As the president and his surrogates and supporters contend that any notion of a Russian connection is a media creation, it is worth remembering that people in the same positions said the same thing about Watergate more than four decades ago.

That does not mean we are in the midst of a Watergate-level scandal. The answer to Spicer's exasperated question could be yes. If the FBI's ongoing investigation ultimately reaches the definitive conclusion that the Trump campaign did not work with Russia to meddle in last year's election — and if journalists feel confident that Trump's hand-picked replacement for James B. Comey finished the probe with integrity — then, at that point, the press will “accept this idea that there was no collusion.”

In the meantime, it is illogical to assume that because no hard evidence of collusion has been made public, none must exist. Yet, that is exactly what the president and his allies say the media ought to do. And their attitudes toward the journalists hunting for evidence carry echoes of the 1970s.

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A front-page article in The Washington Post on March 28, 1973, described the way Republicans accused the media of exaggerating the significance of Watergate. Here's an excerpt:

That point — that press coverage of Watergate is not nearly so intensive outside Washington — is stressed by most Republicans when questioned about the impact of the case. John D. Ehrlichman, the president’s chief assistant for domestic affairs, said in a recent interview that he seldom is asked a question about Watergate when he travels around the country. The whole issue, he said, operates on two levels — media attention and the interest of the average individual, which is very low.

At the time this story was published, The Post had reported that the June 1972 break-in at Democratic headquarters inside the Watergate hotel and office complex was part of an elaborate scheme to help reelect Richard Nixon. Former Nixon aides G. Gordon Liddy and James W. McCord Jr. already had been convicted of conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping.

The scope of Nixon's direct involvement was not yet known, however.

Two months later, in May 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew went after the media in remarks in Charlottesville, The Post reported:

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Drawing both boos and applause from about 4,000 people attending a University of Virginia student legal forum here, Agnew said that “some elements of the press” had made some contribution to unraveling the Watergate case but that their contribution has been “overblown by self-adulating rhetoric.” It’s a “very short jump to McCarthyistic techniques from what’s going on now,” the vice president said in answer to questions — many of them hostile — from the audience. He said some of the press has been guilty of “double hearsay,” “undisclosed source rumor” and “character assassination” and asserted that the public would have eventually been informed of all details of the Democratic headquarters bugging and related incidents without it.

Forty-four years later, the terms have changed — the “self-adulating” press is now “elite,” and “undisclosed source rumor” has been shortened to “leaks” — but the message is essentially the same.

It is an effective message, too. In January 1974 — after the Saturday Night Massacre; after “I'm not a crook” — the New York Times found that in Nixon country, the media still was viewed as the bad guy, not the president. A reporter shadowed Rep. Walter Flowers (D-Ala.) as he participated in a radio call-in show one day.

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“A local leader of the anti-black Citizens' Council called to complain that Watergate had been invented by the news media,” journalist Marjorie Hunter wrote. “A woman called to say that the news media ‘is just looking for bad things to say about our president.’ ”

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Hunter also covered Rep. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) at a town-hall event in Hattiesburg and reported that “no one raised the issue of impeachment during a long question-and-answer period.” Lott finally brought it up:

“I'm going to read every scrap of paper I can get my hands on before I decide how to vote,” he said. But he added, “I don't think Congress will impeach President Nixon.” He beamed happily as the crowd applauded loudly.

Six months later, the House Judiciary Committee recommended impeachment, and Nixon soon resigned.