Back in 1976, even after Vietnam and Watergate, 72 per cent of the public said they trusted the news media. Today, the figure is 34 per cent. What happened?
Sulzberger was pissed. He did not think that he was an agent or an asset, or that he had anything to explain or apologize for. As he saw it, he was just a reporter talking to a government source. “I got a good deal more out of the C.I.A. than it got out of me,” he wrote in an unpublished response to Salisbury’s book. The columnist Joseph Alsop was even more unapologetic. “I’m proud they asked me and proud to have done it,” he told Bernstein about his undercover work for the agency.
The mayor of Chicago, Richard J. Daley, was at heart a Kennedy man, but he was happy to help the President out. When the press arrived in town, they were confronted by a staggering array of inconveniences, some of them mere happenstance. There was a taxi strike. There was also an electricians’ strike, which meant that not enough telephones had been installed. During the Convention, pay phones became choked with dimes as reporters tried to file.
Hendershot’s numbers are slightly different, but not much, and she agrees that images of the demonstrators hardly dominated network coverage. Yet somehow Daley and the Democratic Party managed to convince viewers that the press was to blame for what they saw. People had not been shown what really happened; they should not believe what appeared on television or what the anchormen told them. Fake news.
Letters poured in accusing the networks of biased coverage. Hendershot quotes a typical one, from an Air Force colonel: “Bravo! Bravo! Bravo! Your treatment of the Yippies, hippies, junkies, hoodlums, bums, and other scum during the recent convention was perfect. I noted with delight that the police devoted some richly deserved attention to the prime provocateurs—the press.” Mail to CBS ran eleven to one against the coverage. Mail to Daley, he claimed, was overwhelmingly positive.
This was the networks’ greatest nightmare. Broadcast television had been an oligopoly from the start. An antitrust case was easy to make, and the F.C.C. proceeded to limit the amount of control the networks had over prime-time programming—which allowed Hollywood to get into the television-production business. The network era was coming to an end.
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