Vietnam/Watergate Redux?

This blog argued that today’s “mainstream media” (MSM) doesn’t match the journalist standards held to by its Vietnam/ Watergate era hero-predecessors. And it stated that the MSM’s role in getting us out of Vietnam and dumping Nixon explain its current fixation on getting us out of Iraq and dumping Bush. Now U.S. News & World Report senior writer Michael Barone has made a remarkably similar case:

It has been a tough 10 days for those who see current events through the prisms of Vietnam and Watergate. . . . U.S. forces with a precision air strike killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, on the same day that Iraqis finished forming a government. Zarqawi will not be available to gloat over American setbacks or our allies' defeat, as the leaders of the Viet Cong and North Vietnam did.

[And] special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald announced that he would not seek an indictment of Karl Rove. The left . . . had Mr. Rove pegged for the role of Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Theories were spun about plea bargains that would implicate Vice President Dick Cheney. Talk of impeachment was in the air. But it turns out that history doesn't repeat itself. George W. Bush, whether you like it or not, is not a second Richard Nixon. . .

In all this a key role was played by the press. . . America's newsrooms are populated largely by liberals who regard the Vietnam and Watergate stories as the great achievements of their profession. The peak of their ambition is to achieve the fame and wealth of great reporters like David Halberstam and Bob Woodward. . .

Historians may regard it as a curious thing that the left and the press have been so determined to fit current events into templates based on events that occurred 30 to 40 years ago. The people who effectively framed the issues raised by Vietnam and Watergate did something like the opposite; they insisted that Vietnam was not a reprise of World War II or Korea and that Watergate was something different from the operations J. Edgar Hoover conducted for Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy. Journalists in the 1940s, '50s and early '60s tended to believe they had a duty to buttress Americans' faith in their leaders and their government. Journalists since Vietnam and Watergate have tended to believe that they have a duty to undermine such faith, especially when the wrong party is in office.

. . . The visible slavering over the prospect of a Rove indictment is just another item in the list of reasons why the credibility of the "mainstream media" has been plunging. . .

Vietnam and Watergate were arguably triumphs for honest reporting. But they were also defeats for America. . .They ushered in an era when the political opposition and much of the press have sought not just to defeat administrations but to delegitimize them. The pursuit of Karl Rove by the left and the press has been just the latest episode in the attempted criminalization of political differences. Is there any hope that it might turn out to be the last?