How Richard Nixon Reshaped the Relationship Between the President and the Press

Donald Trump regularly attacks journalists, but Time's David Greenberg argues that Richard Nixon, the president who appeared on the magazine's cover most often before Trump, ran an equally sustained effort to intimidate and punish the reporters who covered him. Conflict is built into the relationship, since presidents want reporters to spread their message while journalists believe they can supply context, fact-checking and dissent. Every president has clashed with the press. Theodore Roosevelt sued Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and lost, and Barack Obama used the Espionage Act against leakers.

Still, Greenberg says that until Trump, none matched Nixon. He took office in 1969 amid distrust fueled by the Vietnam War and Lyndon Johnson's credibility gap. Walter Cronkite called the campaign a conspiracy, and a National Press Club report accused the administration of trying to control information and discredit reporters. Coverage was not uniformly hostile: in the summer of 1972, only about a dozen of more than 2,200 Washington correspondents pursued Watergate, per press critic Ben Bagdikian, and Nixon won re-election easily. His aides later admitted to deceiving reporters, and Chuck Colson pressured CBS executives to shorten a Watergate segment. Some offenses were mild, but others genuinely threatened press independence.

Summarized by PolitiKool from Time’s reporting. Read the full story at Time →