simply an example of atrociously bad journalism. Rather should have borne a lot more of the burden and responsibility for that than he did.

Rather had no love for Reagan, George Bush the first or George W Bush and 60 Minutes has been fairly anti-war, anti-religion, anti-basic-conservative-values. Dan seemed to think Bill Clinton was just fine however. All this combined makes him very much a liberal in my book.

Farmerman says most of the mainstream media is conservative which causes me to believe he has lived the last 30 years using oil lamps in a cave somewhere. Most talk radio, at least successful talk radio, is conservative and Fox News television tilts right, but that's about it as far as mainstream media goes. Everybody else tends to effectively beat the liberal drum.

Apart from that, I agree with Merry Andrew re Rather bearing more of the burden and responsibility except that my major was journalism and I have worked in the business. That was no gaffe. It was intentional. Given the evidence and testimony they had prior to running the piece, there is no way they can call it a 'mistake'.

It's all good though. The liberal media's monopoly has been seriously eroded, and exposure of that kind of dishonesty only hastens that process. Maybe the pendulum is swinging back sufficiently that we will actually have reporters reporting the news--ALL the news--instead of indoctrinating the public with a particular ideology and/or point of view loosely based on current events.

It is interesting that you link anti-war with anti-religion.

War and religion seem to go together, don't they...

So, where is the Mainstream media...

The Mainstream media is right of what I consider center. I would add the triumphant reporting of 63% voter turnout in the Iraqi election with no way to factcheck as a prime example.

Of course the fact that I think the mainstream media is to the right of center says more about me than it does about the media.

Likewise that Foxfyre thinks the media is liberal says a lot about her.

In my more intelligent moments, this argument seems a bit silly.

Nixon had more than Watergate to answer to -- it was like getting Al Capone for tax evasion.

That is true LW. Nixon seriously pushed the constitutional boundaries. Still, we have had a lot worse presidents than he was. And it literally was the media that brought him down.

Labeling


You're seeing ONLY what you want to see. You're labeling and disparaging because doing so promotes your agenda of bashing people you disagree with by labeling them as "liberal" or "liberal drum-beaters" and elevating the people you agree with by labeling them "conservative" and the unfortunate victims of the media.

The media reports the news. [PERIOD] You may want the media to report only those things that reflect favorably on the politicians / persons upon whom you've placed your stamp of approval, but anything newsworthy is going to be reported whether you like it or not.

I'm aggravated by the way issues are avoided by merely screaming foul: "DAMN ACTIVIST LIBERALS." End of argument -- no substance. The name calling is OLD and WORN and done to death. Come up with something new.

No foxy, he broke the constitutional boundaries. I suggest you read All The Presidents Men if you haven't already. He singlehandedly caused the media to tilt left.

I have read All the Presidents Men Panzade and probably most of the other books condemning Nixon. Nixon had zero impact on the media tilting left. That was from an entirely different source--it just started getting wound up good in the Nixon administration. Meanwhile Debra, while no doubt she is very well versed in the law, demonstrates almost no knowledge re the inner workings of the media and a great lack of knowledge of the many studies that have been done re media bias. Some of those have been posted here on A2K just this week.

This is kinda interesting...long as we're discussing the media.

http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050205/COLUMNIST14/502050330/-1/NEWS17

Media are easy marks

HISTORY repeats itself, Karl Marx said, "first as tragedy, second as farce."

In the days immediately following Iraq's historic election, two videotapes from "insurgent" groups were distributed to the news media. One purported to show an American soldier being held hostage. The second purported to show that a British C-130 transport aircraft, which crashed on election day, had been shot down by a surface-to-air missile.

The "American soldier" was Cody, a G.I. Joe action figure. This is obvious from the picture, but the Associated Press and CNN bit hard.

The cause of the C-130 crash is still being investigated. But experts at Jane's Defence Weekly have doubts about the claim of "insurgents."

"The missile footage has just been grafted onto the front," said editor Peter Felstead. "And it looks like a surface to surface missile to me."

Other experts note the wreckage footage was shot in daylight, while the C-130 crashed just before nightfall. It is highly improbable "insurgents" could have been on the scene before the sun set, and there were British soldiers all around the next morning.

Media outlets that were quick to report the insurgents' claims had little to say about the hoaxes. Nor did they speculate on what the hoaxes might mean.

Last Sunday's election demonstrated the massive support of the Iraqi people for democracy, and the relative impotence of the "insurgents." The "river of blood" they promised was barely a trickle.

Eight suicide bombers killed 36 Iraqis besides themselves. Of these, seven were foreigners (six Saudis and a Sudanese). The only Iraqi suicide bomber was a child suffering from Down syndrome. That is, as the Iraqi writer Nibras Kazimi put it, "eight against 8 million." And on what basis, one might ask, do the media call seven foreign terrorists "insurgents"?

The terrorists had to do something to revive their plummeting prestige. That they resorted to clumsy frauds is not a sign of strength.

"The captured toy story could be pretty significant," said the Web logger John Hinderaker (Power Line). "The terrorists need, more than anything else, to be seen as awesome, terrible figures. If they stop inspiring fear, they are finished. So the one thing they cannot stand is ridicule. Their pathetic effort to pass a doll off as a captured American soldier will [make] them laughingstocks throughout the Arab world."

It's also interesting that the terrorists turned to the news media to recover lost momentum. Journalists who fell for these hoaxes may merely be idiots, and their silence about the implications of the hoaxes may simply be the by-product of embarrassment. But more to the point, why are major media so quick to disseminate anything that a terrorist group, or purported terrorist group, releases? For the terrorist, it is like being given millions of dollars in free advertising.

The major media have from the beginning exaggerated the strength and popularity of those they mislabel "insurgents," to the disgust of American soldiers.

"I'm tired of hearing the crap, the whole, well 'We are barely hanging on, we're losing, the insurgency is growing,'?" Marine Sgt. Kevin Lewis told Dan Rather, in Iraq for the election. "It's just a small amount of people out there causing the problems. It's a small number, and we're killing them."

The scandalous remarks of Eason Jordan, CNN's top news executive, last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and the failure of the major media to report them suggest the distortions are deliberate.

Mr. Jordan told a panel that the U.S. military had killed a dozen journalists in Iraq, and that they had been deliberately targeted. When challenged, Mr. Jordan could provide no evidence to support the charge, and subsequently lied about having made it, though the record shows he had made a similar charge a few months before, and also earlier had falsely accused the Israeli military of targeting journalists.

Mr. Jordan's slander has created a firestorm in the blogosphere, but has yet to be mentioned in the "mainstream" media.

Gee, I wonder why not.

It is my understanding that democratic headquarters at Watergate were indeed burglarized. Whether the media reported the crime or not, it happened. Did it not? How can you claim that Nixon's downfall was due to media bias? Didn't he have any personal responsibility in the matter that filtered into his decision to resign the presidency?

It is my understanding that George W. Bush used political connections to secure a position in the Texas Air National Guard rather than risk being drafted and sent to Vietnam. True or not? What does your agenda against media "bias" have to do with that? I'll tell you:

You, and others like you, are using the excuse of "media bias" as a means to deflect people's attention away from the true issues.

You can claim that I am ignorant == or other people who do not swallow your studies are ignorant == but facts are facts and the media reports the facts == like it or not.

The Democratic headquarters were indeed burglarized, the persons who did the burglary were caught, convicted, and sent to prison. Nixon did not provide any pardons and all persons knowledgeable of the circumstances of the event, including those who went to prison, asserted he neither ordered the burglary nor did he know about it in advance of the burglary.

What happened, via the 'secret' recording system in the Nixon office was the implication that Nixon was told about the burglary at some point following the burglary but when questioned about it he denied knowing anything about it. Later when he acknowledged that he had been briefed, somebody recalled that earlier incident when he denied knowledge. That was the crime he was accused of: a lie about when he first knew of the burglary.

Most believe he probably did tell the lie. Few believe it was to obstruct justice or coverup a crime but was one of those knee jerk responses when you're first dealing with something pretty serious.

Bernstein and Woodward of the Washington Post took on this 'crime' as an investigative report that started turning up other less-than-attractive qualities of Nixon and a mostly liberal anti-war media jumped on the wagon to launch an unprecedented intense, prolonged, and acid criticism of a sitting president. For the first time journalism ethics were set aside while speculation, insinuation, suggestion made it to the front pages whether or not there were any facts to back them up.

But it was the "what did the president know and when did it know it" that was billed as the most serious accusation. And as the tapes supported that accusation, that was the one touted as obstruction of justice.

Nixon was no saint for sure, but neither was he guilty of being the 'crook' as the liberal press, including Woodward and Berstein, painted him.

That's why Buchanan used a smiling Nixon as the metaphor to illustrate a liberal press that is finally losing its clout.

And if you doubt that the mainstream press tilts mostly left Debra, you certainly can google up the many polls testifying to that fact or look them up where I and others have posted them on numerous threads here on A2K. If you don't wish to believe it though, don't look it up. It won't change the facts.

If you do want accurate information start with Timber's post made just the other day here:
http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=44511&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=190

Christ, if the media dressed in storm-troopers uniforms, mobilised a fleet of Panzers and invaded Poland that still wouldn't be 'conservative' enough for some. The media is not a coherent group and it's biggest crime is to go along with the 'party line' whenever possible (or face the consequences).

Remember at the beginning of the Iraq invasion, Rupert Murdoch was up there, 'This is a good thing' and 'The cost of oil will drop, it's like a tax-cut for all Americans'. Worthless, self-important old white man talk - that's the only alternative to this alleged 'liberal media bias'.

I don't disagree with much of that Panzade except that Haldeman indeed intended to stonewall the investigation, but I have never been convinced that Nixon was involved any more than that initial first lie. In that era, however, the lie was enough to sink him especially if public opinion could be turned against him.

As for the infamous tapes themselves, there was a legitimate issue of executive privilege involved, the same executive privilege protecting presidential papers, etc. that has been evolked at some point by every president in my memory (and that is becoming quite a long memory).

I watched virtually every minute of the Watergate hearings. And while John Dean told more of the truth than some of the others, I will never believe that he told it exactly the way it went down either. There are still almost as many questions remaining of that incident as remain re the Kennedy assasination. It's just that Watergate is no longer as interesting or provocative as some scandals have been.