![[assets/covers/richard-nixon.jpg]] Richard Nixon (1913–1994) was the 37th President of the United States, who resigned in 1974 following the Watergate scandal. He is remembered as a figure of profound political intelligence combined with a paranoid, self-defeating relationship to truth, a combination that makes him a persistent reference point for later politicians who share the pathology. ## The reflex to discredit When Nick Ut’s photograph of Kim Phuc was published in 1972, Nixon mused on his secret White House recordings whether the image had been faked. The reflex is revealing. Rather than reckoning with what the photograph showed (a nine-year-old girl, naked and burning, fleeing a napalm strike ordered by his administration), Nixon reached instinctively for a way to make the image not true.[^coti-p13] This is a specific kind of motivated reasoning: the conclusion precedes the evidence. It’s possible Nixon genuinely didn’t know the scale of atrocity occurring in Vietnam; it’s also possible he simply didn’t want it to be true and was clutching at straws. Either way, the move is the same: attack the image’s authenticity rather than engage with its content. That [[Photojournalism|documentary photographs]] can be dismissed this way says something about the power they hold; that the dismissal comes before any investigation says something about character. The parallel to Donald Trump is hard to ignore. The confidence, the arrogance, the immediate pivot to fakery when confronted with inconvenient evidence: Nixon feels like D.T. before D.T. What the comparison clarifies is that the ‘fake news’ instinct is not a product of the social media information environment. It predates it by fifty years. It is a personality type finding the tools available to it in a given era, not a pathology the internet created. ## Selected passages > ‘U.S. President Richard Nixon mused on his secret White House recordings whether it had been faked;‘ > > *Custodians of the Internet*, p. 13 ## Appearances - *Custodians of the Internet*, Tarleton Gillespie (2018), Ch. 1 ‘All Platforms Moderate’, p. 13 [^coti-p13]: [[Custodians of the Internet (2018)]], p. 13 · *‘U.S. President Richard Nixon mused on his secret White House recordings whether it had been faked;’*