The president asked Chuck Colson if he’d read the new book “The News Twisters” by Edith Efron, an employee of one of his biggest backers, publisher Walter Annenberg. Colson replied that he had and found it a waste of time. Wrong answer. The News Twisters purported to be an objective study proving the networks followed “the elitist-liberal-left line in all controversies,” “actively slanting” against the “white middle-class majority”—80 percent to 20, Efron concluded. To make the case, she videotaped hundreds of hours of broadcasts about the 1968 presidential election, marking each utterance for the side she took it to favor. Her judgments proved rather idiosyncratic. In heads-I-win-tails-you-lose fashion, footage of Humphrey being heckled by antiwar protesters was scored as “supports demonstrators”; footage depicting Humphrey excoriating H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael and “extremists of the left and the right” was scored as “anti-conservative.” A CBS report that Nixon was “warning his staff against overconfidence, but he himself hardly looks worried,” was scored as suggesting Nixon “is a liar.” This, the president concluded, was literature. Nixon ordered Colson to get it on the bestseller list. Availing himself of $8,000 from the same funds that bought their gear for the Fielding break-in, Colson bought out bookstores’ stock. Cartons of The News Twisters piled up in Howard Hunt’s office—as it appeared on the bestseller lists