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Watergate, of all things, brought conservatives back into the fold. The emerging scandal absorbed the administration not long after Nixon’s second term began. For a generation of mainstream journalists, the scandal would confirm the power of the press to serve as a check on corruption, no matter how powerful the perpetrator. For conservatives, however, the scandal and the press’s role in prosecuting it looked much different. They saw the press as trying to undo the decisive results of the 1972 election. And if the media was so terrified of Nixon, then maybe there was something to the man after all.
Consider how conservative radio host Clarence Manion framed the role of the media in the early days of the Watergate hearings. In an interview with Dan Lyons, an anticommunist Catholic writer, Manion directly attacked the freedom of the press. That noble-sounding phrase, he argued, was something journalists hid behind to appear uniquely vulnerable to government overreach; in fact, the media held the cards.
“The result,” he told his listeners, “is that a gullible public is caught in the talons of a power that ironically disguises itself as freedom.” Lyons echoed the charge, arguing that Watergate had indeed exposed a dangerous concentration of power — but in the press, not the executive branch.
As the rest of the nation followed the unfolding story of corruption and cover-ups, the Watergate-as-liberal-conspiracy narrative quickly took hold in conservative media. After listening to the Lyons interview, Paul Harvey, the radio personality, repeated the attack in his nationally syndicated broadcast. How, he wondered, could the American people accept an all-powerful media capable of turning “a prosecution into a persecution”? And when Sen. Jesse Helms appeared on Manion’s show, he railed against “the incredible New York Times-Washington Post syndicate, which controls to a large degree what the American people will read and learn.”
This attempt to spin Watergate as “persecution” obviously required downplaying the underlying crimes. This, too, was done easily enough. Nixon himself
called the Watergate break-in “a crappy little thing” in a private Oval Office conversation in early 1973, and there was some of that in the conservative media as well. Publisher Henry Regnery greeted the accusations by observing: “I can see no grounds for impeachment, or even to get worked up about.”
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