Fault Lines

by Kevin M. Kruse

  With the federal government seemingly unable to handle national or local problems, polls showed that public confidence in political institutions had plummeted. Trust in government fell from about 55 percent of those polled in 1972 to slightly over 30 percent in 1978.17 The widespread sense of dissatisfaction was captured in Robert Altman’s film Nashville (1975), which featured a never-seen presidential candidate, Hal Phillip Walker, only heard speaking angrily through a loudspeaker. His platform is largely a list of things he opposes. “In keeping with the country’s dark mood,” one reviewer noted, “he has little to say about what he is for.” The leaders of government stand at the top of his hit list. “Who do you think is running Congress?” he blares through the loudspeaker in one scene. “Farmers? Engineers? Teachers? Businessmen? No, my friends. Congress is run by lawyers. A lawyer is trained for two things and two things only. To clarify—that’s one. And to confuse—that’s the other.” 18

  Making matters even worse, the efforts to reform government were halting and difficult, and sometimes even reversed. The Supreme Court shocked supporters of campaign finance reform when it overturned a key component of the post-Watergate wave of reform legislation in the landmark case of Buckley v. Valeo. The court had taken a conservative turn in the early 1970s, with four new Nixon appointees signaling a stark change in direction from the liberal era of the Warren court. In its January 1976 ruling, the new court, now led by Chief Justice Warren Burger, asserted that congressional limits on campaign spending represented an unconstitutional violation of free speech. While the court said that it was legitimate for the government to require spending limits of presidential candidates who accepted federal funds, anything beyond that basic step violated the First Amendment. Notably, the decision also knocked down spending limits on wealthy individuals who paid for their own campaigns. The conservative editors of the Wall Street Journal, pleased with the decision, noted that “The United States Supreme Court has administered a semi-fatal blow to that malformed product of ‘post-Watergate morality,’ the 1974 Federal Election Campaign Act. . . . [T]he court was absolutely right in overthrowing the keystone of the law, a blatantly unconstitutional limit on campaign expenditures.” Still, the editors were unhappy that so much of the law remained, fearing that “the remains of the law will probably act like the Frankenstein’s monster it truly is. It will be awfully hard to kill, and the more you wound it, the more havoc it will wreak.” 19

  There were, indeed, two significant results of the Buckley decision. First, since the ruling upheld many restrictions on campaign contributions from outsiders but struck down all restrictions on how much of his or her own money a political candidate could spend, it created a political climate in which very wealthy candidates would have a tremendous advantage over candidates without a personal fortune. Second, because the ruling allowed independent expenditures from groups unaffiliated with a candidate’s campaign, it encouraged business leaders to take an active and direct role in politics themselves.

  In the wake of the decision, businesses significantly increased their involvement in American politics. First, corporations expanded the number of lobbyists they employed to make their case to Congress. Between 1971 and 1982, the number of individual businesses with full-time registered lobbyists in Washington skyrocketed from 175 to 2,445. Meanwhile, individual industries and companies overcame their narrow interests and banded together in powerful umbrella lobbies, such as the Business Roundtable. Second, business leaders took on a more active role in Washington by forming their own political action committees, or PACs. The first PAC had been a creation of the labor movement in the 1940s and, for decades thereafter, PACs had been a key to the influence of labor unions in American politics while businesses shied away from them. In 1974, for instance, there were 201 labor PACs and just 89 business PACs. But with the Buckley decision, and its insistence on unlimited outside spending, business PACs boomed. In 1976, there were 433 business PACs. In 1978, there were 784; in 1980, there were 1,204. That year, the new business PACs contributed some $19 million to probusiness politicians.20

  For some observers, the changes wrought by Buckley weren’t simply a return to the days before Watergate; they instead heralded something even more troubling. As they saw it, the new rules that privileged wealthy candidates threatened democracy itself. “The combination of this law, this decision, and very expensive campaigns predictably provides an enormous electoral advantage to candidates of great personal wealth who can avoid the angst of fund-raising by their check writing skills,” worried Mark Green in the New York Times. “Then does a House of Representatives become a House of Lords, as heirs and businessmen predominantly end up writing the laws that affect the rest of us.” 21

  Pack Journalism

  In the wake of Watergate, reporters continued to unearth stories of political corruption and incompetence. Importantly, the scandal and its coverage had helped launch a new era of investigative journalism. The previously unknown reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had become overnight stars at the young ages of thirty-one and thirty, respectively. Their status as full-fledged celebrities only increased when their best-selling account of the scandal, All the President’s Men, was made into a major film. Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, two of the most popular actors of the day, portrayed the pair and elevated them in the process. The reporters vainly tried to draw a line between their reality and the Hollywood version of their story. “We hope all the attention will be transferred to them,” Bernstein said of the actors. “Let them do the dog and pony show. We’re reporters.” But the film, which was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won four, only served to build up the mythology around the celebrity reporters.22

  The model set by Woodward and Bernstein revolutionized the world of reporting. “Suddenly, it’s become glamorous, romantic, chic, respectable, even, to be a reporter,” a longtime journalist marveled. “The two young men who broke the Watergate story have glorified the image of reporters and probably inspired legions of bright, honest people to enter” the field. And indeed, evidence showed a new surge of interest in reporting, especially from younger Americans who took Woodward and Bernstein as role models. “Applications to journalism schools are at an alltime high,” Time noted in a cover story in the summer of 1974, “and many of the youngsters say that they want to be investigative reporters.” Established journalists welcomed the attention and prestige that Woodward and Bernstein had brought to the profession, but many resented a new generation of writers who seemed more focused on fame and fortune than the painstaking drudgery of real reporting. “Editors’ in-boxes are filled with resumes and clippings from determined graduates looking for jobs,” an editor at the Los Angeles Times complained. “It seems sometimes that the search is more for glamor than excellence and that the business of plain hard work gets lost somewhere among all the dreams and dreamers.” 23

  Whatever the motivations of the new generation of investigative journalists, they soon made their presence felt. The path to becoming the next Woodward or Bernstein, many reporters assumed, lay in uncovering the next Watergate. In a sign of the original scandal’s lingering impact on the profession, the “-gate” suffix quickly became a mainstay of political reporting. Only a month after Nixon’s resignation, conservative New York Times columnist and former Nixon speechwriter William Safire wrote about the “Vietgate Solution,” a rumored call for blanket amnesty for Watergate conspirators and Vietnam War draft dodgers. Newspapers that winter spread stories of a French scandal involving fraudulent bottles of Bordeaux under the name “Winegate,” while a more serious influence-peddling scandal in 1976 involving the South Korean government and several members of Congress came to be known as “Koreagate.” As such scandals with their echoes of Watergate continued to reverberate through the media, they served to deepen the sense that the original scandal was not an isolated incident, but rather the start of a new series that might never end.24

  Despite the momentum behind investigative journalism, or perha
ps because of it, the new trend quickly reached a crisis point. In the summer of 1976, Don Bolles, a reporter for the Arizona Republic who was probing political corruption and organized crime in the state, was killed in a car bomb explosion. A few months later, a team of journalists from twenty different newspapers banded together under the banner of a new organization called Investigative Reporters and Editors to continue Bolles’s investigation. In a new development, this disparate group of journalists agreed to research, write, and publish their findings as a collective force, producing a series of fifty articles on Arizona corruption that were published in newspapers across the country. Notably, the most prestigious newspapers of the era—the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle—refused to take part in the project and then sharply criticized the results. “It is a venture in pack journalism,” the Post’s ombudsman Charles Seib complained, “with overtones of revenge, subsidization and an unhealthy abandonment of competition.” Defenders of the new trend pushed back, noting that smaller papers’ pooling their resources on one occasion didn’t suggest a lack of competition; the overwhelming influence of a few major papers like the Post did.25

  For smaller newspapers and upstart magazines, investigative journalism represented a way to break through the monopoly held by the major newspapers. New Times, a magazine founded in 1972, originally showcased the stars of what Tom Wolfe called “new journalism,” a style of reporting that abandoned old standards of objectivity for more subjective perspectives and dramatic literary styles. Tapping into the public’s renewed interest in investigative journalism, New Times reached new heights of popularity, with circulation peaking at 350,000 within a few years. But the same scandal-driven coverage that initially drew readers in soon served to drive them away. Subscriptions plummeted, and the increasingly unpopular magazine announced in 1978 that it was shutting down for good. “We bore readers the bad news,” one New Times editor reflected, “and they slew the messenger.” Others in the media drew lessons from the publication’s rise and fall. “It is true that on some days the sins, crimes and lapses of man are too much to read about,” columnist Colman McCarthy noted in the Washington Post. “The news is so heavy that picking up the paper is risking a hernia of the mind. If Ford’s Pintos or Firestone’s radials don’t get us, cancer-causing hamburgers or saccharin will. If it isn’t another congressman convicted of bribery, it’s another corporation.” 26

  While the topics of investigative journalism weighed it down, so too did the tempo of newspapers. Concern for getting a story right still took precedence over getting a story first, and as a result newspapers worked at a slow, methodical pace. Editors and publishers retained tight control over stories that appeared in their pages, especially when they involved politically explosive topics that might generate lawsuits from powerful individuals or even backlash from readers. Accordingly, each piece had to be vetted several times, with one source willing to go on the record to supplement any anonymous ones in the background. In television, the pace was much quicker, though still measured. Typically, the news day at TV networks began with the producers of the nightly news programs, which aired for a half hour in the dinner hour, planning out possible stories with their bureau chiefs. Over the course of the day, bureaus across America and overseas would then work up their stories, returning together for a meeting in the afternoon. (In the meantime, politicians and policy makers had a chance to react to the pending news and prepare themselves for the public revelations to come.) When the producers and anchormen decided on the main stories for the evening, staffs went to work polishing the final script and video before going on air live that evening. The vetting process still occurred, but the usual weeks and months that took place in print journalism had now been compressed to days, if not hours.

  The news business was compressed on television in another sense as well, as the three major television networks—ABC, NBC, and CBS—held an effective monopoly that was much more powerful and persuasive than anything the major-market newspapers had ever enjoyed. Unlike the print world, where there was theoretically a chance for competition from new upstarts, television networks had a built-in advantage in terms of basic infrastructure. The networks sent their signal to local affiliate stations through underground landlines controlled by the telephone giant AT&T, which by arrangement worked to keep barriers for new networks impossibly high as to limit competition. Corporate control of the television networks, critics complained, affected not just the reach of television news but also its content. “We have a Big Three in New York just as we have a Big Three in Detroit,” argued Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner in December 1976. “And what has happened to news is no different from what has happened to cars: We are offered products that are essentially similar, inefficient, and unresponsive to the public interest.” Because the three major networks were all seeking “the same audience,” he continued, they drove their reporting to the middle and neglected to represent “the diversity of views and competition for ideas” that represented a wider range of opinions in the general public. “We should have a half dozen, or a dozen networks,” he proposed, “in which there will be aggressive competition for news, on which the interests, ideological and otherwise, of smaller population groups—such as young people, old people, black people, women, conservatives, the intelligentsia, etc., are reflected.” 27

  The call for more networks beyond the “Big Three” was widely shared, with rumors of a possible “fourth network” continually cropping up across the decade. In 1975, Reese Schonfeld, who had previously run a TV news service for United Press International (UPI), launched the Independent Television News Association. Funded by the conservative beer magnate Joseph Coors and advised by former Nixon aide Roger Ailes, the news service offered independent stations pooled coverage and a nightly newscast.28 In early 1977, three more plans emerged to challenge the hegemony of the television networks. In “Operation Primetime,” or “OPT,” twenty-one independent stations banded together with Universal Studios productions to create a six-hour miniseries that they hoped might compete with the networks’ hit shows. Meanwhile, “Metronet,” a venture between five independent stations and the ad agency Ogilvy & Mather, hoped to create just a half-hour of weeknight programming for its affiliates. Likewise, another ad agency, Benton & Bowles, sought to make family-friendly specials for independent stations to show on Sunday nights. But ultimately, the upstarts simply couldn’t compete. With “no central organization, no national hook-up, no news division, and no apparatus for continuing service,” a report noted, these independent forces paled in comparison. That said, the simple fact that there was some competition struck some as a positive sign. “If we’re not the fourth network, we are at least a counterbalance to the networks as a new force in the market,” an OPT official said. “The networks won’t change their system unless something goes up against them.” 29

  While a fourth network never took off in fact, it did in fiction. In 1976, the hit film Network offered a scathing critique of the ways in which corporate control of the network news had shifted its priorities to profit-seeking and sensationalism. The film revolved around a fictitious fourth network, the Union Broadcasting System (UBS), and its failing news program. Informed that he will soon be fired for low ratings, the venerable news anchor Howard Beale (played by Peter Finch) calmly informs viewers that he will commit suicide, on air, the following night. Talked out of it by the UBS network news president, Beale instead launches into an angry televised rant that tapped into the real nation’s growing anxieties. “I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad,” he begins. “Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newsc
aster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad—worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad!” At this, Beale urges viewers to walk to their windows, lean out and scream into the night sky: “I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!” Thousands do as they’re told.30

  With Beale suddenly a ratings hit, the corporate leaders at the network decide to keep him on the air, promoting him as “the mad prophet of the airwaves.” Through the character’s increasingly angry rants, director Sidney Lumet and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky offer sharp criticisms of the real television news. “The only truth you know is what you get over this tube,” Beale chides his viewers at one point. “Well, television isn’t the ‘truth’! It’s a goddamn amusement park! A circus! A carnival! We’re in the boredom killing business. You’re never going to get any truth from us; we’ll tell you whatever you want to hear!” The rants initially draw ratings, but audiences increasingly find Beale’s bleak pronouncements too depressing, and the show’s ratings once again begin to slide. Seeking to get him off the air and provide a short-term boost in the ratings once more, the network has Beale assassinated, on live television. “This was the story of Howard Beale,” the narrator notes in conclusion, “the first known instance of a man who was killed because he had lousy ratings.” 31