If there’s a president of the United States who likes the press, he has not yet been elected. Of course, in modern times, there have been presidents who charmed certain columnists and correspondents (John F. Kennedy) or liked to banter with the White House press corps (Franklin D. Roosevelt). But that’s not the same as appreciating journalists for what they do or admiring the publications that employ them. Even JFK ostentatiously canceled the White House subscription to the New York Herald Tribune, and once during World War II, FDR told a press conference that he yearned to present an Iron Cross to John O’Donnell of the New York Daily News.
In that sense, Donald Trump more closely resembles his predecessors than not. The principal difference is that whereas most presidents take quiet action against journalists—berating bureau chiefs, complaining to publishers, excluding outlets from access—while protesting their devotion to a free press, Trump in his Trumpian way eliminates the hypocrisy. He says out loud what many, perhaps most, Americans think of the “mainstream” media. And the media respond in kind.
What makes Trump’s apostasy interesting, however, is that he has taken up the cudgel laid down by a figure dismissed from politics long ago and now largely forgotten to posterity: Spiro Agnew (1918-1996), Richard Nixon’s first vice president.
If Agnew is remembered today, it is for quitting his office after pleading no-contest to charges that as a county official, governor, and vice president, he had taken payments from Maryland contractors. Agnew’s resignation was a sensation at the time (1973) but quickly subsumed by the gathering Watergate scandal. Still, in his truncated vice presidency, he delivered a recurring critique of the media that resonated deeply with the public—he was, for a time, more popular with the Republican “base” than Nixon himself—and his attacks were seen, not without reason, as a genuine threat to the power of the press.
Yet the revelation that the messenger was flawed does not distract from the truth of the message; and while Agnew is himself forgotten, his complaint that the mainstream media suffer from left-wing bias took root, and is now largely regarded as self-evident.
It all began, as such things often do, almost inadvertently. At a Republican gathering in Des Moines, in November 1969, Agnew took the occasion to note that after a recent televised presidential address on the Vietnam war, the networks furnished what he called “instant analysis” from Nixon’s political adversaries, notably Averell Harriman, who had been the Johnson administration’s representative at the Paris peace talks. Agnew’s question was fundamental: Who and what, exactly, do the media represent? The mandarins of the press tend to think alike on the issues, he said. They routinely reinforce one another’s views, and certainly live and work in close proximity to one another—what we would now call a “bubble.” Does a free press reflect the interests of readers, or the interests of a free press?
“The views of this fraternity do not represent the views of America,” Agnew declared of those “who live and work in the geographical and intellectual confines of Washington, D.C., or New York City.”
What is most intriguing about Agnew’s observation, from the perspective of 2017, is that it is not only obvious even to most journalists today but, as a daily perusal of the New York Times or Washington Post would reveal, largely unchanged. Indeed, the reaction to Agnew in 1969 was hardly different from the mainstream consensus on Trump. Noting that Agnew had pointedly referred to federal broadcasting licenses and public ownership of the airwaves, Walter Cronkite, the CBS news reader, perceived “an implied threat to freedom of speech in this country,” and one network president (NBC) guessed that Agnew sought an unfree press “subservient to whatever political group was in authority at the time.” And those were the more restrained observations: Reading the 1969 clips we find the familiar allusions to press practices in Hitler’s Germany, and the darkening clouds of government censorship and official repression.
But of course, things have changed over time—and for the better. The political media that Agnew confronted a generation ago was a narrower, more incestuous and exclusive, community than now: The rise of the Internet and decline of the newspaper industry have not quite leveled the playing field, but have certainly broadened it. And Agnew’s complaints did yield one practical dividend: The networks continued their “instant analysis” after presidential speeches but sought to provide some semblance of ideological balance. The “official” party responses to joint addresses and State of the Union speeches are a direct consequence of Agnew’s critique.
Spiro Agnew was a flawed messenger and livened his discourse with alliterative phrases (“nattering nabobs of negativism”) clearly designed to needle and provoke. But in hindsight, the overreaction to his arguments, made a half-century ago, largely validates them. And the same might be said about Donald Trump.
Philip Terzian is literary editor of The Weekly Standard.
