From an interesting
May 2017 Vox article (emphasis added):
Consider how conservative radio host Clarence Manion framed the role of the media in the early days of the Watergate hearings. In an interview with Dan Lyons, an anticommunist Catholic writer, Manion directly attacked the freedom of the press. That noble-sounding phrase, he argued, was something journalists hid behind to appear uniquely vulnerable to government overreach; in fact, the media held the cards.
The result, he told his listeners, is that a gullible public is caught in the talons of a power that ironically disguises itself as freedom. Lyons echoed the charge, arguing that Watergate had indeed exposed a dangerous concentration of power but in the press, not the executive branch.
As the rest of the nation followed the unfolding story of corruption and cover-ups, the Watergate-as-liberal-conspiracy narrative quickly took hold in conservative media. After listening to the Lyons interview, Paul Harvey, the radio personality, repeated the attack in his nationally syndicated broadcast. How, he wondered, could the American people accept an all-powerful media capable of turning a prosecution into a persecution? And when Sen. Jesse Helms appeared on Manions show, he railed against the incredible New York Times-Washington Post syndicate, which controls to a large degree what the American people will read and learn.