{"id":1146,"date":"2005-06-13T09:38:27","date_gmt":"2005-06-13T16:38:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/2005\/06\/frank_rich_and_dandy_he_keeps\/"},"modified":"2005-06-13T09:38:27","modified_gmt":"2005-06-13T16:38:27","slug":"frank_rich_and_dandy_he_keeps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2005\/06\/frank_rich_and_dandy_he_keeps.html","title":{"rendered":"FRANK, RICH, AND DANDY, HE KEEPS ON TRUCKIN’"},"content":{"rendered":"

The latest Frank Rich column<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> is a dandy
\nrecap of what’s been happening in The Land of Oz. “The attacks [on the press] continue to be so
\nsuccessful that even now, long after many news organizations, including The Times, have been
\nfound guilty of failing to puncture the administration’s prewar W.M.D. hype, new details on that
\nsame story are still being ignored or left uninvestigated,” he wrote Sunday, citing the July 23,
\n2002, “Downing Street memo” as an example.
\n

<\/P>
\n

Well, Frank, you can’t say Greg Palast didn’t tell us — see The Gun That Smokes<\/FONT><\/B><\/A>, of May
\n5, 2005. In re: “the kind of lapdog news media the Nixon White House cherished,” which you
\nsingle out for a parallel to the contemporary version, see GAO Finding: Gannon Did Not Break
\nLaw<\/FONT><\/B><\/A>, of June 10. In re: Charles W. Colson, who you rightly point out
\n“embarked on a ruthless program of intimidation that included threatening antitrust action against
\nthe networks if they didn’t run pro-Nixon stories” and so on, see I <\/FONT>Find It
\nStrange<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> (as did many others), of June 1.<\/P>
\n

You certainly summarized, as well as anybody has, the peculiarity of Colson’s moral
\ncomplaint about Mark Felt (a k a Deep Throat):<\/P>
\n


\n

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

<\/P>
\n

I especially love what you concluded from that:<\/P>
\n


\n

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

<\/P>
\n

In re:<\/P>
\n


\n

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

<\/P>
\n

See The Free Press in Full Squeak<\/FONT><\/B><\/A>,
\nof May 29; Imperial Mourning<\/FONT><\/B><\/A>, of Memorial
\nDay, May 30; and What Is Really Happening in
\nIraq?<\/FONT><\/B><\/A>, of May 31.<\/P>
\n

And bless you, Frank, for this:<\/P>
\n


\n

The journalists who do note the resonances of now with then rarely get to
\nconnect those dots on the news media’s center stage of television. You are more likely to hear
\ninstead of how Watergate inspired too much “gotcha” journalism. That’s a rather absurd premise
\ngiven that no “gotcha” journalist got the goods on the biggest story of our time: the false
\nintimations of incipient mushroom clouds peddled by American officials to sell a war that now
\nthreatens to match the unpopularity and marathon length of Vietnam.<\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n

<\/P>
\n

Frank, you have to start watching Democracy Now!<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> We all do. It’s
\nnot the only TV news show that connects the dots, but it does a damned serious job of it, and it’s
\nout there five days a week on more than 330 TV and radio stations, as well as the Web. Put it on
\nyour to-do list, if you haven’t already. Today’s broadcast has an interview<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> <\/FONT>with former FBI agent Mike German, a whistleblower who quit to
\nprotest the FBI’s lousy management of its counter-terrorism program. German talks about the
\nthreat of terrorism, not necessarily from foreign terrorists, but from domestic “lone wolves”
\nspawned by white supremacist groups.<\/P>
\n

By the way, Frank, my staff of thousands envies your full-time research assistant and your
\nLexis-Nexis subscription. So do I, not to mention the nifty writing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest Frank Rich column is a dandy recap of what’s been happening in The Land of Oz. “The attacks [on the press] 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1146","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-iu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1146\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}