Entire organizations were formed to document liberal media bias. A book on the "liberal slant" of news coverage was often an instant ticket to the bestseller list. And, in the subsequent decades, whether in the hands of Rush Limbaugh (who, without any trace of irony, relentlessly attacked the "drive-by media") or with the rise of Fox News — which claimed to be objective in comparison to virtually everyone else — the movement grew. By 2004, the conservative Club for Growth could attack Democratic candidate (and later party head) Howard Dean by telling him to take his "tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs." (emphasis added) And everyone knew what the reference to the Times meant.
One of the great "successes" of the modern conservative movement has been the extent to which it has discredited and delegitimized mainstream journalism. So, the next time a reporter loses his or her job, you can go ahead and credit (or blame) the Internet and the economy. But without the legacy of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, the history and future of American journalism might be very different.
To read the "Stark Ravings" blog, go to thePhoenix.com/blogs/starkravings. Steven Stark can be reached at sds@starkwriting.com.
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Now that the New York Times Company and representatives of the Boston Newspaper Guild, the Boston Globe 's biggest union, have agreed to a deal that will keep the paper alive (more on that in a bit), the great unanswered question becomes: what, exactly, does the Times Co. plan to do now ?
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If there's one group of professionals whose job insecurity rivals that of the Detroit auto worker, it's the men and women who make America's newspapers.
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The local-media story line of the moment is the push by Stephen Taylor — Milton resident, Yale media lecturer, and former Boston Globe executive VP — to recapture the paper his family ran for more than a century, a goal he's pursuing with the backing of (among others) his cousin Benjamin Taylor, the former Globe publisher.
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On top of everything else they’ve blighted over their awful eight-year reign, the Bushies did this: they killed Hunter S. Thompson.
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A president with a history of antipathy toward the media complains openly about the “knee-jerk liberal press.”
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After Watergate and an opened China, Nixon’s next most recognized legacy is probably the warning to make sure you know your medium: His infamously sweaty, maladroit television appearance in the Kennedy-Nixon debate was widely perceived to have cost him that year’s presidency.
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Tom Heslin, executive editor of the Providence Journal , does not say much in public about the broadsheet. And little surprise. The ProJo , which demands transparency elsewhere, has issued a long string of “no comments” about its own affairs.
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