… Mainstream journalism, a shiny and ascendant conveyor of truth during Watergate, is in a battered state after decades of economic erosion, its own mistakes and the efforts of partisan wrecking crews to discredit its work, the most recent one led by the president himself.
All of it gives the Trump White House something Nixon never had: a loyal media armada ready to attack inconvenient truths and the credibility of potentially damning witnesses and news reports while trumpeting the presidential counternarrative, at times with counterfactual versions of events. …
“Nixon was always complaining that he had no defenders,” John Dean, the former Nixon White House counsel, and current CNN contributor, told me Friday. …
With no counterinformational media cocoons on Nixon’s side, his die-hard partisans had to watch as The Washington Post, followed by The New York Times and, eventually, television and the rest of the news media, pounded away at all the Watergate developments. “It does affect public opinion, which affects Congress, which affects impeachment proceedings,” Mr. Dean told me. CONT.
Jim Rutenberg, New York Times