An interesting excerpt from an NYT piece about how the U.S. news media is still recovering from Watergate:

Some excerpts:

... In the end, Watergate gave an important boost to conservatives who were critical of news organizations as far back as the late 1960's, because of their coverage of Vietnam, according to Adrian Wooldridge, the co-author of "The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America."

Watergate fueled suspicions already mounting among politicians - especially conservatives - that journalists approached their work with partisan bias.

"The conservative movement, the conservative establishment, was very much spawned by the reaction to what happened to Nixon," Mr. Wooldridge said.

For many politicians today, like Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, "a lot of their perceptions of how politics works, and to some sense, Bush, was formed in this era as well," he said. "They came to maturity on the political scene at a time when you had a very weak executive and a very powerful media, and I think they set themselves to reverse that."

Some, such as Pat Buchanan, argued that Nixon wasn't destroyed by a band of angels, but by a band of Nixon-haters.

Reporters have a different view, contending that their motive, if they have one, is to expose wrongdoing or depict conflict. Reporters can point to scandals uncovered like Abu Ghraib that follow in the tradition of Watergate.

The public can see this impulse differently. That became clear during the Clinton impeachment, and the race to find every detail of Mr. Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky. In January 1998, when the scandal first broke, only 52 percent of people surveyed said they approved of Mr. Clinton. But once the media jumped fully into the story, his approval numbers rose to 62 percent, said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for People and the Press.

When the respondents were asked what had changed their minds about Mr. Clinton, they offered up, unsolicited, the view that the media and other politicians "were being unfair to him," Mr. Kohut said.

"The public values the watchdog role of the press, but not as much as it once did," he said. Over time, the public "came to see the press as a watchdog that barked too much, and sometimes was out of control."

Watergate, according to Mr. Kohut and others, led some journalists to overreach. "It created a model of journalism that is easily abused and debased," said Alan Brinkley, a historian at Columbia University. "It created generations of people trying to replicate that role by digging in more and more unsavory ways. As much as Watergate is a model of the journalism that we admire, you can also see in it the origins of the distrust we have today."