Analysis of Watergate and Media Influence

I think it's been the case for a long time.

I mean, if you look at what happened to Richard

Nixon, which I, of course, did not

understand at all, Richard Nixon was taken out by

the FBI and CIA

and

with the help of Bob Woodward, who was a Washington Post reporter who had

been

a naval intelligence officer

working in the White House, working in the Nixon White House.

And then he shows up like a year later

and he's this brand new reporter. He'd never been a journalist at all.

He's a naval intel officer,

the famous Bob Woodward we all revere.

And he's at the Washington Post. And somehow he gets the biggest story in

the

history of the Washington Post. He's the lead guy in that story.

Well, I worked at a newspaper. I've been in the news business my whole

life.

That is not how it works. You don't take a kid like his first day

from a

totally unrelated business and put him on the biggest story.

But he was. He was that guy. And who is his main source for

Watergate? Oh, the number two guy at the FBI.

Oh, so you have the naval intelligence officer

working with the

FBI official to destroy the

president. Okay, so that's a deep state coup. What else?

How would you describe that? If that happened in Guatemala,

what would you say?

And yet the way it was framed and the way that I accepted for decades

was, oh,

this intrepid reporter fought power. No, no, no.

This intrepid reporter, Bob Woodward, was a tool of power,

secret power, which is the most threatening kind,

to bounce the single most popular president in

American history, Richard Nixon, from office before the end of his term

and replace him with who? Oh, Gerald Ford, who sat on

the Warren Commission. Now, how did Gerald Ford get to be Richard

Nixon's vice president? Well, because Carl Albert, the

Democrat speaker of the House, told him you must choose him.

We will only confirm him

when they sent the actual elected vice president away for

tax evasion, Spiro Agnew of Maryland.

So you have a complete setup like an absolute Gerald Ford, the only

unelected president in American history, actually sat on the Warren Commission.

Something else that I accepted at face value until I looked at it.

I was like, that's completely insane.

You didn't want to interview Jack Ruby in your investigation of the assassination?

Okay, you're fake. Yeah, he was on the Warren Commission.

Fuck me.

And so, sorry for the long story, but the point is like that that happened

in front of all of us. But the way it was framed cloaks the

obvious reality of it. The people who broke into the Watergate

office building

from which the name is taken, Watergate,

I think it was six of them or seven of them. All but one

was a CIA employee.

That's real. It's like look it up on Google.

So the whole thing, Richard Nixon was elected by

more votes than any president in American history in the

1972 election. He was the most popular by votes, which

is the

only way we can really measure popularity, the most popular president

in his reelection campaign. And two years later, he's gone.

Undone by a naval intel officer, the number two guy at the FBI and a

bunch of CIA employees.

Okay.

You tell me what that is.

How about that?

This country's wild.

How about that?

Yeah, that's Bob Woodward.

That's the guy who wrote Wired.