Who Killed The Globies?

Hey, it couldn’t have been the paper’s slanted coverage, or daily defense of Boston’s corrupt establishment. No, according to the Boston Phoenix, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew and Rush Limbaugh killed The Globies.

Am I making this up? Nope, it’s really there:

But it was Vice-President Spiro Agnew who actually delivered the tirade in 1969 (and who also later left office in disgrace) that launched millions of press haters. In a speech supposedly written by Pat Buchanan, Agnew attacked a “small band of network commentators” who, he charged, were a “tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one.” Because of what he called their dedication to the “endless pursuit of controversy,” he called on the networks to be “more responsive to the views of the nation and more responsible to the people they serve.”

Note that Agnew was specifically attacking the networks — whose licenses come from the government — and not the press as a whole, at least in that speech. Nevertheless, his remarks struck a chord — as did the Nixon administration’s continual campaign against “the media” — a term it popularized because it felt “the media” sounded far colder and more distant than “the press.”

It wasn’t long before the whole conservative movement had taken up the cry that the media establishment was biased against its cause and, by implication, the concerns of Middle America. Whereas liberal populism had once railed against financial titans, conservative populism now targeted editors, publishers, and reporters (among others) as the new dangerous elite.

Entire organizations were formed to document liberal media bias. A book on the “liberal slant” of news coverage was often an instant ticket to the bestseller list. And, in the subsequent decades, whether in the hands of Rush Limbaugh (who, without any trace of irony, relentlessly attacked the “drive-by media”) or with the rise of Fox News — which claimed to be objective in comparison to virtually everyone else — the movement grew. By 2004, the conservative Club for Growth could attack Democratic candidate (and later party head) Howard Dean by telling him to take his “tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.” (emphasis added) And everyone knew what the reference to the Times meant.

Meanwhile, the same New York Times that somehow believes a groundswell of support for the embattled local paper has emerged in Boston is also likely to take a pass on a real public movement: the tax day Tea Parties planned for today across Massachusetts and America.