It’s easy to forget that while the first Watergate article appeared in the summer of 1972, Richard Nixon did not resign until 1974.

Opinion columnist

LZ Granderson

LZ Granderson writes about culture, politics, sports and life in America.

During those two years, Nixon won reelection in a historic landslide, mocked journalism, and threatened the Washington Post repeatedly. It was only when the Supreme Court ordered the release of tapes related to the scandal that Nixon acknowledged the veracity of the information and resigned in shame.

Something else also happened in those two years: Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch bought his first American newspaper – the San Antonio Express-News – and moved to New York.

A fascinating timeline, isn’t it? As the true power of journalism emerged in the country, Murdoch came to America to pervert the industry, just as he had done in other countries with free presses.

Before Watergate, Nixon had often dreamed, with his top aide Roger Ailes, of running his own conservative television network. Murdoch was already known at home and in Europe for using his newspapers to promote a conservative agenda using disinformation. Murdoch’s and Nixon’s impulses seemed almost destined to one day coalesce, and indeed, decades later, when the mogul realized the former president’s dream by creating the conservative Fox News network, Ailes was hired to run it.

However, a few other pieces needed to fall into place first. President Reagan agreed. In the 1980s, Reagan fast-tracked Murdoch’s immigration status, so that as an American citizen he could buy more American media companies. When he took power, Murdoch relied on editors and producers to reflect his political views and not the truth that journalists were uncovering through their reporting.

Reagan also pushed for the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcast licensees to represent multiple sides when dealing with controversial issues. Freed from this, Murdoch’s television stations could claim they were “fair and balanced”, but the law no longer required them to do so. You know what followed, with the rise of Fox News and the decline of an informed public.

Although the 1st Amendment clearly protects the free press, it cannot ensure that public trust in the free press is preserved. It depends on the industry, and in short, we failed. Donald Trump’s return to political power through last week’s election is just the latest byproduct of this failure.

The decline of trust in journalism has been carefully orchestrated. A man who worked for the Heritage Foundation in the 1980s and advocated for the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, James Gattuso, would become a senior official at the Federal Communications Commission under the first President Bush.

This would be the same Heritage Foundation that is behind Project 2025, the conservative plan to reshape the federal government around Trump.

Carl Bernstein, who with Bob Woodward broke the story of the Watergate break-in and Nixon’s involvement, wrote in a 1992 magazine article titled “The Idiot Culture”: “In retrospect, the extraordinary campaign waged by The Nixon administration’s attempt to undermine the credibility of the press was successful. to a remarkable extent, despite all the post-Watergate posturing in our profession. We have succeeded largely because of our own obvious shortcomings. The fact is that our relationship is not good enough. It wasn’t good enough in the Nixon years, it got worse in the Reagan years, and it’s no better today. We are arrogant. We have failed to subject our own media institutions to the same kind of scrutiny that we demand of society’s other powerful institutions. We are no more open or gracious in acknowledging errors or errors of judgment than the congressional miscreants and bureaucratic criminals we spend so much time scrutinizing.

The blurred line between news and opinion – coupled with the “hot takes” that have replaced much informed reporting and analysis – has attracted billions of people to corporate media. The industry now has more consumers than ever, in more media. However, journalism has suffered from this process for decades.

All of this contributed to what we saw last week, when a majority of American voters supported Trump, either because they hadn’t heard about his worst failures – which is hard to imagine – or because they didn’t know whether to believe or how to interpret what Trump had done. they had heard of his failures. This kind of world of distrust and confusion is exactly what Gattuso/Reagan/Murdoch/Ailes had hoped to create, so that criminals like Trump could not be held accountable by a free press as their founders intended.

Questions about Democrats’ mistakes in this election are certainly worth asking. However, Woodward and Bernstein’s industry is also in dire need of analysis. More than 70 million Americans apparently trusted the words of Trump, a serial liar, and embraced his “fake news” characterization of the industry. There’s no way around it: The 2024 election not only reflected a new high for Trump, but also a new low for trust in American journalism.

@LZGranderson