Over the course of those two years, Nixon won reelection in a historic landslide, mocked journalism and threatened the Washington Post repeatedly. Before Watergate, Nixon had often fantasized with his top aide Roger Ailes about running his own conservative television network. While the 1st Amendment clearly protects the free press, what it cannot do is preserve the public’s trust in the free press. Donald Trump’s return to political power through last week’s election is just the latest byproduct of that failure. That sort 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 the founders intended.

Source: Los Angeles Times November 13, 2024 15:43 UTC