NP? worth reading re CREEP

[Doug Millison]

Vineland's treatment of government manipulation of the Movement and  attack
on labor and ligitimate dissent , plus the marvelously Pynchonian acronym,
make this relevant to our discussion, I think:


Three Decades Later, Watergate Is A Cautionary Tale July 10, 2002
By Norman Solomon

Thirty years have passed since Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and
Carl Bernstein began to cover the Watergate story. The investigative
journalism that they did back then still stands out as exceptional.
Unfortunately.

For a long time after the arrests of five burglars at the Democratic
National Committee's executive offices in the early morning of June 17,
1972, the conventional media wisdom was to accept the White House depiction
of a minor crime without any political significance. During that summer and
fall, few journalists devoted much time to probing the Watergate incident
as President Nixon cruised to a landslide re-election victory in November.

"At the time of Watergate, there were some 2,000 full-time reporters in
Washington, working for major news organizations," Bernstein later pointed
out. "In the first six months after the break-in ... 14 of those reporters
were assigned by their news organizations to cover the Watergate story on a
full-time basis, and of these 14, half-a-dozen on what you might call an
investigative basis."

Speaking at Harvard's Institute of Politics in 1989, Bernstein added: "The
press has been engaged in a kind of orgy of self-congratulations about our
performance in Watergate and about our performance in covering the news
since. And it seems to me no attitude could be more unjustified." He was
right on target.

Helen Thomas is one of the most seasoned and candid members of the White
House press corps. "We realize that we did a lousy job on Watergate," she
has recalled. "We just sat there and took what they said at face value."

That's been pretty standard media practice. Presidential assertions get the
benefit of many doubts. And before the press declares a major national
scandal, some movers and shakers need to be riled up.

A central factor in the Watergate story was that it involved foul play by
one elite faction against another. The bungled burglary at the Watergate
complex 30 years ago was part of a furtive illicit operation by a
Republican organization, the Committee to Re-Elect the President (with the
apt acronym CREEP), to filch documents from the headquarters of the other
corporate party.

But what if -- instead of being implicated in a burglary at a Democratic
Party office -- the White House had been implicated in a break-in aimed at
a political party without power? We don't have to speculate. Throughout the
Watergate era, the U.S. government was committing far worse political
crimes against the Socialist Workers Party. Meanwhile, no journalists with
mainstream clout ever seemed to care.

A retrospective Los Angeles Times article, published in 1995, summarized
the historical record: "For 38 years, the FBI waged a campaign of
infiltration and harassment against a small Trotskyite organization called
the Socialist Workers Party. The bureau staged burglaries, planted fake
news stories and otherwise sought to discredit the party and its members,
who, though pushing a radical political agenda, were engaging in peaceful
and lawful political behavior. The 38 years, which ended in 1976, produced
not a single arrest."

Instead of viewing the best Watergate reporting as a model to build on, for
the most part the biggest media outlets soon regarded it as a laurel to
rest on. Before his retirement, Washington Post executive editor Ben
Bradlee acknowledged as much in an interview with author Mark Hertsgaard
about a dozen years after President Nixon's forced resignation. "The
criticism was that we were going on too much, and trying to make a
Watergate out of everything," Bradlee said. "And I think we were sensitive
to that criticism much more than we should have been, and that we did ease
off."

While fond of posturing as intrepid watchdogs, the major news media are
still inclined to ease off. The overall dynamic could be described as
"aggressive-passive." The watchdogs growl sometimes, while routinely
wagging their tails.

And so, White House media strategists must have been quite pleased after
Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the arrest of a man for allegedly
planning to explode a radiological bomb inside the United States.

In typical fashion, the June 11 front page of The New York Times showcased
a well-spun headline -- "Neutralizing Bush Critics: Arrest Seems to Show
Threat, and Response" -- over a story with an implicitly prescriptive
description of the latest news. Before the article jumped to a back page,
it reported in authoritative tones: "Today's disclosure may well galvanize
Americans once again behind the president and the notion that the country
remains at war." It was the kind of story that another wartime president,
Richard Nixon, would have also appreciated.



http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2002-07/02solomon.cfm

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