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Posts Tagged ‘watergate’

Kurt Schlichter

Cronkite’s Legacy Includes the Killing Fields of Cambodia

by Kurt Schlichter

Walter Cronkite passed away a few days ago and pardon me for not joining the wailing and gnashing of teeth of the professional media mandarins.  The fact is that Cronkite was an over-praised meat puppet, a doctrinaire liberal-left talking head who never once uttered a word that would have caused so much as a sigh of consternation in the Manhattan media environs he dwelled in. 

Except among his loved ones, the hoopla that has accompanied his passing has nothing to do with Walter Cronkite the man and everything to do with Walter Cronkite the symbol.  He symbolized a time – “The Golden Age” to hear the wistful liberals tell it – of a solid, unconquerable media monolith that passed judgment on What Is The News and defined Socially Accepted Opinion. 


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Oh, those glorious days of yesteryear, when those drooling slobs without the education or breeding to live in New York and work at the Times or at one of the three networks would genuflect before their black and white TV sets every evening and await Mr. Cronkite to bestow upon them The Truth!  Now (sigh), it’s chaos, with too many different media outlets and too many different opinions.  It’s gotten out of (our) control! 

Come back, Walter, and save us from Fox News! (more…)

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Posted Jul 20th 2009 at 5:27 pm in Featured Story, Media Criticism, Politics | 177 Comments

Andrew Klavan

Frost/Nixon: The Liberal Film As Conservative

by Andrew Klavan

I finally got around to watching Frost/Nixon, and I was struck by how often the conservative view of the world—that is to say, reality—snuck in past the filmmakers’ strenuous attempts to bar the door against it. We see, for instance, that Nixon was right: the media was out to get him. The bitter hate-filled James Reston Jr. (Sam Rockwell) is shown as obsessed with destroying the already-disgraced former President. In the end, Reston’s childish triumph is that television was able to reduce Nixon to a single image of guilt, thus eradicating all the complexities of his legacy. Then there’s ABC’s Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt). Zelnick ridicules Nixon’s complaints that a lovestruck media Obamanized John F. Kennedy. But in that ridicule the facts come out: the mob-linked, priapic Kennedy started the Vietnam war and made enough tactical Cold War errors to drive the world to the very brink of extinction. No, the bias of the mainstream media—and its smallness, meanness and dishonesty—are well on display for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.

Sure, for the most part, the liberal mythos has its way with the truth throughout the picture. This is still a Hollywood film, after all. Nixon gets no credit for helping to expose Communist infiltration in American government, or for stopping the spread of Communism in Asia through his hard line war policies. The left takes no responsibility for the millions of murders brought about by the coming of “peace.” And, of course, we hear that the slaughter-happy Khmer Rouge was a creation of American policy: that comforting old leftist nursery story that no evil exists except when we make it—so if we’re very, very good, the bad men won’t hurt us. (more…)

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Posted Feb 18th 2009 at 5:15 am in Entertainment, Featured Story, Media Criticism | 53 Comments

Geoff Shepard

Lies, Damn Lies and Dramatizations II: ‘All The President’s Men’

by Geoff Shepard

My earlier essay on intentional inaccuracies in the Frost/Nixon movie bemoaned the fact that this sort of quasi-documentary has such dramatic impact-because people actually “see” the invented wrongdoing-that it outweighs any writings constrained by actual fact. 

Perhaps the best example of this comes from the 1976 movie, “All the President’s Men,” produced by Robert Redford and starring Redford and Dustin Hoffman as cub Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.  

The movie was a dramatization of Woodward and Bernstein’s 1974 book by the same name that chronicled the investigative reporting that led to the resignations of Bob Haldeman and John Erhlichman.  The book was a best-seller in its own right-especially after their editor suggested the early drafts needed something more catchy and they hit upon the idea of naming Woodward’s secret source of government information after the recent pornographic movie, “Deep Throat.”  (more…)

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Posted Feb 6th 2009 at 5:15 am in Entertainment, Featured Story, Politics | 34 Comments

Geoff Shepard

Lies, Damn Lies and Dramatizations: ‘Frost/Nixon’

by Geoff Shepard

Introduction:

In a sense, son-in-law Edward Cox was mistaken when he told President Nixon shortly before his 1974 resignation that doing so would not stop the onslaught.

You don’t know these people. I know them. Let me tell you something about them. I worked in the US Attorney’s Office in New York. And I went to school with some of these people. They’re tough. They’re smart. But, most of all, they hate you with a passion. Most because of the war, and some because of other reasons. And they and others like them, and the press, they’re going to hound you. They’re going to harass you for the rest of your life.

Nixon died in 1994, almost fifteen years ago, but even his death did not stop the onslaught from those radicalized by their opposition to the Vietnam War… The “Frost/Nixon” movie is the latest ad hominem attack. (more…)

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Posted Jan 30th 2009 at 5:15 am in Entertainment, Politics | 68 Comments