WHAT lay at issue in 1972 between Richard Nixon, on the one hand, and the adversary press and media of America, on the other, was simple: it was power. The power of the press in America is a primordial one. It sets the agenda of public discussion; and this sweeping political power is unrestrained by any law. It determines what people will talk and think about—an authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties and mandarins.
No major act of the American Congress, no foreign adventure, no act of diplomacy, no great social reform can succeed in the United States unless the press prepares the public mind. And when the press seizes a great issue to thrust onto the agenda of talk, it moves action on its own—the cause of the environment, the cause of civil rights, the liquidation of the war in Vietnam, and, as climax, the Watergate affair were all set on the agenda, in first instance, by the press.
In a fundamental sense, today more than ever, the press challenges the Executive President, who, traditionally, believes his is the right to set the agenda of the nation’s action. Power, said Karl Marx over a century ago, is control over the means of production; that phrase, said Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., recently, should be changed—power in America today is control of the means of communication.
And it was for this control that Richard Nixon warred with his enemies of the press all through the election year, and beyond.
One could best explain the nature of this struggle in 1972 by making an imaginary diagram of the American power structure at the turn of the century and comparing it to the American power structure as the postwar world came to its end.
In 1900, as William McKinley prepared for his second term, the American power structure could be described in pure Leninese. At the pinnacle of power was Wall Street—finance. Wall Street centralized American national action—it decided where mines would be opened, railways built, what immigrant labor should be imported, what technology developed. Wall Street set the agenda of national action without discussion. At a second level was the Congress of the United States—doing the will of the great financiers, enacting the necessary laws, repelling the raiders of prairie discontent. On a third level was the series of largely undistinguished men who until 1900 had held the figurehead office of President of the United States for thirty years; their chief power, beyond the expression of patriotic piety, was to deploy a minuscule professional army and navy against Indians and Spaniards. The American clergy exercised some moral power, best expressed in such issues of national political importance as temperance. Behind came all the other power ingredients—a decorative Supreme Court, the early labor unions, the corrupt big-city machines, the universities. Then the proprietary press—for the press was then a proprietorship, something owned by businessmen for making money.
By 1972 the power structure had entirely changed. The most important fall from power had happened to finance; businessmen might get fat, as they still did in 1972, by wheedling subsidies from national or state governments, but they were now a lobby that came hat-in-hand before a legislature and executive to whom once they had dictated. Labor, big labor, had risen to almost equal political power. The clergy had declined in power even more than big business. Congress, too, was a major loser in the power game—seventy years of domination by vigorous, aggressive Presidents had reduced its self-respect and, even more critically, the respect of the public. The Supreme Court had reached a peak of control over the national agenda in the 1960’s; but its power was beginning to fade again as the seventies began. Universities were among the big gainers in the power hierarchy—universities now surpassed big business and big labor as centers of American innovation. But the two greatest gainers in the reorganized power structure were the Executive President and his adversary press, or, as one should more properly phrase it in modern America, the “press-television complex.”
Both tried to operate under what they considered traditional rules, but American life had made that impossible.
What made it impossible was a number of things. The classical word-on-paper press was being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, into news-gathering oligopolies.1 Joining the word-on-paper press had come the infinitely more potent, even more concentrated power of the national television networks. And in both another change, more subtle but vital, was going on: a new appreciation by journalists themselves of their own role, their own responsibility, their own dignity. Once they had been hirelings of their proprietors, employed to articulate or con-solídate opinion or, at the very most, to entertain the masses with their reporting. At some point in the 1960’s, however, they had begun to see themselves as creators of news—not the recorders, but the shapers, of events, with a self-constituted responsibility to history. The great men of this new journalism might, at a bar with their friends, nostalgically insist that they were reporters like the rest of the fellows; they might show their tattered press cards, reminisce about police stations they had covered from Paris to Kansas City, or recall the idiosyncrasies of the men they had worked for, from Roy Howard to old Hearst to Harry Luce. But they were not reporters any longer. In television, men like Cronkite, Sevareid, Chancellor, Smith had, and recognized, no responsibility to any boss or institution—duty bound them technically only to their deadlines, and conscience to their self-constituted responsibility to the American people. So, too, the senior national reporters still left free to describe the world as they saw it in the word-on-paper press. Concentration of press outlets made those journalists who still enjoyed a free outlet ever more powerful, and in their own eyes ever more responsible for values. The texture of their reporting had changed, too. Before World War II, the natural progression of a reporter’s career had taken him from the sports shack to the political clubhouse; sportswriters had a flair for vivid copy and personalities, and such great artists as Heywood Broun and, later, James Reston were models for many others. Journalists who reached the summit of their profession after the war were, however, immensely more educated men than their predecessors, far more at home in the university seminar than at the police line-up or the football locker room. Their learning and their moralities made them a formidable group.
In the eyes of Richard Nixon and the administration, this concentration of power took on another cast. He could see, as every President before him saw, that somewhere in the press he would find a natural adversary. But within the new concentration of power, the significant heights of influence had been “seized” by men of a world-view, and of a culture, entirely alien to his own. These were the adversary press. Its luminaries not only questioned his exercise of power, as all great American journalists have done when examining a President. They questioned his own understanding of America; they questioned not only his actions but the quality of his mind, and his honor as a man. It was a question of who was closest in contact with the mood of the American people—the President or his adversary press? Neither would yield anything of respect to the other—and in Richard Nixon’s first term the traditional bitterness on both sides approached paranoia.
Again, we must go back to sketch background.
All politics operates in an environment of public opinion. Any of the great episodes of history, wherever one tries to trace the will of people bursting out from tyranny or police or dead tradition, can be understood only by trying to understand the talk of the times, how leaders manipulated it, and what ideas and changing technologies conditioned the way the talk spread. The oldest tradition of journalism is, for example, the style of Amos and Hosea—its rhetoric is still the easiest for crusading journalists to master, as they emulate the prophets crying out from the valleys of the desolate, hoping the voice can reach the fat and the powerful on the hills of Jerusalem. The technology of the times of Amos and Hosea was the range of the human voice, and the political audience limited to the court of Kings Uzziah and Jeroboam. And for millennia thereafter, journalists remained limited in the same way—to the local community of politically involved, within the range of the human voice or the local news sheet.
The modern age of journalism began in the United States at the turn of the century—and with it the modern age of American politics, responding at first slowly, then ever more rapidly, to the new audience brought to political involvement by the changing technologies of news delivery.
It is easiest to approach this change in journalism by glancing at the commerce, structure and technology of 1900—for commerce and technology were, over the next two generations of American life, increasingly to change the news-gathering business until in the 1960’s it climaxed in the explosive force of national television. A number of related developments had been maturing in the decades just before Theodore Roosevelt became President. There was, first, the completion of the railway network, which linked America from coast to coast to provide manufacturers for the first time a continental market. Manufacturers, by 1900, could ship stoves, furniture, oil, beer, machinery, timber, housewares anywhere in the country. But to explore the reachable new market and sell their wares, they needed a national advertising medium. Until the turn of the century no such medium had been available. Local newspapers, when they carried what they called “foreign,” or out-of-state, advertising, printed ads for small package goods, like patent medicines or books, that could be shipped easily. Now, with bulk goods coming in, like washing machines, carpet sweepers, stoves, automobiles, all finally transportable, the manufacturers could deliver all across the country—if they could find a voice, a horn, a trumpet to tout their goods.
Technology had also made the horn ready. The development of the high-speed rotary press which could spin off several million copies a week had made mass printing possible. And coupled with this technical magic was the development of the halftone photo-engraving process which could illustrate text, and thus entrance the semi-literate native Americans of the day as well as the immigrants who could read little or no English. Publishers could now print, illustrate and circulate millions of magazines, and sell their pages to advertisers for huge sums—if only they could find editors with talent enough to capture the imagination of a whole nation.
The men the publishers found (and frequently the editor and the publisher were the same man) were editors of an entirely new breed. Editors of national magazines required a different eye span and thought frame from editors of newspapers. Their medium2 was different, its audience larger—in fact, nationwide. For the first time, a breed of journalists was required who could think beyond the interests of New England, or the Midwest, or the Cotton Country, or the hometown. As they sat there in New York at their desks, the mind’s eye of such men had to sweep the nation as, previously, only the mind’s eye of a Wall Street financier or the President had done. Moreover, their time frame was different from the time frame of newspaper editors of the era. News until then had been just that—the record of what happened in the twenty-four-hour cycle. Newspapers reported what had happened yesterday. But for magazines, the time frame was what was happening—what had been happening last week, last month, the last three months, which would continue to be news, and relevant news, next week, next month, perhaps even next year. Newspapers captured only the event; magazines captured the swell and roll of events. Corruption of municipal governments was not just the local story of a sheriff caught dirty-handed yesterday accepting a bribe; corruption of municipal government was part of a nationwide phenomenon, a disease of the system, and it interested people everywhere. The trusts were not just local gougers—they were national monsters, whose purposes and plans could be made clear only by looking at them nationally; the despoliation of nature was a national problem, not a local offense. And these national problems, once they were identified and exposed and their cast of characters described as villains or heroes, made vivid national reading—as vivid in California as in Maine.
The magazines thrived, and as they thrived they changed American politics. The great writers and editors of the muckraking era of the 1900’s—Lincoln Steffens, Frank Munsey, S. S. McClure, Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker—are the ancestors of every important investigative reporter since then. More than that—they and their editors, for the first time, jostled big business and the clergy for control of the national agenda, forcing politicians to respond to the concerns the “muck-rakers” had raised. In doing so, the muckrakers moved the nation to pass its first consumer legislation, its first environmental legislation, to control the money supply and banking system, create a first-class navy, reorganize its tax system.
The dominance of the magazine as the overbearing news-master of American thinking reached its apogee, perhaps, in 1940 when three publishers of the East, the masters of Time and Life, of Look, of the Saturday Evening Post, the dominant magazines of the day, created a man called Wendell Willkie, decided he should be the Republican nominee of that year—and then imposed him on that party. Few naked exercises of press power can compare to their feat except, perhaps, the imposition of John Garner as Vice-President on the Roosevelt ticket in 1932 by publisher William Randolph Hearst.
But by 1940 the predominance of the magazines was already threatened, for news had been freed from its bondage to the printed word, and had gone electronic. By 1940 Franklin Roosevelt had found that radio was the simplest direct appeal over a hostile printed press to the ears of the American people. Roosevelt learned to use radio not only artfully—for no Republican could match the ring of his silver tone on air—but also with trickery. Friends still recall his glee at the out-foxing of Thomas E. Dewey one evening on radio in the campaign of 1944. Roosevelt reserved time for a quarter-hour radio address on the National Broadcasting Company network; his rival booked the following fifteen minutes to exploit Roosevelt’s listening audience for his reply. But Roosevelt spoke to clock time for only fourteen minutes—then left one full minute of paid time in dead silence after his remarks. The listeners frantically twiddled their dials, searching for sounds on other wave lengths; and the millions, who found other stations as they twiddled, were simply not there when the Republican candidate, Dewey, came on the air to speak.
Electronics are like that—subject to manipulation by experts in a way the printed press is not. But electronic journalism is more than that—it is the human voice, the human personality, there in the room with the listeners, supported by the most elaborate effort to gather all news, all information, all reality into ten-, fifteen- or thirty-minute time packages with incomparable impact on the individual mind. Television has a life and vitality of its own beyond manipulation. The Second World War lured the nation to radio—Edward R. Murrow intoning “This is London,” or voice-casting from a bomber over Berlin; William L. Shirer broadcasting from Berlin and Compiègne. Radio was part of the home atmosphere from D-Day on; by 1960 radio had been multiplied by tele vision; and by 1972 television was where American politics took place.
By 1972, 50,000,000 grown-up Americans sat down each evening to learn of their world as the massive resources of the three great networks delivered their three visions of that world in capsulized twenty-three-minute packages. Ninety-six percent of all American homes held TV sets. A Roper survey declared that 64 percent of all Americans now got most of their news from television, with radio, magazines and newspapers sharing the rest; and they trusted television by two to one over any other medium for credibility. And between this newest and most potent form of news delivery, on the one hand, and the President, on the other, was growing up an institutional hatred.
Richard Nixon never ignored television; had suffered at its hands; would continue to suffer. But by 1972 he had learned how to use the instrument against its masters. As President, he could conscript its time and the attention of its audience—the rules of the game required that when he went to China or to Moscow, television must show what he was doing; the rules of the game stipulated that if he chose to speak on an issue of state—Vietnam, prices, busing—he was news, and television had to give the news air. But though he could command the time of the instrument, he could never master, or even win to friendship, the personalities who controlled television for all the other evening hours of the year. There was the continuing adversary. “We came in talking togetherness,” said Pat Buchanan in 1971, the President’s sage and scout on the news front, “and now they attack us for divisiveness. But we can talk togetherness until we’re blue in the face. It does no good if every night they see on the tube blacks attacking whites, or whites attacking blacks, students in demonstrations, picket lines, war riots. The tube is doing it, the tube is dividing us. The AP and the UPI put out a complete news service every day, and editors can pick and choose how they make up their front pages from what the wires bring in. But the networks lay down a half-hour news show that every station has to use all across the country. It’s as if the AP put out one boiler-plate front page every morning which every single newspaper had to use unchanged.”
It was the struggle over the agenda that bothered Buchanan—and over and over again the struggle between President and press came down to this struggle. Who controlled what went before the American people? Did a candidate—a Democratic candidate as well as Nixon, the Republican—have a right to expect that the newsmen would present what he said as he said it? Or did the newsmen have the right to choose what they thought was important in what he said? Who chose? Who decided what truth and news were, what people would talk about?
In November of 1969, Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew had made the administration’s case public in one of the most masterful forensic efforts in recent public discourse:
“A small group of men, numbering perhaps no more than a dozen anchormen, commentators and executive producers, settle upon the twenty minutes or so of film and commentary that’s to reach the public…. They decide what forty to fifty million Americans will learn of the day’s events in the nation and in the world…. We do know that to a man these commentators and producers live and work in the geographical and intellectual confines of Washington, D.C., or New York City, the latter of which James Reston termed the most unrepresentative community in the entire United States. Both communities bask in their own provincialism, their own parochialism. We can deduce that these men read the same newspapers. They draw their political and social views from the same sources. Worse, they talk constantly to one another, thereby providing artificial reinforcement to their shared viewpoints.”
Was authority in the press and in television really centered in the two cities of New York and Washington, where in truth, as Agnew described them, a limited, definable group had become the leadership elite of the news-gathering profession?
No conspiracy had concentrated this elite in the New York-Washington centers. Commerce and technology had done it, to create a change in American journalism as profound as had ushered in the muck-rakers seventy years before—and even more unpredictable in result.
The figures did not really expose the nature of the change. Just before World War II, there had been 1,878 daily newspapers in the United States. By 1971 that number had fallen to 1,735—apparently no great change. What had changed, however, was proprietorship—great and powerful groups were gobbling up individual papers all across the country, linking them to one another and to radio-TV franchises. Local competition of daily newspapers had all but ceased in 1972; at the time of the muckrakers, 60 percent of ail cities had enjoyed daily a choice of two or more rival newspapers; by 1972 that number had dwindled to 4 percent. Autopsy of the apparently small number of papers which had died was more significant. The most important of them had died in the large metropolitan centers of the nation where the city problem boiled and news competition had been keenest. Los Angeles, which had had four newspapers at the end of the war, had only two by 1972. Chicago had been a town where four proprietors divided the daily press; in 1972 Chicago still published four newspapers—but now only two proprietors controlled them. San Francisco had had four newspapers; by 1972 there were only two. In the Presidential year 1972, Newark, New Jersey, was to lose one of its last two daily newspapers.3 Washing-ton, the same year, was to lose the Washington Daily News, leaving the city’s opinion and information to be divided between the Kauffmann-Noyes family (of the Washington Star) and the Graham family (of the Washington Post). Boston was to lose, in 1972, the Boston Herald-Traveler, having already long since lost the Boston Transcript, the Record, the Post, and remained now with the Boston Globe and the Herald-American.
Television—and, to a lesser extent, the craft unions—had been strangling the older forms of news delivery in the big cities. Television delivered the news quicker, more attractively, with more talented manpower than the older news-delivery system could afford. Television offered news sauced with a visual drama that words could not match; and drew off the advertising dollars, as well as the audience, which had sustained rival systems of news delivery. Television wrote the end of the general national magazine’s hegemony over American thinking—in 1969 the old Saturday Evening Post had been scuttled; in 1971 Look Magazine died; in 1972 Life Magazine, that majestic creative force of photojournalism, was to die, ending the postwar world in American periodical journalism, too.
The geography of the newspapers that survived in the United States required entirely new definition. The need to make a profit and stay in business had sorted them into groups that could better be defined culturally or commercially than by regional, sectional or political interest. There were newspaper chains that published straight news to make money and were efficient at both—the Newhouse chain, the Cox papers, the Scripps-Howard, Knight, Gannett, Ridder chains, the Cowles papers, several papers in the Hearst chain. Such commercial chains accounted for 60 percent of the daily circulation of the country. There were also, across the country, simple, barefoot individual proprietorships whose ideas had changed little since the time of Warren Gamaliel Harding, himself a publisher, proprietor of the Marion, Ohio, Star. These spanned the right end of the opinion spectrum, from stovepipe-hat conservatism (like the Copley or the Pulliam papers) to the rock-throwing, pistol-packing Neanderthal quality of a paper like the Manchester Union Leader, which dominated New Hampshire.
The administration had little to worry about from the “proprietary” press which controlled so large a share of the country’s daily circulation. Ninety-three percent of all papers that endorsed a candidate in 1972 endorsed Nixon—753 dailies, with 30,500,000 in circulation, supported him as against only 56, with 3,000,000 circulation, for McGovern. “Out There,” where lay his spiritual home, Nixon was reported cleanly and fairly, in his own terms. The gentle rounds of Herbert G. Klein, Nixon’s Director of Communications, were smoothly devoted to explaining to the press leaders of Out There what the Nixon Presidency was all about—and Klein was both persuasive and effective.
What neither Nixon nor Klein could reach or affect was a specific cluster of newspapers, all lumped together by them under the convenient rubric “Eastern Liberal Press.” Geography contradicted the neatness of this rubric, however, for this crowning cluster was spread as far west as the Los Angeles Times, held a beachhead in Chicago with the Field papers, reached south to the Louisville Courier-]ournal, as deep into the interior as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and added these logotypes to the obvious Washington Post, New York Times, Boston Globe and Long Island Newsday.
All of these were immensely profitable newspapers. Having survived the competition of television, having established their community leaderships so solidly that nothing could shake their advertisers, they were immune to any hostile pressure except from their unions, or outright government legal persecution.
Yet an even more important characteristic marked them: All these great enemies of the Nixon administration were family-owned or family-controlled publications. And between this “baronial” press and the proprietary press is a difference of spirit far greater than that between a state teachers’ college and an Ivy League university.
The newspaper families of the baronial press are the last great aristocracy in American life. If there is an elite in America, a truly self-recognizing noblesse, it is the great families who own and manage the outstanding daily publications of the nation.
One used to be able to see them all in the flesh in unforgettable display at The New York Times’s annual reception on the tenth floor of its mausoleum at Times Square, when the Associated Press each spring gathers publishers from around the country for its annual meeting. The Sulzberger family would receive as befitted the Grand Dukes of Manhattan, Arthur Hays Sulzberger sitting in his chair, his consort, Iphigene, standing beside him, both nodding graciously and extending their hands to the other noble families of the realm as they strode proudly in. There were the great personages from out-country, the Grand Duchess of Los Angeles, Mrs. Norman Chandler; the Grand Duchess of Washington, Mrs. Philip L. Graham; there were the earls, counts, countesses of lesser but still courtly blood—the Taylors of Boston, the Binghams of Louisville, the Fields of Chicago, the Pulitzers of St. Louis, the Ridders of the Midwest. They were to be distinguished, by bearing and disposition, from those publishers who worked for powerful but publicly held commercial enterprises where family lineage was either absent or, like the Newhouses, too fresh in power to have acquired patina. As politicians and diplomats watched, the great family figures would circle, flanked by small courts of their own famous writers, stars or editors. If swords, costumes and decorations had been permitted, one might have transferred the personages to a levee at Versailles when the nobility of France was assembled in the Hall of Mirrors—and they would have been at home. And among such families, the proudest in carriage and bearing were those who had come to be bracketed as the “Eastern Liberal Press.”
What characterizes these hereditary newspaper barons is something not too difficult to define—a sense of patrician responsibility, a sense of the past both of their own communities and of their nation, and an invulnerability to common fears, common pressures, the clamor of stockholders and advertisers that weaken the vigor of lesser publishers. They understand power better than most politicians; their families have outlived most political families, locally and nationally; they can make politicians—and, on many occasions, break them.
What follows from the pride of these publishers is, however, more subtle, more difficult to define and, in terms of the clash between them and Richard Nixon, the operational fact: They insist on their own concept of honor and style. The families that own the great newspapers of the Liberal Press have the taste, and the purse, for the finest news-writing; they invite from their staffs elegant, muscled, investigative reporting. In this field, they outclass all other newspapers; their quality is evident every day on their front pages; they have survived, and their competitors have perished, because of this quality. These families regard their star reporters as almost sacred—as great racing families regard their horses, horse-handlers and jockeys. Men and women are proud to work for such publishers; their reporters set the style for all other reporters everywhere who hope, someday, to have their prose appear in such newspapers. In a sense, the great organs of the Liberal Press have escaped from the direct control of the publishers who own them and belong to the journalists who operate them for the owners. There is no way the Nixon administration, or any other administration, can reach or influence their reporting, their assessment of the agenda of the nation’s unfinished business, their challenge. They are independent not only of Mr. Nixon, but of all pressures except the internal self-criticism of their own communities. They live in a world of their own.
If, in the 1972 campaign, one had drawn up an imaginary hate-list at the White House, one would have had to rank an order somewhat like this: first, the Washington Post; second, the Columbia Broadcasting System; third, The New York Times; fourth, the Hanoi regime; fifth, the Saigon regime; sixth, American universities; seventh, the Indian government—and so on down the line until one came to George McGovern, the rival candidate, somewhere between tenth and twentieth. (Reviewing this imaginary list one day, a White House friend, who declared it to be preposterous, said to me: “You ought to get the Boston Globe in there somewhere—if it were important enough nationally. It’s even worse than the New York Post—because it’s better.”)
The three top names on the imaginary hate-list deserve special examination.
The Washington Post had been a moribund conservative newspaper until purchased by financier Eugene Meyer in 1933. It had persisted with a feeble flicker of vitality and much deficit financing as a secondary newspaper until management passed in 1948 to Mr. Meyer’s son-in-law, Philip Graham, who acquired control of Newsweek and invigorated both the newspaper and the magazine until they became major national forces. It was, however, only when direct authority passed to Mrs. Katharine Graham, on the death of Philip Graham, her husband, that the Washington Post acquired that exuberance of reporting which made it the chief enemy of Richard Nixon. Mrs. Graham, one of Washington’s great hostesses, a shy and beautiful woman of enormous power, manages her empire as Queen Elizabeth managed England—by choosing vigorous men and sending them out on the Spanish Main with freebooters’ privilege to seek targets of opportunity. The seadogs Katharine Graham chose when she took over her domain in 1964 were buccaneers of the caliber of Drake and Hawkins, men of quality who enjoyed a good fight. Her two chief admirals, Benjamin C. Bradlee, the executive editor of the Washington Post, and Osborn Elliott, editor of Newsweek, two Harvard men of the same generation, proceeded to recruit staffs of their own characteristic vitality and style, and, between them, helped change journalism in the sixties.
It is Bradlee and the Washington Post that concern us most here—for the Washington Post hates Richard Nixon, and Nixon hates the Washington Post, and they are locked like two scorpions in a bottle, determined to destroy each other. It was the Post, more out of zest for the hunt than any political malice, that made the Nixon administration its target. With gusto, total dedication and courage, its reporters made the Nixon administration their prey—and as they cried “Tally-Ho,” the rest of the press pack followed. As the Washington Post uncovered the spoor of the Watergate scandal, word was relayed to Mrs. Graham that John Mitchell, the former Attorney General, had declared that “Kay Graham would find her t-t in a wringer” if her staff carried on. Mrs. Graham folded her arms, figuratively, over her bosom and supported her staff. It was for her a question of losing the loyalty of her troops, on the one hand, or perhaps, on the other hand, of being squeezed out of her substantial broadcasting properties by a hostile government. She chose in lonesome gallantry to support her staff, and the Watergate investigation went on.
The Columbia Broadcasting System, second on the imaginary hate-list of the Nixon administration, was another news-gathering institution which had acquired its own internal dynamic, subject to little more management control than cost-accounting. CBS was not to be compared to the baronial press in corporate structure—it had become a widely held public corporation, quoted daily on the New York Stock Exchange. But three men had made it great. Two of those were William S. Paley, chairman of the board, and Frank Stanton, its former president, who regarded the network as their own property, which it had long since ceased to be. The third man had been Edward R. Murrow, one of the great journalists of the twentieth century. Paley and Stanton had had their problems with Murrow’s intractable integrity over many years; yet they had been proud of him. He was not only the chief decoration of their News and Public Affairs division, but also a spectacularly able organizer and chooser of other men. Murrow had created for himself, and for the broadcasters he chose, a position vis-à-vis management which held simply that management’s only control was to fire them or cut them in pay; he and his broadcasting team could not be told what to say, or what the news meant. Murrow’s professional fathership of names that came to be reference points in the history of television news reads like this: He had first employed Charles Collingwood and Howard K. Smith in Europe, fresh from Rhodes Scholarships. He had added to his staff Eric Sevareid, in Paris, at the age of twenty-seven. He had put to work in television Fred W. Friendly, at the age of thirty-two. He had been the original sponsor of William L. Shirer, David Schoenbrun, Chet Huntley and other still-glittering or once-famous names who created news television. Of the great men of television, only Walter Cronkite had not been moved forward by an assist from Murrow somewhere along the way.
But to all of them, as well as Cronkite, Murrow had bequeathed something more important than opportunity and fame: He had bequeathed a sense of conscience and importance with which neither management nor government might interfere. Murrow’s concept of public advocacy had emboldened him to ignore timid management and launch the attack that destroyed Senator Joe McCarthy; he had spoken for blacks against government, for the poor against the landlords, for the hungry against the establishment. And at CBS, a huge corporation more vulnerable than most to government pressure and Washington reprisal, he had left behind a tradition that the reporting of news and public affairs was to be what its correspondents and producers wanted it to be, not what management sought to make it. Paley and Stanton honored this tradition. It was as inconceivable for them to lift the telephone and tell a Cronkite or a Sevareid what to say as, for example, for the Elector of Saxony to tell Johann Sebastian Bach how to compose his music or to play his tunes at the court’s next chamber-music gathering. When they went on air, the CBS newscasters held absolute, unrestrained power.
There remained next on the imaginary hate-list the press organ most difficult to characterize—the most important of them, The New York Times.
The Nixon administration and its spokesmen insisted that they did not hate The New York Times. It is difficult for anyone to hate The New York Times; but The New York Times, the best newspaper in the world, is the major power force in American thinking—and it can kill, without malice, simply by a reflex of its muscles. Where the reporters of CBS and the Washington Post could be described as being out of the control of their proprietors, The New York Times could be described as being, in critical areas, out of the control of its own management, too. For the Times lives at the center of a closed loop—it lives in the Manhattan world of opinion makers, and it is impossible to say how much the Manhattan opinion makers influence the Times, and how much the Times influences the opinion makers.
The New York Times did not create this closed loop, nor does it even take pleasure in it. But the postwar world had been harsher to the daily press in New York than in any other metropolis. New York had boasted eleven daily newspapers just after the war. One by one, the postwar world had squeezed them out—first, local newspapers like the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the Bronx Home News, leaving those multi-million boroughs as the largest communities in the nation without a voice of their own. The conservative Sun had died; the radical PM had died, as had its successor, the Daily Compass; so, too, had the Daily Worker and the Daily Mirror. In 1964, in the Goldwater-Johnson campaign, there still remained six major daily newspapers in New York—the World-Telegram, a Scripps-Howard paper; the Journal-American, a Hearst paper; the Herald Tribune, an ailing but distinguished baronial newspaper; the New York Post; the New York Daily News; and The New York Times. But television, its evening news and the demands of printing unions had wiped out half of the six, until by 1972 there remained only three—the News, the Post and the Times—of which the Times was clearly the greatest, with a power that no other newspaper in any other city even approached.
The New York Times is not the hometown newspaper of New York—New York is many hometowns, and the Times serves several of them; far more are served by the New York Daily News. But the Times is the hometown newspaper of all men of government, all men of great affairs, all men and women who try to think. In the sociology of information it is assumed that any telephone call made between nine and noon anywhere in the executive belt between Boston and Washington is made between two parties both of whom have already read The New York Times and are speaking from the same shared body of information. Whether in finance, music, clothing industry, advertising, drama, business or politics, it is accepted that what is important to know has been printed that morning by The New York Times. The Times is the bulletin board not just for the city, but for the entire nation’s idea and executive system. It is the bulletin board for book publishers, who decide what books may be incubated from its dispatches; it is the bulletin board for the editors of the great news magazines, who speed their correspondents to the scene of any story the Times unearths; it is the bulletin board of all three national television networks, whose evening news assignments, when not forced by events themselves, are shaped by ideas and reportage in the Times.
The power and the influence of The New York Times stem from its unchallenged supremacy in the art and craft of reporting. Reporting at the Times has since 1968 been under the jurisdiction of A. M. Rosenthal, its managing editor, once a superb reporter himself, who has continued, even after being pinned behind a desk, to salivate at the reading and printing of good reportorial copy. Supported by his publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Rosenthal had by 1972 slowly supplemented a generation of older reporters with younger, more vigorous reporters who vied with the Washington Post team as the best in the country, and excelled it in depth of strength, specialization of coverage and, above all, in foreign correspondence. Whether it was news of Germany or China; of the environment or the Democratic Party; of City Hall or real estate; of Vietnam or Zionism; of the theater, the book business or Advertising Row—the reporting of The New York Times maintained for its proprietors and management the adjective its onetime patriarch Adolph Ochs had most savored: “indispensable.” It was indispensable for anyone making an executive decision anywhere in the world; it was the first paper read at the White House; it was the second paper read in any foreign capital where airmail could carry it; it was the first paper read in any newspaper office or any television station anywhere in America, after the editor or producer had read the local papers.
But The New York Times was more than a great instrument for reporting news. It was also the most powerful voice in the national culture. Its critics of art, books, theater, music, movies, dance, its Sunday Book Review and cultural sections were to the cultural marketplace what the Dow Jones ticker is to Wall Street.
On the Times, as on most other publications, these departments deal in value judgments; and the values which dominate the Times are not those of “Out There.” They are the values dominant in New York’s centers of culture, values shared by the major university campuses. These values, as we have noted earlier, were strongly anti-war from 1967 on, highly tolerant of radical youth and black militancy, and in polar opposition to those of the President.
What was true of the Times’s critics was also true of its editorial writers. Their values and opinions, moreover, were given national circulation not only through the nationwide distribution of the Times itself, but through its syndicated news service to 221 client newspapers throughout the country which conveyed the generally liberal opinions of Tom Wicker, Anthony Lewis, and James Reston (along with those of the only consistent President well-wisher, C. L. Sulzberger, its chief foreign correspondent). The impact of the critical and editorial writers of the Times, piggy-backed across the nation on the Times’s indispensable hard reporting, was massive. And, in the eyes of the Nixon administration, formidable. What the Nixon administration found most offensive in the Times was not its provocative reporting, but its editorial reflection of the opinion industry of Manhattan.
For the Nixon administration, the Washington Post was a recognizable enemy, out to get it. The New York Times was different—it was the spreader of elusive values that completely contradicted the administration’s own: the values of Manhattan, of the universities, of the opinion set, of the intellectuals—the subtle, corrosive values which had, somehow, taken over television’s minds and, through television, set up the chief opposition the administration recognized in the campaign.
The values of Manhattan’s avant-garde, and the university, television and opinion centers they influence, are matters for another book—on American intellectual history. In the campaign of 1972, however, those values were the values the administration saw itself as opposing: the judgment of all its performances against an unreachable perfection of attainment, the art critic’s measure of all things by their symmetry of composition; the derivative intellectual scorn of men who profess a higher morality than those who must compromise with reality or settle for less than perfect in order to make things work now. Words are the fuel of politics. In 1972 the words of patriotism, honor, family, peace-and-quiet, law-and-order—as well as the blunter, harsher words that describe the cruel front of race clash in American communities—were essential dividers in the political contest between the liberal cause and the conservative cause.
Power is to liberals, said someone, what sex is to Puritans—liberals loathe it, yet lust for it; distrust it, yet itch for it. The key belief of liberal intellectuals, shared with conservatives, is that power, in the hands of any but their own kind, conceals a hidden wickedness. In the case of Richard Nixon, liberals were not only convinced of the hidden wickedness of his use of power, but affronted by his manners, his speech, his style. For years, thus, climaxing in 1972, Nixon felt himself relentlessly pursued by such intellectuals, who thereby displayed to their own friends and admirers their courage, their superior virtue, their pious orthodoxy. The election of 1972 as it unrolled outraged liberals—it proved that Richard Nixon read the mind of the country better than they, that he was closer to the country’s throb. The tragedy was that, however great his achievements—and they were spectacular—his management of power in the place closest to him was flawed exactly as liberals expected it to be. A crime had been committed in his name, authorized by men of his choice. The unveiling of the Watergate scandal was on the way—and when it broke, it would entirely erase whatever credit balance was his in the proceedings between him and the Liberal Press.
We have thus the pattern of opinion in the campaign of 1972—a proprietary press across most of the country overwhelmingly in favor of Richard Nixon; a “Liberal Press” in several great metropolitan centers freed of the dictates of its proprietors; and an opinion center radiating out of New York, its ideas carried on the back of The New York Times’s indispensable reporting, and influencing at the center most of the major news magazines, all of the book publishers, all of the sectarian magazines of opinion and, most importantly of all, the world-view of the great national news networks.
The most apt political parallel for New York is to be found in Berlin of the 1920’s. Berlin in the 1920’s was the cultural center of the Western world—the place where great art developed, where theater exploded, where experimental writing was entertained, where the most bizarre political theories were given hearing. But Berlin could not capture the mind or culture of out-country Germany, where Germans listened to other voices. In 1972 New York could influence serious thinkers anywhere in the country; but it could not reach the thinking of the common people beyond the Alleghenies. For those in the towers and lofts of Manhattan, the thinking even of Queens County across the river from their windows was as remote as the thinking of Bavaria from Berlin in the twenties.
The President feigned indifference to the press and New York-based television networks. And, indeed, he behaved as he insisted he must—he must act by his own instincts and judgments, not heeding what the nets and liberals said. Yet a reporter could never rid himself of the realization that the hostility of the Liberal Press obsessed Nixon.
Across the street from the White House, in Rooms 122 to 127 of the Executive Office Building, there had been installed under the management of Dr. Lyndon (Mort) Allin, a political-science graduate of the University of Wisconsin, an elaborate center for press surveillance. There the White House view of the press was daily shaped; and the shape the press made of itself was, to the Nixon command, frightening. Each day a staff of four, assisted sometimes by eight volunteer clipping ladies on the top floor of the Executive Office Building, monitored, reported and clipped the news-and-opinion flow of the nation. News tickers clacked; video-tape monitors stood by to record the television news shows; newspapers and magazines piled up from all over the country, stacked on tables, desks, wastebaskets, shelves, until the offices looked like a paper-baling operation in a junk shop. And out of this each day Allin and his staff prepared for Pat Buchanan, who passed it on to the White House, a summary of what television was saying, what the wire nets were reporting, what the opinion magazines opined, what the columnists and commentators commented.
Each day the Allin scrutiny examined fifty key newspapers among the 1,700 dailies in the country. These included, of course, all the famous names of the notorious “Liberal Press.” They also included what Allin described as “the stalwarts” which would be with Nixon “no matter what”—the Detroit News, the Dallas Morning News, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, minor newspapers in Jacksonville and Orlando, Florida. Then followed the “generally sympathetic newspapers”—the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the Houston newspapers, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle. Then followed the neutral papers, which played the news straight from the wire services, but whose editorials and comment might go either way. And once below the top fifty newspapers of the country, support for the President grew overwhelmingly.
Apart from the country press, however, the view from the White House was dismal. The networks were all of them generally regarded as “bloody,” with CBS the most hostile and, in White House eyes, ABC the most reasonable. The syndicated commentators and columnists were filed by name—forty of them—with their key dispatches all preserved for the record; the columnists were, of course, generally hostile. Worst of all, however, as seen from Allin’s paper-barricaded lair, were the opinion periodicals.
The surveillance center received some forty-two major periodicals of opinion and reportage. They ranged from Human Events (hostile to Nixon from the right—Human Events believes Nixon is soft on Communism) to Manhattan’s Village Voice and the New York Review of Books (hostile to Nixon from the left—they treat him as if he does not belong to the human race). In between came all the rest, the finest of American thinking, intellectual conception and cultural values—Time, Newsweek, Lije, The New Yorker, Atlantic and Harper’s; Saturday Review, New Republic, Nation, National Review; the Progressive, Intellectual Digest, Current, Kenyon Review, Partisan Review, Commentary, Ms., Esquire. Of the forty-two opinion reviews received in 1972, two were published in Europe (the Economist in London, the weekly Le Monde in Paris); one was published in Wisconsin (the Progressive); and all the rest were published in the belt of resistance to Nixon—Boston (1), Washington (7) and New York (all the rest). Apart from the business magazines (Dun’s Review, Forbes, Business Week) and the periodical stalwarts (Reader’s Digest, U.S. News & World Report), the panorama with one exception—the National Review—ranged from distrust to suspicion to contempt to disgust. The nation’s opinion makers, centered in the Boston-New York-Washington area, loathed the President.
Each day the Allin rooms summarized this vast outpouring of material for some thirty members of the White House staff, all of whom needed to be approved by H. R. Haldeman for receipt of distribution. Allin’s staff worked around the clock, from seven in the morning until one the next morning. The top two pages of the report, prepared by Buchanan himself, who arrived at seven, always summarized the three evening news shows on television and whatever the major wire services said of note. Then followed twenty to thirty pages of summary of other television shows (Today or the CBS Morning News) and the gleanings from the fifty major newspapers. And on Mondays, to start the week, there was a special summary of the opinion journals and the commentators, a bitter dosage for the President. “I just don’t understand,” said Mort Allin after two years on the job, “how the hell he can sit there and take this shit day after day.”
Mr. Nixon had passed, however, by 1972, well beyond any public sensitivity to news comment. He had, perhaps wistfully, hoped that his election in 1968 might cause some abatement in the relentlessness with which he had been pursued by the press for over twenty years. Now that he was President, perhaps they might treat him with the dignity the office suggested. But he was up against Hooker’s Law of journalism. In another time of trouble, four centuries earlier, Bishop Hooker had written, without knowing it, the basic future code of American political journalism: “He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not so well governed as they ought to be, shall never want for attentive or favorable hearers…. And … are taken for principal friends to the common benefit of all…. Whereas on the other side, if we maintain things that are established we have … to strive with a number of heavy prejudices … in the hearts of men, who think that herein we serve the time and speak in favor of the present state because thereby we either hold or seek preferment.” The way of advancement in political journalism is not to praise but to attack, and Nixon was coming to office at a time, as we have seen, when American journalism, at least in the hands of its most eloquent practitioners, was passing from the reporting of events to interpretive or advocacy journalism; and when the variety of opinion was being more and more concentrated by technology to fewer and fewer voices.
The Liberal Press was doing its job, as it always had—but with relish. The press was, in Nixon’s mind, frustrating him on Supreme Court appointments in 1969 and early 1970; the press was obscuring his effort to disengage in Vietnam, deriding it as deception. Nixon rammed through the first logical attempt to deal with environmental problems in 1970. It was ignored by the press. He was trying to engage Congress in a serious effort to reorganize national welfare programs—the press gave it only intermittent attention. At the beginning of 1971 he was preparing his Big Six proposals,4 announcing the New American Revolution. More than thirty Washington columnists, commentators, bureau chiefs were invited to individual briefings by White House staffers; Congress was divided up into key contact groups; the President himself would attend four regional conferences of key editors and publishers; Cabinet members would brief editorial boards in their home cities. Nixon’s staff and thinkers had worked hard over this system of proposals, but the dry administrative substance needed press resonance if it were to be made romantic enough for government action. The press resonance was not there. The New American Revolution rippled like a phrase in the wind for a few days, and then vanished—absolutely vanished.
There was never any concerted, planned-out response by the Nixon administration to what it considered press hostility. The President himself, by 1972, had completely tuned out the adversary press and television. They no longer influenced him. His adversaries had pursued him so relentlessly over so many years that whatever they said could be discounted as malice or fiction—even the Watergate affair. Which was tragedy. Others in the administration, however, had taken their cue from his mood. Vice-President Agnew had felt—with the President’s approval—that the concentration of the press in hostile hands should be publicly denounced as a national peril, and so he did, starting in 1969. Attorney General John Mitchell had begun another counterattack by leading the way for innumerable assaults in court on the privacy of reporters’ sources, which, if successful, might well undermine the First Amendment. He had followed, further, with the first attempt in American history to restrain newspapers by prior censorship when first The New York Times, then the Washington Post sought to publish the famous Pentagon Papers, stolen from government files by an individual but legitimately published as current, once made open. Others struck even more personally at specific administration enemies—as, for example, an FBI investigation of CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr in one of the most shameful attempts on record to intimidate a reporter into submission or moderation of tone. The Nixon administration had begun with formidable enemies in the press; it proceeded to imperil them by a counterattack in which their survival seemed at stake.
Mr. Nixon had by the beginning of 1972 arrived at a personal assessment of the problem. All his major impacts on the American people in his first term had been made by an appeal over the concentrated voices and influence of his very real enemy, the Eastern Liberal Press. His speech of November 3rd, 1969, on Vietnamization of the war, had been sneered at by his enemies—but had turned out to be a triumph, judged by the response of public opinion. His announcements of his trip to China, of wage-price controls in 1971, followed by his own trip to China in early 1972, convinced him that the critically important elements of the news-delivery system in America would bleach out all his thoughts except those expressed in fact and deed. Thus, his campaign of 1972 would be carried to the American people by leap-frogging the news system itself.
The Nixon campaign baffled the news system as few others had done before.
The leading candidate was simply unavailable for questioning.
He had given only eight formal press conferences in his first year in office; in 1970, the number had dropped to four; in 1971 he had moved up to nine press conferences; but in 1972, election year, he had dropped that number to seven. From Franklin Roosevelt on, Presidents had found the press conference the easiest, quickest way of reaching the news system and provoking reaction—they had averaged, until Nixon’s time, from twenty-four to thirty-six press conferences a year. Richard Nixon reduced that average to seven. He preferred to reach the people directly, by TV and radio, with the pageantry of the Presidency in action.
1972 was a year when Nixon dominated the airwaves—Nixon from Peking, Nixon from Shanghai, Nixon from Moscow, Nixon from Kiev, Nixon from Hawaii, Nixon greeting foreign chiefs of state. For those who wanted more substance and less pageantry, Nixon had another channel—the campaign radio address. He had first experimented with radio in 1968 and had found paid half-hours, in terms of dollar cost, the most effective way of delivering a serious theme. By 1972 he had, thus, abandoned the telethon, the question-and-answer period, which had once been a staple of his campaigning. In 1972 he was to deliver no less than thirteen daytime radio addresses (plus one in the evening), usually on weekends. With sober, carefully prepared stands on the major issues as he saw them, he reached usually one to three million people per broadcast, and he provided with the texts the background material that the out-country press could digest as policy. If the nation wanted drama, there was the President on TV; if the editorialists demanded that issues be clarified, there were the radio speeches they could read. His public record and theoretical proposals were delivered to the American people better than any candidate’s had been before.
But for newsmen, reporting the President was a chore. The news corps had grown in number as the number of newspapers in America shrank. By 1972 their number was almost self-defeating—graying veterans and college editors all jostled in a mob in which every second hand seemed to sprout a microphone, and the booms, cameras and sound poles of television crews clubbed any head not alert enough to duck in time. If one followed the President and was very lucky, one might be made a pool member, one of the revolving five men or women allowed to sit in the rear of Air Force One. There, occasionally some member of the White House inner staff might wander back to say hello and even vouchsafe real information. On the plane you might actually see the President—a newsman scrambling down the rear steps could alight in time to view the President as he came down the front steps of the plane. But the rest, the swollen horde that had now become the trail of all campaigns, were sentenced to the press buses.5 And the press buses, two, three, sometimes four, would stretch a quarter-mile behind the President in procession, too far back for their passengers ever to see the man in the flesh, who was audible, if at all, only on the loudspeaker in the bus, from which the voice of a pool man up front might relay what was happening on the trip they were covering. It was easier to cover the President on campaign in 1972 by staying home and watching television with the rest of the people—which was the way the President wanted it.
Mr. Nixon had planned his strategy long before the nomination of George McGovern; the strategy ignored all Democratic candidacies as well as the conventional news-delivery system. But even had the Nixon strategy been planned with George McGovern as the intended victim, it could not have trapped his Democratic rival better. McGovern’s philosophy of “open politics” was not merely verbal. It reflected the deep personal conviction of George McGovern and his entire staff, and was in turn reflected at every level of his campaign. It was reflected in the pleasant, companionable atmosphere of his plane, where he and his staff were almost always available for direct questioning, and where the cloth partition between the candidate’s personal forward section and the large rear press section could always be breached by a smile. It was reflected even more in his Washington headquarters, where his staff had been trained to be straightforward with newsmen, and thus invited them to explore every crevice of privacy and report each rustle of discontent. The press covered McGovern with stifling thoroughness—partly because he invited it, partly because it was, as one reporter called it, “the only show in town.” Analyzing his defeat, McGovern said bitterly, after the campaign was over, “I was subjected to the close, critical reporting that is a tradition in American politics…. Yet Mr. Nixon escaped a similar scrutiny. The press never really laid a glove on him, and they seldom told the people that he was hiding, or that his plans for the next four years were hidden…. Not a single reporter could gather the courage to ask a question about the bugging and burglary of the Democratic National Committee….” The press was to make up for that shortfall in 1973—but by then it was too late to do George McGovern any good.
It is always easier to write of a campaign long after it is over than when it is going on. In October of 1972 it was quite clear: No candidate had ever more calculatedly set out to ignore the press or done it better than Richard Nixon; and no candidate who had ever set out to befriend newsmen had done worse than George McGovern. Richard Nixon had won hands down. Had his ministry of power in his own home been as successful as his ministry of power in the world abroad and the nation at large, he would have been positioned to tilt positively the battle between the American Executive and the adversary press in favor of the Executive, perhaps permanently.
But this was not to be. The Watergate scandal played only a secondary role in the campaign of 1972. With five clowns seized in a bungled burglary and wire-tapping, and two more held under suspicion, it seemed to be dismissable in June, 1972, as an excess of zeal or stupidity on the part of hustlers—except by those of the adversary press whose reputations and honor were on the line. Two young reporters of the Washington Post, at a level almost below the notice of management, had locked onto a simple police story. One of them, Bob Woodward, thirty years old, had left the Navy only two years before and had not yet enjoyed eighteen months of tasting the power of the press when, on June 20th, three days after the Watergate break-in, he learned from another Post reporter, Eugene Bachinski, that the police had seized two notebooks from the burglars containing White House telephone numbers that could be traced to E. Howard Hunt. Woodward set out immediately to find out what he could about Hunt. Three days later, twenty-nine-year-old Carl Bernstein, another reporter of the same paper, found that the source of $25,000 in cash paid to the burglars could be traced directly to the Committee to Re-Elect the President. And on October 25th both young reporters, combining in what was to become a series of almost 200 articles by the next year, struck at the throne itself—alleging that H. R. Haldeman, chamberlain to the sovereign, was implicated in a deed unprecedented in American politics. “It tightens your sphincter muscles,” said Bradlee, executive editor of the Washington Post, as he described the responsibility of an editor whose proprietor had given him authority to place the entire reputation of her enterprise as well as her properties and her fortune behind two young reporters whose charges seemed, to the outside world, incredible.
It also tightened the sphincter muscles of the White House—but that was to come later.
The story of Watergate was only one of a number of major stories in the election of 1972. As it unraveled, it was to become a story of 1973 and would fit better, someday when all was known, into a story of the use and abuse of power in a modern state. The elections of 1972 were determined, basically, by the record Richard Nixon had written in the understanding of his people—and his chief adversary was not George McGovern, but that vanguard of the press which claimed it understood and spoke for the people better than he did himself. On this immediate level of contest, Richard Nixon won. The people preferred Richard Nixon.
There was, however, the other level of contest—the ongoing fight between the President and the press which an election could not settle: control of the agenda. The Washington Post, followed by the Columbia Broadcasting System, followed by The New York Times, had decided they would place squarely on the agenda of public talk the matter of corruption in government and, specifically, corruption of power in the Nixon campaign.
Once there, it could not be removed, and would become the tragic Watergate story.
1 See “The Rush to Chain Ownership,” by Robert L. Bishop, in the Columbia Journalism Review, November/December, 1972.
2 “Media” is a word invented by advertising agencies. Essentially, it is a phrase in the advertising man’s sales pitch to manufacturers about the cost-effectiveness of their advertising dollar. A maker of goods has just so much money to be budgeted for reaching potential customers—and advertisers measure the reach in Cost-per-Thousand, or so many dollars per thousand of potential audience. “Media” is a quantitative, commercial term and measures the relative effectiveness of spending to reach such thousands via newspapers, magazines, radio, television, billboards or direct mail. “Media” is an outsider’s term, and no journalist thinks of himself as a member of the media. The author will do his best to avoid the use of the word “media” in the rest of this book and refer to members of the news community by the old-fashioned word “newsmen.”
3 The condition of press and public affairs in New Jersey can only be regarded as tragedy. New Jersey, the eighth largest state of the Union, had been deprived in the 1960’s of its only VHF television franchise, thus leaving it the only state without a video outlet of its own. The death of the Newark Evening News closed down even further the ability of New Jersey’s citizens to find out what is going on in their own communities. New Jersey’s politics has come to rank among the most sordid, squalid and disgusting in the chronicles of state politics. Between the 1968 and 1972 Democratic conventions, no less than six members of the 1968 New Jersey delegation were convicted of felonies. Cursed with unmanageable problems of industry, race and suburbanization, none of its citizens can easily find out what is happening in New Jersey today. The state is a national sadness, the stamping ground of demagogues and ignorants.
4 See Chapter Three.
5 A fresh view of press coverage of the 1972 campaign will be forthcoming in the fall of 1973 in a most entertaining book by Timothy Crouse called The Boys on the Bus, published by Random House.