Jewish control of the media?

I just read an interesting article entitled "Jewish Media Stranglehold?" on the website of The Nation magazine. The article starts out by relating part of a conversation between President Nixon and Reverend Billy Graham found on Nixon's White House tapes:

Graham and Nixon are heard agreeing that left-wing Jews dominate the news media. The Reverend then warns: "The [Jewish media] stranglehold has got to be broken or the country's going down the drain." He confides to Nixon that his Jewish acquaintances and colleagues--mentioning A.M. Rosenthal, then executive editor of the New York Times--don't know his true feelings.

"A lot of the Jews are great friends of mine, they swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I'm friendly with Israel," Graham tells Nixon. "But they don't know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country."

Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. offered this harsh assessment: "He (Graham) just showed that he was the pious hypocrite that we all knew that he was anyway."

Near the end of the article, however, is a quote from political columnist Walter Shapiro:

"This is in no way a defense of Billy Graham, but people in the Oval Office have a historic inability to say what they think, and agree with whatever the President of the United States is saying. That is something to bear in mind always in dealing with the Nixon tapes."

Historian Renata Adler adds:

"I think it's silly to take this private conversation and draw any conclusions--about the situation that year, about the anti-Semitism. Sometimes they mean it for ten seconds, sometimes they mean it for their whole life. The only significance is that Nixon and Graham didn't conduct their public life anti-Semitically."

I have always had a high opinion of Billy Graham, so, frankly, I welcome any informed opinion that lets him off the hook a little. Still, his remarks are dismaying. Anti-Semitism is something I just can't relate to. Partly because it's clearly ludicrous to denigrate an entire ethnic group, and partly because some of the finest human beings I've known have been Jews.

One small item in the article got my attention: Marvin Kalb (formerly of CBS) got on Nixon's enemies list, one result being that he was audited by the IRS every year. The same thing happened to my Dad (a onetime Republican Party county chairman) after he wrote a letter to Nixon objecting to the President's economic policies.