I’m fascinated by Watergate. I don’t think there’s anyway the establishment media would go after a Republican White House that way today. The story would be broken by a free weekly type publication and then everyone would ignore it. Serious people would agree that this was just “criminalizing politics”, that you should just keep on walking, and so on. Also too, what Hillary Rosen did was just as bad, remember the time that anonymous MoveOn member put a Hitler mustache on a picture of W, and the hypocrisy of liberals wanting an investigation when many of them watch Bill Maher. Howie Kurtz would certainly think this was a terrible breach of journamalistic ethics:
The secret source that legendary journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein referred to as a “mystic” in their investigation that brought down President Nixon turns out to have been a grand juror who spoke to them in a likely violation of the law.
El Cid
No one was interested in the My Lai story until Hersh got it published in the alternative Dispatch News Service, which got it to 35 papers nationwide.
c u n d gulag
I’ve always felt that deep down, Woodward was as much of a ratf*cker, as any of Nixon’s henchmen.
rlrr
turns out to have been a grand juror who spoke to them in a likely violation of the law.
“… and therefor Palin should be President.”
— Tea-baggers
Rathskeller
I cannot see it. If it was something juicy, I don’t think the source being from an illegal grand jury disclosure would stop any reporter today. They’re certainly willing to be a conduit for oppo research.
Heliopause
Hard to say, but they might. The biggest variable is who the target of the sleaze is. Nixon was crazy and went after everybody, including powerful people. A fairly big deal was made of Iran-Contra because they were going behind the backs of Reagan’s drinking buddies in Congress.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
If Nixon was president today he would have likely have been primaried out for his failures of purity in office like the EPA. Very likely Watergate would have been a break into another Republicans campaign.
FlipYrWhig
The Bureau of Land Management scandal during the Bush administration featured sex and drugs as well as political corruption, and virtually nobody ever heard about it. I’m not sure Watergate would get the same play it did. Then again, look at Whitewater and Solyndra, two big piles of absolutely nothing.
Mino
Hell, they’d be arrested under the Patriot Act, tried by a military court for “giving support to our enemies” and shot.
mistermix
It’s telling that what really set Woodward off was that Bradlee still had some doubts about some of their reporting, not the revelation that they spoke to a grand juror.
Hunter Gathers
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Not even close to being accurate. Want to know how Nixon would have campaigned if he ran today? Look no further than Mittens. The only thing Nixon ever gave 2 shits about was winning.
Mino
@FlipYrWhig: Yep. And even the Dems have forgotten–witness their failure to compare and contrast.
And my sister reminded me that TailHooks put those modern pikers to shame.
The Dangerman
Back in the day when the news focused on the NEWS and not entertainment/ratings (i.e. The Blonde and Nice Tits Brigade at Fox)
SatanicPanic
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Nixon wouldn’t have even considered creating the EPA except that it was politically advantageous to do so. Nixon was the Romney of the liberal era.
ETA- Hunter Gathers beat me to it
seanindc
@c u n d gulag:
You are actually pretty close. He got a job at the Washington Post with less than 2 years of journalistic experience fresh out of the Navy where he did a stint in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). During that tour in the ONI, he was assigned to the White House as a Naval Liaison under the DCoS for the Navy. Once Woodward left, he had a pipeline into the Nixon White House through that Liaison office. The ONI at the time immediately before Watergate was reading State’s China traffic, to which they vehemently disagreed with both it’s recommendations and intel. The Joint Chiefs started feeding Woodward info on Nixon. Just another thread of this thing…
Hill Dweller
@FlipYrWhig:
The MMS corruption also cost the country a couple billion dollars. But Obama talked about the Bin Laden raid and Hillary Rosen made an in-artful statement.
SenyorDave
@El Cid: And if My Lai broke today there would be defenders, and then David Gregory could do “its a partisan issue” crap.
Roger Moore
@FlipYrWhig:
And Fast and Furious. OTOH, those are basically getting trumpeted by Fox and get relatively little play outside the RWNM.
Ben Franklin
“I don’t think there’s anyway the establishment media would go after a Republican White House that way today.”
That depends on whether they think the story has legs. They are bizness driven, not iconoclasts, as a profession. We depend on a few hardcore newsmen to hammer and tong it, until it gets picked up by their peers.
Until they see dollar signs, it will lay fallow.
Brachiator
@FlipYrWhig:
It wasn’t tied directly to the president.
The establishment media did not initally go after Watergate. I recall that early on, the NY Times downplayed the story. And there is this as background.
But since then, the establishment media has become even more “establishment,” and the government and individual politicians have found more ways to curry favors with or subvert favored journalists and pundits.
And the public has fallen into a false super cynical slumber in which they don’t consistently care when their politicians do dirty shit, or figure that everybody does it, or that their side must have had good reasons, etc.
As always, the shitty thing about a democracy is that if the people are not vigilant and concerned about the public good, then it doesn’t much matter how corrupt the government or how complaisant the media might be.
General Stuck
I was in the Army the entire period of the Watergate Hearings and drama, up to Nixon’s resignation. I was not very political at the time, unless you count protesting to impress the many hippy chicks of the day.
About every day when I got off duty, I would make the usual stop for a fifth of Tequila and park my ass in front of the boob tube to watch the hearings and the general circus show of Watergate. It was utterly fascinating, though I didn’t get a lot of the stuff that was going on. But the entire thing was a perfect exclamation point of the insanity all around me coming of age in that time period.
But as whackadoodle as things got, I never had the sense that we were teetering on the edge, as a country, of the abyss of self inflicted destruction like I do now a days
edit – the reason I felt that way then and now, was bad as shit turned in the 60’s and early 70’s, I had a feeling things were working like they should to emerge from a crisis of governance as a country. It is just the opposite these days, seems to me.
Chris
@Heliopause:
Yep. Plus he never really had a constituency in Washington that unambiguously saw him as “one of us” – mainstream Democrats, moderate Republicans, conservative Republicans and Dixiecrats all had their reasons to distrust and dislike him. So there wasn’t as much incentive to protect him as there might otherwise have been.
Besides that, Watergate also happened to be the crowning jewel of an era in which revulsion at and distrust of the U.S. government were at an all-time high. Without that kind of atmosphere, I have a hard time seeing any president being forced to resign by a Watergate-type event in our era.
taylormattd
@General Stuck:
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Southern Beale
I am absolutely gob-smacked at the lengths conservatives go to defend all sorts of criminal behavior by Republicans and corporations. I shouldn’t be but I am. I see it ALL the fucking time on my blog. It’s just truly astonishing. A guy in comments on my post about Wal-Mart bribing Mexican officials here actually defended Wal-Mart, saying it’s “just how they do business in Mexico” (ignoring the fact that it’s against the law in both Mexico and the U.S.) and “a victimless crime.”
Yeah. Victimless crime. Like Secret Service agents getting it on with Colombian prostitutes? They didn’t seem to happy about that.
The level of IOKIYAR in our country has just reached the level of self-parody.
Yevgraf
I was 12. It consumed the entire summer tv schedule that year.
Villago Delenda Est
Howie Kurtz, Village vermin, should be beheaded after he’s shot, after he’s vivisected, after he’s drawn and quartered.
Martin
@General Stuck:
Dude, if you putting away a fifth of tequila during the news, that’s probably why you didn’t get a lot of the stuff going on. Also probably why it was fascinating.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Hunter Gathers:
BINGO!
This is a very important contrast/comparison. Mittens is arguably the most slippery devious lying weasel in American politics since Nixon. And that is saying a lot. And I think the psychological roots of this world-class mendacity has similar roots in both cases. Nixon was interested in only one thing policy wise, besides power for power’s sake, and that was Cold War foreign policy. He was a stone-cold wonk in that area and he really, really wanted to play King of the US Imperial epoch, and he didn’t give a fig about anything else policy wise, so long as it didn’t get in the way of what he really wanted. Perlstein unearthed a ton of anecdotes in both Before the Storm and Nixonland showing up this aspect of Nixon’s personality.
__
And on the basis of present evidence I think Mittens is showing a very similar attitude, except the area of policy he really cares about is 1%er domestic economic policy. The rest of it is just noise, something he has to talk about to fool the rubes and peasants so he can get his hands on the levers of power. But I don’t think he gives a fig about the rest, and as a consequence he can’t open his mouth without lying about something. Romney will be Nixon-redux if he gets into office.
__
And to return to DougJ’s orginal point, of course there is no fucking way the mainstream press would dig up a scandal like Watergate today if a Republican was in the White House. So Romney = Nixon + Right Wing MSM = big trouble.
PeakVT
@Southern Beale: Modern Republicans are objectively pro-corporate crime.
catclub
@rlrr: please see today’s xkcd
on Ayn Rand. In particular, the text that appears when you mouse over the image.
General Stuck
@Martin:
Oh, I shared it with my roomies at the time. One of which would get pie eyed drunk and call his girlfriend back in Missouri, and get all existential emo. The other roomie was a Chaplin’s assistant I was corrupting for the hell of it, so as he’d shut up about the jeebus thing to where we could get drunk in peace.
edit – plus I was a practicing Buddhist at the time that drove them both crazy me chanting to my scrolls when I felt like it.
eemom
What is this, dumb ass nonsequitor day? Or dare I hope this post is a parody of lil Freddie’s preening nonsense below?
Yes, for an infinitude of reasons that have been commented on here an umptitude of times, this is a very different world from the one in which Watergate happened and was reported. Most notably that the main stream media, aka the ad nauseum code phrase Very Serious People, just don’t fucking do journalism anymore. Which again is pretty much a constant refrain around here. And of which Watergate has been made the poster child at least a million times.
What a vortex of stoopid this place is sometimes.
(And a preemptive GFY to anyone who tells me to start my own blog.)
Chris
@General Stuck:
I wasn’t around back then, but from what I’m seeing in hindsight, I think I agree with this.
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Interesting – he sounds like LBJ in reverse, the guy who cared about his domestic issues and saw foreign policy as a distraction.
And yes, I agree with the comparisons with Mitt – except I think Romney is considerably lazier and stupider than Tricky Dick. But he’s got advantages that Nixon didn’t have, so it doesn’t matter as much.
Villago Delenda Est
@Brachiator:
The NY Times has been butthurt that the WaPo got the scoop on this for a very long time. It think it had a great deal to do with their playing up of the non-scandal of Whitewater, and never letting go, no matter how much it was pointed out to them that there was NOTHING there. Likewise the entire Wenn Ho Lee thing, fomented a sack of Freeper shit. They thought they were going to get their limit on Presidents, and they utterly failed. They continue to fail, their oped page, with only a couple of exceptions, is a wasteland of rigid CW establishment thinking, sterile and lifeless.
These dinosaurs deserve to die.
Argive
@SenyorDave:
There were plenty of defenders at the time My Lai broke. Hell, the jurors in Calley’s trial got something like 100 times more hate mail than supportive correspondence. Some troops in Vietnam expressed open support for Calley (exemplified by chants like: Calley, Calley, he’s our man!/If he can’t do it, Medina can!). No less than Governor Jimmy Carter encouraged the citizens of the great state of Georgia to “honor the flag, as ‘Rusty’ (Calley’s nickname) had done.” If My Lai happened today? I think we all know that not only would there be more defenders, but at the end of it all the conclusion would have something to do with how an infantry platoon is like a big barrel of apples, and you only need a few bad ones to spoil the bunch.
Raven
@Argive: WSB tv interviews with people after the guilty verdict and the fucking goobers on there talking about how they’d have helped him kill all them gooks is something to behold. Not everyone however.
http://crdl.usg.edu/cgi/crdl?format=_video&query=id%3Augabma_wsbn_62845
EIGRP
I first read that as “…keep on wanking” which would make sense for the media.
Eric
Chris
@Argive:
I doubt if it would even make the news (though I’m sure there were My Lais in Vietnam, as well, that never saw the light of day). One of the key lessons the Pentagon learned in Vietnam was to make sure the media never again got enough access or latitude to even come close to doing their job.
The Tragically Flip
@Chris:
Don’t think this is right. I think mistrust of Government and the quasi governing institutions of society are currently at their all time highs. Now things like Watergate are just more of the same, back then I think Watergate was illusion shattering.
Bush nearly had his own Saturday night massacre with Ashcroft and numerous other mucky mucks at DoJ prepared to resign over whatever the original NSA program was doing, I’m glad they did stand up to Bush for something, and I’m really glad it didn’t come to them resigning en masse because I’m quite cynical that the public reaction would have led to Bush’s impeachment. It would have been a 2 day story, and then a celebrity sex tape would have resumed its proper place in the limelight.
I mean, fuck, the CIA’s torture mastermind just confessed on to his crimes on 60 Minutes and nothing will happen to him.
We’ve entered the George Costanza era of Government criminality: It’s not a crime if you don’t believe it is.
Brachiator
@Villago Delenda Est:
Very true. Funny how much ego there is in the journalism business.
The LA Times was so impressed about they way that the WaPo newsroom was depicted in All the President’s Men, that they upped their game when remodeling the third floor Editorial department. And went nuts with stuff like a big test kitchen for the Food editor and special screening room for the critics.
LA Times Watergate coverage was actually pretty good. Some of the reporters knew Nixon and Washington very well. But the East Coast papers, and the networks got more of the glory.
Chris
@The Tragically Flip:
You’re right, but I think it’s a different kind of mistrust – expressed more in outrage back then, versus resignation and even acceptance today. Political elites can weather the latter much easier than the former.
The Tragically Flip
We shouldn’t forget that Iran/Contra did not result in the removal from office of Ronald Reagan, as it should have if the system was functioning as intended. Iran/Contra was probably worse than Watergate given what it represented.
The door has been rotten for a long time. The Bush crime family just kicked it in.
General Stuck
@The Tragically Flip:
And though Rodriguez was talking about something else, he also gave us the reason why he and the lawyers and the president made a safe gamble they’d get away with about anything inflicted on the 9-11 suspects.
When he stated that this attack killed 3000 people on the continental homeland, that the public would not stand for criminal prosecutions for that reason alone, against torturing, or any other illegal treatment toward the people who conducted that attack. If it had happened overseas someplace, they probably wouldn’t have built a government policy of torture with full infrastructure world wide to carry it out. That says nothing good about the American perps of torture, nor the country of our citizenship.
edit – and for the purpose of causing us to violate our own senses of morality as well as laws against torturing prisoners, OBL succeeded beyond all expectations
Mouse Tolliver
@FlipYrWhig: Not to mention the $10 billion that was lost in Iraq to waste, mismanagement and overpriced privatized services. $3 billion of that $10 billion went to Halliburton. But the $10 billion didn’t get much traction. GSA spends $800,000 in Vegas. ZOMG! Tax and spend Demoncrats!!!
Zach
“I don’t think there’s anyway the establishment media would go after a Republican White House that way today.”
There shouldn’t be any “think” about it. There’s nothing in the Pentagon Papers that comes close to what we actually know about the Bush administration in the run up to Iraq when it comes to saying different things in private and public… and that was about the actual cause of war rather than PR in an ongoing/escalating war. If it’d been 30 years earlier there would’ve been no end to the political and media pressure on the Bush administration until an eventual series of leaks revealed what the actual discussions were behind the scenes, Winter 02/03. Today, we still don’t have much of a clue as to who was really responsible for the lies because the media still won’t call them lies and Democrats are apparently too embarrassed for having believed them to do anything about it.
The Tragically Flip
@General Stuck:
I agree, but I don’t think this failing is unique to Americans (and FWIW, I’m Canadian). It’s all the more reason for the ICC to have jurisdiction where a nation’s internal politics don’t allow it to respond appropriately to crimes against humanity. I think that’s probably the norm for torture regimes, where they are primarily aimed at outsiders to protect the nation from some perceived threat. Examples of nations that have prosecuted torturers tend to be nations that had oppressive regimes torturing mostly citizens.
I think this is a very natural blind spot in judicial systems. It reminds me how it usually takes decades to centuries for governments to apologize for past serious misdeeds: They tend to wait for everyone culpable to be dead or at least completely out of political power. Hopefully Bush regime torture victims don’t have to wait for 2050 to get that apology, but absent some external forcing agent like an ICC, I don’t see what force in domestic politics could cause it to happen.
c u n d gulag
@seanindc:
Yeah, Nixon’s presidency, especially Watergate, seems endless.
And I wonder how much we don’t yet know about Reagan and “Papa Doc” Bush and Iran-Contra, and “Baby Doc’s” coup, and disastrous presidency?
And the MSM seems uninterested in looking any deeper.
Argive
@c u n d gulag:
I’ve no doubt that historians and political scientists are salivating at the prospect of writing major exposes on Reagan and Bush I’s relationships with Iran-Contra/Baby Doc. The problem is that even once they write those books no one is going to read them.
wapsie
@eemom:
You’re such a pleasant person.
Catsy
@eemom:
What about a newsletter?
Argive
@Chris:
My Lai saw the light of day partially due to the efforts of an Army photographer stationed with Charlie Company named Ronald Haeberle, who took all those famous color photos (the dead people in the ditch, for instance) with his personal camera and then gave speaking tours in which he displayed every single shot upon going back to the US. He only got away with that because the Army didn’t confiscate his camera after the massacre. Obviously it’s more difficult to contain war zone footage these days, but I don’t think anyone is liable to get as lucky as Haeberle was again.
Barry
@Ben Franklin: “That depends on whether they think the story has legs. They are bizness driven, not iconoclasts, as a profession. We depend on a few hardcore newsmen to hammer and tong it, until it gets picked up by their peers.”
No. They didn’t even dig into the Bush II scandals when he was despised by everybody but the Tea Partiers.
Davis X. Machina
They made a movie about a one-legged pitcher once. They don’t make many about two-legged pitchers….
The same would apply to instances of the Washington Post doing its job. They made a movie out of it, because how often does that happen?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Hunter Gathers:
And what, pray tell, does Nixon’s campaign style, have anything to do whether as incumbent in today’s Republican party he would be facing a primary challenge or not?
Nixon would do anything to win is given after Watergate
I say Nixon would fail the Right’s purity test as president because of Nixon’s “as long as shuts the biggest group of people up” domestic policy (and yes, it’s clear the EPA was a cynical ploy with his reelection in mind)
Now put those to things together; a GOP president who doesn’t give a shit as long is gets him the most votes in the general, a base totally committed to purity or death and that is why I am saying if Nixon ran for reelection in ’12 it would be him bugging Santorum’s campaign headquarters during a real viscous GOP primary.
Davis X. Machina
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Nixon, but without the opera… no way John Adams could do anything with the Mittster.
The banality of evil banality. Richard the Third v. Charles Keating.
handsmile
References by several commenters above to the My Lai massacre prompted me to review its Wikipedia article. Grim stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre
Reading it, I was reminded that Lt. John Calley, convicted of premeditated murder in the shooting of 22 Vietnamese villagers, ultimately served 3-1/2 years of house arrest at Fort Benning. That outcome must comfort Robert Bales.
Surely everyone recalls Robert Bales. Another “bad apple” story in which the corporate media demonstrated its commitment to seeking the truth and informing the public.
Davis X. Machina
@Raven:
The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley.
Brachiator
@Argive:
With digital cameras, flash drives, and the Internets,and international news sources, I think it is more difficult to suppress these images today. We are helped by a public who has been told that they really don’t want to know, and that too much probing hurts the war effort and doesn’t support the troops.
aretino
I’m fascinated by Watergate. I don’t think there’s anyway the establishment media would go after a Republican White House that way today. The story would be broken by a free weekly type publication and then everyone would ignore it.
Well, the establishment media ignored Watergate for a long time, too. Remember, Woodward and Bernstein were obscure reporters working the city beat. If they had been prominent insiders working the executive branch beat, they would have steered clear, too.
khead
Did Dan Savage bully Christians?
According to the responses from Brad Hirschfield (to pretty much every question during this chat) at Kaplan….. YES!
I, for one, am shocked.
Southern Beale
I thought the secret source was Mark Felt, then Associate Director of the FBI?
Davis X. Machina
@Brachiator: A wash, I think. The same internet and other technologies would simplify Mau-mauing the photographer every bit as much as the photographer’s getting the story out in the first place.
Kerners are always go. And the sandbox 1/32 models of Bradleys are ready to hand.
Catsy
@The Tragically Flip:
One might observe how former Bush administration officials–Cheney in particular–are very cautious about where they travel outside of the US, due to a very well-grounded (and well-deserved) fear of prosecution by some other country that actually still treats torture as a crime.
My hope is that Rodriguez will at some point neglect to be so diligent.
gene108
@Brachiator:
If that was the case the MSM would’ve quashed Whitewater to get in bed with President Clinton’s “establishment”.
The reality is the right-wing, post Watergate has done an astounding job in creating their own media universe that pushes stories into the MSM. People weren’t aware of this happening, because the MSM treated all those right-wing rags – Washington Times, American Spectator, etc. – as real news organization because their publications came out in the same font size as the Washington Post and New York Times.
Then came Fox News, which picked up ratings and forced the media to change, because they were losing viewers to Fox News.
Right-wing print rags never made money and were the hobbies of billionaires, who wanted more influence in society. The MSM print media is losing money and may become obsolete in the near future.
At some level, what we see as reporting are adjustments to a new business model, where the MSM doesn’t have the resources to do a Watergate-level investigative story anymore and the right-wingers can fling their monkey-poo out and see what sticks because Mellon-Scaife and Rev. Moon don’t care about making profits off their media investments.
This causes a lot of the imbalance in reporting we see today and how right-wingers dominate news cycles.
handsmile
@Davis X. Machina: (#54)
One of Adams’ better-known works is entitled “Shaker Loops.” So perhaps he might be commissioned to compose something on another American religious cult.
Also re your comment #52 on two-legged pitchers:
As much as I despise Kaplan Test Prep Daily, it continues to employ Dana Priest, the finest and most invaluable investigative reporter working for any American newspaper. (This is the first sentence of a comment I posted on an earlier thread today.) Priest, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes (for her series on CIA secret prisons and the Walter Reed Medical Center scandal) and author of the essential recent book, Top Secret America, deserves her very own movie, and exemption from the otherwise almost wholesale dereliction of her employer.
Ben Franklin
@gene108:
This causes a lot of the imbalance in reporting we see today and how right-wingers dominate news cycles.
Ever hear of William Randolph Hearst? Take a look at where the term ‘yellow journalism’ comes from. This is not new.
Martin
Hmm, so Mittens who is on record saying that going after OBL probably isn’t worth it, and on record saying that he wouldn’t go into Pakistan, is now also on record saying that even Jimmy Carter would have approved the OBL raid.
So does Mittens really want to volunteer that Carter was stronger on defense than he would be? Because that’s kinda how I read that.
louc
What @brachiator said. But also, Woodward and Bernstein were local reporters, not national ones. Typically local reporters do a better job of ferreting out wrongdoing. That’s why the demise of local newspapers is scary.
Hill Dweller
@Martin: A reporter asked Obama about it at the press conference with the Japanese PM. She also implied there was excessive celebration for Bin Laden’s death in a question for PM Noda, which earned her a smack down from the President.
Obama went on to compliment the military, intelligence agencies and the political process. In regards to Willard’s remarks about Carter, Obama asked the press to remember his opponents’ reactions when he said he would go into Pakistan to get OBL during the ’08 campaign. And if they didn’t mean what they said at the time, perhaps they should explain that to the media/public.
gene108
@Ben Franklin:
In the broadcast era it is.
When the government started imposing standards on newly formed broadcast networks, via licenses for radio frequencies in the 1920’s (or whenever), you saw a shift from “yellow journalism”.
Thomas Jefferson controlled his own little network of newspapers to smear Adams, in the election of 1800.
Things change.
In our lifetimes (I assume most folks here are under 80 years old) we have taken for granted a relatively objective news media.
What the right-wing did post-Watergate really changed what most of our expectations of the media are by being able to mask partisan hack pieces as news; no one was thinking “yellow journalism” would find a way back into the mainstream, especially the MSM, which is why they were such easy suckers to parrot right-wing talking points.
Brachiator
@Davis X. Machina:
But my point is that the story would get out (as ultimately was the case with the recent story about US soldiers posing with limbs of killed Afghan soldiers).
And with Twitter and FaceBook and Tumblr and Instagram other sources, this stuff can spill out all over the place.
There is all kinds of stuff out there now with respect to Iraq and Afghanistan, and yet some Balloon Juicers are still stuck in some time warp in which they believe that the mainstream media are still the most powerful arbiters and gatekeepeers of this information.
By the way, I think this is why the US and other countries are so hot to pass laws to rein in the Internet using the false claims of cyber security or even intellectual property.
@gene108:
Nonsense. The right wing has exploited some people’s deep desire to be intellectually balkanized. People flock to Faux news and Limbaugh precisely because they want to be lulled with what they most want to hear.
This is simply not true. The LA Times, for example, made tons of money when they were an official tool of the WASP ruling class. They continued to make money when they became more moderate. The same is true of many other media empires, including of course that of Rupert Murdoch.
Not really. Many news organizations are still part of extremely popular entertainment companies. And in the past, during its glory days, the highly esteemed news division of CBS ran at a loss. Prestige was considered to be more important than ratings and a crass appeal to the bottom line.
I agree that much has changed in the news business, but it is much more complicated than perhaps you allow.
Oh, yeah, and even William Randolph Hearst could run some good investigative pieces when he felt like it. For example, the old Hearst newspapers in California were always more strongly union than the virulently anti union LA Times.
gene108
@Hill Dweller:
Who can remember what happened in 2008? That’s like expecting someone to remember being born. You just have to take your parent’s word for it.
The MSM is like our parents, we just have to trust them about stuff that’s being said now is what has always been said.
Mike G
I see Watergate as a power struggle between different establishment right-wing factions in DC. Today’s equivalents would all be solidly in the Repuke party.
Nixon was taken down because he pissed off the wrong powerful right-wing forces. The concept of Watergate as a victory for progressive forces against right-wing power entrenched in Washington is a fallacy. The benefit to the Dems was an accidental byproduct of the right-wing project to get Nixon.
Any modern equivalent would be a result of a Repuke president alienating corporate media, the Security State or other right-wing interests. And the right-wing media has enough tentacles that many would be shouting down any attempt unless support for it was very broad-based within that toxic world.
Davis X. Machina
@Brachiator: The MSM’s grip is gone, perhaps, but replaced by a noisy ecosystem of replacements on balance more likely to get the story out, perhaps, but out into a more hostile world for it once delivered.
Bush’s adventures in — out of — the ANG e.g.
patrick II
he republicans have spent the lasst forty yars innoculating themselves from every having another republican president impeached. While going after Clinton was partly revenge, the primary motive was to show democrats that they could abuse the special prosecutor’s office and abuse the impeachment process and intimidate the democrats into not considering impeachment under any circumstances.
Dick Cheney’s entire vice presidency was about normalizing behavior that would have caused impeachment in the seventies. Torturing prisoners — screw you and the law, we will do it if we want to. Part of the reason for the Iraq war was to create circumstances in which republican executive could do whatever he wants.
The forty years of republican disdain for the limits of democracy and normalizing unfettered power has made a new “watergate” leading to the impeachment of a republican president virtually impossible.
Martin
@Hill Dweller: And the excessive celebration is bullshit.
It’s not like Obama made the announcement emerging from a Blackhawk helicopter in full SEAL gear with a ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner behind him. Now that would have been excessive. Particularly if the mission hadn’t even finished yet.
gene108
@Brachiator:
The American Spectator and Washington Times, by the 1990’s, were taken as serious news organizations. The American Spectator was one of the main drivers for pushing Whitewater, unearthing Clinton’s fling with Paula Jones, and all the other noise in the 1990’s.
Fox News is just the cherry on top, for the right-wing media.
Limbaugh, et. al. in radio do a great job of whipping people up, but no one ran with a story from Limbaugh’s radio show and published a follow up piece in the NYT or WaPo.
Outside of Murdoch’s media empire, many right-wing rags are money losing ventures for billionaires. Even within Murdoch’s media empire, I’ll bet there are a few loss making units Murdoch keeps around because he wants to be in certain media markets.
You say potato, I say pot-ah-to…bottom line is they don’t have the budgets they used to have to investigate news stories…
Hill Dweller
@Martin:
In tone and body language, Obama was screaming bullshit at the reporter. In fact, he actually answered the question posed to the Japanese PM.
Nevertheless, Obama’s answer was good. It was essentially ‘I said I’d get OBL, and I did it’. Although he didn’t say Willard’s name, Obama called him(and his other critics) a liar, without actually saying the word.
Ben Franklin
@Hill Dweller:
Who would you want answering the phone at 3 am?
Obama, the Terminator, or Mitt the Equivicator? 8 >)
eemom
I will not link, but per memeorandum Greek Clowness Arianna is sucking Romdick on the OBL ad.
Could that woman possibly be more despicable? I think not.
Chris
@Mike G:
Well, I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say it was the powerful right-wing forces that brought him down (though I’d love to hear more), but they certainly let it happen. Nixon seems to me to’ve gone the way of McCarthy, someone they liked to use for a while but threw under the bus once he became a liability.
(In both cases, the right wing killed the monster, but salvaged the things that had made him a monster – the Red-baiting madness for McCarthy, the race/culture war electoral strategies for Nixon – and went on to integrate them into the political process to the point that they became mainstream, defining aspects of it).
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@eemom:
__
The press is going to make this a horse race even if they have to strap Mitt to the top of their clown car and drive him down the highway at 120 mph to do it, in order to give him a chance of catching Obama. And don’t even ask if the engine or the suspension can take the strain.
__
Fortunately for us, the highway they know best is the Washington Beltway, so the probability of them going round and round in circles without getting anywhere is fairly high.
eemom
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
….and of crashing and burning, even higher. : )
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@eemom:
__
If memory serves me correctly, there is a particularly tricky curve on the nothern segment of the Wa. Beltway known to locals as “The Mormon Temple” after a prominent architectural landmark you can see from the highway.
Brachiator
@Davis X. Machina:
People want to have it both ways. They want to cheer the demise of old media and also complain about new media. OK.
The bottom line is that in a democracy, for now, people still have some control. Contrast the countries in which the governments actively control the media or intimidate or murder reporters.
In this regard, Americans are wusses.
I understand your points, but it’s always a hostile world for attempts to do good journalism.
@gene108:
OK. But Whitewater was ultimately a lame distraction. And Clinton did not have a fling with Paula Jones. Even he admitted that his actions towards her were inappropriate.
I dispute your assertion that the Washington Times is taken seriously as anything other than fishwrap.
You keep saying this. You don’t know much about the news industry or its history, or the financials of major media organizations.
It’s more about the will than the budget. And newspapers are still winning Pulitzers for investigative reporting. Also, by the way, one of the biggest issues here is not the cost, but the need for deep pockets to deal with potential legal expenses.
liberal
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Yes, it’s between Silver Spring and Bethesda, mainly going west (outer loop).
When I first saw it maybe 15 years ago, someone had written “Free Dorothy!” on an overpass, which was pretty funny.
Brachiator
@louc:
Yep. Great point.
Some of the bravest editors and publishers have been those of small local papers, often with more on the line than the media giants, who buck a lot of local opposition to tell the stories that need to be told.
David Koch
@eemom: the thin skinned greek beard is just pissed that Obama mocked her at the WHCD.
mclaren
The massive criminality and corruption of the Bush White House was Watergate^666. If that shit had gone on in the 60s or 70s, it would’ve been outed by the New York Times and resulted in Bush’s impeachment and resignation.
But by the early 2000s, the New York Times was now helping sell Bush’s lies by acting as stenographers and enablers for his flagrant scams and made-up bullshit and pro-WMD propaganda.