By: Tom Mascaro
When Donald Trump called journalists "the enemy of the people" in 2017, I contacted University of Michigan Press and urged them to reissue William Porter’s 1976 monograph, Assault on the Media: The Nixon Years. The press generously invited me to take on the project. I anticipated appending an introduction and adding some analysis. But as I re-engaged the original, it became obvious I would have to blend entirely new content, in light of the half century of new scholarship and availability of primary source documents, with Porter’s classic. I also realized I would have to venture outside my comfort zone.
Porter’s original Assault on the Media documented Nixon-era threats to journalism and democracy. Porter explicated a year-by-year review of the most prominent attacks on journalism and journalists and reinforced his work with a collection of primary “Documents of Significance,” memos and excerpts of speeches and court rulings dealing with the press. 
Initially I tiptoed around Porter’s work, not wanting to do violence to the original. I settled into writing a brief introduction to each chapter and then a longer analysis, based on research published since the Nixon era.
Other factors changed my course—and forced my hand. Based on my own research into network documentary journalism history, I wrote about how 1968 altered network news. Working from Reuven Frank’s memoir, Out of Thin Air, and Daniel Walker’s Rights in Conflict, an assessment of the police riot in Chicago at the ’68 Democratic National Convention, including assaults on reporters and their equipment, I wrote a new chapter about the “Prelude to the Assault.” This bridged Porter’s opening chapter, “Background on the Nixon Attitude,” with “Year 1969.”
The major hurdle in completing the project, though, emerged from Porter’s final chapter, “Effects of the Assault.” Porter published Assault on the Media less than two years after Nixon’s resignation—too soon to assess the lasting damage of the Nixon-era assault. But he listed four areas of concern going forward: 1) the impact of the Pentagon Papers decision on press freedom; 2), prior restraint workarounds; 3), confidentiality as a currency of power; and 4), antitrust as a threat to journalism.
I was faced with the reality that you can’t reissue a classic book some fifty years after publication without addressing the aftermath. In particular, I had to come to terms with what had changed. Much of that content revolves around media law and First Amendment questions. Two conditions helped me tackle Porter’s “assignment.” The first was the body of literature published by our colleagues in media law and professional journalism observers who blend contemporary reporting with historical analyses. The second was the availability of online documents among Nixon administration papers at his presidential library. In particular, Nixon’s chief of staff H.R. Haldeman’s diaries are available online through the Nixon Library.
I then curated excerpts of Haldeman’s diaries that focused on media policy, journalists, and administration efforts at gatekeeping, agenda setting, and framing—as a counterpoint to academic studies of these theories about the press. I coupled that analysis with a collection of White House memos from Patrick Buchanan, Nixon’s media adviser, curated by Dr. Lori Cox Han at Chapman University. These troves of primary documents revealed baseline attitudes about journalists as “others,” attempts to court ethnic Whites, challenges to academia, plans to plant stories in sympathetic outlets, and inconsistencies in Nixon-era policies regarding “the media.” Trump’s assault on journalism also triggered a number of contemporary studies that reference the Nixon and other administrations’ era, as did recent academic books on the presidency and the press.
Eventually I was able to interpret Assault on the Media: The Nixon Years from my own perspective, while also honoring Prof. Porter’s original work. I very much appreciate the support of University of Michigan Press in helping me reissue the pages of Porter’s first edition with my interstitial analysis, plus new chapters based on my own and colleagues’ half century of research on the Nixon era. My analysis resulted in a proof of concept proffered by Porter, who saw the Nixon-era assault on journalism unfolding in threatening ways. Our new, co-authored book—Updated with Analysis of 21st Century Threats to Democracy—documents and warns that attacks on journalists and democracy have worsened in the twenty-first century.
Tom Mascaro is professor emeritus in the School of Media & Communications at Bowling Green State University and a documentary historian.
