Book Review: Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture by Mark Feldstein

Abstract

Poisoning Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture. Mark Feldstein. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. 462 pp. $30 hbk.This book richly deserved AEJMC's 2011 Frank Luther Mott/Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award for 2010's best book on journalism and mass communication based on original research published. It is a modern Greek tragedy, forces of evil and goodness battling each other to death, with evil ultimately winning. It's a page-turner, reading more like a novel than carefully researched work of history that it is.(Full disclosure: Feldstein is now a professor at University of Maryland, but as a professor emeritus there myself, I have not met him. I should also note that as a young journalist in Washington, I regarded Jack and Drew Pearson as heroes-the only real investigative reporters in town; later did guest lecturing in my classes. I was also a victim of an abusive investigation by Nixon FBI. So I'm not exactly objective about two main characters in this book.)That said, as I was reading, it seemed to me that Feldstein was too even handed in dealing with (once a near saint in my estimation) and Nixon (the devil incarnate). But by end of book, poisoning of press in title makes sense.Nixon did approve a plot to assassinate (and poison was weapon of choice), and he would have loved to eliminate investigative journalists altogether. Feldstein makes it clear that Anderson's last twenty years were bizarre, and he became poisoned with money. But I don't think it was who poisoned press, and, in account of Mott award, stoked the toxic sensationalism that contaminates contemporary media discourse. By mid-1980s, was no longer influential in journalism circles (where he was often mocked), and did not inspire media's growing obsession with profits.But in 1960s and early 1970s, landed one great scoop after another, beating large newspapers at their game. In 1972, he won Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for his expose of Nixon administration's tilt toward Pakistan. He also did groundbreaking reporting on Watergate break-in and burglary, though he was upstaged by Woodward and Bernstein, who got glory and Pulitzer.While Anderson's reporting often led way on important stories in sixties and seventies, he was cramped by his format. More than a thousand newspapers carried his Washington Merry-Go-Round at its peak, but column was limited to 750 words, and he was unable to give his work in-depth and extensive coverage available in large news hole of Post, New York Times, and other newspapers.His critics complained constantly about ethics of his news gathering. He didn't hesitate to pay sources for crucial information. He encouraged whistle-blowers to break law to provide him with classified documents. The so-called Anderson Papers, based on a large cache of classified material leaked to him by a fellow Mormon and Navy yeoman who had typed many of documents, exposing Pakistan affair, were in some quarters considered as important as Pentagon Papers. …