Challenge: keep the media operating under pre-Watergate SOPs

Before Watergate the media generally saw senior politicians as friends to be helped, not enemies to be mercilessly hunted down. Also a good many things that in OTL 2010 would be "scandal" were simply SOP, and ignored as such, until Watergate. If there was no Watergate or Nixon was never elected how long could this state of affairs last? Part of it has to do with mass media proliferation but not all.

I'll detail the precise definition of "friend" when we get to the 1960s. ;)
 
Rather then some dystopian black hole of media-endorses only sponsors very openly "This is Fox Sports, sponsored by X CANDIDATE" , I think instead we might see less political interest everywhere on the media and only a flash of interest during campaigning season. This could mean people like Glenn Beck and O'Reilly are out of a job.
 
I'm not sure getting rid of Watergate would be enough.The internet and other technologies makes invasion of privacy much easier than it use to be. Also, a good number of political scandals in American Politics these days (heck, even outisde American politics) have to do with sex, so maybe so maybe we need an America more comfortable with sexuality in public.
 
The media didn't know and if they did, they did, they didn't care. Ben Bradlee never knew that Jack Kennedy was sleeping with his (Bradlee's) sister-in-law. RFK had his own way of dealing with would-be journalistic rats. Usually the first step, a threat to terminate the social connection, worked.
 
Roguebeaver,

Perhaps it might involve Hunter thompson not getting involved in American Politics (If he hated Nixon, then imagine him gdoing his stuff in the KENNEDY era :eek::cool:)
 
Without Watergate, many of the Open Records and Sunshine laws that are currently on the books would never have been passed, and thus the opportunity to do much of the investigative reporting we've seen in the past 30 years would not have happened. Reporters in those days depended much more on personal relationships with officials to gain access to various reports and records, and so they often gave those officials a pass on unpleasant coverage.

I personally benefited (and still do) from the access those laws provided. Court clerks in the old days could bar access to civil trial records if they wanted to protect friends and local politicians, for example, and officials thought nothing of barring access to government records or kicking reporters out of meetings when they wanted to discuss subjects such as budgets and zoning laws. That is no longer the case.
 
For Britons: perhaps the most egregious example of using the old SOPs is when the press barons gathered at Chequers and they agreed not to report the severity of Churchill's '53 stroke. Had they done so, it might've forced his resignation as PM.
 
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