COMPARATIVE STUDY OF MEDIA AND JOURNALISM OF NEPAL
The state of media in Nepal
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
- History of media goes parallel with the political history of any country. We can also witness similar situation in Nepalese context. The history of Nepali media has been immensely influenced by the Nepalese political history.
- The political history of Nepali journalism can be divided into seven phases.
· Traditional communication system
· Rana period
· Period after the establishment of democracy
· Panchayat period
· Period after the restoration of democracy
· Period during king’s regime
· Period following the success of People's Movement-2063 BS onwards
Traditional Communication System
During the period, there were no any aids of print and audio-visual media. This period of traditional communication system is non-recorded history of Nepali Media.
Bengal Gazette, as the first newspaper of the South Asia, was published from Calcutta, India in 1837 BS (1780AD). However, it did not have any effect to the development of Nepali journalism. Nepal was passing through the unification era at the moment during which no educational or extra activities took momentum. Owing to the political, educational, transportation among many other causes, no influential move took place regarding the publishing of newspapers in Nepal. 'Katuwal Karaune', 'Jhyali Pitne', 'Sankha Phukne', 'Damaha Thataune', 'Karnal Phukne' etc. were in practice for public information and mass communication during this period .
Those practices were in use for a long time and are still in existence in some rural parts of Nepal. Katuwal played an important role in the history of mass communication of Nepal; village panchayat used to appoint them as peons. Due to the geographical difficulties, illiteracy, backward communities and other difficulties in the country, Katuwals were more effective than other modern media including newspapers to disseminate information.
Rana period − 19o3 to 2007
This period is considered as the initial phase or beginning of the development of journalism of Nepal.
In 1908 BS, then Prime Minister Jung Bahadur Rana (JBR) imported a hand press instruments in Nepal from Europe in course of his visit there.
Although it was used for publication purpose only after 58 years of its entry into Nepal, It was said to be the first press machine here..
It was kept at JBR's then Palace at Thapathali, Kathmandu. Due to the trademark of an eagle pasted in the machine, it was often called 'Giddhe Press'. But its official name was Type Printing Press '.
GORKHA BHARAT JEEVAN
This was the Nepali magazine brought out from Banaras, India. This is first media outlet in Nepali language. Ram Krishna Barma served as the founder editor of this magazine brought out on the prime initiative of great scholar Moti Ram Bhatta. Gorkha Bharat Jeevan was a monthly magazine based on literature. It was Printed at Bharat Jeevan Press, Banaras which was owned by Editor himself. There was no uniformity regarding the date of its publication, however, different dates are found in the history of journalism.
1943 BS - according to the Press Commission Report- 2015
1945 BS. - According to the historian of Nepali language and literature Harsha Nath Sharma
Bs. 1950 -according to a book entitled 'Patrakarita' authored by Ram Raj Poudyal
An advertisement was published at the cover page of a book entitled 'Gorkha Hasya Mangari' in 1952 BS which was published from the same Bharat Jeeban Press, Banars. '' G]fkfnL efiffdf afa' /fds[i0f jdf{ ;Dkfbs ''uf]vf{ ef/t hLjgn] cg]s t/xsf xf;L lbNnuL cf} rt'–ofO{sf s'/f ;+ux u/L cfkm\gf lghL oGqfnodf 5fkL ksfz u/] .
Whether it was brought to Nepal or not has not been mentioned and the number of copies published is still unknown. Kamal Mani Dixit has mentioned in his book 'Kalo Akchhar' that some copies of 'Gorkha Bhatat Jeevan' were in Kashi Vidyapeeth.
Anyway the magazine played two major roles in the history of Nepali journalism that are as follows.
A) Preserved existence of Gorkha ( Nepali) language among other languages of Indian sub- continent.
B) Boosted up confidence and inspiration among Nepalese youth and scholars for the publishing of magazine in their mother language.
SUDHA SAGAR
Sudhasagar was a monthly literary magazine published as the first print media outlet from Nepal. This is the second publication in Nepali language.
It was published in Shrawan, 1955 BS and Pandit Naradev Pandey and Kapil Dev were the editors of the magazine. The magazine was printed at Pashupat Press, Thahiti of Kathmandu. Being inspired by Motiram Bhatta, the two youths took initiative to publish this magazine. But Bhatta did not witness the initiatives taken for the publication of magazine since he passed away at the delicate age of 30 in 1953 BS. Number of issues and copies published was also unknown Media historians Ram Raj Poudyal and Grishma Bahadur Devkota had not also trace it. Itihans Siromani Baburam Acharya noted that he had at least four copies of Sudha Sagar, but lost in the debris of 1990 's earth quake. It was not clear whether the copies were same or different.
gnf]kfVofg a book published in 1956 BS under the aegis of Nardev and his friends in the same press Pashupat and his friends) mentioned some information about Sudha Sagar at the back page as following.
यो बडो खुशीको बात भयाको छ की हाम्रा गोर्खा भाषामा पनि ५५ सालका श्रावण मैना देखीन सुधासागर भन्या मासीक पत्र निस्क्याको छ जस्मा अनेक तरहका बिध्न आनन्द दिन्या श्लोक- कथाहरु समेत हाली प्रकाश हुन्छ । यस्मा हाम्रो गोर्खाली षज्जन महाशयहरुले आफ्नो देश आफ्नो भाषाको उन्नतिका निमित्त अवश्य दया दृष्टि गर्नु हुन्ये छ । मदिसेहरुका हजारौ पत्र निस्कन्छन तापनि एक २ अखबार दस हजार बारहजार ग्राहक छन् भन्या हाम्रा गोर्खामा फगत एक मात्र छ झन यसमात सबै हाम्रा स्वदेसीय महाशयहरु सवैले जावेा कमपनि १॥ रुपैया मात्र देशोन्नती भाषाको उन्नती गर्नाका निमित्त ग्राहक श्रेणीमा अवस्य नाम लेखाउनु पर्छ किन भन्या यो मासिक पत्र तपाइहरुबाट मदद्त नगर्दिनाले कथंकदाचित बन्द भयो गा्रहक कम भया भन्या मेरो मात्र नोक्सान पान्र्या हावौन की तपाइहरुलाई पनि केही सरम हुन जाला । बिदेसी पनि यहि भन्नन की नेपालबाट एक मासिक पत्र निस्क्याको थियो सो पनि ग्राहक कम हुनाले वन्द भयो गोख्ार्ालीहरु ब्ार्ष दिनको जावो १॥रु दिनलाई पनि गाहारो मान्या रह्या छन् तस्मात हे स्वदेसीय बुद्धिवन्त महाशयहरु यो कुरा सवै विचार गर्नु हवस यस फगत एकलो अनाथ सुधासागरका उपर दयाराखी आफ्ना देश भाषाको उन्नति गर्नु हवस् ु ''
We can understand various aspects including financial situation of the Sudha Sagar with this advertisement. There was big lack of financial along with other resources for the publishing of Sudha Sagar and Gorkha Bharat Jeevan as well. Then Rana regime did not provide any support to these magazines. It shows there might be big research about these two publications.
GORKHAPATRA
Gorkhapatra started to get published after two years and ten months of the publication of the Sudha Sagar. It was first printed in Baisakh 24, Monday of 1958, (May 6 1901). With the publishing of Gorkhapatra, Nepal has entered into the newspaper development era in the history of Nepali journalism. Gorkhapatra is the first Nepali newspaper, second press publication and third press publication in Nepali language .
Gorkhapatra was published in the period of the Rana regime where civil rights and democracy was no more in Nepal. Prime Minister Dev Shumsher JBR was more liberal and reformist in comparison to other Rana Rulers. Therefore, the publication of Gorkhapatra was made possible with his liberal thoughts. It was also one of the reformative initiative among others brought out during his rule in Nepal. He handed over the Giddhe Press and Litho Press to Nardev and authorized him to publish Gorkhapatra under the supervision of Lt. Conl.Dilli Samsher Thapa. But, Dev Shumsher JBR was subjected to victim by his brother Chandra Shumsher .JBR's conspiracy and overthrown from Prime Minister's post. Chandra Shumsher JBR ruled for 31 years as he was a hardliner ruler. In his period there was no chance to have other newspaper published.
He even did not allow to have published 200 copies of each issue of Gorkhapatra during his rule. Media activities were almost limited to zero during Rana Period. Deficit financial situation, lack of educated human resource and curtailment of civil rights attributed to the limitation of the development of journalism. Later during the period of Juddha Shumsher JBR, Sharada Monthly got published in Falgun, 1991 BS on the leadership of Riddhi Bahadur Malla. It was the third press publication brought out with some financial support from Rana government .It was a new publication in Nepal after a long gap of 33 years.
- In Bharda, 1992 BS, editor Surya Bhakta Joshi started Udhyog Fortnightly as an industrial information journal. But it converted into monthly literary magazine after two years. In Asoj, 2000, Gorkhapatra started publishing twice a week after 42 years of its beginning and thrice a week later.
Newspaper publication during Rana Period
1 Sudha Sagar
2 Gorkhapatra
3 Sharada: Monthly newspaper started publishing in 1991 Falgun, Editor: Rhiddi Bahadur Malla,
4 Udhyog: Fortnightly magazine published first in 1992 BS, Editor : Suryabhakta Joshi .
Juddha S. JBR was positive to develop media industry in the country. So, this newspaper was published as a journal to impart industrial information. But it was converted to the literary magazine after two years .It got published having various poems of great poet Laxmi Prasad Devkota.
5 Sahitya Shrot: Baisakh, 2004 BS, Monthly Literary Magazine, Editor: Hridayachandra Singh Pradhan;
6 Gharelu Ilam Patrika: Jestha, 2004 BS, Fortnightly, Editor: Bhimnidhi Tiwari. It was published by Gharelu Ilam Prachar Adda (government office)
7. Shikshya: Jestha, 2004 BS, Fortnightly, Editor: Bhimnidhi Tiwari .
8 Kathmandu Municipal Patrika : Manghsir, 2004 BS, Fortnightly, published on the initiative of Kathmandu municipality .
9 Nepal Shikshya: Asoj, 2005 BS, Monthly, A team of five editors headed by Trailokyanath Upreti published the magazine.
10 Ankha: Asoj, 2005 BS, Monthly, Editor: Devi Prasad Rimal
11 Purusartha: Poush, 2006 BS, Monthly literary magazine , Editor : Budhisagar Seshraj Sharma.
12 Jagaran Weekly: Falgun, 2007 BS, Editor: Hridayachandrasingh Pradhan. It was the first weekly newspaper published from the private sector and first anti–Rana newspaper.
Various newspapers were published from some cities of India in Nepali language.
Radio Broadcasting
Indian and other foreign radio programs were likely to listen in Nepal during the rule of Judda S. Rana There were only few sets of radio with well-off families of Nepal and they brought the sets from India. But all radio sets were seized by Juddha S. JBR during the Second World War due to German propaganda. Prime Minister Padma S. JBR returned those radio sets to respective owners in 2003 BS. First test broadcasting was carried out from Bijuli Adda, Kathmandu in 2003 Magh 14 from 1 to 1.3o PM. Electrical Engineer Kashi Raj Pandey was the main person to carry out this test broadcasting. It was not exactly the radio frequency but the only radio sounds. Ramayan and other religious hymns were played in during the occasion of religious days through loud speakers in and around Tundikhel.
Nepali radio came to introduction through revolution. Narad Muni Thulung, Jayandra Bdr.Thapalia and their friends made efforts to broadcast radio programme from Bhojpur. It was the practice of mobilizing people against Rana oligarchy in Nepal. In Mangshir, 2007, they started the radio frequency for the first time in the history of Nepalese radio. Later on, under the leadership of Tarini Prasad Koirala 'Prajatantra Radio' broadcasting was initiated in 2007 from the premises of Raghupati Jute Mills, Biratnagar. It was also a part of anti-Rana revolution. After establishment of democracy, the same transmitter was brought to Kathmandu and started Nepal Radio as a state run broadcasting service from 2007 Chaitra 20th , again under the leadership of Mr. T.P. Koirala. In this way, a few but important steps were taken in the establishment of radio in Nepal after toppling down of 104 year-Rana regime.
AFTER ESTABLISHMENT OF DEMOCRACY − 2007 to 2017
This period is taken as the initial stage of the Nepalese journalism. Various sectors such as education, economics, politics, journalism etc were immoderately benefited following the establishment of democracy. Political parties enjoyed open environment and democratic institutions were established and strengthened. Within 24 hours of the proclamation of democracy, 'Awaj' the first daily news paper of Nepal was published in Falgun 8, 2007 from Kathmandu. Siddhi Charan Shrestha was the Editor of the newspaper. It presented a Banner headline news on royal proclamation of democracy establishment, along with photograph of King Tribhuvan in its first issue. Unfortunately, Awaj sustained just for two years.
In Bhadra 24, 2011 BS, 'Samaj', the second daily newspaper was brought out from Kathmandu, Editor of the newspaper was Pashupati Dev Pandey; later Mani Raj Upadhyaya gave editorial leadership to the newspaper. Many weeklies, half weeklies and dailies got published during the period. Women also took initiatives to publish the newspaper . In 2008 Jestha 'Mahila' a monthly magazine was published having Editors namely Sadhana Pradhan and Kamakchha Devi (first female journalist of Nepal). Journalism was started in various languages like English, Newari, Hindi in Nepal.
'Nepal Guardian' is the first English monthly magazine which was published from Kathmandu in 2010 BS (1948 AD). The magazine was printed in Calcutta, Editor- Barun Samsher JBR.
'The Commoner', the first English daily newspaper of Nepal, published from Kathmandu in 2012 (1956 July 15),
Editor- Gopal Das Shrestha.
Other newspapers published in English language include, Daily Mirror, Everest News, The Motherland etc.
In Kartik, 2009, 'Pasa ', a fortnightly newspaper was published in Newari language. Editor of the newspaper was Asharam Shakya. 'Nepal Bhasa Patrika', the first Newari daily newspaper was published from Kathmandu in 2012 Asoj 16. Fatte Bdr. Singh was the Editor of the newspaper.
'Tarang Weekly', the first Hindi newspaper, got published from Kathmandu in 2008 Shrawan, Editor- Bhoj Bahadur Singh.
'Jai Nepal', the first Hindi Daily, was published in 2012, Shrawan from Kathmandu. Editor was Indra Chandra Jain. The publication took place out of Kathmandu valley. 'Sewa' was the first monthly newspaper published from out of Kathmandu valley (Birgunj) in 2008, Shrawan. It was printed in Banaras of which Editor was Shyam Prasad Sharma. The regular broadcasting of Radio Nepal started under the leadership of Tarini Prasad Koirala in 2007, Caitra 20 from Singha Durbar, using the same transmitter of Prajatantra Radio. News Agency- Nepal Sambad Samiti, the first news agency of Nepal established in 2016, Paush 1 from private sector. Sagarmatha Sambad Samiti (second news agency) was incepted in 2017, Baisakh 30.
During this period, around 170 newspapers brought out in Nepal.
Mainly political parties were enthusiastic to publish the newspaper as a means of political awareness at the moment. Around 35 political publications took place during the period. Some main political party publications were Nepal Pukar and Nawa Nepal published by Nepali Congress, Nepal Sandesh and Jana Bani by Rastriya Praja Parishad, Nawa Yug by Communist Party of Nepal, Mashal, Naya Bato by Nepali Rastriya Congress, Samyukta Prayas by Samyukta Prajatantra Party, Karmabir by Karmabir Mahamandal etc. Most of them were weeklies.
- Parliamentary reporting (2016 / 2017) was also started at that time. Bhogya Prasad Shah and Prakash Man Singh were first parliamentary reporters. They were associated to Radio Nepal and used to provide news to the parliamentary secretariat.
Publications of this period can be divided into 5 categories;
- a) News oriented - dailies b) Views oriented- weeklies, half weeklies and fortnightlies c) Language and literature oriented - monthlies, bimonthlies d) House journals - publications of parties and other institutions e) Government publications
-Journalism of this period can be named as 'initial stage of modern journalism in Nepal'.
PANCHAYAT PERIOD − 2017 to 2046 BS
Panchayat period is taken as the period marking the beginning of mission journalism. For the first time in the history of Nepal, the mission journalism was introduced during the period. Journalism during the period was divided into two missions: pro-panchayat and anti panchayat
Main objective of the pro-panchayat newspaper was to justify the necessity of the panchayat system whereas anti-panchayat newspaper came to front to advocate for democracy. Press freedom was not more in practice and many actions took place against press. There were two phases of journalism: Before Referendum (2017 to 2036 BS) and After Referendum (2036 to 2046BS).
Views oriented weekly newspapers were more popular at that time. Although there was no guarantee of civil rights and press freedom during the period, development of infrastructure was sped up in various sectors of press. Ministry of Communication was given autonomy. Earlier, other Ministries looked after the portfolio related to information and communication. News Agency was established as a government media and at the same time Press Council was founded on the initiative of government. The Tribhuvan University began teaching journalism education and press publication and media development took a professional turn. Nepal entered into the television era and radio was expanded outside Kathmandu.
Gorkhapatra became daily from 2017 Falgun 7 (after 59 years of its publication).
Gopal Pd. Bhattarai was first editor of daily Gorkhapatra. The Rising Nepal national daily published in 2022 Paush 1, Editor Barun S. JBR
Other dailies; Hamro Desh, Naya Nepal, Nabin Khabar, Naya Samaj, Nirman (Biratnagar), Jana Jeevan (Birgunj), Dainik Nirnaya (Pokhara / Bhairahawa).
Some Leading weeklies : Samikchha, Matribhumi, Naya Sandesh, Saptahik Manch, Jana Sambad, Yug Sambad, Jana Jyoti, Jan Jagriti, Deshantar, Dristi, Punarjagaran, Saptahik Manch, Saptahik Bimarsha, Rastra Pukar, Chalphal, Pratibadha, Gatibidhi, Tarka, Arati, Arpan, Panchayat Bato, Anchal Sandesh (Janakpur), Lumbini Sandesh, Bheri Sandesh, Gandaki Sandesh, Himalayan Guardian, Nepal Review, The Nepalese Perspective etc.
Rastriya Sambad Samiti, RSS (later called Rastriya Samachar Samiti established in 2018 Falgun 7th after merge of two private news agency SSS and NSS .
Radio broadcasting development committee was started in 2041 and its capacity was expanded to the various region of the country as the transmission stations in Dhankuta, Dharan, Kathmandu, Bardibas, Pokhara etc. Few TV sets entered into Nepal in the decade of 30s, and possible to see only foreign channels. Nepal Television (NTV) project initiated in 2041 Magh 17 under the leadership of Nir Shah. First test transmission was done in 2042, Srawan 29 to cover youth mass communication workshop. Visual news transmitted in 2042 Bhadra 16 to 21 to cover Their Majesties' State visit to Australia. NTV project converted into NTC corporation in 2042 Paush 12. Regular transmission from 2042 Paush 14 (on the occasion of king Birendra's birthday) Active role in third SAARC summit held in Kathmandu 2044.
Nepali media was allowed to the parliamentary reporting (Rastriya Panchayat) and got open environment after the referendum. They became more free and critical in comparison to the previous time. It was the impact of referendum.
Fatal attack to journalist Padam Thakurathi took place in 2043 Bhadra. It was a major incident in the history of Nepalese media that occurred Panchayat period. Fortunately Thakurathi survived and united Nepali media professionals to condemn the panchayat system.
Press and student unions played the role of opposition in Panchyat regime, press used to give high priority to student's activities. High commands of Panchayat politics like Gaun Pharka Rastriya Abhiyan, Panchyat Neetee Tatha Jhanchbujh Samiti and Zonal Chiefs (Anchaladhis) etc. misused media. Interviews and columns became more popular. Namita, Sumita murder case (Pratidhoni weekly), Bomb scandal 2042 (Matribhumi), 84 boxes Soviet arms (Nepal Post), B.P. Koirala's policy of returned back to homeland, death of B.P. Koirala, Sikkim issue, Chernovil milk scandal, earthquake 2045, media war with India during 15 month of border blockade in 2045 ( an unique feeling of national unity), corruption scandals like carpet, dollar, hashish etc., session of Rastriya Panchyat were the major issues covered by Nepalese media during Panchayat system.
Nepali media played great role in people's Movement 2046 started with Chaksibari meeting at the leader Ganeshman Singh's residence on 2045, Magh 5 . Nepali congress and left political parties joined hands for movement to dethrone Panchayat system. Active role played by private and foreign media to support the movement. Government media were compelled to support Panchayat system till last minute but the journalists extend their moral support to the movement. After struggle of 50 days, party less system was declared end at late night in 2046 Chaitra 24th.
AFTER RESTORATION OF DEMOCRACY − 2047 to 2061 Magh
This period is regarded as the phase of modern and professional journalism in the history of Nepali journalism. After the success of people's movement, new constitution (Nepal's constitution 2047) has guaranteed the press freedom and right to information to people. It was widely praised. Wide impact of this provision has been seen to the media sector. Political and other sectors have also been benefited by this freedom. This provision encouraged the media sector luring huge investment in media. Media became professional and it was accepted as the industry of the country. Political parties became free and Political activities sped up.
Before this, man can not imagine television run by private sector. Television and Radio in private sector started and are going on. Off set press came into use and due to the accessibility of computer media became too advanced. So there was a favorable environment to develop professional journalism in Nepal.
The door has been opened for huge investment and from private sector Kantipur Publications established with ambitious investment of more than Rs.30 million ( 3 crore).
Kantipur and The Kathmandu Post, the first broad sheet national dailies from private sector were published in 2049 Falgun 7th. Due to the popularity in the short time many other broadsheet dailies came out. Some of them sustained and some went out from the sight. During this period online journalism also came out and because of the computer it was possible to read the newspaper and to hear the radio in computer.
Shree Sagarmatha, Everest Herald (English daily), Lokpatra, Space Time, Space Today, Shree Deurali, Naya Sadak stopped their publication not because of government but by their own problem.
Simultaneous publication also started to get published. Nepal Samacharpatra started to publish from Biratnagar since 2058, Baisakh . Kantipur started since 2061 Ashar from Bharatpur. Newspaper publications were also stared from outside the country. For example Nepal Samacharpatra initiated its publishing from Doha, Qatar since 2062 Ashead, although it could not sustain for a long time. Now Kantipur and Rajdhani dailies have their weekly publication from Doha but not simultaneous. Newspaper publication in different languages was started and going on. Significant changes have occurred in radio broadcasting after 2047 and radio Nepal has started to broadcast the news service in 20 different languages. New wave of FM broadcasting from non government and private sector has become significant initiative in South Asia. Private channels in television came into the light. Channel Nepal, Kantipur TV, Image started their service. New debate on foreign investment in media and multi media ownership is on. The FM's expansion is significant in this period and it is going on in a new height. There seemed the very gloomy picture in Nepalese media during the Maoist Conflict, State of Emergency and during the period of direct rule by the king Gynendra. Some 18 innocent media persons killed, more than 100 put behind the bars, several cases of arrested, kidnapped and tortured from both sides i.e. state and Maoist insurgents . Nepal was characterized as ' the world's biggest prison for the journalists.
(you can add more based on your own observation)
PERIOD DURING KING’S REGIME
Militarization over the news and media was started at the king's regime. Presence of military officials in media houses and even news rooms was normal. Confiscation of radio equipments from FM studios and unfair distribution of government advertisements was in use. The radios of country played the vital role against the king's regime and to establish democracy.
AFTER SUCCESS OF THE PEOPLE'S MOVEMENT -2 ( 2063 Baishak Onwards)
Nepali press played an important role against king's regime. It fought for the freedom of press and democracy. Due to its contribution to the democracy Nepali press is admired among the society and government itself also created the favorable atmosphere to exercise press freedom. No any restriction or pressure from the state and rebels after the democracy.
Government took initiative for overall development of media .Some important achievements of this time are as follows:
1 High Level Commission for Media Recommendation.
2 High Level Taskforce to recommend restructuring the government media.
3 Right to Information Act, 2064
4 First Amendment in working journalist Act
5 Minimum wages recommendation commission of the working journalist
6 Clear provision about press freedom in interim constitution (even in preamble)
7 State run media are also enjoying more press freedom
8 No any journalists in jail
9 various television channels and newspapers are coming out with huge investment .
(you can add more based on your own observation)
Unpleasant part is also noticed in the journalism;
Journalist are killed and threatened,
Terai movement
Everyday news about anti-press incident has come to notice.
(you can add more based on your own observation)
oooooooooo
GORKHAPATRA: A LIVING HISTORY OF ONE CENTURY
Pre – History :
Crown Prince of England Edward VII had a hobby of collecting newspapers of all over the world- while not having any newspaper of Nepal, he enquired about it- Field Marshal Lord Robert visited Kathmandu in 1948 bs - he also explained about Crown Prince's hobby - PM Bir S.JBR managed to publish few copies of Gorkhapatra (gp) in hurry and put it on breakfast table for the special guest Lord Robert - although it is just a saying - no any strong evidence - no one has the copy of those gp - historians of Nepalese journalism late Grishma bdr. Devkota and Ram Raj Poudyal have mentioned it as a story, not as a history.
- Regular publication of gp started only in bs 1958 and made a glorious history of one century.
- P.M. Dev S.JBR authorized to Pandit Nardev by a 'sanad' (authorisation paper) to publish gp in 1988 Baisakh badi 11.
- Terms of reference explained in the 'sanad ' were as follows-:
a) permission to use Type Chapakhana ( giddhe press) and Lithograph Chapakhana to print gp.
b) Permission to use manpower of both press.
c) Authority to publish gp 1000 copies per week. ( yearly subscription rate moharu. 3-)
d) Pay scale of the press staff and budget ( annual moharu 3904-)
e) Policies on what to publish and what not to publish in gp.
f) Instruction to finalized by Lt. Coln. Dilli Samsher Thapa.
g) Instruction to maintain sales account.
What to publish ; ( छाप्ने
दुनियाँलाई हुन्या इस्तीहार नटाँसिने कुरा नयाँ ऐन कलकत्ता र यहाँको दरभाउ जंगी निजामतिले गरेका राम्रा काम श्री ३ र मुख्तियारले दिएको भाषण अनौठा कुरा आकाशमा उडेर जाने समुद्र मुनी जाहाज अदालतमा अन्याय भएको फोहर गरेको भ्रष्टाचार पक्का गरी छाप्ने काम जान्नेले नोकरी चाहेको धाउ फलाम खानी पाएको कसुर भइ हाकिमको अदली बदली भएको खेतीपाती इलम उन्नतिको कुरा उल्था गरी छाप्ने श्री ५को ठुलो उत्सवका कुरा स्वर्गवासी श्री ३ को तारिफ छाप्नु हुन्छ बाबुले कमाएको धन जुवारण्डीबाजी बदनीयत गरी खर्च गर्नेहरु बारे शिकारका बहादुरी खुकुरीले चिपुवाभालु मारेको ग्याजेट प्रोग्राम बैंकटेश्वर बंगबासी छापाका असल कुरा उल्था गरी छाप्ने दुनियाँको बद्चलन र फतुरा खर्चबाट दिल हटाउने राय डाक्टरले निको पारेको ।
What not to publish - नछाप्ने
श्री ५ र श्री ३ महाराजका दरवार भित्रका स्वास्नीमानिसका बिषय फौज र हातहतियार राजकाज बिषय सरकारका आम्दानी खर्च भोट नेपाल सीमानाको बिकट बाटोको बयान सुन खानी पाएको र हाम्रा तारीफका कुरा नछाप्नु ।
-According to the Sanad, the first issue of gp appeared in bs 1958 Jestha badi 3 (Baisakh 24).
- 8 pages weekly publication
- One copy of first issue is preserved only in Madan Library, Patan Dhoka.
Merits of gp ; ( according to the list published in first issue )
1) Information of public grievances and expectation of response.
2) Motivation to progress and mutual faith between the king and people.
3) Information of military achievements
4) Performance reports of central and local authorities
5) News and information to local bodies
6) Information exchange between Nepalese people inside and outside the homeland
7) Benefit to business community by publication of pricelist
8) Transfer of skill and technology
9) Legal information
10 ) Motivation for education
11) Inspiration for women upliftment
12)Reference materials to teachers
13)Benefit to farmers by agro- information
14) Benefit to Brahamins to performed their traditional job
- The editorial (Pl86sf]{ /fo ) of the first issue explained about the importance and objective of gp publication.
- P.M. Dev S.JBR over threw by Chandra S.JBR after two month of gp. publication , it was a big set back to the country and gp.
- But gp did not published that big news, only after some time its editorial supported the step taken by Chandra S.JBR.
- The name of Editor -in -chief of gp was not clear. From 1958 bs to 1990 bs name of the chief editor was not published.
- Only from the issue of 1991Jestha 5th name of the Editor ( Prem Raj) mentioned in gp.
- Pandit Nardev was sacked after two years when Chandra S.JBR became PM.
- After Nardev, Raja Jaya Prithavi Bahadur Singh took over the charge of gp.
- He published the gp with the help of three Pandits ( jetha pandit Uday Dev Pande, mahila pandit Chiranjeebi Poudel and kancha pandit Narendra Keshari Aryal)
- Mahila pandit Chiranjeebi was very talented in prose writings, his editorials were more strong and impressive, therefore PM Chandra and other hardliner Ranas were not pleased with Chiranjeebi, so editorial was stopped in gp for some times
- Chiranjeebi had explained in his auto - biography ' Atma Charitra', about his hard days in gp.
- During the entire ruling period ( 31 years) of PM Chandra gp could not grew up.
- He was ready to close down gp, but due to the letter by foreign reader Silvan Levi ( renowned French intellectual) he could not closed it
- Gp had access to UK, France, USA, Russia, China too. Many old libraries in foreign countries had collection of old issues of gp.King Mahendra BBS Dev observed its old issues in the Library of Congress during his state visit to US in 1960 ad.
- From 1983 Chitra 29 gp printed in 'Gorkhapatra electric machin press', Naxal, Kath.
- From 1983 Jestha 4th 'uf]vf{kq' became 'uf]/vfkq'
- First photo in gp was published in 1984 Baisakh 13 at 3 page, the photo was of Suryamati Shrestha, a 12 years old girl of Brgunj who was spinning the Shree Chandra Kamdhenu Charkha.
- From the beginning gp was used to published on every Monday but from 1991Baisakh 15th it published on every Friday
- Gp published twice a week from 2000 Asoj 29th , thrice a week from 2003 Paush 8th , daily from 2017 Falgun 7th , evening issue from 2019 Kartik 2nd to 2022 Asoj 12th , Saturday supplement from 2019 Ashad.
- Post offices, other government offices and Indian newspapers were the main sources of news for gp, no provision of own correspondents at its early days.
- Some city reporters were appointed for Kathmandu valley in 2000bs.
- Major contribution of gp - a) information exchange between the state and people b) social history of one century c) foundation of newspaper tradition in Nepal d) an intellectual exercise in closed and conservative society e) strong medium for development of Nepali language and literature f) source of information about Nepal in foreign countries g) an important position in Asian journalism due to its long continuation.
NATIONAL COMMUNICATION PLAN - 2028 (NCP)
- 'Communication for development' main slogan
- main objective was to mobilized communication sector to promote Panchayat system.
- Before NCP, no independent ministry for communication affairs
- NCP designed independent Ministry of Communication (moc) with complete organogram
- Five organs under moc - Department of Information, Department of Broadcasting (Radio Nepal), Dept.of Postal Service, HMG Press , Press Council Nepal.
- Six corporations under moc - Nepal Telecommunication corp.,
Royal Nepal Film Corp., Gorkhapatra Corp.,RSS, Cultural Corp., Shree Ratna Recording Corp.
- NCP gave a new dimension and laid foundation for communication development.
LONG TERM PLAN FOR THE INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION
SECTOR - 2059
- based on - constitution 2047- open, liberal and competitive economic policies - ninth plan - communication access to rural level - communication service as a tool to alleviate poverty and social backwardness.
- 16 points main long term plan and other sectoral plans
MEDIA EDUCATION IN NEPAL
- history of journalism in Nepal more than 100 years
-history of journalism education in Nepal 25 years
- tradition to entry in journalism without background of journalism education
- previously no opportunity to gain journalism education inside the country
- now two types of opportunities - academic course and training course
- in academic course at present journalism is available from class IX to Masters and Ph.D. level
- first initiation by TU in Ratna Rajya Campus- 2033bs.- certificate level
- diploma level in Patan campus in 2036, shifted to RR campus in 2038
- out of valley in Prithivi Narayan campus,Pokhara, certificate level - 2041
- Peoples campus (private) certificate level- 2043
- Functional paper in Diploma level in various campuses - 2055
- Masters level by TU in RR campus and by Purbanchal U. in Kantipur City College and College of Journalism and Mass Communication - all in 2058
- Bachelor level in various private colleges- 2059
- four year bachelor level course in KU- 2062
- In various higher secondary schools (10 +2)
Training Courses
- Nepal Press Institute - 2041 ( ten month proficiency course)
- One year diploma course from 2058
- Three months and other short term courses by NPI Regional Media Center in Biratnagar, Butwal and Nepalgunj
- Media Point -2053 (ten month proficiency course)
- Center for Women Development - 6 month course only for girls (not running now)
- Short term course by various institutions like Global media center, Smarika, Communication Corner, Media House, AAVAS, Jamaleshor Institute, Sambad, Kathmandu communication training center etc.
- Short term courses by various professional organizations and NGOs like FNJ, Sancharika Samuha, WOJAN, Nepal Press Union, Press Chautari, Nepal Institute of Mass Communication, Photo journalists associations, Reiyukai etc.
- Journalism training available for one day to one year.
Friday, September 24, 2010
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Penny press
Penny press newspapers were cheap, tabloid-style papers produced in the middle of the 19th century.
History
As the East Coast's middle and working classes grew, so did the new public’s desire for news. Penny papers emerged as a cheap alternative to the standard dailies. They replaced dry political conversation with coverage of crime, tragedy, adventure, and gossip. The penny papers represented the crudest form of journalism because of the sensational gossip that was reported. [7].
The Penny Press was most noted for being very low-priced - only one cent per paper - while other contemporary newspapers were priced around six cents per issue. The exceptionally low price popularized the newspaper in America and extended the influence of paper media to the poorer classes. With the penny press, newspaper made the news and journalism more important. The newspapers also began to pay more attention to the public that they served. They realized that the same information that interested the upper class did not interest the penny public. The “new public” enjoyed information about police and criminal cases. The main revenue of the penny press was advertising while other newspapers relied heavily on high priced subscriptions. [5]
The idea of a penny paper was not new in the 1830s. By 1826, multiple editors were experimenting with sports news, gossip, and a cheap press.[4]
Most newspapers in the early nineteenth century cost 6 cents and were distributed through subscriptions. On July 24, 1830, the first penny press newspaper came to the market: Lynde M. Walter's Boston Transcript. Unlike most later penny papers, Walter's Transcript maintained what was considered good taste, featuring coverage of literature and the theater.This paper sold for four dollars a year. [4]
The penny paper’s largest inspiration came from Charles Knight’s 1832 Penny Magazine. The main purpose of the magazine was to educate and improve England’s poor, but was very popular with Americans. It became a very successful magazine as it attained a circulation of more than 20,000 within a year. [4]
Fredrick Hudson, one the first to write about the history of American journalism, believed the rise of the penny press to be a key factor in the development of the modern newspaper. Hudson considered newspapers to be dull during the 1840s.[1]
The penny press arrived in New York on January 1, 1833, when Horatio David Shepard teamed up with Horace Greeley and Francis W. Story and issued the Morning Post. Although both Greeley and Story went on to fame and fortune in the New York press world, the concept of bringing out a penny paper belonged exclusively to Shepard. He made a habit of taking daily walks through the teeming streets of the Bowery, where he observed merchants selling small items for a penny a piece. Other papers of the time were selling for six cents which allowed for a wider spread of people to read the Penny Press so they could afford it. He also took note of the fact that sales were brisk.[2]
Benjamin Day was the leader in true transformation of the daily newspaper. The newspaper went from narrowly focused on the wealthy and sparsely distributed to a broad-based medium of the news. These changes were mostly seen in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, and other East Coast cities. [6]
Later that year, publisher Benjamin Day introduced The Sun. The Sun appealed to a wider audience, using a simpler, more direct style, vivid language, and human interest stories.[3] Day was a New Englander who worked for the Springfield, Massachusetts paper, the Republican. He came down to New York to be a compositor, but in the depression of 1833, he started The Sun in desperation. Day reasoned that a penny paper would be popular in hard times as many could not afford a 6 cent paper. He also believed that a substantial untapped market existed in the immigrant community. The paper was an instant success. Day made advances in the written news by introducing a new meaning of sensationalism, which was defined as reliance on human-interest stories. He placed emphasis on the common person as he or she was reflected in the political, educational, and social life of the day. Day also introduced a new way of selling papers. Day put into practice the London Plan. This plan included newsboys hawking their newspapers on the streets. [4]
The success of the penny papers was not automatic; selling the new concept of the newspaper to the consuming audience took some persuading. Consumers did not want to buy a new newspaper day after day, which became a challenge. Mostly newspapers at the time did not have any sort of timeliness, so buying a newspaper daily had no point. But, eventually people were concerned with the latest news as penny papers had the latest news. [6]
James Gordon Bennett's 1835New York Herald added another dimension to penny press newspapers, now common in journalistic practice. Whereas newspapers had generally relied on documents as sources, Bennett introduced the practices of observation and interviewing to provide the stories with more vivid details.[4] Bennett is known as redefining the concept of news, reorganizing the news business, and introducing newspaper competition. Bennett’s New York Herald was financially independent of politicians because of large numbers of advertisers. Bennett reported mainly local news, and corruption in an accurate style. He realized that, “there was more journalistic money to be made in recording gossip that interested bar-rooms, work-shops, race courses, and tenement houses, than in consulting the tastes of drawing rooms and libraries.” He is also known for writing his “money page” which was included in the Herald and also coverage of women in the news. His innovations made others want to imitate him as he spared nothing to get the news first. [4]
Horace Greeley, publisher of 1841's The New York Tribune, also had an extremely successful penny paper. He was involved with the first penny paper, Boston’s Morning Post, which was a failure. Instead of sensational stories, Greeley relied on rationalism in the Tribune. His editorial pages were the heart of his paper and the reason for its large influence. Greeley is also known as using his newspaper as a platform to promote the Whig and Republican parties. [4]
Political factors
Political and demographic changes were also significant. Much of the success of the newspaper in the early United States owed itself to the attitude of the "founding fathers" toward the press. Many of them saw the free press as one of the most essential elements in maintaining the liberty and social equality of citizens. Thomas Jefferson said he considered the free press as even more important than the government itself: "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate any moment to prefer the latter." It was because of his attitude that freedom of the press gained mention in the First Amendment to the Constitution, and though early politicians, including Jefferson, occasionally made attempts to rein in the press, newspapers flourished in the new nation.
However, the penny press was originally apolitical both in content and in attitude. As Michael Schudson describes in Discovering the News, the Sun once replaced their congressional news section with this statement: "The proceedings of Congress thus far, would not interest our readers." The major social-political changes brought on by the development of the penny press were themselves helped by the penny press' focus on working-class people and their interests. Thus an apolitical attitude was, ironically, a political factor influencing the advancement of the penny press.
The founders of the penny press popularized both low prices for newspapers and newspaper economics based on sales instead of political party backing. Benjamin Day created The Sun without any political party backing. This was rare because this was an era where political parties sponsored newspapers. Horace Greeley, however, used his newspaper, The New York Tribune, as a platform for Whig politics. [9]
Journalists
• The penny papers became to hire reporters and correspondents to seek out and write the news. The papers began to move away from sounding editorial to sounding journalistic. It is noted as the rise of objectivity. Also, reporters were assigned to beats and were involved in the conduct of local interaction. [8]
Demographic factors
Following the success of The Sun, James Gordon Bennett, Sr. started the New York Herald in 1835, and Horace Greeley started the New York Tribune in 1841. Three daily penny papers in one city were possible because the recent urbanization in industrialized New England had swollen the population of New York City and surrounding cities. By the 1830s, the general population had become both sufficiently localized and sufficiently literate that a penny newspaper could have a weekly circulation of 50,000. For comparison, the influential Spectator of a little over a century earlier had a maximum circulation per issue of about 4,000.
Historians credit the popularity of the penny press with a rise in literacy. The United States saw a 233 percent increase in population between 1833 and 1860. During the same period, public education developed and illiteracy dropped to 9 percent, calculated on the basis of Caucasians over twenty years of age. [4]
History
As the East Coast's middle and working classes grew, so did the new public’s desire for news. Penny papers emerged as a cheap alternative to the standard dailies. They replaced dry political conversation with coverage of crime, tragedy, adventure, and gossip. The penny papers represented the crudest form of journalism because of the sensational gossip that was reported. [7].
 |
| The Sun : Published by Ben Day |
The Penny Press was most noted for being very low-priced - only one cent per paper - while other contemporary newspapers were priced around six cents per issue. The exceptionally low price popularized the newspaper in America and extended the influence of paper media to the poorer classes. With the penny press, newspaper made the news and journalism more important. The newspapers also began to pay more attention to the public that they served. They realized that the same information that interested the upper class did not interest the penny public. The “new public” enjoyed information about police and criminal cases. The main revenue of the penny press was advertising while other newspapers relied heavily on high priced subscriptions. [5]
The idea of a penny paper was not new in the 1830s. By 1826, multiple editors were experimenting with sports news, gossip, and a cheap press.[4]
Most newspapers in the early nineteenth century cost 6 cents and were distributed through subscriptions. On July 24, 1830, the first penny press newspaper came to the market: Lynde M. Walter's Boston Transcript. Unlike most later penny papers, Walter's Transcript maintained what was considered good taste, featuring coverage of literature and the theater.This paper sold for four dollars a year. [4]
The penny paper’s largest inspiration came from Charles Knight’s 1832 Penny Magazine. The main purpose of the magazine was to educate and improve England’s poor, but was very popular with Americans. It became a very successful magazine as it attained a circulation of more than 20,000 within a year. [4]
Fredrick Hudson, one the first to write about the history of American journalism, believed the rise of the penny press to be a key factor in the development of the modern newspaper. Hudson considered newspapers to be dull during the 1840s.[1]
The penny press arrived in New York on January 1, 1833, when Horatio David Shepard teamed up with Horace Greeley and Francis W. Story and issued the Morning Post. Although both Greeley and Story went on to fame and fortune in the New York press world, the concept of bringing out a penny paper belonged exclusively to Shepard. He made a habit of taking daily walks through the teeming streets of the Bowery, where he observed merchants selling small items for a penny a piece. Other papers of the time were selling for six cents which allowed for a wider spread of people to read the Penny Press so they could afford it. He also took note of the fact that sales were brisk.[2]
Benjamin Day was the leader in true transformation of the daily newspaper. The newspaper went from narrowly focused on the wealthy and sparsely distributed to a broad-based medium of the news. These changes were mostly seen in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, and other East Coast cities. [6]
Later that year, publisher Benjamin Day introduced The Sun. The Sun appealed to a wider audience, using a simpler, more direct style, vivid language, and human interest stories.[3] Day was a New Englander who worked for the Springfield, Massachusetts paper, the Republican. He came down to New York to be a compositor, but in the depression of 1833, he started The Sun in desperation. Day reasoned that a penny paper would be popular in hard times as many could not afford a 6 cent paper. He also believed that a substantial untapped market existed in the immigrant community. The paper was an instant success. Day made advances in the written news by introducing a new meaning of sensationalism, which was defined as reliance on human-interest stories. He placed emphasis on the common person as he or she was reflected in the political, educational, and social life of the day. Day also introduced a new way of selling papers. Day put into practice the London Plan. This plan included newsboys hawking their newspapers on the streets. [4]
The success of the penny papers was not automatic; selling the new concept of the newspaper to the consuming audience took some persuading. Consumers did not want to buy a new newspaper day after day, which became a challenge. Mostly newspapers at the time did not have any sort of timeliness, so buying a newspaper daily had no point. But, eventually people were concerned with the latest news as penny papers had the latest news. [6]
James Gordon Bennett's 1835New York Herald added another dimension to penny press newspapers, now common in journalistic practice. Whereas newspapers had generally relied on documents as sources, Bennett introduced the practices of observation and interviewing to provide the stories with more vivid details.[4] Bennett is known as redefining the concept of news, reorganizing the news business, and introducing newspaper competition. Bennett’s New York Herald was financially independent of politicians because of large numbers of advertisers. Bennett reported mainly local news, and corruption in an accurate style. He realized that, “there was more journalistic money to be made in recording gossip that interested bar-rooms, work-shops, race courses, and tenement houses, than in consulting the tastes of drawing rooms and libraries.” He is also known for writing his “money page” which was included in the Herald and also coverage of women in the news. His innovations made others want to imitate him as he spared nothing to get the news first. [4]
Horace Greeley, publisher of 1841's The New York Tribune, also had an extremely successful penny paper. He was involved with the first penny paper, Boston’s Morning Post, which was a failure. Instead of sensational stories, Greeley relied on rationalism in the Tribune. His editorial pages were the heart of his paper and the reason for its large influence. Greeley is also known as using his newspaper as a platform to promote the Whig and Republican parties. [4]
Political factors
Political and demographic changes were also significant. Much of the success of the newspaper in the early United States owed itself to the attitude of the "founding fathers" toward the press. Many of them saw the free press as one of the most essential elements in maintaining the liberty and social equality of citizens. Thomas Jefferson said he considered the free press as even more important than the government itself: "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate any moment to prefer the latter." It was because of his attitude that freedom of the press gained mention in the First Amendment to the Constitution, and though early politicians, including Jefferson, occasionally made attempts to rein in the press, newspapers flourished in the new nation.
However, the penny press was originally apolitical both in content and in attitude. As Michael Schudson describes in Discovering the News, the Sun once replaced their congressional news section with this statement: "The proceedings of Congress thus far, would not interest our readers." The major social-political changes brought on by the development of the penny press were themselves helped by the penny press' focus on working-class people and their interests. Thus an apolitical attitude was, ironically, a political factor influencing the advancement of the penny press.
The founders of the penny press popularized both low prices for newspapers and newspaper economics based on sales instead of political party backing. Benjamin Day created The Sun without any political party backing. This was rare because this was an era where political parties sponsored newspapers. Horace Greeley, however, used his newspaper, The New York Tribune, as a platform for Whig politics. [9]
Journalists
• The penny papers became to hire reporters and correspondents to seek out and write the news. The papers began to move away from sounding editorial to sounding journalistic. It is noted as the rise of objectivity. Also, reporters were assigned to beats and were involved in the conduct of local interaction. [8]
Demographic factors
Following the success of The Sun, James Gordon Bennett, Sr. started the New York Herald in 1835, and Horace Greeley started the New York Tribune in 1841. Three daily penny papers in one city were possible because the recent urbanization in industrialized New England had swollen the population of New York City and surrounding cities. By the 1830s, the general population had become both sufficiently localized and sufficiently literate that a penny newspaper could have a weekly circulation of 50,000. For comparison, the influential Spectator of a little over a century earlier had a maximum circulation per issue of about 4,000.
Historians credit the popularity of the penny press with a rise in literacy. The United States saw a 233 percent increase in population between 1833 and 1860. During the same period, public education developed and illiteracy dropped to 9 percent, calculated on the basis of Caucasians over twenty years of age. [4]
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Watergate scandal
The Watergate scandal was a political scandal in the United States in the 1970s, resulting from the break-in to the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. Effects of the scandal ultimately led to the resignation of the President of the United States Richard Nixon on August 9, 1974, the first—and so far, only—resignation of any U.S President. It also resulted in the indictment and conviction of several Nixon administration officials.
The affair began with the arrest of five men for breaking and entering into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972. The FBI connected the payments to the burglars to a slush fund used by the 1972 Committee to Re-elect the President.[1][2] As evidence mounted against the president's staff, which included former staff members testifying against them in an investigation conducted by the Senate Watergate Committee, it was revealed that President Nixon had a tape recording system in his offices and that he had recorded many conversations.[3][4] Recordings from these tapes implicated the president, revealing that he had attempted to cover up the break-in.[2][5] After a series of court battles, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the president had to hand over the tapes; he ultimately complied.
Facing near-certain impeachment in the House of Representatives and a strong possibility of a conviction in the Senate, Nixon resigned the office of the presidency on August 9, 1974.[6][7] His successor, Gerald Ford, issued a pardon to President Nixon after his resignation.
On the evening of June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a security guard at the Watergate Complex, noticed tape covering the latch on locks on several doors in the complex (leaving the doors unlocked). He took off the tape, and thought nothing of it. An hour later, he discovered that someone had retaped the locks. Wills called the police and five men were arrested inside the Democratic National Committee's (DNC) office.[8] The five men were Virgilio González, Bernard Barker, James W. McCord, Jr., Eugenio Martínez, and Frank Sturgis. The five were charged with attempted burglary and attempted interception of telephone and other communications. On September 15, a grand jury indicted them and two other men (E. Howard Hunt, Jr. and G. Gordon Liddy)[9] for conspiracy, burglary, and violation of federal wiretapping laws.
The men who broke into the office were tried and convicted on January 30, 1973. After much investigation, all five men were directly, or indirectly, tied to the 1972 Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP, or sometimes pejoratively referred to as CReeP). The trial judge, John J. Sirica, suspected a conspiracy involving higher-echelon government officials.[10] In March 1973, James McCord wrote a letter to Sirica, claiming that he was under political pressure to plead guilty and he implicated high-ranking government officials, including former Attorney General John Mitchell.[11] His letter helped to elevate the affair into a more prominent political scandal.[12]
Investigation
The unraveling of the coverup began in the immediate aftermath of the arrests, the search of the burglars' hotel rooms, and a background investigation of the initial evidence, most prominently thousands of dollars in cash in their possession at the time of arrest. On June 19, 1972, it was publicly revealed that one of the Watergate burglars was a GOP security aide. Former Attorney General John Mitchell, who at the time was the head of the Nixon re-election campaign, denied any involvement with the Watergate break-in or knowledge of the five burglars. On August 1, a $25,000 cashiers check earmarked for the Nixon re-election campaign, was found in the bank account of one of the Watergate burglars. Further investigation would reveal accounts showing that still more thousands had passed through their bank and credit card accounts, supporting their travel, living expenses, and purchases, in the months leading up to their arrests. Examination of the burglars' accounts showed the link to the 1972 Committee to Re-Elect the President, through its subordinate finance committee.
Several individual donations (totaling $89,000) were made by individuals who thought they were making private donations to the President's re-election committee. The donations were made in the form of cashier's, certified, and personal checks, and all were made payable only to the Committee to Re-Elect the President. Investigative examination of the bank records of a Miami company run by Watergate burglar Bernard Barker revealed that an account controlled by him personally had deposited, and had transferred to it (through the Federal Reserve Check Clearing System) the funds from these financial instruments.
The banks that had originated the checks (especially the certified and cashier's checks) were keen to ensure that the depository institution used by Bernard Barker had acted properly to protect their (the correspondent banks') fiduciary interest in ensuring that the checks had been properly received and endorsed by the check’s payee, prior to its acceptance for deposit in Bernard Barker's account. Only in this way would the correspondent banks, which had issued the checks on behalf of the individual donors, not be held liable for the un-authorized and improper release of funds from their customer’s accounts into the account of Bernard Barker.
The investigative finding, which cleared Bernard Barker’s bank of fiduciary malfeasance, led to the direct implication of members of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, to whom the checks had been delivered. Those individuals were the Committee Bookkeeper and its Treasurer, Hugh Sloan.
The Committee, as an organization, followed normal business accounting standards in allowing only duly authorized individual(s) to accept and endorse on behalf of the Committee any financial instrument created on the Committee’s behalf by itself, or by others. Therefore, no financial institution would accept or process a check on behalf of the Committee unless it had been endorsed and verified as endorsed by a duly authorized individual(s). On the checks themselves deposited into Bernard Barker’s bank account was the endorsement of Committee Treasurer Hugh Sloan who was duly authorized and designated to endorse such instruments that were prepared (by others) on behalf of the Committee.
But once Sloan had endorsed a check made payable to the Committee, he had a legal and fiduciary responsibility to see that the check was deposited into the account(s) which were named on the check, and for which he had been delegated fiduciary responsibility. Sloan failed to do that. He was confronted and faced the potential charge of federal bank fraud; he revealed that he had given the checks to G. Gordon Liddy and was directed by Committee Deputy Director Jeb Magruder and Finance Director Maurice Stans to do so.
On September 29, 1972 it was revealed that John Mitchell, while serving as Attorney General, controlled a secret Republican fund used to finance intelligence-gathering against the Democrats. On October 10, the FBI reported that the Watergate break-in was part of a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of the officials and heads of the Nixon re-election campaign. Despite these revelations, Nixon's re-election campaign was never seriously jeopardized, and on November 7 the President was re-elected in one of the biggest landslides ever in American political history.
Barker had been given the checks by Liddy in an attempt to avoid direct proof that Barker ever had received funds from the organization. Barker had attempted to disguise the origin of the funds by depositing the donor’s checks into bank accounts which (though controlled by him), were located in banks outside of the United States. What Barker, Liddy, and Sloan did not know was that the complete record of all such transactions are held, after the funds cleared, for roughly six months. Barker’s use of foreign banks to deposit checks and withdraw the funds via cashier’s checks and money orders in April and May 1972 guaranteed that the banks would keep the entire transaction record at least until October and November 1972.
The connection between the break-in and the re-election campaign committee was highlighted by media coverage. In particular, investigative coverage by Time, The New York Times, and especially The Washington Post, fueled focus on the event. The coverage dramatically increased publicity and consequent political repercussions. Relying heavily upon anonymous sources, Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered information suggesting that knowledge of the break-in, and attempts to cover it up, led deep into the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, and even the White House. Chief among the Post's anonymous sources was an individual they had nicknamed Deep Throat (who was much later revealed in 2005 to be former Deputy Director of the FBI William Mark Felt, Sr.) It was Deep Throat who met secretly with Woodward, and told him of Howard Hunt’s involvement with the Watergate break-in, and that the rest of the White House staff regarded the stake in Watergate extremely high. Deep Throat also warned Woodward that the FBI wanted to know where he and the other reporters were getting the information which was uncovering even a wider web of crimes than first disclosed. In one of their last meetings, all of which took place at an underground parking garage somewhere in Washington DC at 2:00 AM, Deep Throat cautioned Woodward that he might be followed and not to trust their phone conversations.
Rather than ending with the trial and conviction of the burglars, the investigations grew broader; a Senate committee chaired by Senator Sam Ervin was set up to examine Watergate and began issuing subpoenas to White House staff members.
On April 30, 1973, Nixon was forced to ask for the resignation of two of his most influential aides, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, both of whom were indicted and ultimately went to prison. He also fired White House Counsel John Dean, who went on to testify before the Senate and become the key witness against President Nixon.
The President announced these resignations in an address to the American people:
In one of the most difficult decisions of my Presidency, I accepted the resignations of two of my closest associates in the White House, Bob Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, two of the finest public servants it has been my privilege to know. Because Attorney General Kleindienst, though a distinguished public servant, my personal friend for 20 years, with no personal involvement whatever in this matter has been a close personal and professional associate of some of those who are involved in this case, he and I both felt that it was also necessary to name a new Attorney General. The Counsel to the President, John Dean, has also resigned.
—Richard Nixon, [13]
On the same day, Nixon appointed a new Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, and gave him authority to designate, for the Watergate inquiry, a special counsel who would be independent of the regular Justice Department hierarchy. In May 1973, Richardson named Archibald Cox to the position.
Tapes
The hearings held by the Senate Committee, in which Dean and other former administration officials delivered testimony, were broadcast from May 17 to August 7, 1973, causing political damage to the President. After the three major networks of the time agreed to take turns covering the hearings live (the first 24-hour news channel was not introduced until 1980), each network thus maintained coverage of the hearings every third day, starting with ABC on May 17 and ending with NBC on August 7. An estimated 85% of Americans with television sets tuned in to at least one portion of the hearings.[14]
On Friday, July 13, 1973, in an interview session, Donald Sanders, the Deputy Minority Counsel, asked Alexander Butterfield if there was any type of recording systems in the White House.[15] Butterfield answered that, though he was reluctant to say so, there was a system in the White House that automatically recorded everything in the Oval Office and other rooms in the White House, including the Cabinet Room and Nixon's private office in the Old Executive Office Building. On Monday, July 16, 1973, in front of a live, televised audience, Chief Minority Counsel Fred Thompson asked Butterfield if he was "aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the president?" The shocking revelation transformed the Watergate investigation yet again. The tapes were soon subpoenaed by special prosecutor Archibald Cox and then by the Senate. Nixon refused to release them, citing his executive privilege as President of the United States, and ordered Cox to drop his subpoena. Cox refused.[16]
A taped conversation that was crucial to the case against President Nixon [17] took place between the President and his counsel, John Dean, on March 21, 1973. In this conversation, Dean summarizes many aspects of the Watergate case, and then focuses on the subsequent coverup, describing it as a "cancer on the presidency". The burglary team was being paid hush money for their silence and Dean states: "that's the most troublesome post-thing, because Bob [Haldeman] is involved in that; John [Ehrlichman] is involved in that; I am involved in that; Mitchell is involved in that. And that's an obstruction of justice."[18] Dean continues and states that Howard Hunt is blackmailing the White House, demanding money immediately, and President Nixon states that the blackmail money should be paid: "...just looking at the immediate problem, don't you have to have -- handle Hunt's financial situation damn soon? [...] you've got to keep the cap on the bottle that much, in order to have any options." [18] At the time of the initial congressional impeachment debate on Watergate, it was not known that Nixon had known and approved of the payments to the Watergate defendants much earlier than this conversation. Among later released recordings, Nixon's conversation with Haldeman on August 1, 1972 is one of several tapes that establishes this. Nixon states: "Well...they have to be paid. That's all there is to that. They have to be paid" [19] During congressional debate on impeachment, those who believed that impeachment required a criminally indictable offense focused their attention on President Nixon's agreement to make the blackmail payments, regarding this as an affirmative act to obstruct justice as a member of the cover-up conspiracy.[20]
"Saturday Night Massacre"
Cox's refusal to drop his subpoena influenced Nixon to demand the resignations of Richardson and deputy William Ruckelshaus, on October 20, 1973, in a search of someone in the Justice Department willing to fire Cox. This search ended with Solicitor General Robert Bork. Though Bork believed Nixon's order to be valid and appropriate, he considered resigning to avoid being "perceived as a man who did the President's bidding to save my job."[21] However, both Richardson and Ruckelshaus persuaded him not to resign, in order to prevent any further damage to the Justice Department. As the new acting department head, Bork carried out the presidential order and dismissed the special prosecutor. Allegations of wrongdoing prompted Nixon to famously state "I'm not a crook" in front of 400 Associated Press managing editors on November 17, 1973.[22][23]
Nixon was compelled, however, to allow the appointment of a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, who continued the investigation. While Nixon continued to refuse to turn over actual tapes, he agreed to release transcripts of a large number of them; Nixon cited the fact that any audio pertinent to national security information could be redacted from the released tapes.
The audio tapes caused further controversy on December 7, when an 18½ minute portion of one tape was found to have been erased. Nixon's personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, said she had accidentally erased the tape by pushing the wrong foot pedal on her tape player while answering the phone. However, as photos all over the press showed, it was unlikely for Woods to answer the phone and keep her foot on the pedal. Later forensic analysis determined that the tape had been erased in several segments — at least five, and perhaps as many as nine.[24]
Supreme Court
The issue of access to the tapes went to the Supreme Court. On July 24, 1974, in United States v. Nixon, the Court, which did not include the recused Justice William Rehnquist, ruled unanimously that claims of executive privilege over the tapes were void, and they ordered the president to give them to the special prosecutor. On July 30, 1974, President Nixon complied with the order and released the subpoenaed tapes.
Final investigations and resignation
On March 1, 1974, former aides to the president, known as the "Watergate Seven" — Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Charles Colson, Gordon C. Strachan, Robert Mardian and Kenneth Parkinson — were indicted for conspiring to hinder the Watergate investigation. The grand jury also secretly named Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator. John Dean, Jeb Stuart Magruder, and other figures had already pleaded guilty. On April 5, 1974, former Nixon appointments secretary Dwight Chapin was convicted of lying to the grand jury. Two days later, the Watergate grand jury indicted Ed Reinecke, Republican lieutenant governor of California, on three charges of perjury before the Senate committee.
Nixon's position was becoming increasingly precarious, and the House of Representatives began formal investigations into the possible impeachment of the president. The House Judiciary Committee voted 27 to 11 on July 27, 1974 to recommend the first article of impeachment against the president: obstruction of justice. The second (abuse of power) and third (contempt of Congress) articles were passed on July 29, 1974 and July 30, 1974, respectively.
The "Smoking Gun" tape
On August 5, 1974, the previously unknown audio tape from June 23, 1972, was released. Recorded only a few days after the break-in, it documented Nixon and Haldeman meeting in the Oval Office and formulating a plan to block investigations by having the CIA falsely claim to the FBI that national security was involved. Haldeman introduces the topic as follows: "...the Democratic break-in thing, we're back to the--in the, the problem area because the FBI is not under control, because Gray doesn't exactly know how to control them, and they have... their investigation is now leading into some productive areas [...] and it goes in some directions we don't want it to go." After explaining how the money from CRP was traced to the burglars, Haldeman explained to Nixon the coverup plan: "the way to handle this now is for us to have Walters [CIA] call Pat Gray [FBI] and just say, 'Stay the hell out of this ...this is ah, business here we don't want you to go any further on it.'" President Nixon approved the plan, and he is given more information about the involvement of his campaign in the break-in, telling Haldeman: "All right, fine, I understand it all. We won't second-guess Mitchell and the rest." Returning to the use of the CIA to obstruct the FBI, he instructs Haldeman: "You call them in. Good. Good deal. Play it tough. That's the way they play it and that's the way we are going to play it." [25]
Prior to the release of this tape, President Nixon had denied political motivations in his instructions to the CIA, and claimed he had no knowledge prior to March 21, 1973 of any involvement by senior campaign officials such as John Mitchell. The contents of this tape persuaded President Nixon's own lawyers, Fred Buzhardt and James St. Clair, "The tape proved that the President had lied to the nation, to his closest aides, and to his own lawyers – for more than two years." [26] The tape, which was referred to as a "smoking gun", hampered Nixon politically. The ten congressmen who had voted against all three articles of impeachment in the committee announced that they would all support impeachment when the vote was taken in the full House.
Resignation
Throughout this time, Nixon still denied any involvement in the ordeal. However, after being told by key Republican Senators that enough votes existed to remove him, Nixon decided to resign. In a nationally televised address from the Oval Office on the evening of August 8, 1974, the president said,
In all the decisions I have made in my public life, I have always tried to do what was best for the Nation. Throughout the long and difficult period of Watergate, I have felt it was my duty to persevere, to make every possible effort to complete the term of office to which you elected me. In the past few days, however, it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that effort. As long as there was such a base, I felt strongly that it was necessary to see the constitutional process through to its conclusion, that to do otherwise would be unfaithful to the spirit of that deliberately difficult process and a dangerously destabilizing precedent for the future....
I would have preferred to carry through to the finish whatever the personal agony it would have involved, and my family unanimously urged me to do so. But the interest of the Nation must always come before any personal considerations. From the discussions I have had with Congressional and other leaders, I have concluded that because of the Watergate matter I might not have the support of the Congress that I would consider necessary to back the very difficult decisions and carry out the duties of this office in the way the interests of the Nation would require.
I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interest of America first. America needs a full-time President and a full-time Congress, particularly at this time with problems we face at home and abroad. To continue to fight through the months ahead for my personal vindication would almost totally absorb the time and attention of both the President and the Congress in a period when our entire focus should be on the great issues of peace abroad and prosperity without inflation at home. Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office.
The morning that his resignation was to take effect, President and Mrs. Nixon and their family bade farewell to the White House staff in the East Room.[29] A helicopter took him from the White House to Andrews Air Force base in Maryland. Nixon later wrote that he remembered thinking "As the helicopter moved on to Andrews, I found myself thinking not of the past, but of the future. What could I do now?..." At Andrews, he boarded Air Force One to El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in California and then to his home in San Clemente.
Pardon and aftermath
Though President Nixon's resignation prompted Congress to drop the impeachment proceedings, criminal prosecution was still a possibility. Nixon was succeeded by Vice President Gerald Ford, who on September 8, 1974, issued a full and unconditional pardon of President Nixon, immunizing him from prosecution for any crimes he had "committed or may have committed or taken part in" as President.[30] In a televised broadcast to the nation, Ford explained that he felt the pardon was in the best interest of the country and that the Nixon family's situation "is an American tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must."[31]
Nixon proclaimed his innocence until his death in 1994. He did state in his official response to the pardon that he "was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate, particularly when it reached the stage of judicial proceedings and grew from a political scandal into a national tragedy."
The Nixon pardon has been argued to be a factor in President Ford's loss of the presidential election of 1976.[32] Accusations of a secret deal made with Ford, promising a pardon in return for Nixon's resignation, led Ford to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on October 17, 1974.[33][34]
In his autobiography A Time to Heal, Ford wrote about a meeting he had with Nixon's Chief of Staff, Alexander Haig. Haig was explaining what he and Nixon's staff thought were Nixon's only options. He could try to ride out the impeachment and fight against conviction in the Senate all the way, or he could resign. His options for resigning were to delay his resignation until further along in the impeachment process to try and settle for a censure vote in Congress, or pardon himself and then resign. Haig then told Ford that some of Nixon's staff suggested that Nixon could agree to resign in return for an agreement that Ford would pardon him.
Haig emphasized that these weren't his suggestions. He didn't identify the staff members and he made it very clear that he wasn't recommending any one option over another. What he wanted to know was whether or not my overall assessment of the situation agreed with his.[emphasis in original]... Next he asked if I had any suggestions as to courses of actions for the President. I didn't think it would be proper for me to make any recommendations at all, and I told him so.
—Gerald Ford, [35]
Charles Colson pleaded guilty to charges concerning the Daniel Ellsberg case; in exchange, the indictment against him for covering up the activities of the Committee to Re-elect the President was dropped, as it was against Strachan. The remaining five members of the Watergate Seven indicted in March went on trial in October 1974, and on January 1, 1975, all but Parkinson were found guilty. In 1976, the U.S. Court of Appeals ordered a new trial for Mardian; subsequently, all charges against him were dropped. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell exhausted their appeals in 1977. Ehrlichman entered prison in 1976, followed by the other two in 1977.
The effect on the upcoming Senate election and House race, only three months later, was significant. The Democrats gained five seats in the Senate and 49 in the House. Watergate was also indirectly responsible for changes in campaign financing. It was a driving factor in amending the Freedom of Information Act in 1974, as well as laws requiring new financial disclosures by key government officials, such as the Ethics in Government Act. While not legally required, other types of personal disclosure, such as releasing recent income tax forms, became expected. Presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt had recorded many of their conversations, but after Watergate this practice purportedly ended.
Also, Congress investigated the scope of the President's actual legal powers, and belatedly realized that the United States had been in a continuous open-ended state of emergency since 1950, which led to the enactment of the National Emergencies Act in 1976.
The Watergate scandal left such an impression on the national and international consciousness that many scandals since then have been labeled with the suffix "-gate".
According to Thomas J. Johnson, professor of journalism at Southern Illinois University, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger boldly predicted during Nixon's final days that history would remember Nixon as a great president and that Watergate would be relegated to a "minor footnote." [36]
Since Nixon and many senior officials involved in Watergate were lawyers, the scandal severely tarnished the public image of the legal profession.[37][38][39] In order to defuse public demand for direct federal regulation of lawyers (as opposed to leaving it in the hands of state bar associations or courts), the American Bar Association (ABA) launched two major reforms. First, the ABA decided that its existing Model Code of Professional Responsibility (promulgated 1969) was a failure and replaced it with the Model Rules of Professional Conduct in 1983.[40] The MRPC have been adopted in part or in whole by 48 states. Its preamble contains an emphatic reminder to young lawyers that the legal profession can remain self-governing only if lawyers behave properly. Second, the ABA promulgated a requirement that law students at ABA-approved law schools take a course in professional responsibility (which means they must study the MRPC). The requirement remains in effect.
Purpose of the break-in
Despite the enormous impact of the Watergate scandal, the actual purpose of the break-in of the DNC offices has never been conclusively established. Some theories suggest that the burglars were after specific information. The likeliest of these theories suggests that the target of the break-in was the offices of Larry O'Brien, the Chairman of the DNC.[41] In 1968, O'Brien was appointed by Vice President Hubert Humphrey to serve as the national director of Humphrey's presidential campaign and, separately, by Howard Hughes, to serve as Hughes' public-policy lobbyist in Washington. O'Brien was elected national chairman of the DNC in 1968 and 1970. With the upcoming Presidential election, former Howard Hughes business associate John H. Meier, working with Hubert Humphrey and others, wanted to feed misinformation to Richard Nixon. John Meier's father had been a German agent during World War II. Meier had joined the FBI and in the 60s had contracted to the CIA to eliminate Fidel Castro using Mafia bosses Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante.[42] In late 1971, the President’s brother, Donald Nixon, was collecting intelligence for his brother at the time and was asking Meier about Larry O'Brien. In 1956, Donald Nixon had borrowed $205,000 from Howard Hughes and never repaid the loan. The fact of the loan surfaced during the 1960 presidential election campaign embarrassing Richard Nixon and became a real political liability. According to author Donald M. Bartlett, Richard Nixon would do whatever was necessary to prevent another Hughes-Nixon family embarrassment.[43] From 1968 to 1970, Hughes withdrew nearly half a million dollars from the Texas National Bank of Commerce for contributions to both Democrats and Republicans, including presidential candidates Humphrey and Nixon. Hughes wanted Donald Nixon and Meier involved but Richard Nixon was opposed to their involvement.[44]
Meier told Donald that he was sure the Democrats would win the election because they had considerable information on Richard Nixon’s illicit dealings with Howard Hughes that had never been released, and that Larry O’Brien had the information,[45] (O’Brien who had received $25,000 from Hughes didn’t actually have any documents but Meier claims to have wanted Richard Nixon to think he did). It is only a question of conjecture then that Donald called his brother Richard and told him that Meier gave the Democrats all the Hughes information that could destroy him and that O’Brien had the proof.[46] The fact is Larry O'Brien, elected Democratic Party Chairman, was also a lobbyist for Howard Hughes in a Democratic controlled Congress and the possibility of his finding about Hughes illegal contributions to the Nixon campaign was too much of a danger for Nixon to ignore and O'Brien's office at Watergate became a target of Nixon's intelligence in the political campaign.[47] This theory has been proposed as a motivation for the break-in.
Numerous theories have persisted in claiming deeper significance to the Watergate scandal than that commonly acknowledged by media and historians:
• In the book The Ends of Power, Nixon's chief of staff H. R. Haldeman claimed that the term "Bay of Pigs", mentioned by Nixon in a tape-recorded White House conversation as the reason the CIA should put a stop to the Watergate investigations,[2] was used by Nixon as a coded reference to a CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro during the John F. Kennedy administration. The CIA had not disclosed this plot to the Warren Commission, the commission investigating the Kennedy assassination, despite the fact that it would attribute a motive to Castro in the assassination.[48] Any such revelation would also expose CIA/Mafia connections that could lead to unwanted scrutiny of suspected CIA/Mafia participants in the assassination of the president. Furthermore, Nixon's awareness as vice-president of the Bay of Pigs plan and his own ties to the underworld and unsavory intelligence operations might come to light. A theoretical connection between the Kennedy assassination and the Watergate Tapes was later referred to in the biopic, Nixon, directed by Oliver Stone.
• Silent Coup, is a bestselling 1992 book written by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin in which they contend that former Nixon White House counsel John Dean orchestrated the 1972 Watergate burglary at Democratic National Committee headquarters to protect his future wife, Maureen Biner, by removing information linking her to a call-girl (prostitute) ring that worked for the DNC. The authors also argued that Alexander Haig was not Deep Throat but was a key source for Bob Woodward, who as a Naval officer had briefed Haig at the White House in 1969 and 1970.[49][50]
• Secret Honor by Stone and Freed implies that Nixon deliberately sacrificed his presidency to save democracy from a plan to implement martial law. The theory uses the construct of "Yankees" vs. "Cowboys" to suggest that, since the postwar era, the United States has been dominated by Yankees competing with Cowboys. Nixon, who hailed from the Southwest, was initially backed by the military industrial defense contractor power-brokers (the Cowboys); however, he later wanted to jump ship and return government to the east-coast establishment of Yankees. His resignation accomplished this because Nelson Rockefeller, the epitome of the eastern economic elite, assumed the vice presidency after Nixon's resignation.
• Peter Beter's Conspiracy Against the Dollar further explains how Nixon was possibly a rogue liberal with a conservative mask.
• Gordon Novel, a man known for several controversial investigations, has claimed Watergate served as a discourse to stop the Nixon administration to hold Senate hearings about a postmortem on the Vietnam war.[51]
• Political scientist George Friedman argued that: "The Washington Post created a morality play about an out-of-control government brought to heel by two young, enterprising journalists and a courageous newspaper. That simply wasn't what happened. Instead, it was about the FBI using The Washington Post to leak information to destroy the president, and The Washington Post willingly serving as the conduit for that information while withholding an essential dimension of the story by concealing Deep Throat's identity" and that FBI under the direction of Mark Felt must have began spying on the White House before the Watergate break-in.[52] In fact Felt was later revealed to have been the Post's source known as "Deep Throat."
• MIT professor Noam Chomsky argued that it was Nixon's dismantling of the Bretton Woods system that made him an enemy of multinational corporations and international bankers.[53]
New Nixon Library Museum exhibit stalled
A "searing" exhibit on the scandal at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California prepared by the National Archives was supposed to have opened July 1, 2010. The exhibit had not opened by August 9 because of objections from the Nixon Foundation, "a group of Nixon loyalists who controlled the museum until the Archives took it over" in 2007. A room for the new exhibit sits largely empty at the Museum. "Bob Bostock, a former Nixon aide who designed the original Watergate exhibit and has been enlisted by the foundation to challenge the installation, filed a 132-page letter of objection to the archives [a month after the scheduled opening date], claiming that the [new] exhibit lacked the context needed to help young visitors learning about Watergate to understand exactly what Nixon did. ... 'It is the last fight over Watergate,' said Timothy Naftali, the director of the museum .... Mr. Naftali has overseen the release of a flood of Nixon papers and tapes since ... 2006. [and said] he was confident a resolution could be worked out that addressed at least some of the concerns of both sides." Mr. Bostock said he'd worked for the former president during the last five years of Nixon's life and worked with him on the original Watergate exhibit, now removed, in the museum. Bostock also "questioned whether [Nixon's] misdeeds justified [his] being forced from the White House." Jon Wiener, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, who would take his classes to the museum on annual field trips as it studied Nixon, said of the previous exhibit, "It was a long dark tunnel that was completely uninviting, block ... after block of small panels, white text on a black wall. It had to go."[54] An extensive online background to the exhibit, with some 150 oral histories and tape snippets, along with pictures of some 30 principals, has been posted by the museum.[55]
The affair began with the arrest of five men for breaking and entering into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972. The FBI connected the payments to the burglars to a slush fund used by the 1972 Committee to Re-elect the President.[1][2] As evidence mounted against the president's staff, which included former staff members testifying against them in an investigation conducted by the Senate Watergate Committee, it was revealed that President Nixon had a tape recording system in his offices and that he had recorded many conversations.[3][4] Recordings from these tapes implicated the president, revealing that he had attempted to cover up the break-in.[2][5] After a series of court battles, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the president had to hand over the tapes; he ultimately complied.
Facing near-certain impeachment in the House of Representatives and a strong possibility of a conviction in the Senate, Nixon resigned the office of the presidency on August 9, 1974.[6][7] His successor, Gerald Ford, issued a pardon to President Nixon after his resignation.
On the evening of June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a security guard at the Watergate Complex, noticed tape covering the latch on locks on several doors in the complex (leaving the doors unlocked). He took off the tape, and thought nothing of it. An hour later, he discovered that someone had retaped the locks. Wills called the police and five men were arrested inside the Democratic National Committee's (DNC) office.[8] The five men were Virgilio González, Bernard Barker, James W. McCord, Jr., Eugenio Martínez, and Frank Sturgis. The five were charged with attempted burglary and attempted interception of telephone and other communications. On September 15, a grand jury indicted them and two other men (E. Howard Hunt, Jr. and G. Gordon Liddy)[9] for conspiracy, burglary, and violation of federal wiretapping laws.
The men who broke into the office were tried and convicted on January 30, 1973. After much investigation, all five men were directly, or indirectly, tied to the 1972 Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP, or sometimes pejoratively referred to as CReeP). The trial judge, John J. Sirica, suspected a conspiracy involving higher-echelon government officials.[10] In March 1973, James McCord wrote a letter to Sirica, claiming that he was under political pressure to plead guilty and he implicated high-ranking government officials, including former Attorney General John Mitchell.[11] His letter helped to elevate the affair into a more prominent political scandal.[12]
Investigation
The unraveling of the coverup began in the immediate aftermath of the arrests, the search of the burglars' hotel rooms, and a background investigation of the initial evidence, most prominently thousands of dollars in cash in their possession at the time of arrest. On June 19, 1972, it was publicly revealed that one of the Watergate burglars was a GOP security aide. Former Attorney General John Mitchell, who at the time was the head of the Nixon re-election campaign, denied any involvement with the Watergate break-in or knowledge of the five burglars. On August 1, a $25,000 cashiers check earmarked for the Nixon re-election campaign, was found in the bank account of one of the Watergate burglars. Further investigation would reveal accounts showing that still more thousands had passed through their bank and credit card accounts, supporting their travel, living expenses, and purchases, in the months leading up to their arrests. Examination of the burglars' accounts showed the link to the 1972 Committee to Re-Elect the President, through its subordinate finance committee.
Several individual donations (totaling $89,000) were made by individuals who thought they were making private donations to the President's re-election committee. The donations were made in the form of cashier's, certified, and personal checks, and all were made payable only to the Committee to Re-Elect the President. Investigative examination of the bank records of a Miami company run by Watergate burglar Bernard Barker revealed that an account controlled by him personally had deposited, and had transferred to it (through the Federal Reserve Check Clearing System) the funds from these financial instruments.
The banks that had originated the checks (especially the certified and cashier's checks) were keen to ensure that the depository institution used by Bernard Barker had acted properly to protect their (the correspondent banks') fiduciary interest in ensuring that the checks had been properly received and endorsed by the check’s payee, prior to its acceptance for deposit in Bernard Barker's account. Only in this way would the correspondent banks, which had issued the checks on behalf of the individual donors, not be held liable for the un-authorized and improper release of funds from their customer’s accounts into the account of Bernard Barker.
The investigative finding, which cleared Bernard Barker’s bank of fiduciary malfeasance, led to the direct implication of members of the Committee to Re-Elect the President, to whom the checks had been delivered. Those individuals were the Committee Bookkeeper and its Treasurer, Hugh Sloan.
The Committee, as an organization, followed normal business accounting standards in allowing only duly authorized individual(s) to accept and endorse on behalf of the Committee any financial instrument created on the Committee’s behalf by itself, or by others. Therefore, no financial institution would accept or process a check on behalf of the Committee unless it had been endorsed and verified as endorsed by a duly authorized individual(s). On the checks themselves deposited into Bernard Barker’s bank account was the endorsement of Committee Treasurer Hugh Sloan who was duly authorized and designated to endorse such instruments that were prepared (by others) on behalf of the Committee.
But once Sloan had endorsed a check made payable to the Committee, he had a legal and fiduciary responsibility to see that the check was deposited into the account(s) which were named on the check, and for which he had been delegated fiduciary responsibility. Sloan failed to do that. He was confronted and faced the potential charge of federal bank fraud; he revealed that he had given the checks to G. Gordon Liddy and was directed by Committee Deputy Director Jeb Magruder and Finance Director Maurice Stans to do so.
On September 29, 1972 it was revealed that John Mitchell, while serving as Attorney General, controlled a secret Republican fund used to finance intelligence-gathering against the Democrats. On October 10, the FBI reported that the Watergate break-in was part of a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of the officials and heads of the Nixon re-election campaign. Despite these revelations, Nixon's re-election campaign was never seriously jeopardized, and on November 7 the President was re-elected in one of the biggest landslides ever in American political history.
Barker had been given the checks by Liddy in an attempt to avoid direct proof that Barker ever had received funds from the organization. Barker had attempted to disguise the origin of the funds by depositing the donor’s checks into bank accounts which (though controlled by him), were located in banks outside of the United States. What Barker, Liddy, and Sloan did not know was that the complete record of all such transactions are held, after the funds cleared, for roughly six months. Barker’s use of foreign banks to deposit checks and withdraw the funds via cashier’s checks and money orders in April and May 1972 guaranteed that the banks would keep the entire transaction record at least until October and November 1972.
The connection between the break-in and the re-election campaign committee was highlighted by media coverage. In particular, investigative coverage by Time, The New York Times, and especially The Washington Post, fueled focus on the event. The coverage dramatically increased publicity and consequent political repercussions. Relying heavily upon anonymous sources, Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered information suggesting that knowledge of the break-in, and attempts to cover it up, led deep into the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, and even the White House. Chief among the Post's anonymous sources was an individual they had nicknamed Deep Throat (who was much later revealed in 2005 to be former Deputy Director of the FBI William Mark Felt, Sr.) It was Deep Throat who met secretly with Woodward, and told him of Howard Hunt’s involvement with the Watergate break-in, and that the rest of the White House staff regarded the stake in Watergate extremely high. Deep Throat also warned Woodward that the FBI wanted to know where he and the other reporters were getting the information which was uncovering even a wider web of crimes than first disclosed. In one of their last meetings, all of which took place at an underground parking garage somewhere in Washington DC at 2:00 AM, Deep Throat cautioned Woodward that he might be followed and not to trust their phone conversations.
Rather than ending with the trial and conviction of the burglars, the investigations grew broader; a Senate committee chaired by Senator Sam Ervin was set up to examine Watergate and began issuing subpoenas to White House staff members.
On April 30, 1973, Nixon was forced to ask for the resignation of two of his most influential aides, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, both of whom were indicted and ultimately went to prison. He also fired White House Counsel John Dean, who went on to testify before the Senate and become the key witness against President Nixon.
The President announced these resignations in an address to the American people:
In one of the most difficult decisions of my Presidency, I accepted the resignations of two of my closest associates in the White House, Bob Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, two of the finest public servants it has been my privilege to know. Because Attorney General Kleindienst, though a distinguished public servant, my personal friend for 20 years, with no personal involvement whatever in this matter has been a close personal and professional associate of some of those who are involved in this case, he and I both felt that it was also necessary to name a new Attorney General. The Counsel to the President, John Dean, has also resigned.
—Richard Nixon, [13]
On the same day, Nixon appointed a new Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, and gave him authority to designate, for the Watergate inquiry, a special counsel who would be independent of the regular Justice Department hierarchy. In May 1973, Richardson named Archibald Cox to the position.
Tapes
The hearings held by the Senate Committee, in which Dean and other former administration officials delivered testimony, were broadcast from May 17 to August 7, 1973, causing political damage to the President. After the three major networks of the time agreed to take turns covering the hearings live (the first 24-hour news channel was not introduced until 1980), each network thus maintained coverage of the hearings every third day, starting with ABC on May 17 and ending with NBC on August 7. An estimated 85% of Americans with television sets tuned in to at least one portion of the hearings.[14]
On Friday, July 13, 1973, in an interview session, Donald Sanders, the Deputy Minority Counsel, asked Alexander Butterfield if there was any type of recording systems in the White House.[15] Butterfield answered that, though he was reluctant to say so, there was a system in the White House that automatically recorded everything in the Oval Office and other rooms in the White House, including the Cabinet Room and Nixon's private office in the Old Executive Office Building. On Monday, July 16, 1973, in front of a live, televised audience, Chief Minority Counsel Fred Thompson asked Butterfield if he was "aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the president?" The shocking revelation transformed the Watergate investigation yet again. The tapes were soon subpoenaed by special prosecutor Archibald Cox and then by the Senate. Nixon refused to release them, citing his executive privilege as President of the United States, and ordered Cox to drop his subpoena. Cox refused.[16]
A taped conversation that was crucial to the case against President Nixon [17] took place between the President and his counsel, John Dean, on March 21, 1973. In this conversation, Dean summarizes many aspects of the Watergate case, and then focuses on the subsequent coverup, describing it as a "cancer on the presidency". The burglary team was being paid hush money for their silence and Dean states: "that's the most troublesome post-thing, because Bob [Haldeman] is involved in that; John [Ehrlichman] is involved in that; I am involved in that; Mitchell is involved in that. And that's an obstruction of justice."[18] Dean continues and states that Howard Hunt is blackmailing the White House, demanding money immediately, and President Nixon states that the blackmail money should be paid: "...just looking at the immediate problem, don't you have to have -- handle Hunt's financial situation damn soon? [...] you've got to keep the cap on the bottle that much, in order to have any options." [18] At the time of the initial congressional impeachment debate on Watergate, it was not known that Nixon had known and approved of the payments to the Watergate defendants much earlier than this conversation. Among later released recordings, Nixon's conversation with Haldeman on August 1, 1972 is one of several tapes that establishes this. Nixon states: "Well...they have to be paid. That's all there is to that. They have to be paid" [19] During congressional debate on impeachment, those who believed that impeachment required a criminally indictable offense focused their attention on President Nixon's agreement to make the blackmail payments, regarding this as an affirmative act to obstruct justice as a member of the cover-up conspiracy.[20]
"Saturday Night Massacre"
Cox's refusal to drop his subpoena influenced Nixon to demand the resignations of Richardson and deputy William Ruckelshaus, on October 20, 1973, in a search of someone in the Justice Department willing to fire Cox. This search ended with Solicitor General Robert Bork. Though Bork believed Nixon's order to be valid and appropriate, he considered resigning to avoid being "perceived as a man who did the President's bidding to save my job."[21] However, both Richardson and Ruckelshaus persuaded him not to resign, in order to prevent any further damage to the Justice Department. As the new acting department head, Bork carried out the presidential order and dismissed the special prosecutor. Allegations of wrongdoing prompted Nixon to famously state "I'm not a crook" in front of 400 Associated Press managing editors on November 17, 1973.[22][23]
Nixon was compelled, however, to allow the appointment of a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, who continued the investigation. While Nixon continued to refuse to turn over actual tapes, he agreed to release transcripts of a large number of them; Nixon cited the fact that any audio pertinent to national security information could be redacted from the released tapes.
The audio tapes caused further controversy on December 7, when an 18½ minute portion of one tape was found to have been erased. Nixon's personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, said she had accidentally erased the tape by pushing the wrong foot pedal on her tape player while answering the phone. However, as photos all over the press showed, it was unlikely for Woods to answer the phone and keep her foot on the pedal. Later forensic analysis determined that the tape had been erased in several segments — at least five, and perhaps as many as nine.[24]
Supreme Court
The issue of access to the tapes went to the Supreme Court. On July 24, 1974, in United States v. Nixon, the Court, which did not include the recused Justice William Rehnquist, ruled unanimously that claims of executive privilege over the tapes were void, and they ordered the president to give them to the special prosecutor. On July 30, 1974, President Nixon complied with the order and released the subpoenaed tapes.
Final investigations and resignation
On March 1, 1974, former aides to the president, known as the "Watergate Seven" — Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Charles Colson, Gordon C. Strachan, Robert Mardian and Kenneth Parkinson — were indicted for conspiring to hinder the Watergate investigation. The grand jury also secretly named Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator. John Dean, Jeb Stuart Magruder, and other figures had already pleaded guilty. On April 5, 1974, former Nixon appointments secretary Dwight Chapin was convicted of lying to the grand jury. Two days later, the Watergate grand jury indicted Ed Reinecke, Republican lieutenant governor of California, on three charges of perjury before the Senate committee.
Nixon's position was becoming increasingly precarious, and the House of Representatives began formal investigations into the possible impeachment of the president. The House Judiciary Committee voted 27 to 11 on July 27, 1974 to recommend the first article of impeachment against the president: obstruction of justice. The second (abuse of power) and third (contempt of Congress) articles were passed on July 29, 1974 and July 30, 1974, respectively.
The "Smoking Gun" tape
On August 5, 1974, the previously unknown audio tape from June 23, 1972, was released. Recorded only a few days after the break-in, it documented Nixon and Haldeman meeting in the Oval Office and formulating a plan to block investigations by having the CIA falsely claim to the FBI that national security was involved. Haldeman introduces the topic as follows: "...the Democratic break-in thing, we're back to the--in the, the problem area because the FBI is not under control, because Gray doesn't exactly know how to control them, and they have... their investigation is now leading into some productive areas [...] and it goes in some directions we don't want it to go." After explaining how the money from CRP was traced to the burglars, Haldeman explained to Nixon the coverup plan: "the way to handle this now is for us to have Walters [CIA] call Pat Gray [FBI] and just say, 'Stay the hell out of this ...this is ah, business here we don't want you to go any further on it.'" President Nixon approved the plan, and he is given more information about the involvement of his campaign in the break-in, telling Haldeman: "All right, fine, I understand it all. We won't second-guess Mitchell and the rest." Returning to the use of the CIA to obstruct the FBI, he instructs Haldeman: "You call them in. Good. Good deal. Play it tough. That's the way they play it and that's the way we are going to play it." [25]
Prior to the release of this tape, President Nixon had denied political motivations in his instructions to the CIA, and claimed he had no knowledge prior to March 21, 1973 of any involvement by senior campaign officials such as John Mitchell. The contents of this tape persuaded President Nixon's own lawyers, Fred Buzhardt and James St. Clair, "The tape proved that the President had lied to the nation, to his closest aides, and to his own lawyers – for more than two years." [26] The tape, which was referred to as a "smoking gun", hampered Nixon politically. The ten congressmen who had voted against all three articles of impeachment in the committee announced that they would all support impeachment when the vote was taken in the full House.
Resignation
Throughout this time, Nixon still denied any involvement in the ordeal. However, after being told by key Republican Senators that enough votes existed to remove him, Nixon decided to resign. In a nationally televised address from the Oval Office on the evening of August 8, 1974, the president said,
In all the decisions I have made in my public life, I have always tried to do what was best for the Nation. Throughout the long and difficult period of Watergate, I have felt it was my duty to persevere, to make every possible effort to complete the term of office to which you elected me. In the past few days, however, it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that effort. As long as there was such a base, I felt strongly that it was necessary to see the constitutional process through to its conclusion, that to do otherwise would be unfaithful to the spirit of that deliberately difficult process and a dangerously destabilizing precedent for the future....
I would have preferred to carry through to the finish whatever the personal agony it would have involved, and my family unanimously urged me to do so. But the interest of the Nation must always come before any personal considerations. From the discussions I have had with Congressional and other leaders, I have concluded that because of the Watergate matter I might not have the support of the Congress that I would consider necessary to back the very difficult decisions and carry out the duties of this office in the way the interests of the Nation would require.
I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interest of America first. America needs a full-time President and a full-time Congress, particularly at this time with problems we face at home and abroad. To continue to fight through the months ahead for my personal vindication would almost totally absorb the time and attention of both the President and the Congress in a period when our entire focus should be on the great issues of peace abroad and prosperity without inflation at home. Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office.
The morning that his resignation was to take effect, President and Mrs. Nixon and their family bade farewell to the White House staff in the East Room.[29] A helicopter took him from the White House to Andrews Air Force base in Maryland. Nixon later wrote that he remembered thinking "As the helicopter moved on to Andrews, I found myself thinking not of the past, but of the future. What could I do now?..." At Andrews, he boarded Air Force One to El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in California and then to his home in San Clemente.
Pardon and aftermath
Though President Nixon's resignation prompted Congress to drop the impeachment proceedings, criminal prosecution was still a possibility. Nixon was succeeded by Vice President Gerald Ford, who on September 8, 1974, issued a full and unconditional pardon of President Nixon, immunizing him from prosecution for any crimes he had "committed or may have committed or taken part in" as President.[30] In a televised broadcast to the nation, Ford explained that he felt the pardon was in the best interest of the country and that the Nixon family's situation "is an American tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must."[31]
Nixon proclaimed his innocence until his death in 1994. He did state in his official response to the pardon that he "was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Watergate, particularly when it reached the stage of judicial proceedings and grew from a political scandal into a national tragedy."
The Nixon pardon has been argued to be a factor in President Ford's loss of the presidential election of 1976.[32] Accusations of a secret deal made with Ford, promising a pardon in return for Nixon's resignation, led Ford to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on October 17, 1974.[33][34]
In his autobiography A Time to Heal, Ford wrote about a meeting he had with Nixon's Chief of Staff, Alexander Haig. Haig was explaining what he and Nixon's staff thought were Nixon's only options. He could try to ride out the impeachment and fight against conviction in the Senate all the way, or he could resign. His options for resigning were to delay his resignation until further along in the impeachment process to try and settle for a censure vote in Congress, or pardon himself and then resign. Haig then told Ford that some of Nixon's staff suggested that Nixon could agree to resign in return for an agreement that Ford would pardon him.
Haig emphasized that these weren't his suggestions. He didn't identify the staff members and he made it very clear that he wasn't recommending any one option over another. What he wanted to know was whether or not my overall assessment of the situation agreed with his.[emphasis in original]... Next he asked if I had any suggestions as to courses of actions for the President. I didn't think it would be proper for me to make any recommendations at all, and I told him so.
—Gerald Ford, [35]
Charles Colson pleaded guilty to charges concerning the Daniel Ellsberg case; in exchange, the indictment against him for covering up the activities of the Committee to Re-elect the President was dropped, as it was against Strachan. The remaining five members of the Watergate Seven indicted in March went on trial in October 1974, and on January 1, 1975, all but Parkinson were found guilty. In 1976, the U.S. Court of Appeals ordered a new trial for Mardian; subsequently, all charges against him were dropped. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell exhausted their appeals in 1977. Ehrlichman entered prison in 1976, followed by the other two in 1977.
The effect on the upcoming Senate election and House race, only three months later, was significant. The Democrats gained five seats in the Senate and 49 in the House. Watergate was also indirectly responsible for changes in campaign financing. It was a driving factor in amending the Freedom of Information Act in 1974, as well as laws requiring new financial disclosures by key government officials, such as the Ethics in Government Act. While not legally required, other types of personal disclosure, such as releasing recent income tax forms, became expected. Presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt had recorded many of their conversations, but after Watergate this practice purportedly ended.
Also, Congress investigated the scope of the President's actual legal powers, and belatedly realized that the United States had been in a continuous open-ended state of emergency since 1950, which led to the enactment of the National Emergencies Act in 1976.
The Watergate scandal left such an impression on the national and international consciousness that many scandals since then have been labeled with the suffix "-gate".
According to Thomas J. Johnson, professor of journalism at Southern Illinois University, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger boldly predicted during Nixon's final days that history would remember Nixon as a great president and that Watergate would be relegated to a "minor footnote." [36]
Since Nixon and many senior officials involved in Watergate were lawyers, the scandal severely tarnished the public image of the legal profession.[37][38][39] In order to defuse public demand for direct federal regulation of lawyers (as opposed to leaving it in the hands of state bar associations or courts), the American Bar Association (ABA) launched two major reforms. First, the ABA decided that its existing Model Code of Professional Responsibility (promulgated 1969) was a failure and replaced it with the Model Rules of Professional Conduct in 1983.[40] The MRPC have been adopted in part or in whole by 48 states. Its preamble contains an emphatic reminder to young lawyers that the legal profession can remain self-governing only if lawyers behave properly. Second, the ABA promulgated a requirement that law students at ABA-approved law schools take a course in professional responsibility (which means they must study the MRPC). The requirement remains in effect.
Purpose of the break-in
Despite the enormous impact of the Watergate scandal, the actual purpose of the break-in of the DNC offices has never been conclusively established. Some theories suggest that the burglars were after specific information. The likeliest of these theories suggests that the target of the break-in was the offices of Larry O'Brien, the Chairman of the DNC.[41] In 1968, O'Brien was appointed by Vice President Hubert Humphrey to serve as the national director of Humphrey's presidential campaign and, separately, by Howard Hughes, to serve as Hughes' public-policy lobbyist in Washington. O'Brien was elected national chairman of the DNC in 1968 and 1970. With the upcoming Presidential election, former Howard Hughes business associate John H. Meier, working with Hubert Humphrey and others, wanted to feed misinformation to Richard Nixon. John Meier's father had been a German agent during World War II. Meier had joined the FBI and in the 60s had contracted to the CIA to eliminate Fidel Castro using Mafia bosses Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante.[42] In late 1971, the President’s brother, Donald Nixon, was collecting intelligence for his brother at the time and was asking Meier about Larry O'Brien. In 1956, Donald Nixon had borrowed $205,000 from Howard Hughes and never repaid the loan. The fact of the loan surfaced during the 1960 presidential election campaign embarrassing Richard Nixon and became a real political liability. According to author Donald M. Bartlett, Richard Nixon would do whatever was necessary to prevent another Hughes-Nixon family embarrassment.[43] From 1968 to 1970, Hughes withdrew nearly half a million dollars from the Texas National Bank of Commerce for contributions to both Democrats and Republicans, including presidential candidates Humphrey and Nixon. Hughes wanted Donald Nixon and Meier involved but Richard Nixon was opposed to their involvement.[44]
Meier told Donald that he was sure the Democrats would win the election because they had considerable information on Richard Nixon’s illicit dealings with Howard Hughes that had never been released, and that Larry O’Brien had the information,[45] (O’Brien who had received $25,000 from Hughes didn’t actually have any documents but Meier claims to have wanted Richard Nixon to think he did). It is only a question of conjecture then that Donald called his brother Richard and told him that Meier gave the Democrats all the Hughes information that could destroy him and that O’Brien had the proof.[46] The fact is Larry O'Brien, elected Democratic Party Chairman, was also a lobbyist for Howard Hughes in a Democratic controlled Congress and the possibility of his finding about Hughes illegal contributions to the Nixon campaign was too much of a danger for Nixon to ignore and O'Brien's office at Watergate became a target of Nixon's intelligence in the political campaign.[47] This theory has been proposed as a motivation for the break-in.
Numerous theories have persisted in claiming deeper significance to the Watergate scandal than that commonly acknowledged by media and historians:
• In the book The Ends of Power, Nixon's chief of staff H. R. Haldeman claimed that the term "Bay of Pigs", mentioned by Nixon in a tape-recorded White House conversation as the reason the CIA should put a stop to the Watergate investigations,[2] was used by Nixon as a coded reference to a CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro during the John F. Kennedy administration. The CIA had not disclosed this plot to the Warren Commission, the commission investigating the Kennedy assassination, despite the fact that it would attribute a motive to Castro in the assassination.[48] Any such revelation would also expose CIA/Mafia connections that could lead to unwanted scrutiny of suspected CIA/Mafia participants in the assassination of the president. Furthermore, Nixon's awareness as vice-president of the Bay of Pigs plan and his own ties to the underworld and unsavory intelligence operations might come to light. A theoretical connection between the Kennedy assassination and the Watergate Tapes was later referred to in the biopic, Nixon, directed by Oliver Stone.
• Silent Coup, is a bestselling 1992 book written by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin in which they contend that former Nixon White House counsel John Dean orchestrated the 1972 Watergate burglary at Democratic National Committee headquarters to protect his future wife, Maureen Biner, by removing information linking her to a call-girl (prostitute) ring that worked for the DNC. The authors also argued that Alexander Haig was not Deep Throat but was a key source for Bob Woodward, who as a Naval officer had briefed Haig at the White House in 1969 and 1970.[49][50]
• Secret Honor by Stone and Freed implies that Nixon deliberately sacrificed his presidency to save democracy from a plan to implement martial law. The theory uses the construct of "Yankees" vs. "Cowboys" to suggest that, since the postwar era, the United States has been dominated by Yankees competing with Cowboys. Nixon, who hailed from the Southwest, was initially backed by the military industrial defense contractor power-brokers (the Cowboys); however, he later wanted to jump ship and return government to the east-coast establishment of Yankees. His resignation accomplished this because Nelson Rockefeller, the epitome of the eastern economic elite, assumed the vice presidency after Nixon's resignation.
• Peter Beter's Conspiracy Against the Dollar further explains how Nixon was possibly a rogue liberal with a conservative mask.
• Gordon Novel, a man known for several controversial investigations, has claimed Watergate served as a discourse to stop the Nixon administration to hold Senate hearings about a postmortem on the Vietnam war.[51]
• Political scientist George Friedman argued that: "The Washington Post created a morality play about an out-of-control government brought to heel by two young, enterprising journalists and a courageous newspaper. That simply wasn't what happened. Instead, it was about the FBI using The Washington Post to leak information to destroy the president, and The Washington Post willingly serving as the conduit for that information while withholding an essential dimension of the story by concealing Deep Throat's identity" and that FBI under the direction of Mark Felt must have began spying on the White House before the Watergate break-in.[52] In fact Felt was later revealed to have been the Post's source known as "Deep Throat."
• MIT professor Noam Chomsky argued that it was Nixon's dismantling of the Bretton Woods system that made him an enemy of multinational corporations and international bankers.[53]
New Nixon Library Museum exhibit stalled
A "searing" exhibit on the scandal at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California prepared by the National Archives was supposed to have opened July 1, 2010. The exhibit had not opened by August 9 because of objections from the Nixon Foundation, "a group of Nixon loyalists who controlled the museum until the Archives took it over" in 2007. A room for the new exhibit sits largely empty at the Museum. "Bob Bostock, a former Nixon aide who designed the original Watergate exhibit and has been enlisted by the foundation to challenge the installation, filed a 132-page letter of objection to the archives [a month after the scheduled opening date], claiming that the [new] exhibit lacked the context needed to help young visitors learning about Watergate to understand exactly what Nixon did. ... 'It is the last fight over Watergate,' said Timothy Naftali, the director of the museum .... Mr. Naftali has overseen the release of a flood of Nixon papers and tapes since ... 2006. [and said] he was confident a resolution could be worked out that addressed at least some of the concerns of both sides." Mr. Bostock said he'd worked for the former president during the last five years of Nixon's life and worked with him on the original Watergate exhibit, now removed, in the museum. Bostock also "questioned whether [Nixon's] misdeeds justified [his] being forced from the White House." Jon Wiener, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, who would take his classes to the museum on annual field trips as it studied Nixon, said of the previous exhibit, "It was a long dark tunnel that was completely uninviting, block ... after block of small panels, white text on a black wall. It had to go."[54] An extensive online background to the exhibit, with some 150 oral histories and tape snippets, along with pictures of some 30 principals, has been posted by the museum.[55]
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Ten Tips for a Better Interview
1. Be prepared! Always read up on the subject you are reporting about and the person you are interviewing. Your source will appreciate your effort, and you will be able to skip questions that can be answered by an assistant, book or document. When scheduling the appointment, ask your source to suggest documents or other sources of information about the topic you will discuss. The interviewee will appreciate your interest and often share valuable documents before the interview. Make sure your tape recorder has batteries that work. Bring an extra tape as well as pens and notebook.
2. Set the rules of the interview right up front! Be sure your subject understands the story you are working on (this will help keep the interview on track). Additionally, the interviewee must understand that everything they say is "on the record." It is best to establish these ground rules when making the interview appointment. Although most government officials have enough experience with the media to indicate when something is "off-the record" or "on background," other experts may not understand the differences. Remember that an upfront clarification may be required (especially when your source's job or life could be endangered by being quoted).3. Be on time! The worst impression you can make on a source is being late for the interview.
4. Be observant! Observe details of the place and of your interviewing partner; this can add color to your story. If you are interviewing people in their home or office, be sure to get a good look around and note what you see. For example, they may have some old photos that show them in a more personal light. You may start an interview with assumptions about a person and leave with a completely different impression. However, this may be exactly what your source intended. Perception is a tricky business! Try to talk to others, colleagues or friends of your source, to get a bigger picture.5. Be polite. Don't rush your source! It is important to establish a polite rapport and a level of comfort for the interviewee. Some interviewees, on the other hand, need a couple minutes to become comfortable talking to reporters. Even though you may only have 30 minutes for an interview, you should not rush your subject. If you sense the interviewee is in a hurry, adjust your timing accordingly. Keep in mind, everyone is different. Taking the time to get to know your sources will prove valuable, especially when you need to call with follow-up questions or use them as a source for future stories. If the interview goes well, it may even go beyond the scheduled time. Give yourself plenty of time between appointments to avoid scheduling conflicts
6. Listen but don't be afraid to interrupt when you don't understand! Keep your audience in mind! One reason you are conducting this interview is to explain it to your readers. If your subject uses scientific jargon or explanations only his/her peers would understand, politely interrupt and ask for further explanation. Never be embarrassed about not knowing something
7. Silence is golden. Sooner or later you will have to ask the tough questions that your subject may be loath to discuss. When you start asking those provocative questions, the answers most likely will be short, useless or carefully worded. You may not get an answer at all. If this occurs, look your source in the eye and don't say a word. In most cases, your opponent will begin to feel uncomfortable and begin to share information again. If this doesn't work, ask for sources who might be able to answer your question.
8. Maintain eye contact! A reporter who spends most of the interview bent over taking notes or looking into a notebook can be as disconcerting as a tape recorder in an interviewee's face. While taking notes and recording the interview, maintain as much eye contact as possible. Learn to take abbreviated notes looking down only once in a while so you can focus on your interviewee. This will make the interview more like a conversation, and enable everyone to be more relaxed.
9. Before your leave... ask your source if there is anything that you might have forgotten to ask. Perhaps the interviewee is burning to tell you useful information, but you did not even think to ask that question. Don't leave without getting a contact number or e-mail address and a good time to call with follow-up questions. Always ask for other sources. Colleagues or friends of the interviewee may be more knowledgeable or willing and able to speak to you. Thank your source for spending time talking with you before you leave.
10. Review your notes right after the interview! Don't wait until the end of the day or later in the week to review your notes. Go over them right away, while everything is fresh in your mind, filling in your shorthand and elaborating on your observations. Skip that date for drinks with your office pals until after you have reviewed and organized your notes.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
History of communication
The history of communication dates back to the earliest signs of life. Communication can range from very subtle processes of exchange, to full conversations and mass communication. Human communication was revolutionized with speech perhaps 200,000 years ago[citation needed]. Symbols were developed about 30,000 years ago[citation needed], and writing about 7,000. On a much shorter scale, there have been major developments in the field of telecommunication in the past few centuries.
Speech
Ronald Reagan speaking by the Berlin Wall (Tear down this wall), an example of transmission of older media (public speaking) with new mass media (television, Internet).
Evolution of the brain differentiated humans from animals, as among other things it allowed humans to master a very efficient form of communication - speech. A mutation of the FOXP2 gene, which occurred in homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago, was likely responsible for much of this change.
Speech greatly facilitated the transmission of information and knowledge to further generations. Experiences passed on through speech became increasingly rich, and allowed humans to adapt themselves to new environments - or adapt the environments to themselves - much more quickly than was possible before; in effect, biological human evolution was overtaken by technological progress and sociocultural evolution. Speech meant easier coordination and cooperation, technological progress and development of complex, abstract concepts such as religion or science. Speech placed humans at the top of the food chain, and facilitated human colonization of the entire planet.
Speech, however, is not perfect. The human voice carries only so far, and sign language is also rather limited in terms of distance. Further, all such forms of communications relied on human memory, another imperfect tool: memory can become corrupted or lost over time, and there is a limit to how much one can remember. With the accidental death of a 'wise man' or tribal elder, a pre-literate tribe could lose many generations of knowledge.
Symbols
The imperfection of speech, which nonetheless allowed easier dissemination of ideas and stimulated inventions, eventually resulted in the creation of new forms of communications, improving both the range at which people could communicate and the longevity of the information. All of those inventions were based on the key concept of the symbol: a conventional representation of a concept.
Cave paintings
For more details on this topic, see Cave paintings.
The oldest known symbols created with the purpose of communication through time are the cave paintings, a form of rock art, dating to the Upper Paleolithic. Just as the small child first learns to draw before it masters more complex forms of communication, so homo sapiens' first attempts at passing information through time took the form of paintings. The oldest known cave painting is that of the Chauvet Cave, dating to around 30,000 BC.[1] Though not well standardized, those paintings contained increasing amounts of information: Cro-Magnon people may have created the first calendar as far back as 15,000 years ago.[2] The connection between drawing and writing is further shown by linguistics: in the Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece the concepts and words of drawing and writing were one and the same (Egyptian: 's-sh', Greek: 'graphein').[3]
Petroglyphs
The next step in the history of communications is petroglyphs, carvings into a rock surface. It took about 20,000 years for homo sapiens to move from the first cave paintings to the first petroglyphs, which are dated to around 10,000 BC.[4]
It is possible that the humans of that time used some other forms of communication, often for mnemonic purposes - specially arranged stones, symbols carved in wood or earth, quipu-like ropes, tattoos, but little other than the most durable carved stones has survived to modern times and we can only speculate about their existence based on our observation of still existing 'hunter-gatherer' cultures such as those of Africa or Oceania.[4]
Pictograms
A pictogram (pictograph) is a symbol representing a concept, object, activity, place or event by illustration. Pictography is a form of proto-writing whereby ideas are transmitted through drawing. Pictographs were the next step in the evolution of communication: the most important difference between petroglyphs and pictograms is that petroglyphs are simply showing an event, but pictograms are telling a story about the event, thus they can for example be ordered in chronological order.
Pictograms were used by various ancient cultures all over the world since around 9000 BC, when tokens marked with simple pictures began to be used to label basic farm produce, and become increasingly popular around 6000-5000 BC.
They were the basis of cuneiform[2] and hieroglyphs, and began to develop into logographic writing systems around 5000 BC.
Ideograms
Pictograms, in turn, evolved into ideograms, graphical symbols that represent an idea. Their ancestors, the pictograms, could represent only something resembling their form: therefore a pictogram of a circle could represent a sun, but not concepts like 'heat', 'light', 'day' or 'Great God of the Sun'. Ideograms, on the other hand, could convey more abstract concepts, so that for example an ideogram of two sticks can mean not only 'legs' but also a verb 'to walk'.
Because some ideas are universal, many different cultures developed similar ideograms. For example an eye with a tear means 'sadness' in Native American ideograms in California, as it does for the Aztecs, the early Chinese and the Egyptians.
Ideograms were precursors of logographic writing systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Chinese characters.
Examples of ideographical proto-writing systems, thought not to contain language-specific information, include the Vinca script (see also Tărtăria tablets) and the early Indus script. In both cases there are claims of decipherment of linguistic content, without wide acceptance.
Writing
The oldest-known forms of writing were primarily logographic in nature, based on pictographic and ideographic elements. Most writing systems can be broadly divided into three categories: logographic, syllabic and alphabetic (or segmental); however, all three may be found in any given writing system in varying proportions, often making it difficult to categorise a system uniquely.
The invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of the Bronze Age in the late Neolithic of the late 4th millennium BC. The first writing system is generally believed to have been invented in pre-historic Sumer and developed by the late 3rd millennium into cuneiform. Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the undeciphered Proto-Elamite writing system and Indus Valley script also date to this era, though a few scholars have questioned the Indus Valley script's status as a writing system.
The original Sumerian writing system was derived from a system of clay tokens used to represent commodities. By the end of the 4th millennium BC, this had evolved into a method of keeping accounts, using a round-shaped stylus impressed into soft clay at different angles for recording numbers. This was gradually augmented with pictographic writing using a sharp stylus to indicate what was being counted. Round-stylus and sharp-stylus writing was gradually replaced about 2700-2000 BC by writing using a wedge-shaped stylus (hence the term cuneiform), at first only for logograms, but developed to include phonetic elements by the 2800 BC. About 2600 BC cuneiform began to represent syllables of spoken Sumerian language. Finally, cuneiform writing became a general purpose writing system for logograms, syllables, and numbers. By the 26th century BC, this script had been adapted to another Mesopotamian language, Akkadian, and from there to others such as Hurrian, and Hittite. Scripts similar in appearance to this writing system include those for Ugaritic and Old Persian.
The Chinese script may have originated independently of the Middle Eastern scripts, around the 16th century BC (early Shang Dynasty), out of a late neolithic Chinese system of proto-writing dating back to c. 6000 BC. The pre-Columbian writing systems of the Americas (including among others Olmec and Mayan) are also generally believed to have had independent origins, although some experts have noticed similarities between Olmec writing and Shang writing that seem to suggest that Mesoamerican writing was imported from China [3].
Alphabet
The first pure alphabets (properly, "abjads", mapping single symbols to single phonemes, but not necessarily each phoneme to a symbol) emerged around 2000 BC in Ancient Egypt, but by then alphabetic principles had already been incorporated into Egyptian hieroglyphs for a millennium (see Middle Bronze Age alphabets).
By 2700 BC Egyptian writing had a set of some 22 hieroglyphs to represent syllables that begin with a single consonant of their language, plus a vowel (or no vowel) to be supplied by the native speaker. These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names.
However, although seemingly alphabetic in nature, the original Egyptian uniliterals were not a system and were never used by themselves to encode Egyptian speech. In the Middle Bronze Age an apparently "alphabetic" system is thought by some to have been developed in central Egypt around 1700 BC for or by Semitic workers, but we cannot read these early writings and their exact nature remain open to interpretation.
Over the next five centuries this Semitic "alphabet" (really a syllabary like Phoenician writing) seems to have spread north. All subsequent alphabets around the world with the sole exception of Korean Hangul have either descended from it, or been inspired by one of its descendants. (Source Wikipedia)
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