watergate scandal

Dan Froomkin ~ Non-Denial Denials: It Started With Watergate

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RichardNixonIn late October 1972, as the Washington Post was aggressively uncovering the secret, massive campaign of political spying and sabotage directed by Richard Nixon’s top White House and campaign officials, Watergate editor Barry Sussman started documenting a common theme in the public denials those stories were eliciting.

As Sussman wrote in his definitive 1973 book, “The Great Coverup: Nixon and the Scandal of Watergate“:

I picked out seventeen examples of unfounded criticism of the Post or of carefully worded statements meant to pass as denials that had been made by [then-press secretary Ron] Ziegler, [then-White House official Clark] MacGregor and [then-chairman of the Republican National Committee Bob] Dole, and put together a four-page analysis of them for others at work. I felt I had found an important key to understanding the Administration’s response, one that might give us at least some comfort if the attack on the Post continued. We were trying to report the news as best we could; they were playing at semantics, trying to make The Washington Post, and not Nixon campaign spying, into an election issue…

We had not been in error. We had hit a nerve.

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The Loss Of The Fourth Estate And The Threat To American Liberty

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Christian Post |  November 28 2012

Opinion ~ One of the most chilling realities of the contemporary age in the United States and other Western nations is the demise of the Fourth Estate. The death of a vigorous and free press came when mainstream media and other vital components of the information establishment became propaganda organs for the government.

“If it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without a free press or a free press without a government, I would prefer the latter,” said Thomas Jefferson.

Edmund Burke, an 18th century British political philosopher, seeded the concept of the Fourth Estate. The “three estates” present in the Parliament were the king, the lords, and the commons. But, said Burke, there was a “fourth estate” that trumped them all –
the press.

The contemporary co-opting of journalists and journalism by politicians and their regimes has led to a polarization of media. As mainstream print and broadcast journalists have veered increasingly to the left, the right has responded with its own conservative media establishment.

This was a necessary development, vital for countering leftist propaganda. But the demise of the Fourth Estate means there’s not much left in the middle to probe for the truth buried somewhere beneath the shrills and shills of left and right. Who can the people trust to give them the plain, unspun facts?

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