It’s a little obscure for most people, but I think a pretty strong case can be made for blaming the sorry state of American journalism on the Nixon administration. As Dan Rather just said in a speech at Fordham University:

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather said Monday that there is a climate of fear running through newsrooms stronger than he has ever seen in his more than four-decade career. [...]

Addressing the Fordham University School of Law in Manhattan, occasionally forcing back tears, he said that in the intervening years, politicians “of every persuasion” had gotten better at applying pressure on the conglomerates that own the broadcast networks. He called it a “new journalism order.”

He said this pressure — along with the “dumbed-down, tarted-up” coverage, the advent of 24-hour cable competition and the chase for ratings and demographics — has taken its toll on the news business. “All of this creates a bigger atmosphere of fear in newsrooms,” Rather said. [...]

Nevin asked Rather if he felt the same type of repressive forces in the Nixon administration as in the current Bush administration.

“No, I do not,” Rather said. That’s not to say there weren’t forces trying to remove him from the White House beat while reporting on Watergate; but Rather said he felt supported by everyone above him, from Washington bureau chief Bill Small to then-news president Dick Salant and CBS chief William S. Paley.

“There was a connection between the leadership and the led . . . a sense of, ‘we’re in this together,”‘ Rather said. It’s not that the then-leadership of CBS wasn’t interested in shareholder value and profits, Rather said, but they also saw news as a public service. Rather said he knew very little of the intense pressure to remove him in the early 1970s because of his bosses’ support.

Now let’s take a look back to what was happening to newspapers in that era - a little something called the Newspaper Preservation Act, something that started the downward slide of American media with joint operating agreements, or JOAs:

…While JOAs probably have “preserved” some papers, it’s likely that they kill more competition, and more papers, than they save. The business of getting the U.S. attorney general to aprove a new JOA has become a racket of manufactured “failure.” These cynical maneuvers reached their nadir in Detroit, where the Gannett and Knight-Ridder chains plunged their previously profitable Detroit News and Detroit Free Press into a ruinous price war in the belief, as the administrative law judge found, that “failure too had its reward” — a belief borne out when Attorney General Edwin Meese overruled the judge and approved the JOA.

Further, it’s increasingly clear that JOAs perversely produce the single-paper monopolies they are supposed to prevent. The JOA endgame, in which the owner of the weaker paper gets paid to kill it off, has rubbed out Newhouse’s St. Louis Globe-Democrat and Cox’s Miami News. The same fate now stalks Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner and probably awaits, after a decent interval, Gannett’s Detroit News — which was declared “dominant” for the purpose of gaining the JOA that now is doing it in.

The most graphic conflict between the NPA and the First Amendment lies in the procedure by which publishers apply to the U.S. attorney general for approval of a new JOA. Historians agree that the First Amendment was intended, if nothing else, to forbid any system of licensing the press such as had existed in England. Yet here in America, after 200 years of the First Amendment, we have publishers applying to a high government official for what is literally a license to operate a daily-newspaper monopoly, a license that can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the publishers involved.

What the JOA procedure can do the independence of the press was memorably demostrated by Knight-Ridder in 1988 while the Detroit JOA application was pending before Meese. The chain’s Detroit Free Press killed editorial cartoons and toned down editorials critical of Meese’s conduct as attorney general, while its flagship paper, The Miami Herald, pitched in by telling its editorial cartoonist to lay off Meese. As columnist Jerry Knight wrote in The Washington Post: “It is a sad story, unworthy of a great newspaper chain, an embarrassment to the fine journalists who work for Knight-Ridder, such an embarrassment to the profession that few people in the news business want to write about it.”

Knight-Ridder’s coddling of Meese and Hearst’s arm-twisting of Nixon both deserve a shadowy niche in the gallery of the First Amendment. Both episodes show how a law like the Newspaper Preservation Act can prevent the press from performing its constitutional function as a check on government. In the next two hundred years maybe we can avoid repeating the mistake.

JOAs, while not specifically intended to stifle the competition (think of it more as a happy side benefit for publishers), do have that effect. And concentrating media ownership in the hands of a few giant corporations of course makes them reluctant to offend the government officials who are so helpful with their legislative support.

Good news for stockholders - and bad news for citizens.