This is probably not the result that White House officials had in mind when they came up with the strategy of marginalizing Fox News. Last night Anderson Cooper had on guests James Carville (Democrat) and Kevin Madden (Republican) to debate a growing meme that should concern the Obama administration: do they have a “Nixon-type enemies list”?

The New York Times is reporting that William Safire, a long-time former columnist for the paper, and speechwriter for Richard Nixon has died at 79. Safire joined the Times in 1973 and won the Pulitzer in 1978 for his commentary. Prior to this he worked on Nixon’s 1960 and 1968 presidential campaigns and after Nixon’s 1968 victory served as chief speechwriter for both Nixon and his then Vice President Spiro Agnew.

Long before The Daily Show, long before The Colbert Report, Saturday Night Live was making fun of the news in a way that no one had ever seen before.
In honor of the premiere of Season 35, we’ve pulled together 35 of SNL‘s choicest news anchor spoofs and Weekend Updates, from Baba Wawa to Fred Armisen‘s Joy Behar to the infamous Couric/Palin interview.

Erin Andrews, the ESPN Sportscaster, was the victim of a peephole video last month when someone rigged a small camera to record her changing in her hotel room. As a guy who is retro-fitting a prosthetic eye to be a video camera, I have followed the debate about video ethics and privacy closely. Because my video camera eye (a working field model is nearly done! Stand by!) is a bit creepy I get a lot of criticism for potentially invading people’s privacy.

Historians generally agree that Watergate was a great moment for the press – and for the Washington Post, which published the scoops of that would eventually take down a president. But the July 17th issue of the Economist points to a more unorthodox take: That the Washington Post was selfish, irresponsible, and directly responsible for thwarting the World Peace that Richard Nixon would certainly have won.

For anyone whose political identity was formed during the poison years bracketed by Walter Cronkite‘s tenure as CBS evening anchor, the avuncular newsman was like the kindly, reassuring narrator of a political horror story.

If, as CBS News president Sean McManus mourns, that Cronkite’s status “will never be duplicated again,” it’s not only due to the modern fragmentation of the news audience — it’s also because, ideally, the country will never again go through such an extended trainwreck.