In the New Yorker, Oct 1, 1973, Richard Harris wrote an in-depth essay on the “The Presidency and the Press”, coving the Nixon White House and providing a good deal of background on the topic. It can be found here.
This country’s reporters observe the odd tradition of providing a new President with a “honeymoon”—that is, leaving him largely free of press criticism for a few months after he is inaugurated, regardless of the damage done to the people’s right and need to know what the government is up to. Ordinarily, the journalistic honeymoon is three or four months long, but President Nixon’s honeymoon in 1969 ran for nearly nine months. As a result, very little was said by the press about some of the most important actions that the Nixon Administration took during the period—actions that showed the course it would follow.