There is an inherent tension in the relationship between governments wanting to control the portrayal of events and journalists determined to report what is really happening. In 1734, John Peter Zenger, a printer and editor in New York City, was indicted, tried, and acquitted on charges of sedition and libel against Governor William Cosby of the New York Colony. The jurors accepted the defense contention that Zenger’s articles were not libelous because they were based on facts. There is a direct line from the fulminations of the colonial regime to the administration of George W. Bush, which is intent—at a minimum—on threatening journalists for revealing what the government does not think the public has a right to know. Recognizing that this struggle between authorities and the Fourth Estate is an embedded feature of American life does not mean, however, that the press will ultimately prevail, as Zenger did. The Bush administration’s attempts since Sept 11, 2001, to intimidate and punish the media, or at least to manipulate and mislead it, represent one of the most concerted assaults on the First Amendment since it was written in the heat of America’s revolution.

“Bush’s War against the Press” was the headline on a memorable column by James C. Goodale in the New York Law Journal. Goodale was vice-chairman of The New York Times Company during the Pentagon Papers case of 1971. He has been at the law firm of Debevoise and Plimpton for many years, specializing in media law. Goodale’s list of Bush administration actions included officially sanctioned tapping of reporters, demands for documents, possible indictments, and a plan to turn the Espionage Act of 1917 into a British-style official secrets act designed to restrict what can be reported in the press. Goodale calls these actions “chilling” and adds that it is hard to believe they are coincidental. Whether or not the president has mandated a concerted strategy to restrain reporting of the government’s activities, particularly in the national security area, there is no doubt that Bush is prepared to use every means available (including those of dubious legality) to limit disclosure of information the White House chooses to protect.

The history of government at all levels trying to supervise what is disclosed about what it is doing is very clear in one respect: the goals are usually about official convenience rather than the public good. National security too often is used as a shield to permit tactics that in hindsight have invariably turned out to be excessive. What we already know is that the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, culminating a period in which Al Qaeda’s tentacles had reached throughout south Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, became a pretext for the Bush administration to pursue policies at home and abroad that justified restrictions of civil liberties in ways that are astonishing for their boldness. The War on Terror is already enshrined as one of America’s greatest tests of freedom in the face of perceived threats from an enemy abroad with possible fellow-travelers at home.

It is possible to isolate almost any period in time as an illustration of the struggle between governments and the press. But the modern era in defining the relations between officials and their monitors probably began with the combination of foreign and domestic upheavals known as Vietnam and Watergate. John F. Kennedy was as sophisticated about reporters needs and as friendly with them as any president has ever been and yet, in retrospect, the transition to today’s world came in his thousand-day administration when many of our contemporary issues were framed. The New York Times was persuaded to downplay the Bay of Pigs preparations, a Pentagon spokesman asserted that dissembling to the press was part of his job, the president’s sexual escapades were studiously overlooked, and the FBI and the president’s brother, the attorney general, used wiretaps and other forms of sleuthing to keep track of critics and dissidents in the name of protecting the national interests.

But it was Lyndon Johnson and his anguish over the Vietnam War and Richard M. Nixon’s toxic brew of political paranoia symbolized by Watergate that truly set the terms for the modern relationship between White Houses and the media. Another critical determinant was the vast prevalence of network television, which magnified and glamorized the role of the press as nothing ever had before. While Johnson and his advisers, particularly Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, recognized that the war in Vietnam was not leading to a defeat of the North Vietnamese and Vietcong, they insisted that it was. Inevitably, as reporters described what they were witnessing and underscored the contrast between the official version of the war and the unmistakable reality on the ground, trust on all sides gradually broke down. The more the administration insisted on the reliability of their version of events, the more reporters felt it necessary to refute them. That dynamic was ingrained on both sides and to this day, journalists assume that whatever the government says is suspect, very often with good reason.

The concept of retaliation against the media was turned into policy by the Nixon administration. The public voice of Nixon’s antipathy towards the press was Vice President Spiro Agnew. In a book to be published in 2007 called Very Strange Bedfellows about this most dysfunctional of political alliances, the writer, Jules Witcover, who was with the Washington Post at the time, recreates the era. Agnew was tasked to take on the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the television networks in particular and hurled insults which were often personal. He called the Washington Post’s cartoonist Herblock, who had famously awarded Nixon a clean shave on inauguration day, “that master of sick invective.” With some speechmaking skill of his own and the assistance of wordsmiths such as Pat Buchanan and William Safire (both of whom, of course, later became celebrated commentators themselves), Agnew proclaimed his right to assail the press. In a diary entry quoted by Witcover, Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, warned on the eve of a 1969 Agnew speech in Montgomery, Alabama, “Huge problem late today as [Press Secretary Ron] Ziegler tells me of VP’s speech for tomorrow night, a real blast, not just at TV, now he takes on newspapers, a lot of individuals and the kids again. Pretty rough and really goes too far. Problem is Agnew is determined to give it. . . . ” Haldeman, as tough an operative as Nixon had around him, actually had to restrain by his own account, Agnew’s vituperation.

The speech as given remained harsh and specific, concluding, “I do not seek to intimidate the press, the networks, or anyone else from speaking out. But the time for blind acceptance of their opinions is past. And the time for naïve belief in their neutrality is gone.” The notion that the press was an adversary to be singled out and attacked became a routine feature of the Nixon administration, clearly instigated by the president. While primarily rhetorical at the outset, the idea that the press can and should be bullied, and where possible, disciplined, became as much a part of administration political strategy as their attitude towards Democrats, the civil rights movement, and war protestors. Because of the enduring battles over the Pentagon Papers and later the Watergate break-in and cover-up, this period has an almost mythic glow in the media. The outcomes invariably favored the press, and with the collapse of Nixon’s power (Agnew himself was an ignominious sideshow), it was possible to assume that forever, a dynamic, aggressive, intrepid media would prevail over governments in the pursuit of truth.

As it was in so many ways, the de facto start of the new century in relations between the White House and the press was September 11, 2001. What will likely be known in history as the era between “11/9” (Nov. 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall came down) and “9/11” will be seen as an interregnum in time characterized in domestic political terms by the president, the intern, and the piercing shrillness surrounding impeachment that contrived largely to obscure the emergence of many of the profound ideological, religious, and nationalistic issues that dominate our discourse today. The spectacle in Washington and the sanction it gave to the tabloidization of so much coverage was the major media story of the time. When the events of that period settle into history, Bill Clinton’s fecklessness will have to be balanced with the media’s own focus on tackiness and cynical gamesmanship of the sort practiced by Newt Gingrich at the expense, it is fair to argue, of exploring issues that turned out to be far more important.

No one will claim that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the vast assortment of conflicts that arise from theocratic extremism and rage of other kinds are not very serious. The threats of nuclear confrontation that were the most dangerous feature of the Cold War have subsided and it is tempting now to say that they may have been exaggerated, except perhaps for the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. But the consequences of terrorism directed from caves, back alleys, and mosques as much as from government ministries have the potential to be vastly disruptive. The possibility of weapons of mass destruction being unleashed by a fervent lunatic is a real one. The scale of today’s dangers are not figments of anyone’s imagination, even if, as is the case, the administration of George W. Bush finds it compatible with its instincts to portray their role as the protector of a nation at great risk and therefore within its rights to curtail the civil liberties that are an American bedrock.

The Bush administration is less rhetorically disposed to attack the media than the Nixon administration was. Vice President Dick Cheney can be as blunt an instrument as Agnew, but he uses less public bluster. Bush, Cheney, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (the latter pair tracing their political sensibilities to Nixon’s time) assert maximum control over all elements of their landscape and wherever possible demonize their adversary. We have to assume that the administration takes its tone from the president with political adviser Karl Rove in “the architect” role, as Bush has characterized it.  What we don’t know is whether in their Oval Office and telephone chatter, this team uses the same furious, defensive, and obscene language as the Nixon people did, but when it comes to the media, their demeanor and in many respects their actions reflect contempt veering all the way to enmity.

A number of factors have combined to make the clash between this administration and the media particularly nasty. The media has become steadily more omnipresent as technology expands, while the widely disparate standards and speed of information make the whole process of information feel almost chaotic. The ricochet of action and reaction means that reflection is at a minimum and what remains after a political skirmish dies down are impressions of conflict rather than the specific arguments that support the respective sides. The war in Iraq has been covered extensively and the mistakes made by the administration are documented relentlessly in books by Seymour Hersh, Thomas B. Ricks, Bob Woodward, and others. The newspapers, magazines, and broadcast outlets reporting from Iraq are severely constrained in what they can do because of the level of violence. Yet the portrait that has emerged from the battlefronts is unmistakably of a situation that has gone terribly wrong.

But the administration has succeeded far more than it deserves in deflecting the obvious conclusion that its blunders are responsible for the debacle. They have adopted the mantra that they are engaged in a global War on Terror in which they are winning and democracy is the goal. Polls now show that a majority of the American public do not agree with the administration’s boasts of accomplishment. Despite casualties in the tens of thousands, expenditures in the hundreds of billions, and the refutation of administration claims for progress against the Iraqi insurgencies, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban, the White House is not in anything like the crisis that Bill Clinton faced a decade ago over Monica Lewinsky. So far, in the tests of strength between the media and the government over what is really happening, it is hard to score on the side of the press, as happened in Vietnam and Watergate, for example. The revelations about Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, CIA secret prisons, torture, and denial of fundamental rights are countered with the argument that these actions somehow are necessary in the global War on Terror. And no matter how vividly all these horrors are described, the administration has proven largely impervious to pressure.

For all the media’s commitment and resources, one of the most enduring aspects of events since September 11 is a widespread sense that the preparations for war, particularly in Iraq, were poorly covered. In the annals of media history, there is a litany of mistaken or phony stories: the blowing up of the U.S.S. Maine in 1898, which lead to the Spanish-American war; Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize–winning dispatches from Russia in the 1930s that dramatically mislead readers about Joseph Stalin’s tyrannical rule; the timid acceptance of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist ravings in the 1950s. To that list will surely be added coverage of the administration’s internal debate over Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and alliances with terrorists in the region.

History will have a field day with the misbegotten war in Iraq. An immense American intelligence apparatus and its strategic allies in places such as Britain and Israel simply failed to accurately assess what Saddam Hussein had done with his weapons in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War of 1991. Richard Butler, the Australian diplomat who headed up the United Nations weapons inspectors until they were expelled by Saddam in 1998, wrote a book called The Greatest Threat: Iraq, Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Crisis of Global Security. If anything, Republicans said at the time, Butler underestimated the problem and they faulted the United Nations and the Clinton administration for not being sufficiently tough on the Iraqi regime. So could the press have written stories that showed that WMD was not a significant threat? Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who has been pilloried by her professional peers for stories that were substantially wrong, has said in her defense that a reporter is only as effective as the information it gets from sources. To be fair, to Miller and to the media overall, no one—not one single person in a position to know—asserted between 2001–03 that Saddam Hussein no longer had an arsenal any more dangerous than his traditional weaponry. It was possible to find those who were skeptical of the amount of WMD and others who were doubtful that Saddam was the source of international terrorism that the Bush people said he was. But in our argumentative age, those sorts of stories were merely seen as predictable nay-saying from people with an anti-Bush bias, rather than dry-eyed technocratic judgment.

By far the most persuasive case to me of the prevailing certainty that there were WMD in Iraq was a top-level Marine officer’s rueful private acknowledgment three years after the war started that his troops had been trained to the point of perfection to encounter chemical and biological weapons in their invasion, but the term “insurgency” was no where in the military vocabulary about Iraq. In other words, the greatest military in the history of the world sent its troops to battle prepared for the wrong war. No wonder they have been stymied. But, reflecting the way today’s media driven world operates, the Bush administration has always focused as much on the perception of what was happening as the facts on the ground. So reporting that cast doubt on the White House’s strategy was easy to belittle as politically motivated. The media is perceived as essentially an extension of ideological differences in politics, rather than the arbiter of truth.

A generation ago, when Agnew attacked the media as tilting liberal, it was on the whole (think Cronkite, Huntley-Brinkley, Reston, Lippmann) moderate at best. But over time the notion that the press had to compensate for a natural bias towards the left has had the effect of making it timid. “Bending over backwards to be fair” sometimes is the equivalent of suspending critical opinion. Over time, the vociferous and unapologetic right-wing media—the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Fox News, and the Weekly Standard among others—have refined a tone that is disciplined, militant, and very penetrating. The moderate press is often muted in the effort to be fair-minded and tepid by comparison to its adversaries on the right. There are commentators on the liberal or what is now called “progressive” side, for example Al Franken and Michael Moore. But their invective does not contain the menacing messages used by the right that to disagree with the administration is to support terrorism and appeasement.

When, after holding the story for a year, the New York Times was preparing to publish its blockbuster on domestic wiretapping by the National Security Agency, President Bush told the Times publisher and editor that if something dreadful happened in the aftermath of publication, they personally would have “blood on their hands,” according to reports of the meeting. The Times went ahead with the story, but was subjected to widespread condemnation from Republicans. In May, 2006 Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said on ABC’s This Week that he would seek indictment of the press if he could show as Paragraph 798 of the U.S. Code requires, that publication “will surely result in direct, immediate and irreparable damage to our Nation or its people.” What the Bush administration has done in its relationship to the media, as it has done in so many other ways in determining the rules of American justice, is decide that the War on Terror permits sharply restricting the fundamental principles of liberty in our society. By framing its policies as a defense of the country in wartime, the Bush White House has shifted the rules of engagement in the traditional tussles with the media to a conflict with much higher stakes.

During World War II, the role of the press was inarguably to be supportive of a life-and-death struggle with fascism. During the Cold War, the press was wary of being perceived as “soft on communism.” Today’s equivalent of this issue of determining who is serving the national interest is to suggest that criticism or skepticism of the administration’s goals in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the global struggle is as unwarranted and dangerous as it would have been to question the U.S. determination to defeat Nazis and Soviets. From the moment of the September 11 attacks through the early months of the Iraq war, the balance of belief was heavily on the administration’s side. That is why the media’s role in that period was considered in retrospect to be lacking in toughness. But just as we now know that the intelligence on WMD was all wrong, we are also learning in a torrent of revelations from journalists who have found their voice and the information that they need to make a strong case that the White House and Pentagon provided disastrously inadequate leadership of the war effort. The Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld domination of policy and tactical execution looks now to be one of the worst episodes of incompetence in our modern history.

A massive military apparatus (and a nation that fervently wants to hold its soldiers in high regard) has been degraded by mistakes in planning for the post-invasion period. The press on the ground in Iraq and their counterparts at the Pentagon gave the war effort the benefit of the doubt for about a year before the bloody uprising in Fallujah and the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib made it obvious that were things about Iraq that were not going the way they had been intended. For a while, the administration’s response was to drag out the old Vietnam-era chestnuts about how the press was missing the story by concentrating on the negative. And reporters, acutely conscious of the risks of being “unfair,” went to significant lengths to keep their stories balanced. Finally, however, the scale of violence in the war-zones, and a worsening situation in Afghanistan as well, brought about a consensus even among the war’s strongest supporters in the political arena and media: the wars probably could not be won in any conventional metric of victory and that the best that could be obtained was an orderly withdrawal that gave the peoples of the respective countries a chance to settle their own differences.

The Bush administration still rails at criticism as siding with the enemy, but it has become increasingly difficult to make the press a scapegoat. As the stories about detainee abuses and the use of surveillance at home have multiplied, the White House spokesmen have tended to adopt the position that they are, on the whole, recycled material that were already known. The president’s tone has become more strident as his poll numbers have declined and journalists, including Bob Woodward whose first two books about the war were considered pro-Bush, have come out firmly with the view that the post–September 11 war effort was in the wrong places, with the wrong deployment of troops and without the sort of popular alliance at home and abroad that would be necessary for success.

So where does that actually leave the media in its tug-of-war with the White House and the substantial security machine at its disposal? Much is being written and said about the explosion of information resources in the age of round-the-clock broadcast and Web news. There is so much too choose from in the way of commentary and opinion that it is possible to overlook the fact that the indispensable material comes from reporters at the serious echelons of radio and television and those who write for the best newspapers and magazines and are turning out an unprecedented number of revealing books. It is hard to denounce books like Thomas B. Ricks’ Fiasco that are based on unassailable accounts from scores of military and civilian experts. The evidence of failure is now too strong for the administration to get away with insults, warnings, and threats.

But there are long-term consequences of the relentless assertion by political leaders that the press is irresponsible and wrong-headed. The contorted saga of the leaking of CIA official Valerie Plame’s name in retaliation for her husband’s article in the New York Times showing how the White House had exaggerated Saddam’s efforts to develop nuclear weaponry ended badly for the press. Judy Miller went to jail for refusing to reveal the name of her source about Plame for an article she never actually wrote. But instead of emerging as a martyr for the rights of the press, Miller’s case ended with a Supreme Court judgment that had the net effect of making it harder in the future for reporters to protect the names of their sources. Even some of the most ardent supporters of media rights in the legal community concluded that the Plame case did the press more harm than good.

Philip Meyer, the Knight Professor at the University of North Carolina, wrote recently about a study made by two professors at the University of Connecticut who surveyed high school students in 2004 and 2006 and made a disturbing discovery. Most of the students knew that the Constitution’s First Amendment guaranteed freedom of religion, speech, and press as well as the right to peaceably assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Among almost 15,000 students surveyed in 2006, 55 percent thought the First Amendment went too far in granting rights, according to Meyer, which was a swing from majority support for those rights in 2004. Meyer wrote that the researchers, Kenneth Dautrich and David Yalof, have long studied attitudes toward the First Amendment and believe that the reason for the change in views is the debate over liberty versus national security.

The Bush administration’s expansive view of its power in wartime and the public’s complicated feelings about what the media does has combined to create an atmosphere in which it is easier to attack the “nattering nabobs of negativism,” in Spiro Agnew’s famous phrase, as a source of problems rather than the solution. But publishers, reporters, and editors do have one very powerful resource at their disposal that will withstand any attacks: that is to seek out the facts and report them with precision. The best stories do not need to be embellished with flourishes of rhetoric. Truth speaks for itself.