Spiro Agnew’s ghost lives on in the 2016 campaign - By E.J. Dionne Jr.
By E.J. Dionne Jr. Opinion writer September 18 at 7:00 PM
Spiro Agnew is remembered for pleading no contest to tax-evasion charges related to bribery and resigning as Richard Nixon’s vice president. But his signal political achievement was igniting a campaign that endured for more than four decades painting the mainstream media as biased, liberal and elitist.
Anti-media sentiment had long been bubbling on the right when Agnew targeted what were then the Big Three television networks for representing “a concentration of power over American public opinion unknown in history.”
“The American people would rightly not tolerate this kind of concentration of power in government,” Agnew declared in a 1969 speech in Des Moines. “Is it not fair and relevant to question its concentration in the hands of a tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one, and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by government?”
Agnew was unrelenting. With help from William Safire and Pat Buchanan, gifted Nixon speechwriters (and, later, columnists), he coined many memorable phrases, including the alliterative “nattering nabobs of negativism.”
Rarely has a concerted political effort been more successful. Ever since, reporters, editors and producers have incessantly looked over their right shoulders, fearing they’d be assailed as secret carriers of the liberal virus. But the 2016 campaign has brought an intense progressive counterattack on media timidity toward the right. Coverage of Donald Trump has become the occasion for a new crisis of credibility.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/spiro-agnews-ghost-lives-on-in-the-2016-campaign/2016/09/18/8b9dbbfe-7c49-11e6-bd86-b7bbd53d2b5d_story.html?utm_term=.cc566b1a40c0&wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1
