Will We Need a New 'All the President's Men'?

by Frank Rich, New York Times
October 17, 2004

Such is the power of movies that the first image "Watergate" brings to mind
three decades later is not Richard Nixon so much as the golden duo of
Redford and Hoffman riding to the nation's rescue in "All the President's
Men." But if our current presidency is now showing symptoms of a
precancerous Watergate syndrome - as it is, daily - we have not yet reached
that denouement immortalized by Hollywood, in which our scrappy heroes
finally bring Nixon to heel in his second term. No, we're back instead in
the earlier reels of his first term, before the criminality of the Watergate
break-in, when no one had heard of Woodward and Bernstein. Back then an
arrogant and secretive White House, furious at the bad press fueled by an
unpopular and mismanaged war, was still flying high as it kneecapped with
impunity any reporter or news organization that challenged its tightly
enforced message of victory at hand.

It was then that the vice president, Spiro Agnew, scripted by the
speechwriter Pat Buchanan, tried to discredit the press as an elite - or, as
he spelled it out, "a tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men." It was
then that the attorney general, John Mitchell, under the pretext of national
security, countenanced wiretaps of Hedrick Smith of The Times and Marvin
Kalb of CBS News, as well as a full F.B.I. investigation of CBS's Daniel
Schorr. Today it's John Ashcroft's Justice Department, also invoking
"national security," that hopes to seize the phone records of Judith Miller
and Philip Shenon of The Times, claiming that what amounts to a virtual
wiretap is warranted by articles about Islamic charities and terrorism
published nearly three years ago.

"The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate
and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never
before," wrote William Safire last month. When an alumnus of the Nixon White
House says our free press is being attacked as "never before," you listen.
What alarms him now are the efforts of Patrick Fitzgerald, the special
prosecutor in the Valerie Plame-Robert Novak affair, to threaten reporters
at The Times and Time magazine with jail if they don't reveal their sources.
Given that the Times reporter in question (Judith Miller again) didn't even
write an article on the subject under investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald
overreaches so far that he's created a sci-fi plot twist out of Steven
Spielberg's "Minority Report."

It's all the scarier for being only one piece in a pattern of media
intimidation that's been building for months now. Once Woodward and
Bernstein did start investigating Watergate, Nixon plotted to take economic
revenge by siccing the Federal Communications Commission on TV stations
owned by The Washington Post's parent company. The current White House has
been practicing pre-emptive media intimidation to match its policy of
pre-emptive war. Its F.C.C. chairman, using Janet Jackson's breast and
Howard Stern's mouth as pretexts, has sufficiently rattled Viacom, which
broadcast both of these entertainers' infractions against "decency," that
its chairman, the self-described "liberal Democrat" Sumner Redstone,
abruptly announced his support for the re-election of George W. Bush last
month. "I vote for what's good for Viacom," he explained, and he meant it.
He took this loyalty oath just days after the "60 Minutes" fiasco prompted a
full-fledged political witch hunt on Viacom's CBS News, another Republican
target since the Nixon years. Representative Joe Barton, Republican of
Texas, has threatened to seek Congressional "safeguards" regulating TV news
content and, depending what happens Nov. 2, he may well have the political
means to do it.

Viacom is hardly the only media giant cowed by the prospect that this White
House might threaten its corporate interests if it gets out of line.
Disney's refusal to release Michael Moore's partisan "Fahrenheit 9/11" in an
election year would smell less if the company applied the same principle to
its ABC radio stations, where the equally partisan polemics of Rush Limbaugh
and Sean Hannity are heard every day. Even a low-profile film project in
conflict with Bush dogma has spooked the world's largest media company, Time Warner, proprietor of CNN. Its Warner Brothers, about to release a special
DVD of "Three Kings," David O. Russell's 1999 movie criticizing the first
gulf war, suddenly canceled a planned extra feature, a new Russell
documentary criticizing the current war. Whether any of these increasingly
craven media combines will stand up to the Bush administration in a
constitutional pinch, as Katharine Graham and her Post Company bravely did
to the Nixon administration during Watergate, is a proposition that hasn't
been remotely tested yet.

Interesting new articles at PeacePolitical News (formerly Ecumenical News) -- see continually updated list, with my favorite articles marked with a [+]. Look now at www.Peacepolitical.com :-))