New Book On Media Myths

April 11, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, News media, Presidents, Richard Nixon, TV News Personalities, U.S. History, Watergate | 1 Comment 

W. Joseph Campbell is a professor at American University School of Communications. Before he entered academia he spent 20 years as a journalist, often traveling and working abroad (in the days when major American newspapers and magazines could afford to send a fair number of reporters overseas).

He has a new book coming out in July, Getting It Wrong, published by the University of California Press. It focuses on ten major myths about the Fourth Estate that have arisen in the last century or so. The Washington Post website’s “Political Bookworm” discusses three of these: that the Spanish-American War was mainly the creation of William Randolph Hearst; that Edward R. Murrow, when he criticized Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy on his TV show See It Now, was the first major journalist to criticize McCarthy’s tactics (when several reporters and columnists were already doing so regularly); and that the thirty-seventh President was removed from office entirely through the efforts of Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman and the late Jason Robards Jr:

Katharine Graham, The Post’s publisher during the Watergate period, said in 1997: “Sometimes people accuse us of bringing down a president, which of course we didn’t do. The processes that caused [Nixon's] resignation were constitutional.” She was right, but the complexities of Watergate are not readily recalled these days. What does stand out is a media-centric interpretation that the dogged reporting of Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought Nixon down.

Diane Sawyer To Become ABC World News Anchor

September 2, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under News media, Obama administration, Presidents, Richard Nixon, TV News, TV News Personalities | 3 Comments 

In 1868, Benjamin Disraeli, upon achieving the office of British Prime Minister, at the age of 63 and thirty-one years after first winning election to the House of Commons, said: “I have reached the top of the greasy pole.”

Disraeli was much admired by Richard Nixon for his determination and persistence, and I have the feeling that somewhere RN is giving the thumbs-up to Diane Sawyer, his former assistant and collaborator on his memoirs (and also Ron Ziegler’s assistant at the Nixon White House press office), who – a few weeks after turning 64, and thirty-one years after entering the field of broadcast news at CBS – will replace Charles Gibson as the host of ABC World News, starting next January.

It’s been a long time coming. Back in 1993 when Connie Chung briefly co-anchored with Dan Rather at CBS, network insiders wondered if Sawyer, who had joined ABC in 1989, might one day replace Peter Jennings. But following Jennings’s death in 2005, ABC instead named Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff as co-anchors. Within a matter of weeks, Woodruff was gravely injured by a roadside bomb while covering the Iraq war, and for several months afterwards, Vargas alternately co-anchored with Charles Gibson and Sawyer, the co-hosts of Good Morning America.  At the end of May 2006, Vargas resigned, and Gibson replaced her, with Sawyer staying on as host of GMA.

At the time, there were reports that Gibson would retire at the end of 2007 and Sawyer would replace him. But as the 2008 presidential campaign picked up steam, Gibson elected to stay for at least another year – and then for a year longer, to cover the start of the Obama Administration. This was not completely to the liking of ABC News’s top brass; after leading the ratings in 2006 and 2007, Gibson was overtaken by Brian Williams at NBC. But now, at the age of sixty-six, the retirement of the ABC anchor has been announced by the network.

How long Sawyer will remain in the anchor’s chair is hard to guess. Traditionally, evening network news anchors, no matter how successful, have retired on reaching or approaching the age of sixty-five; Dan Rather, who lasted at CBS Evening News until he was seventy-three, and Gibson are the only exceptions. Sawyer’s sixty-fifth birthday will come in December 2010, less than a year into her stint as anchorperson. But if she can improve on ABC’s declining ratings and bring them somewhere close to the level of NBC’s, she probably can stay on longer, and perhaps can outlast Katie Couric, who’s struggling at CBS.

Rick Perlstein On The Town Hall Demonstrators

August 16, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Bush Administration, Congress, Double Standard Paranoia Quotient, George W. Bush, Healthcare, New Media, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixonland Nitpicks, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Public Opinion, Richard Nixon, Sarah Palin, TV News Personalities, U.S. History | 9 Comments 

A little over a year ago, when Rick Perlstein published his mammoth study of “the American berserk” – the original subtitle of Nixonland – in the years between 1965 and 1972, he concluded his 748-page saga of heated hardhats and howling hippies (or was it the other way around?) by arguing that the culture and political wars of the late Sixties and early Seventies had not only not died, but had never really gone away.

Perlstein maintained that the 37th President’s legacy to the nation was “a notion that there are two kinds of Americans: one kind viewing themselves as “people of faith,” patriots, “nonshouters,” and viewing the other kind – “liberals,” “cosmopolitans,” “intellectuals” – as “un-Americans, anti-Christians, amoralists, aliens [Perlstein's emphasis].”

The book’s final paragraphs read:

Do Americans not hate each other enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political and cultural disagreements? It would be hard to argue they do not.

How did Nixonland end? It has not ended yet.

When Nixonland appeared, several reviewers criticized that penultimate statement, and said that Perlstein clearly was mistaken to think that the passions of that time still ran as strong.

But that was last year, and now that many of this month’s “town halls” about the proposed health-care legislation across the country have featured very heated rhetoric, not only at the meetings themselves, but among the crowds assembled outside the venues, Perlstein has written an op-ed for the Washington Post that makes it clear that he considers himself vindicated in his argument.

Now, anyone following the town hall meetings closely knows that many speakers at them have been as fervent about single-payer care and the proposed legislation’s failure to incorporate it, though not as visible in TV sound bites as the ones who have been waving pocket copies of the Constitution and arguing against the bill’s big-government tendencies.

But the leftist voices at the meetings count for nothing where Perlstein is concerned. What he sees is nothing less than the return of the right-wing fervor that swept through parts of America during the Kennedy years. And the op-ed’s title, though probably the work of a dependably liberal Post staffer, sums up its attitude toward the liberatarian and conservative voices at these gatherings: “In America, Crazy Is A Pre-Existing Condition.”

Yes, all the objections raised to the mammoth scope of the bill, and to the possibility that it marks the start of a path which will see Americans turn over as large a percentage of their income to the state as was the case in Sweden at the height of its cradle-to-grave system – or perhaps more – yes, all the worries raised by hard-working citizens, in Perlstein’s opinion, are on a par with the fears of almost 50 years ago that fluoride in drinking water would brainwash children into being Communists, or whatever members of the John Birch Society were supposed to have believed in those days.

(I have to admit that sometimes fluoride does worry me a bit. The other night I was gargling with that new Listerine “Whitening Formula,” or whatever it’s called, in which the active ingredient is sodium fluoride. On the back of the bottle I noticed an instruction not to drink or eat anything for 30 minutes after using it. If the idea is to keep fluoride out of my system, then why would it be in my drinking water? But then again, my dentist tells me there’s been an upsurge in cavities because kids don’t drink as much tap water as they once did. End of digression.)

In the op-ed, Perlstein states:

Liberal power of all sorts induces an organic and crazy-making panic in a considerable number of Americans, while people with no particular susceptibility to existential terror — powerful elites — find reason to stoke and exploit that fear. And even the most ideologically fair-minded national media will always be agents of cosmopolitanism: something provincials fear as an outside elite intent on forcing different values down their throats.

Why, of course, “crazy-making panic” is endemic only to conservative Americans, otherwise defined, in the world of the Post, as those people who still insist on regarding Sarah Palin as a political force even after her daughter’s former fiance has started dating Kathy Griffin. Those thousands upon thousands (or maybe millions upon millions) of words, many of them still online, which fretted about Guantanamo in the Bush years presaging internment camps for the young and disaffected in the United States? That was legitimate political discourse, nothing irrational about it.

(As is, presumably, the post at a left-leaning site I read the other day that compared the present political situation in America to that of Germany in about 1930. Anyone for Obama as the new Heinrich Bruening?)

Although, as I write, it will be several more hours before Perlstein’s piece appears in the antiquated ink-on-paper format, it has already stirred up several dozen responses from across the political spectrum. Matt Yglesias has one of the most thoughtful posts about it on the Left. He focuses on these remarks of Perlstein’s:

You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to “debunk” claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president’s program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn’t adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of “conservative claims” to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as “extremist” — out of bounds.

As opposed to the “in-bounds” rhetoric of the SDS and Black Panthers, which got substantial on-air attention. But let’s look at today’s situation. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when President Obama held his town hall meeting about health care this week, William Kostric, a self-described “free stater,” was spotted in the crowd by an MSNBC crew with a sign reading “Time To Water The Tree” (it referred to a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson, which concludes “with the blood of patriots and tyrants”) – and a gun strapped to his leg, which he had a permit to carry.

It turned out that Kostric had not simply brought the weapon to provide a headache to Secret Service personnel who had to worry about any individuals who might not be carrying weapons simply to “make a statement.” He meant for the gun to attract media attention and stir curiosity about what he wanted – which turned out to be, presumably like all the “crazies” Perlstein describes, to get on TV.

And which program finally extended an invitation to appear? Was it Glenn Beck’s show, or Sean Hannity’s, or The O’Reilly Factor, or any of the other shows which, as every schoolperson in Santa Monica or Marin County knows, are diabolically constructed by “elites” to inflame the heartland? No, it was Hardball with Chris Matthews, a show which is not usually viewed as a hotbed for “crazies.”. I assume that Kostric chose Hardball because MSNBC was the channel that gave him visibility. (He also appeared on Alex Jones’s radio talk show, a venue more along the lines of his personal views, but certainly not the creation of any media “elite.” Indeed, Michael Savage, singled out as a rabble-rouser by Perlstein, has not had Kostric appear on his program.)

Perlstein doesn’t seem to realize that most of those who are concerned about the drawbacks of the health-care bill are voicing heartfelt and rational objections. They know that every citizen of the country already is shouldering a share of the national debt equivalent to nearly a fifth of a million dollars and they hope that there’s some way to keep it from going to a quarter of a million. They were not happy with the idea of a President doing his best Lyndon Johnson imitation and insisting that Congress pass over a thousand pages of slapped-together taxes and regulations before the end of last month, before it became clear that would not happen. (And compared to the versions of the health-care bill now in the works, even the most hastily drafted bills of LBJ’s Great Society look like they were penned by James Madison or George Mason.)

But that doesn’t matter to Perlstein; for him, “the tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America’s flora.” However, he’s not going unchallenged about this. One of the more impressive retorts so far has come from Stephen Bainbridge, a professor at UCLA’s law school. The professor sums up the op-ed as follows: “we lefties are rational, nice, kind people who are puzzled by conservative crazies. We’ve got no crazies on our side, of course. Just nice rational people like me.” Then Bainbridge lists some “rational” responses to perceived threats from the Right by left-wing organizations, starting with the Weathermen.

Bainbridge’s post got this prompt response from Perlstein, who says: “I hate the Weathermen. Read my book. So does everyone I know on the left.”

Well, it may be that everyone Rick knows on the Left deplores what the Weathermen, as a whole, became, or some of its actions. But individual former members of the Weathermen, whether or not they still think they were justified in what they did, certainly are not hated by many of his colleagues – indeed, quite the opposite, as Bill Ayers’s recent well-attended book tour demonstrates.

And, before I forget: does Perlstein mention Richard Nixon in his article? Yes, he does, classing RN as one of the “vultures” who exploited the fears sprouting from the “tree of crazy” – and, somehow, managed, by doing so, to secure a 49-state victory in 1972.

With a little help from 47,168,710 “crazies.” Count ‘em.

McGovern-Cronkite ‘72?

July 20, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Apollo XI XLth, Democratic Party, In Memoriam, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, TV News, TV News Personalities, U.S. History, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

A few minutes ago the fortieth anniversary arrived of the moment when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface. For most American TV viewers that awe-inspiring night, the voice commenting on the images that were seen over the next several hours belonged to Walter Cronkite of CBS, who died on Friday. His wholehearted enthusiasm for the space program and its accomplishments was deep and lasted throughout his life; in his 1996 autobiography A Reporter’s Life he cites the Apollo missions and the opening to China as among the accomplishments during the presidency of Richard Nixon that he admired the most.

However, Cronkite did not like what he described as the participation of RN and Vice President Spiro Agnew in “a conspiracy to destroy the press’s credibility.” On the air, as anchorman for the CBS Evening News, he did not offer an opinion directly on Agnew’s 1970 speeches criticizing television coverage of the Nixon White House or criticisms leveled by other figures in the Administration; this was left to Eric Severeid.

But in private, Cronkite, a thoroughgoing liberal, found much to dislike about the Nixon policies. And in some parts of New York City and within the Beltway, his attitudes were known.

Last year, as Barack Obama looked over his vice-presidential possibilities, former Senator George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, published an op-ed in the New York Times reminiscing about the hours after he was chosen by his party’s convention in Miami Beach, as the delegates waited for the other half of the ticket to be selected.

McGovern says that he had already been turned down by former Vice-President Hubert Humphrey and Sen. Edmund Muskie, whom he had defeated in the sometimes bitterly contested primaries. After receiving the nomination, his next choice was Sen. Ted Kennedy, who declined, but suggested Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri instead.

McGovern then moved on to Sargent Shriver, but learned that the former Peace Corps director was in the Soviet Union and could not be reached before 4 pm, when the choice had to be announced. He then asked Sen. Walter Mondale of Minnesota (who would become Jimmy Carter’s running-mate four years later), but Mondale declined, also recommending Eagleton as the nominee.

McGovern’s next choice was Sen. Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, who answered that although he would be honored to be the first Jewish nominee on a major-party ticket, he was about to get married and could not juggle a honeymoon with a national campaign. (This brings to mind the 2004 race, in which some of the supporters of Rep. Dennis Kucinich, still a bachelor in those days, were actively seeking a spouse for him in the event that he got out of the single digits in the polls.)

McGovern writes that he then telephoned Mayor Kevin White of Boston, who accepted at once, but was then vetoed by John Kenneth Galbraith (a member of the convention’s Massachusetts delegation), who claimed there would be a walkout if White was selected.

It was at this point that Frank Mankiewicz, the senior member of the McGovern inner circle, remarked: “Walter Cronkite was just named the most trusted man in America. What about him?”

The idea was tossed back and forth between those in the room, who, besides McGovern and Mankiewicz, included campaign manager Gary Hart and pollster Pat Caddell. Nowadays, when Tom Brokaw is routinely mentioned as possible Presidential timber should he ever care to emerge from retirement, and Rush Limbaugh, every four years, has to remind his legions of Dittoheads that he is disinclined to move from Florida to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue “because I can’t afford the pay cut,” it’s hard to recall a time when newspaper publishers like Frank Knox and William Randolph Hearst were the only figures in the media who received serious consideration for the White House (or, as in the case of Warren G. Harding, were actually elected).

But in 1972, it was less usual to imagine TV personalities in electoral office at a high level. True, Ronald Reagan, after years on G.E. Theater and Death Valley Days, was the sitting Governor of California, but at the time McGovern was making his choice no liberal thought that Reagan could ever reach the Oval Office. So the nominee and his associates set aside the choice of Cronkite for the vice-presidency as unrealistic.

But, says McGovern: “I later learned from Walter that he would have accepted. I wish I had chosen him.” Instead, after being turned down by Sen. Gaylord Nelson, he chose Eagleton, who later was forced to quit the ticket, then Shriver.

The idea of Cronkite being on the 1972 Democratic ticket is still an intriguing one for connoisseurs of alternate history. All through McGovern’s progress to the nomination, it was clear that despite being a South Dakotan he was having trouble appealing to middle-American voters – as Nixon staffers Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman would say, he didn’t “play in Peoria.” Could Cronkite, who’d spent his childhood in Missouri (and his adolescence and young manhood in Texas, which would have been of no small consequence were he on the ticket), have been able to reach those voters?

There’s also the matter of Watergate. In September and October of 1972, McGovern often would discuss the articles appearing in the Washington Post about the break-in and its background, but the reaction from the electorate was tepid and indifferent. That October, Cronkite devoted over half of a CBS Evening News broadcast to Watergate, but that presentation had little impact. Had Uncle Walter been able to cast aside an impartial tone and appear in commercials speaking of Watergate in the way he spoke, in 1968, of what he saw as the failure of the Vietnam War, what would have been the impact of his words?

It seems unlikely that McGovern could have prevailed even with such a revered figure on the ticket – RN’s popularity was high in the summer and fall of ‘72 not just because of his trips to China and the Soviet Union, but because the economy was (temporarily) thriving. But undoubtedly the Democratic ticket would have carried more states than just Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. Cronkite’s presence could have secured the Northeast, California and the Northwest, and the states that were part of what was just beginning to be called the Rust Belt.

Here, it should be mentioned that the McGovern camp’s contemplation of Cronkite was not the first time that he’d been mooted as a political prospect. In 1967, Sen. Robert Kennedy reportedly asked Cronkite if he’d be interested in challenging the other New York senator, Republican Jacob Javits. And in the spring of 1980, Rep. John Anderson, as he dropped out of the GOP presidential primaries and prepared to launch an independent bid, let it be known that he would like Cronkite as his running-mate, since it was already known that the newscaster, under the policy then in effect at CBS, would soon have to retire. But Cronkite, according to an article appearing in Time, dismissed the notion:

“Oh, yes, I’ve daydreamed about [running for office],” Cronkite says. “As I’ve daydreamed about sailing around the world—or rather, not as much, because I have thought of sailing around the world.”

His thinking goes like this: “Obviously anybody in any profession has a perfect right to get into politics. But one shouldn’t as a journalist serve two masters. There’s a basic conflict of interest—it’s a bad idea. I’ve been approached by both sides. Some are sincere, but others are flatly cynical, wanting to take advantage of a name that requires no buildup, no posters. Popularity on TV might have great appeal, but I don’t have any policy on how to run the country.”

So it’s clear that when Cronkite later told McGovern that he would have accepted a spot on the Democratic ticket in 1972, he was speaking with the benefit of hindsight, after the major part of his career in the media was finished, and that it isn’t that easy to assume that he would have made the jump, not long after the halfway point of his tenure telling us the way it was. Still, the two names on a tin button seem to linger in the mind’s eye.

Is Sarah Palin In Or Out Of The Picture?

July 10, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, News media, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, Sarah Palin, TV News Personalities, U.S. History | 4 Comments 

On November 11, 1962, five days after Richard Nixon told an audience of reporters that “you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference,” ABC News aired a thirty-minute TV special titled The Political Obituary Of Richard Nixon, hosted by veteran broadcaster Howard K. Smith. Among those featured in the broadcast were then-Rep. Gerald R. Ford and RN’s longtime advisor Murray Chotiner, both of whom expressed their regret that his political career had concluded; former Rep. Jerry Voorhis, who mused bitterly about his defeat by Nixon in 1946; and Alger Hiss, the former State Department official who had been convicted and jailed for perjury after a House investigation led by Nixon (and whose appearance on this program led to ABC’s switchboard being deluged by angry callers).

None of the four expressed any doubt that Nixon had, in fact, given his press conference and was gone from the political stage. Yet a little over five years later not only was he back on it, but well on his way to the White House.

It’s therefore rather amusing that last Sunday, although not using the same title as the 1962 show, ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos featured a 20-minute panel discussion about the political future of soon-to-be-former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin featuring the show’s host; columnists George Will and Tony Blankley; former Bush strategist Matthew Dowd; journalist Cynthia Tucker; and Todd Purdum, whose article in the current issue of Vanity Fair is thought in some circles to have helped trigger Palin’s announcement of her impending resignation.

With the exception of Blankley, who argued that the resignation freed Palin to make a greater impact in political life in “the lower 48″ and to strengthen her following, and a rather cautious Stephanopoulos, the panel seemed to take it for granted that the career of the 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee has ended. Naturally, Nixon’s “last press conference” of 1962 was brought up; Blankley cited it as evidence that it’s unwise to count Palin out.

All through this week, the division of opinion has continued. The Washington Post ran two columns, side by side, by William Kristol and Richard Cohen. Cohen’s column was couched entirely in terms of the menace that might have been, treating the end of Palin’s career as a given, while Kristol, who played an important role in bringing the Alaska Governor to the notice of Sen. John McCain as a possible running-mate, made it plain that he doesn’t think she’s in the wilderness yet (other than in the literal sense, “way up north” as the late Johnny Horton would say).

As the days have gone by, several more voices have expressed the view that the political picture for Palin is rosier than many people claim. Interestingly, two of those arguing the case for her continued relevance have ties to the Nixon era. In NewsMax.com, Roger Stone, who served his political apprenticeship in the 1972 Nixon campaign, and who has probably studied the details of RN’s re-emergence from 1962 to 1968 as carefully as any historian, explains why he thinks Palin’s resignation puts her in a stronger position than before.

And in The Fix, Chris Cillizza’s often insightful column in the Washington Post, Fred Malek, a premier GOP strategist and fundraiser (and Nixon White House veteran), makes the case for Palin’s continued importance for 2012. Cillizza writes:

Malek is quick to note that he has absolutely no idea whether Palin will ultimately run for president and, even if she does, he isn’t pledging his support for her.

But, he does have some advice for the soon-to-be former governor if she wants to continue to keep her name in the mix as a national figure and/or potential presidential nominee.

Malek believes Palin should keep her hometown of Wasilla as a home base and make two of three trips a month out of the state. Those trips should include appearances for candidates — Malek said former Virginia state attorney general Bob McDonnell is very interested in Palin coming to the state — fundraising for 2010 candidates, a paid speech or two and perhaps an event for a charity of her choosing.

Should Palin really want to run for president, she would need to get “more serious on substantive stuff,” hire a speech writer, pen an occasional opinion piece to flesh out her world view and make a foreign trip (Palin recently traveled to Kosovo) every six months or so, according to Malek.

What is most striking about Malek’s remarks is his observation that Bob McDonnell, locked in a hard-fought race for the governorship of Virginia, wants Palin to visit the state. Her rallies in the Old Dominion in 2008 were heavily attended and high-spirited. Her image as a moose-hunting mom also helps in a state which has one of the highest numbers of National Rifle Association members per capita in the country.

Therefore, despite what a lot of the pundits say, I’m thinking that we haven’t heard the last of the Wasilla wonder yet.

John Dean And The Tapes

July 10, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under John Dean At The Nixon Library, News media, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon Library events, Nixon in the News, TV News Personalities, The New Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate, Yorba Linda | 5 Comments 

No, not those tapes.

A little over two weeks ago I posted about one of the webpages of the groundbreaking and very informative nixontapes.org site run by Luke Nichter, an assistant professor of history at Tarleton State University in Texas. This page, at the time I posted, included links to two audio files in which John W. Dean III, White House counsel during the Nixon administration, was featured.

In one file, from a recording of a telephone conversation made in 1989, Dean could be heard explaining that when writing his book about Watergate, Blind Ambition, “I never actually went back and re-read my [Senate Watergate Committee] testimony.” This was by way of explaining why some passages in the book described events in a way somewhat different from what Dean told the Committee two years earlier. A second audio file was an excerpt from a recording made of Dean’s appearance last month at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, to promote the reissue (with a lengthy new afterword) of Blind Ambition.

However, if anyone goes to that part of nixontapes.org now, he or she will find a notice from Professor Nichter stating that these sound files have been removed as a result of a notice from Dean threatening legal action if they remained on the site. (However, the 1989 conversation can still be heard at watergate.com, the site founded by Silent Coup co-author Len Colodny.)

An article at FoxNews.com by Joseph Abrams delineates the situation further. “I merely wanted to bring these contradictions to light and thought I was doing a service, but Dean was absolutely mortified when he found out that I had these materials,” Professor Nichter explains, and notes that his modestly funded site does not have the resources to contest Dean in court.

Indeed, Dean’s previous legal actions against the authors and publisher of Silent Coup and Watergate figure-turned-radio host G. Gordon Liddy have made some journalists nervous. Jim Hougan, whose 1984 book Secret Agenda was the first work to raise substantial questions about Dean’s role in Watergate, refused to comment to Abrams at all about Dean.

But Fox News Washington correspondent James Rosen, author of the 2008 biography of John Mitchell The Strong Man, which contains the most meticulously documented and groundbreaking research into Dean’s role in Watergate to see print thus far, has not been cowed. He told Abrams:

“My book speaks for itself, and I think it’s noteworthy that Dean has entirely avoided engaging its substance. Dean himself is well aware that his historical reputation has suffered enormously in the last two decades, and so he resorts to frivolous litigation and bullying tactics to rehabilitate himself. Not since Albert Speer [Hitler's architectural and technological mastermind] has a historical figure so assiduously used his post-prison writings to muddy and distort the historical record of the events in which he was culpable.”

Although Dean was one of the younger figures to be involved in the Watergate scandal, he is 70 now, so one wonders for how much longer his story of what happened will continue to go unchallenged by many journalists and historians.

Journalism 101 With Bob Woodward

June 30, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under New Media, News media, TV News Personalities, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

Youtube is setting up a kind of journalism school of the internet, featuring clips in which various eminences of the Fourth Estate attempt to explain their profession in the space of five or six minutes. The project is being undertaken with the cooperation of many of America’s surviving dailies, and the “faculty” includes many names not widely known outside their particular cities except by their peers in the profession.

But some of the names that have been recruited for the project so far are known from coast to coast, and beyond: Arianna Huffington, Tavis Smiley, Katie Couric….and Pulitzer-winning Bob Woodward. Woodward’s clip is chock-full of old photos of himself, Carl Bernstein and Ben Bradlee striking the poses familiar to all students of the cinema of the late Alan J. Pakula). Over these images, the reporter’s voiceover describes how he got started breaking local stories, until the day he and his partner Carl came across a “metro” subject that, well, jes’ grew.

It all makes one wonder when the Youtube academy will include a clip in which Bernstein offers his sage reminiscences about the art of ordering Brandy Alexanders at just the right moment when investigating a sizzling story in mixed company, back in the days when the art of journalism involved far more than poking around with a computer.

Paging The Hardball Desk

April 10, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Democratic Party, Media, News media, Presidents, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, TV News Personalities, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

At the website of the magazine Foreign Policy, David J. Rothkopf, a Washington-based consultant and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has written about “Five Books That Haven’t Been Written Yet” (but, he continues, “ought to be”). Four of these titles are:

Carla [Bruni] And I: The Early Years

A School For The Differently Humor-Enabled (about the school attended by Mr. Rothkopf’s daughters, which recently staged Mel Brooks’s The Producers, complete with the “Springtime For Hitler” extravaganza but without the swastikas)

Did The News Media Die Or Commit Suicide?

and The Takeover: Goldman Sachs And The Leveraged Buyout Of America.

But it was something Mr. Rothkopf said in his description of his fifth desired title, America’s Real First Family: The Daleys Of Chicago that caught my eye. After referring to Richard Daley’s role in the 1960 presidential election, he adds this parenthetical aside:

It would also be great to see a side-by-side comparison of say John Kennedy and Richard Nixon that would offer a fair evaluation of who really best exemplified the American dream of making it on one’s own, who actually committed the greater crimes in pursuit of their political futures and who actually was the better president. Of all these books…this last Kennedy vs. Nixon idea is the one least likely to actually get written given the machinery that would shut it down.

It’s been 13 years since Kennedy And Nixon by Chris Matthews was published, a book which went a long way toward making readers think about those questions (and answering them, to the degree the archival record permitted at the time), and in the years since then many, many documents have become public which would be invaluable in the writing of another such volume. It’s true that the most recent crop of Kennedy-themed books seeing the presses this year and next – spurred by the illness of Sen. Edward Kennedy – seem as if they’ll have a hagiographic tone, by and large. But not long after that the 100th birthday of RN will be approaching, so it may be the right time for a book such as Mr. Rothkopf describes.

Stewart Vs Cramer: The Latest Round

March 14, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Economic issues, Media, Money, News media, TV News Personalities, economy | 3 Comments 

Earlier this week, as noted in TNN’s Featured Articles section, Jim Cramer of CNBC wrote a column for Mainstreet.com defending himself from criticisms leveled by The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart regarding the overly rosy economic forecasts he made in the year before the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers heralded economic collapse across the board – a year which, our leading economists tell us, actually represented the opening phase in the ongoing recession.

Stewart’s response was to have Cramer on his show last Thursday. The host grilled his guest for over 20 brutal minutes, in a performance many have since compared with Mike Wallace in his heyday. Clips from the show have been flooding Youtube and other sites ever since, and Stewart’s skewering of CNBC’s hosts has been getting more media attention by the hour. Here are two representative examples from Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz and David Bauder of the Associated Press. The AP story includes two rather telling quotes:

[...] Don Hodges, chairman of Hodges Capital Management in Dallas, said he doesn’t fault CNBC for not seeing the bust coming.

“I’m not sure that anybody had seen it coming,” he said. “I’ve listened to all of the so-called experts, and it’s obvious that everybody is very confused.”

You don’t say. And:

“Stewart’s a comedian and Cramer is a showman,” said Robert Howell, professor at Dartmouth University’s Tuck School of Business. “If anybody takes seriously anything that (Cramer) says, they’re stupid.”

This might be a worthwhile question for opinion polls: what percentage of Americans made their investments in the last few years based on what Jim Cramer said? Or Maria Bartiromo or Carl Quintanilla, the other targets of Stewart’s wrath? Or, Heaven forfend, Suze Orman?

The Ginsburg Slam, Or Meeting The Media

February 4, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, News media, Obama administration, Obama family, Presidents, Public Opinion, Richard Nixon, TV News Personalities, U.S. History, economy | Leave a Comment 

Eleven years and three days ago, when the nation was ten days into the trauma that was l’affaire [Monica] Lewinsky (or Lewinski, as the late Richard Grenier initially spelled her name in his Washington Times column), the personal attorney of the errant intern, William H. Ginsburg, came to the nation’s capital and introduced a new term into the language of broadcasting.

All four major broadcast networks and CNN frantically wanted to get Mr. Ginsburg on the air,  with whatever revelations he might have about his client’s past deeds or future plans.  And he happily obliged them.  Between 9 am and noon EST that first of February 1998, he appeared on Fox News Sunday, Meet The Press, Face The Nation, This Week, and Late Edition — not revealing very much, but clearly enjoying the attention he’d garnered for being the keeper of the secrets of the minx sphinx in the Watergate.

The punditocracy was duly impressed, and “a full Ginsburg” afterwards became the chosen phrase to describe one who had managed to appear on the five Sunday morning talking-heads shows on the same day.  For more than two years, Mr. Ginsburg remained the only person who had accomplished this.

Then in July 2000, future Vice President Dick Cheney, shortly after his selection by then-Texas Governor George W. Bush, became the second to do so.  Four years passed, and then a few weeks before Election Day 2004, Democratic vice-presidential nominee John Edwards blessed the airwaves with five different views of the most famous political coiffure before the Age of Blagojevich.

In September of the following year, Homeland Security Secretary Michael  Chertoff managed the elusive full Ginsburg, and in September 2007, Sen. Hillary Clinton, in her final months as President-presumptive, did the same — the only woman to undertake the feat so far, and the last person to date.

In this brave new world, the rules have changed a little.  Last month Late Edition was replaced on CNN by State Of The Union, which concludes one hour after its predecessor did, at 1 pm. Therefore, a full Ginsburg, from now on, will not quite be the heroic achievement it once was.

And another fact which has diminished the luster of the full Ginsburg was that, until now, no sitting President had ever undertaken anything resembling it.  But a variation on the old full G – which I’ll call the Ginsburg Slam – has proven to be yet another in the ever-growing list of the dubious achievements of the Obama Administration.

A little over forty-eight hours ago, as former Senator Tom Daschle sweated before a Senate committee not quite satisfied with his account of how he failed to pay taxes in timely fashion for the services of a limo and driver, the White House was still assuring one and all that no matter what, the President was solidly behind his nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services.

But at 11 am yesterday morning Nancy Killefer, Obama’s choice for the newly-minted post of “Chief Performance Officer,” announced that she was removing herself from consideration because of her own tax troubles, and about two hours later Daschle did the same.  The President and his advisors decided that damage control was the order of the day.  How to handle it?

It would seem that the most logical way to approach the problem would be for President Obama to simply stroll into the White House press room after arranging for a few minutes of airtime, inform the assembled reporters and the nation that he regretted that the decisions of Killefer and Daschle had to be made, wish them well, take no questions, and return to the Oval Office and more consequential tasks.

Instead, he arranged for face-to-face conversations with ABC’s Charles Gibson, CBS’s Katie Couric, NBC’s Brian Williams, CNN’s Anderson Cooper (take that, Lou) and Fox’s Chris Wallace, informing each of them by turn, and at some length, that he had Screwed Up and was Really Sorry.  The mea culpas, taken together (or indeed separately), do not suggest Camelot redux.  After all, when John F. Kennedy botched the Bay of Pigs invasion, he promptly took the blame for it — once – and was rewarded with the highest approval rating achieved by a President before George W. Bush topped him in the weeks after 9/11.

Instead, Obama’s use of several hours of President Time (time that could be employed to work on the economy, or terrorism, or finally choosing a pup for Malia and Sasha, or something) to repeat his regrets five times over and ask for forgiveness isn’t an approach calculated to impress our adversaries abroad, whether Hugo Chavez or Kim Jong Il or a nameless thug in western Iraq, that the Chief Executive is brimming with determination or resolve.   Rather, it brings to mind some of the unhappier moments of the Carter era.  You have to wonder what’s going to happen when the killer rabbit shows up.

The way in which the Daschle debacle was handled suggests that President Obama has a preoccupation with winning over the media that makes Lyndon Johnson’s agonies over each new Scotty Reston or Walter Lippmann column look almost, well, Nixonian.  It’s 180 degrees removed from the approach of George W. Bush, who may well be concerned now with what the historians will write but, when in office, reasoned that if he did the occasional sit-down with Brit Hume or Tony Snow or Tim Russert, then everything else would take care of itself.

One has to wonder what the future has in store.  Will MTV’s Kurt Loder or the correspondent from Disney Radio be added to the list of people to whom the President must speak whenever a bill fails to pass, or whenever he knocks over an unwary staffer on the basketball court?  It’s time for some realistic thinking about media relations in the West Wing.

A Day To Remember

January 24, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Bush Administration, Congress, Election 2008, First Ladies, George W. Bush, News media, Obama administration, Obama family, Presidents, TV News Personalities, U.S. History, White House | 2 Comments 

I have lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, since November 1997, and so have been within a twenty-minute subway ride to downtown Washington for the last three Presidential inaugurations. But I didn’t go downtown for either the 2001 or 2005 swearing-in. I was not quite up to braving the crowds, and since I was not invited to witness the event from indoors, I also was not keen on dealing with winter weather for hours.

But this year was different. Thanks to my wife Rene, we were invited to attend the inauguration as guests of a Treasury Department employee, and so, at 6 am, we awoke, met our host and some other guests, proceeded to Silver Spring’s Metro station (already phenomenally crowded at 7 am) and managed to catch a train to downtown.

We emerged at Metro Center, got breakfast, then walked to the Treasury Department’s annex, east of Lafayette Square. After going down an underground corridor, we emerged in the oldest part of the Treasury Building, constructed in the 1830s.

We then went to the Andrew Johnson Suite, got some coffee, sat down, and watched the televised proceedings for a while. This group of rooms is where the seventeenth President conducted the business of the nation from the hour that Abraham Lincoln died on April 15, 1865, until Mary Todd Lincoln moved out of the White House six weeks later.

It was here that Johnson met with his Cabinet, oversaw the concluding stages of the Civil War (such as Johnston’s surrender to Sherman), and read and listened to reports about the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth and the capture of his fellow conspirators. (I thought about this on Wednesday night when I watched a History Channel show on the search for Booth.  These shows are so much more exciting to watch when you’ve been in one or another of the locations being described and depicted.)

After a while, one of the other guests called me to the window, and I watched the limousine carrying the 43rd and 44th Presidents come down the street between Treasury and the White House’s East Wing on its way to the Capitol. That was a powerful moment.

But not quite as powerful as witnessing the swearing-in ceremony itself, with the stirring music of Aretha Franklin and John Williams (as performed by a quartet including Itzhak Perlman and Yo Yo Ma), and President Obama taking the oath of office — even a somewhat botched version that enabled my fellow Indiana native, Chief Justice John Roberts, to become the first man in history to swear in a President twice for the same term.

I watched the swearing-in on a big-screen TV set up in a hallway where nearly every President from Martin Van Buren to the present has walked sometime during his time in office. The sense of history in the making was palpable.

After another hour or so in the Treasury Building, our host told us we were to come outside and sit in the bleachers at the south end of Lafayette Square, almost directly across from the White House. So we braved the cold and proceeded to those seats. In front of us, Al Roker spoke to NBC viewers. A voice came on over the PA speakers set up on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was Charlie Brotman, who has provided commentary to the spectators at every inaugural parade since Eisenhower’s second term began in 1957.

After a wait that wasn’t especially long but seemed an eternity thanks to the cold and my decision not to wear jeans, the police motorcycles came down the street, followed by bands representing the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Coast Guard, and, finally, President and Mrs. Obama and Vice President and Mrs. Biden. We all reached for our cameras. It was as thrilling a moment as I can remember having. Then we went back to the land of crabcakes and orioles and watched the rest of the parade in the comfortable warmth of the Tastee Diner.

I was going to call this “A Week To Remember” and cover some of the other events since Sunday, but the one that comes to mind just now – Caroline Kennedy’s bizarre withdrawal from consideration for the U.S. Senate seat formerly occupied by Secretary of State Clinton – seems a bit anticlimactic after the moments I just recounted. I’ll just note that Time’s “Swampland” blog put up a very interesting timeline of how the Kennedy withdrawal went down. It clearly came as a shock to much of her family and several of them seem to have attempted to get her to change her mind at the last moment, with no luck. And then there was the embarrassing attempt by her “people” to spin the withdrawal as having happened because of Sen. Ted Kennedy’s health, which evidently annoyed him considerably.  This definitely has not been one of Camelot’s more shining moments, though perhaps it was just brief enough to be overlooked when the time comes for another Kennedy to seek office.

Surprise, Surprise, Surprise

November 3, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Media, Republican Party, TV News Personalities | Leave a Comment 

….as PFC (LCpl as of 2001, but that’s another story) Gomer Pyle would say.  In today’s Washington Post Howard Kurtz acknowledges that network and cable TV coverage of the presidential race on talk programs, most notably (but certainly not exclusively) The View, has been enormously biased toward Sen. Barack Obama and against Sen. John McCain.

DSPQ

August 31, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Comedy, DSPQ, TV News, TV News Personalities | Comments Off 

Take a look at the video of Campbell Brown’s highly partisan hectoring intemperate inappropriate unprofessional weird bizarro lively interview with McCain Political Director Mike Duhaime on CNN after Sarah Palin was named for the GOP ticket’s veep slot.  

In this interview Ms. Brown achieves levels of animation that would be envied at Disney.  I suppose one explanation could be that she’s simply frightened out of her mind by that ominous exploding graphic just over her shoulder.   Or, as a native Louisianan and daughter of a former Democratic State Senator and public official, perhaps she’s worried sick about Gustav.  

What else could explain locutions like “just give me a reality check here,” “…can you concede that point and just be honest with me on that?” and “I mean, doesn’t naming Governor Palin as his running mate really undermine your entire argument against Senator Obama?” 

DUHAIME:. Campbell, I realize you’re very upset about this, obviously.  This is somebody who…

BROWN: I’m by no means upset about it. But I’m asking you to try to be honest with here [sic] — let’s cut through the bull and give me an honest answer. 

Mr. Duhaime is a real pro who does his job and takes not even a scintilla of crap.  Would Ms. Brown have dared to pull all those faces if Mr. Duhaime had been sitting across from her at the desk?

But maybe it’s just me.  Take a look and see what you think.  

Of course, Ms. Brown, who cut her network teeth as co-anchor of NBC’s Weekend Today show has never been known for her restraint.  Her reputation in this regard has already achieved sufficient critical mass to be parodied by Tracey Ullman on her Showtime series Tracey Ullman’s State of the Union: