I got this from Dennis Kobray on green_all_views at yahoogroups.com.

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Message: 14
Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 09:08:02 EDT
From: DBachmozart@aol.com
Subject: Bait and Switch - then and now

Don’t Follow the Money

By FRANK RICH
Published: June 12, 2005
THE morning the Deep Throat story broke, the voice on my answering
machine was as raspy as Hal Holbrook’s. “I just want you to remember
that I wrote ‘Follow the money,’ ” said my caller.

“I want to know if
anybody will give me credit. Watch for the accuracy of the media!”

The voice belonged to my friend William Goldman, who wrote the movie
“All the President’s Men.” His words proved more than a little
prescient. As if on cue, journalists everywhere - from The New York
Times to The Economist to The Washington Post itself - would soon start
attributing this classic line of dialogue to the newly unmasked Deep
Throat, W. Mark Felt. But the line was not in Woodward and Bernstein’s
book or in The Post’s Watergate reportage or in Bob Woodward’s
contemporaneous notes. It was the invention of the author of “Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Marathon Man” and “The Princess Bride.”

This confusion of Hollywood’s version of history with the genuine
article would quickly prove symptomatic of the overall unreality of the
Deep Throat coverage. Was Mr. Felt a hero or a villain? Should he
“follow the money” into a book deal, and if so, how would a 91-year-old
showing signs of dementia either write a book or schmooze about it with
Larry King? How did Vanity Fair scoop The Post? How does Robert Redford
feel about it all? Such were the questions that killed time for a nation
awaiting the much-heralded feature mediathon, the Michael Jackson verdict.

Richard Nixon and Watergate itself, meanwhile, were often reduced to
footnotes. Three years ago, on Watergate’s 30th anniversary, an ABC News
poll found that two-thirds of Americans couldn’t explain what the
scandal was, and no one was racing to enlighten them this time around.
Vanity Fair may have taken the trouble to remind us that Watergate was a
web of crime yielding the convictions and guilty pleas of more than 30
White House and Nixon campaign officials, but few others did. Watergate
has gone back to being the “third-rate burglary” of Nixon administration
spin. It is once again being covered up.

Not without reason. Had the scandal been vividly resuscitated as the
long national nightmare it actually was, it would dampen all the Felt
fun by casting harsh light on our own present nightmare. “The
fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and
criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never
before” was how the former Nixon speech writer William Safire put it on
this page almost nine months ago. The current administration, a
second-term imperial presidency that outstrips Nixon’s in hubris by the
day, leads the attack, trying to intimidate and snuff out any Woodwards
or Bernsteins that might challenge it, any media proprietor like
Katharine Graham or editor like Ben Bradlee who might support them and
any anonymous source like Deep Throat who might enable them to find what
Carl Bernstein calls “the best obtainable version of the truth.”

The attacks continue to be so successful that even now, long after many
news organizations, including The Times, have been found guilty of
failing to puncture the administration’s prewar W.M.D. hype, new details
on that same story are still being ignored or left uninvestigated. The
July 2002 “Downing Street memo,” the minutes of a meeting in which Tony
Blair and his advisers learned of a White House effort to fix “the
intelligence and facts” to justify the war in Iraq, was published by The
London Sunday Times on May 1. Yet in the 19 daily Scott McClellan
briefings that followed, the memo was the subject of only 2 out of the
approximately 940 questions asked by the White House press corps,
according to Eric Boehlert of Salon.

This is the kind of lapdog news media the Nixon White House cherished.
To foster it, Nixon’s special counsel, Charles W. Colson, embarked on a
ruthless program of intimidation that included threatening antitrust
action against the networks if they didn’t run pro-Nixon stories.
Watergate tapes and memos make Mr. Colson, who boasted of “destroying
the old establishment,” sound like the founding father of today’s
blogging lynch mobs. He exulted in bullying CBS to cut back its
Watergate reports before the ‘72 election. He enlisted NBC in
pro-administration propaganda by browbeating it to repackage 10-day-old
coverage of Tricia Nixon’s wedding as a prime-time special. It was the
Colson office as well that compiled a White House enemies list that
included journalists who had the audacity to question administration
policies.

Such is the equivalently supine state of much of the news media today
that Mr. Colson was repeatedly trotted out, without irony, to pass moral
judgment on Mr. Felt - and not just on Fox News, the cable channel that
is actually run by the former Nixon media maven, Roger Ailes. “I want
kids to look up to heroes,” Mr. Colson said, oh so sorrowfully, on NBC’s
“Today” show, condemning Mr. Felt for dishonoring “the confidence of the
president of the United States.” Never mind that Mr. Colson dishonored
the law, proposed bombing the Brookings Institution and went to prison
for his role in the break-in to steal the psychiatric records of The
Times’s Deep Throat on Vietnam, Daniel Ellsberg. The “Today” host, Matt
Lauer, didn’t mention any of this - or even that his guest had done jail
time. None of the other TV anchors who interviewed Mr. Colson - and he
was ubiquitous - ever specified his criminal actions in the Nixon years.
Some identified him onscreen only as a “former White House counsel.”

Had anyone been so rude (or professional) as to recount Mr. Colson’s
sordid past, or to raise the question of whether he was a hero or a
traitor, the genealogical line between his Watergate-era machinations
and those of his present-day successors would have been all too
painfully clear. The main difference is that in the Nixon White House,
the president’s men plotted behind closed doors. The current
administration is now so brazen it does its dirty work in plain sight.

In the most recent example, all the president’s men slimed and
intimidated Newsweek by accusing it of being an accessory to 17 deaths
for its errant Koran story; led by Scott McClellan, they said it was
unthinkable that any American guard could be disrespectful of Islam’s
holy book. These neo-Colsons easily drowned out Gen. Richard Myers, the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Afghanistan’s president,
Hamid Karzai, both of whom said that the riots that led to the 17 deaths
were unrelated to Newsweek. Then came the pièce de résistance of Nixon
mimicry: a Pentagon report certifying desecrations of the Koran by
American guards was released two weeks after the Newsweek imbroglio, at
7:15 p.m. on a Friday, to assure it would miss the evening newscasts and
be buried in the Memorial Day weekend’s little-read papers.

At other times the new Colsons top the old one. Though Nixon aspired to
punish public broadcasting by cutting its funding, he never imagined
that his apparatchiks could seize the top executive positions at the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Nor did he come up with the
brilliant ideas of putting journalists covertly on the administration
payroll and of hiring an outside P.R. firm (Ketchum) to codify an
enemies list by ranking news organizations and individual reporters on
the basis of how favorably they cover a specific administration policy
(No Child Left Behind). President Bush has even succeeded in
emasculating the post-Watergate reform that was supposed to help curb
Nixonian secrecy, the Presidential Records Act of 1978.

THE journalists who do note the resonances of now with then rarely get
to connect those dots on the news media’s center stage of television.
You are more likely to hear instead of how Watergate inspired too much
“gotcha” journalism. That’s a rather absurd premise given that no
“gotcha” journalist got the goods on the biggest story of our time: the
false intimations of incipient mushroom clouds peddled by American
officials to sell a war that now threatens to match the unpopularity and
marathon length of Vietnam.

Only once during the Deep Throat rollout did I see a palpable, if
perhaps unconscious, effort to link the White House of 1972 with that of
2005. It occurred at the start, when ABC News, with the first
comprehensive report on Vanity Fair’s scoop, interrupted President
Bush’s post-Memorial Day Rose Garden news conference to break the story.
Suddenly the image of the current president blathering on about how
hunky-dory everything is in Iraq was usurped by repeated showings of the
scene in which the newly resigned Nixon walked across the adjacent White
House lawn to the helicopter that would carry him into exile.

But in the days that followed, Nixon and his history and the long
shadows they cast largely vanished from the TV screen. In their place
were constant nostalgic replays of young Redford and flinty Holbrook.
Follow the bait-and-switch.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/opinion/12rich.html?th&emc=th

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