that were reported in the press and forced him to make his famous “Checkers” Writings on George W. Bush speech on TV. After taking office as President in 1968 he was breaking his September, 2004 promise to wind down the war in Vietnam — in fact, he was expanding it, and Part 3 — Capturing the Media the press was pointing this out. He did not like that and started a campaign to muzzle the press. He let his vice president speak for him in denouncing the press The opening paragraph of a book by David Corn, a respected Washington as biased in its reporting. His speech writers, Pat Buchanan and William Safire, correspondent, says: needed a way of showing that the major TV networks were biased. To do this they invented the “silent majority.” Nixon then said he spoke for this imagined “George W. Bush is a liar. He has lied large and small. He has lied directly silent majority, which was, of course, much more conservative in its outlook and by omission. He has misstated the facts, knowingly or not. He has than the networks. Safire has admitted that the “silent majority” was the brain misled. He has broken promises, been unfaithful to political vows. Through child of Pat Buchanan. It worked beautifully in berating the networks. Safire and his campaign for the presidency and his first years in the White House, he Buchanan knew that the very conservative viewpoint that they were espousing has mugged the truth — not merely in honest error, but deliberately, had only a small following in the country, but to make it grow they had to invent consistently, and repeatedly to advance his career and his agenda. Lying something with which to bully the networks and major newspapers. greased his path toward the White House; it has been one of the essential tools of his presidency.” (The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Advisers working with the Nixon White House also told the president that those Politics of Deception. David Corn. Crown Publishers, 2003.) folks making up the right-wing minority, and those who might be pulled into that circle, were mostly folks who felt left behind, downtrodden, unrewarded, If our president is as described by Corn, how is it that we do not have continuing and who did not like intellectuals or folks who could be seen as “elite.” So those reports in our newspapers, magazines and TV about his deceptions? The answer crafting the assault on the TV networks and big city newspapers cast the is that the media has been beaten into submission by a continuing assault from reporters as “effete” or “elite” “eastern liberals” who only spoke to each other right-wing forces for the past thirty years, and is now essentially cowed into over cocktails in the bar, or at dinner in the best restaurants, and who never pulling its punches when it comes to reporting on the activities of Republicans. talked to common folks. Casting the TV reporters and newspaper journalists as If you doubt this, let me first quote Paul Krugman and then proceed to review of elitists who were out of touch with the rest of the country outside of New York the evidence from the past thirty years so you can see how this all played out. City and Washington, DC seems to be the beginning of the “class warfare” we Paul Krugman is a professor of economics at Princeton, and is thought by some currently hear of today. to be of sufficient standing that he is in the running for a Nobel Prize in the next Were TV and Newspapers Objective? few years. He was recruited to be a columnist for the NY Times a few years ago; he expected to be writing on economic issues but was drawn to the It should be noted that newspapers in this country had changed drastically since statements that the candidates were making in the presidential election of 2000. the last century. At the founding of our republic newspapers were biased and He was astonished that the numbers being put forward by candidate Bush did subscribers picked the newspaper they read according to the views they held. As not make sense — they simply did not add up. As he said in one of his columns such each newspaper reflected the viewpoint of its owner and editors and not following the election when he was still trying to make sense of what happened: only were the opinion pages biased, but so too could be the regular news stories. About the turn of the 20th century a move began to make journalism a “In the early months of the 2000 campaign I had trouble believing what was profession; universities began turning out graduates who were instructed in how happening. Was the presidential candidate of a major political party really lying, to keep their opinions to themselves and to base news stories on the facts, for blatantly, about the content of his own program? Were the media really letting which the reporter would have to dig. By the time of the 1970s the standards of him get away with it? He was, and they were.” journalism were well established and strong. Opinion was limited to the In the early columns Krugman wrote the editor at the NY Times, Howell Raines, editorial page; the news was based on the facts, not the reporter’s opinion. would not let him use the words liar or lying. Instead words like ‘distortion’ had So when the Nixon administration began attacking newspapers and TV as to be used. Later when the lying became utterly apparent Raines relented and having a “liberal bias” the networks and newspapers began a self-review to see allowed Krugman to use stronger language. Krugman has continued to devote if it could be true, and tried to accommodate the administration by bringing in some of his columns to politics. He is one of the few columnists that actively persons from suggested by the ultra-right to be heard and read. But the liberal take on the Bush Administration. He has received a number of death threats for bias campaign continued unabated — it even appeared on bumper stickers. Of his writing which he now takes seriously and passes along to the FBI. course, as Buchanan and Safire knew, there was no liberal bias; it was just a tool Starting in the Nixon Years to move the media toward a more conservative viewpoint. In fact, as one book that was written about CBS in 1988 said, “CBS News was about as left-wing as Richard Nixon did not like the media. He thought that they “had it in for him” the Cedar Falls Chapter of the American Legion.” ever since he ran for office back in the early 1950s and used some dirty tactics Page 1 of 8 Edith Efron published a book, The News Twisters, in 1971, which was her own propaganda rather than research and investigation of issues. In charge were Paul private evaluation of the bias shown by the TV networks during the 1968 Weyrich and Edwin Feulner. Weyrich was excellent at putting together election. Since Efron was a strong ultra-right figure it is no surprise that she organizations, but came with extreme right-wing views: he was part of George found a strong liberal bias. Nixon propelled her book onto the best seller list by Wallace’s American Independent party, the John Birch Society, and belonged to taking funds from his reelection campaign funds and secretly buying thousands religious organizations that backed segregation, the death penalty for of her books to boost its sales figures. But while the sales figures were good the homosexuality, and was strongly anti-Semitic. Working as an assistant was reviews of the book were universally sour — her “research” was so bad that it Stuart Butler who wanted to dismantle the federal government using the ideas of was considered worthless, she might as well have made up the numbers for her Lenin. writing expressed nothing except her view of the world. Nevertheless, once a book is on the best seller list it attracts other readers, and once in print the Many think tanks were created in the 1970s with funding coming from opinions expressed get amplified and are accorded more general support. That is multimillionaires and their foundations — usually nonprofit foundations that to say, the damage is done. purported to be educational in their mission. That the money went illegally for political purposes has rarely been examined by the IRS. By 2000 it was The Powell Memo estimated that $1 billion had been spent on just the top twenty think tanks, and by then there were more than 800 right-wing think tanks out there. And by 2000 Just before Lewis Powell was nominated for the Supreme Court by Nixon in about $1 billion a year was being spent in total on the think tanks. The big 1971 he wrote a memo on how business should get itself viewed in a better light. funders, the “Four Sisters,” are Bradley, Olin, Richardson and Scaife. The He thought the universities, the media, the political establishment and the courts Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation is funded from an auto parts fortune all were attacking business, and he suggested a sneak counter-attack. He started in Milwaukee (Mr. Bradley is a member of the John Birch Society). The proposed a hidden “guerilla war” that would enlist a “movement” that would Olin Foundation was set up and funded from the profits of a chemical company underwrite “scholars, writers, and thinkers” who would put out propaganda to earned long ago; the foundation is controlled by William Simon (more on Simon put business and conservative views in a good light.