Reply #9: Well, that's how Agnew termed the press...he was mad because they only, in his mind, reported the

[MADem]

BAD news...which was the only news coming out of the Nixon administration.

We can blame William Safire for the "nattering nabobs" term as he wrote it for Agnew.

Quite honestly, I would say that the REAL problem nowadays is that we don't have enough of those nattering nabobs in the US press corps--they're all a bunch of toadies, afraid to piss off their corporate masters....those NBC reporters, why, they've gotta please their General Electric (GE--We Bring Good Wars to Life) masters as well as put out a punchy news product. Fox, CNN, ABC, even CBS, you follow the money and they're all making a bundle off of the US government. They'll go "so far" and no further, because they like their paychecks. It's rank cowardice, really. There's no independence anymore.

The gloom and doom types here who play out the Chicken Little scenario almost daily are another story, but if you walk the "nattering nabob" cat back to its original iteration, in that it referred to the PRESS, we need MORE of those, not fewer.