Bob Schieffer: Free Press Is ‘What Sets Us Off from a Totalitarian Society’

EXCERPT:

SCHIEFFER: "First, about the President, I feel like I’ve seen and heard this movie before. Yesterday I ran across a tape where Richard Nixon — this is true — sat down Henry Kissinger and Alexander Hague and said, 'The establishment is the enemy, the professor are the enemy, the press is the enemy. Write that on the blackboard a hundred times.' We need to check with Secretary Kissinger to find out if he ever carried that out, but battering nabobs of negativity, I remember when we were all called that. So not really very much new on that front, but it is very, very dangerous, I think, Andrea, because when people try to undermine the press, this is one of the foundations of democracy. A democracy depends on having access to independently gathered information that they can compare to the government’s version of events. That’s what sets us off from a totalitarian society. If you don’t have that, you can’t have our kind of democracy, and that’s our assignment. That’s what the Founders told us we needed to be doing. I think we have to do that."