Remembering Nixon
The first year of Barack Obama's presidency has seen some absurd media memes, from nonexistent "death panels" to crazy birtherism. But for overall ahistorical (not to mention hysterical) audacity, it's tough to beat the past week's overheated comparisons of Barack Obama to Richard Nixon.
The Obama administration's purportedly "Nixonian" sin is its public criticism of Fox News, a cable channel that has repeatedly tied Obama to terrorists and compared him to Adolf Hitler. Having had enough, White House communications director Anita Dunn, press secretary Robert Gibbs, and others have said that Fox is less a news organization than a partisan political operation.*
Even if we stipulate for the sake of discussion that Fox is a news organization, that's tame stuff by the standards of previous White Houses. You'd be hard-pressed to find an administration that hasn't at times taken a more aggressive approach toward journalists. If you're thinking "Lincoln," think again. Faced with complaints about his administration's censorship of the press in 1863, Lincoln responded, "I think when an office in any department finds that a newspaper is pursuing a course calculated to embarrass his operations and stir up sedition and tumult, he has the right to lay hands upon it and suppress it, but in no other case."
And yet the Obama administration's criticism of Fox News -- criticism, not censorship or suppression of Fox's "reporting" -- was greeted with immediate howls of protest and allegations of Nixonian behavior.
Fox foot soldiers like Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck and right-wing bloggers like Instapundit led the way, of course, but that's to be expected. People who don't hesitate to compare Obama to Hitler and Mao Zedong cannot be expected to hesitate before comparing him to Nixon -- unless it is to consider whether such a comparison will be seen as a compliment, considering the source.
But Beck and O'Reilly were quickly joined by people who should know better. The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus wrote that the criticism of Fox "has a distinct Nixonian -- Agnewesque? -- aroma." NPR's Ken Rudin said the criticism is "almost Nixonesque" -- and this was no throwaway comment; Rudin drew out the comparison for a full paragraph. (To his credit, Rudin apologized for the comments the next day, calling them "boneheaded.") CNN's Anderson Cooper asked, "[D]oes the Obama White House have an enemies list?" and, "[D]o you see shades of Nixon here?" (Even Cooper's Republican guest, Kevin Madden, was unwilling to sign on to that premise.) Baltimore Sun TV critic David Zurawik wrote, "I have compared the current administration to the White House of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, and believe me, I did not do that lightly."
The comparison is preposterous, as Salon's Joe Conason, Media Matters' Eric Boehlert, Washington Monthly's Steve Benen, and others have explained.
In short: The Nixon administration wiretapped journalists' phones and audited their taxes. G. Gordon Liddy and another Nixon henchman even plotted to murder Jack Anderson.** That's "murder" as in "kill." And "kill" as in "dead."
Meanwhile, Obama aides have publicly criticized Fox News for lying about their boss.
It is rather obvious that these are not the same things.
You know who would really be outraged by the comparison? Richard Nixon. If a Nixon aide had proposed dealing with a hostile entity like Fox News with a sternly worded public statement rather than a (literal) firebombing, he'd likely have been axed (with luck, figuratively) on the spot.
What makes the comparison of Obama and Nixon really astounding, however, is that the comparison wasn't made with President George W. Bush, whose administration engaged in warrantless domestic spying and other tactics that actually were reminiscent of Nixonian tactics.
In addition to spying on domestic environmental and poverty-relief organizations, Bush's FBI dug into reporters' phone records. Former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice revealed that the NSA monitored the communications of "U.S. news organizations and reporters and journalists." James Risen, the New York Times reporter who broke the warrantless wiretapping story, has said, "What I know for a fact is that the Bush administration got my phone records." The statements from Tice and Risen went all but ignored by the media, as Eric Alterman explained earlier this year.
As far as I can tell, The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus has never compared the Bush administration's surveillance of journalists to the Nixon administration's surveillance of journalists -- she has never described anything Bush did as "Nixonian." Neither has the Baltimore Sun's David Zurawik, who has repeatedly compared Obama to Nixon. Or NPR's Ken Rudin.
The Bush administration spied on journalists and who knows who else, and Marcus, Zurawik, and Rudin never once thought to note the similarities to Richard Nixon's surveillance of journalists and who knows who else. But Anita Dunn criticizes Fox News for lying, and all of a sudden, they think they're seeing the second coming of Chuck Colson and Gordon Liddy. The double standard and the lack of perspective are simply staggering.
Jamison Foser is a Senior Fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog and research and information center based in Washington, D.C. Foser also contributes to County Fair, a media blog featuring links to progressive media criticism from around the Web, as well as original commentary. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook or sign up to receive his columns by email.
*A brief response to the question some have raised about whether it is appropriate for the White House to decide what is or is not a news organization: Of course it is. The only question is whether it has drawn the line in the right place. Nobody would expect the White House to grant the Weekly World News or the Halliburton corporate newsletter or the author of the Republican National Committee's mass emails the same access they grant ABC and The New York Times. The question isn't whether the White House should make a determination about which news outlets to treat as a legitimate, it's whether it makes the right determinations.
**During last year's presidential campaign, the news media, which were so obsessed with Obama's ties to Bill Ayers, were unconcerned by John McCain's palling-around with Liddy. Then again, Liddy had merely plotted to murder a journalist; he didn't appear on CNN to criticize Fox News.
She made a similar point on her own this morning - MMFA has posted a link to that commentary.
During the show yesterday, she included a tape of Nixon saying "the press is the enemy". Sen Alexander still wouldn't be budged from his allegations that, in some ways, the Obama Administration has gone even further than the Nixon Administration, especially with regard to an enemies list.
Mr. News
It can be taken by Innuendo or an office Fling.
But to have Andrea Mackris' Virtue stolen by Bill-O the Clown?
A Gay Basher & Sexual Phone Preditor of some Renown.
Speak truth to power.
Mr. News
Please excuse my changing of the subject.
Mr. O'Reilly has never apologized for Sexually Harrrassing Andrea Mackris. That makes it more than Relevant.
I will defend even with a Shot-Gun Blast to the Gut your Right to make a Complete & Utter Fool of Yourself.
Mr. News
It's "Predator". Like "Aliens Vs."
Other than that, you were right on.
I mis-spelled Predator and Mr. Hebert74 was correct.
It Surprises me that everyone else is giving Bill O'Reilly a pass?
Mr. O'Reilly gets to "Phone Rape" a Woman (Andrea Mackris) & i'm the only one with some Sass?
Speak truth to power.
Mr. News
it would be nice if MMFA allowed authors to edit our text to fix typos, perhaps with some kind of "rollback" or "verify" capability should someone write something and try to hide their tracks permanently. Coders, there's a feature for you.
</sarcasm>
These con's are getting so unhinged lately, that it's sometimes hard to tell who's kidding and who's just an idiot!
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I try to save my, "Are you being sarcastic or are you just stupid?" for the ACTUAL stupid ones!
I mean, popular Democratic presidents get openly hammered by the press. That's just the way it is, I guess. It's as if journalists, a class of citizen that is overwhelmingly liberal, need to compensate for their personal favorable opinions toward popular presidents by treating every conservative meme with a straight face.
I'm not the only one to see this. There's a reason that Fox News personalities will constantly engage in the false equivalency between their right wing coverage and the mainstream media's supposedly liberalism. Fox knows it's not true, media outlets are staffed by generally liberal reporters, yes, but those liberal reporters are tightly leashed by conservative editors, producers and business owners and advertisers. But Fox isn't in the business of reporting the news. They're in the business of making the news to the benefit of the Republican Party. Now if we could only get the other outlets to cover that with the same fervor they report to us which tyrant Obama resembles this week.
Musings on psychology and overcompensation fade away under the realization that the media's output has been reliably conservative on major story after major story for every one of the last 30+ years.
Liberal bias is a cover for our corporate MSM!
That's why you see them all circling the wagons around FAUX nooze.
Heaven forbid that the populace ever figures out that they're being played for fools by a Kabuki play enacted by the right-wing corporate media and the far right-wing corporate media.
~
So, I stand by my statement: reporters, who are otherwise quite liberal, are hounding this very popular quasi-liberal President because they don't want to be accused of liberal bias - hence creating a liberal bias.
I never said the media was liberal. I never mused on psychology. This is a line of argument that's been brought up by all sorts of commentators, from John Stewart to Bill Moyers.
Ceci Connolly - Liberal?
Your serve, boburell.
~
So look, I made a point. I spoke from experience, having friends who are journalists and being a writer myself. I know what I said was correct because I watched the media go down this road throughout the Clinton and Bush years; first, they covered every wacky conspiracy theory any right-wing think tank floated about Clinton, then they were mum on some of the greatest transgressions against liberty and humanity ever committed by an America President when Bush squatted in the White House. See a patter there? Instead of addressing my argument, two separate posters have rebutted with general assertions of 30+ years of conservative bias and cited an outlier that certainly doesn't represent the vast majority of journalists in this country. If you didn't want to actually debate, why did you bother to respond to my post?
"reporters, who are otherwise quite liberal, are hounding this very popular quasi-liberal President because they don't want to be accused of liberal bias" -- that's psychology to me. It is a total non-factor in explaining 30 years of conservative dominance in what the media produces.
And my assertion that liberal journalists don't want to expose themselves to the charge of liberal bias is professional wariness, not psychology. And it's not a non-factor, and it wasn't meant to explain "30 years of conservative dominance in what the media produces" because that's pure crap. The media, pre-Bush, traditionally acted in an adversarial mode toward whichever political ideology attained power in Washington. That’s what good journalists do. They take the contrarian view because, as one of our best journalists said, “A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.” Whichever party prevails, the Fourth Estate cannot relinquish their institutional cynicism, or democracy doesn’t have any future.
Look, this is pointless. Arguing with you is like arguing with the Fox trolls in some of the other threads. You speak from generalities, are unaware of the consequences of your premisses, and you have exactly zero sense of irony. I don't want to be rude, but I'm getting nothing from you that's really worth the time it took to type this. Have a good one. I'm done.
Did the media act in an "adversarial mode" to Gingrich in 1994, or to the thugs pushing impeachment?
Please don't make any more posts. See, you're in an environment that provides a "reply" button. Clearly that's not for you. Why don't you start a blog that's closed to comments?
Get drunk on insanity. And come party with the RNC and the talking heads like it's 1974!
Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm.
Didn't think so. Ya ain't slick!
Mr, Jennings that evening took it upon himself to berate, the president, why was he not in the white house , and so on ,we all remember this. I never watched Peter Jennings again, and to this day I cant tell you who does the nightly news. I will watch Cnn .
Of course after the way they ran the election I tend to look at what they say with some degree of scepticizm. I watch FOX if I can but Im not exactly sold on them either. Glenn Beck gives me hives. I have to get news from many sources, like media matters and so on. But I would never try to tell you what to watch, If it were not for FOX we would not have known anything about Obama.
CNN, ABC, NBC, MSNBC,was too busy taking a sledge hammer to Sara Palin. then when they were done they turned to Hillary and took an axe to her. While Obama just coasted right on through. Fox was the only coverage going. Also I must add that, I dont trust anybody who gets a tingle up his leg about..........Anybody.!