Berating reporters, revoking credentials, suing news organizations—hardly a week goes by without Donald Trump’s attacking the press.
asserted
Trump → berate → press
An experienced commander of headlines and inveterate consumer of media, he cajoles journalists one day and harangues them the next.
asserted
he → cajole → them
But the man who preceded Trump as the President to appear most often on the cover of TIME reigned supreme in media manipulation too.
asserted
who → precede → manipulation
Well before Trump railed against fake news, Richard Nixon waged a sustained campaign to intimidate and punish those who covered him.
asserted
who → rail → him
Since the emergence of a modern mass media and a professional White House press corps in the early 20th century, Presidents have sought to use journalists to disseminate their ideas, goals, and achievements—and have treated coverage that deviates from their spin as misleading, hostile, or malicious.
asserted
that → seek → spin
Reporters, on the other hand, while recognizing their duty to relay what the President says and does, believe that they can offer a fuller, more accurate account of events than the White House does—by adding context, checking facts, and airing dissenting views.
asserted
House → recognize → views
In that difference of perspective lies a recipe for conflict.
asserted
recipe → lie → conflict
Every President has warred with journalists.
asserted
President → war → journalists
Theodore Roosevelt sued Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World for alleging corruption in the purchase of the Panama Canal.
asserted
Roosevelt → sue → Canal
(He lost.)
asserted
He → lose → ?
Franklin Roosevelt instructed an impertinent correspondent to don a dunce cap and stand in the corner.
asserted
Roosevelt → instruct → corner
Dwight Eisenhower baldly lied to the press after the Soviet Union shot down an American spy plane.
asserted
Union → lie → plane
Barack Obama tried to exclude Fox News from an interview with the other TV networks and used the Espionage Act to pursue leakers.
asserted
Obama → try → leakers
The list goes on.
asserted
list → go → ?
But, at least until Trump, no other President had a more contentious relationship with the media than Nixon.
asserted
President → have → Nixon
By the time he took office in 1969, the White House–press relationship had grown sharply combative, thanks to the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson’s “credibility gap,” and the cultural upheavals and suspicion of authority that marked the 1960s.
asserted
that → take → 1960s
Journalists took it for granted that Nixon, with his long history of resenting the press, had nefarious designs on neutering the Fourth Estate.
asserted
Nixon → take → Estate
The venerated CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite labeled Nixon’s antipress campaign “a grand conspiracy.”
asserted
anchorman → label → campaign
Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee charged that “the First Amendment is in greater danger than any time I’ve seen it.”
asserted
I → charge → it
A National Press Club report found Nixon guilty of “an unprecedented, government-wide effort to control, restrict and conceal information” and “discredit the press.”
asserted
Nixon → find → press
And all of this happened before impeachment proceedings even began.
asserted
proceedings → happen → this
At times, even as they distrusted him personally, reporters showered Nixon with admiring coverage, such as during the summer of 1972 when détente was easing tensions with the Soviet Union and after Nixon made his breakthrough trip to communist China.
asserted
Nixon → distrust → China
That summer, according to press critic Ben Bagdikian’s count, of more than 2,200 Washington correspondents, only about a dozen pursued the emerging Watergate story.
uncertain
dozen → accord → story
Nixon coasted to re-election.
asserted
Nixon → coast → election
Yet these bouts of positive coverage did little to appease Nixon, whose antipress campaign continued unabated.
asserted
campaign → do → Nixon
Some of the President’s men later owned up to zealotry.
asserted
Some → own → zealotry
“We used to watch the news broadcasts and go up the walls at what we thought was unfair coverage of Nixon,” recalled Chuck Colson, who in the fall of 1972 bullied CBS executives into shortening the second part of a Watergate exposé.
asserted
who → use → exposé
Speechwriter Ray Price said flatly, “We did often lie, mislead, deceive, try to use [the press], and to con them.”
asserted
We → say → them
William Safire, another speechwriter, recalled Nixon insisting that “the press is the enemy ... to be hated and beaten”—an attitude Safire called “neither justifiable nor defensible” and yet deeply held.
asserted
Safire → recall → ?
The particular skirmishes in Nixon’s war on journalists would fill not only a ledger but a shelf of books.
asserted
skirmishes → fill → books
(In writing my own book about Nixon, I consumed at least a dozen books on the subject, with titles like The Chilling Effect in TV News: Intimidation by the Nixon White House and The Engineering of Restraint: The Nixon Administration and the Press.)
asserted
I → write → Restraint
Some of the Administration’s offenses appear in retrospect fairly routine or mild, like the maddening evasiveness of press secretary Ron Ziegler, or even Vice President Spiro Agnew’s baroque diatribes in which he lashed out at the power of the TV networks and major newspapers.
asserted
he → appear → networks
But others were genuinely disturbing assaults on the independence of the press corps, waged by a man loath to acknowledge any constraints on his power.
asserted
others → disturb → power
One of the earliest of these was Nixon’s plan, hatched with National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, to stop leaks by wiretapping the homes and phones of journalists who reported critically on the Administration’s actions, starting with the 1969 bombing of North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia, which the White House had hoped to keep secret.
asserted
House → hatch → which
At the Georgetown home of syndicated columnist Joseph Kraft, another targeted newsman, White House hireling John J. Ragan, wearing a repairman’s uniform, climbed up a nearby telephone pole to install a battery-operated transmitter that would convey every conversation on the Kraft family phone to a tape recorder in the trunk of a car parked close by.
asserted
that → syndicate → car
The wiretaps on Kraft and other reporters, installed without any warrant, wouldn’t be exposed until just before the 1973 Watergate hearings, but they were later found to be unconstitutional infringements on the journalists’ rights.
asserted
they → instal → rights
The wiretapping scheme grew out of Nixon and Kissinger’s mania for clamping down on leaks that might damage the Administration’s standing.
uncertain
that → grow → standing
That mania resurfaced in 1971, after the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, a Defense Department study of American involvement in the Vietnam War.
asserted
Times → resurface → War
Told by Kissinger that he would be seen as a “weakling” if he didn’t respond, the President had his Attorney General sue the Times to force it to stop publishing the classified documents.
asserted
General → tell → documents
No previous Administration had ever tried to impose “prior restraint”—government censorship prohibiting the publication of material before it appears.
asserted
it → try → material
…and 22 more, not listed.
The Aporia
