Jesse Helms has won another one!

Back in the 1980s, when I was just a young reporter in Lenoir, North Carolina, Jesse Helms had taken after Dan Rather. It was 1985 and Helms called on conservatives to buy CBS stock and in sufficient numbers to gain control of the company.
Helms, our notorious “Senator No,” was upset with Rather. The CBS news hound, if you remember, had been anchor for a few years after replacing Walter Cronkite and Helms wanted Rather fired. Rather had made a habit of confronting Republicans in Washington. If you remember, Rather famously, or infamously depending on your point of view, confronted Richard Nixon at a press conference with a belligerent response to a quip by Nixon. But Jesse’s efforts failed to get CBS brass to send Rather packing.
Well, that was funny at the time and I had some fun writing opinion columns supporting the freedom of the press and getting stinging letters to the editor back from Carter Wrenn, one of Jesse’s more right-wing minions in the Congressional Club. That was Helm’s keep me in Washington organization that searched for money across the nation and even, some have said, from some foreign donors.
Rather wasn’t fired, and neither was I. All seemed safe in the world of journalism. Even a guy as powerful as Jesse Helms couldn’t crash the First Amendment.
I have come to the conclusion, however, that Jesse Helms actually won that war. While I might have won a small skirmish in that great campaign to cripple the independent press in America, Helms and his minions, like Wrenn and Tom Ellis were able to keep Helms in power by defeating the most powerful Democrat of his generation, Jim Hunt. They were able to get Republicans, and not just country club Republicans like Jim Broyhill, elected to state office. They got conservative, really off the wall right-wing Republicans elected even at the expense of more moderate Republicans office holders. Helm’s cry for conservatives to buy stock and own a network and fire its top anchor proved farsighted.
What’s going on today in our world of media? Newspapers are sloughing off newsroom employees about as fast as an Ebola victim sheds blood. Our broadcast news organizations are weak shadows of the broadcast newsrooms of the past. And we did it to ourselves. One thing you could say about Jesse Helms, there was no hubris there. He always knew that it could end for him if he ever let his guard down. But we in the news media were only too content to sit on our powerful perches and believe the First Amendment was the only protection we needed from the likes of Jesse Helms, Carter Wrenn and Tom Ellis and the others who have spent the past two decades attacking the press at every opportunity.