I was watching CNN's documentary series about the 1970's, and being about the 70's, Nixon is, of course, heavily featured. It got me reading about his years after his resignation. He started working heavily on a "come back" in 1974, and worked tirelessly on rebuilding his political ties and public image. He met with world leaders , wrote memoirs and gave interviews. He became a best selling author, and his interviews became some of the most watched program in television history at the time. He supported Ronald Regan, and appeared in campaign adverts. From what I can tell, by the time he was meeting with Bill Clinton in the oval office in 1993, he was regarded as a respected elder statesman, with a great political mind and an excellent memory.
Nowadays, however, any portrayal of him in movies or television has him as this bumbling , sweaty, cowardly imbecile. He may have committed huge mistakes during his time in office, but he was never considered stupid, and he may have been paranoid during the investigation , but he always had a pretty domineering personality. He was clearly respected when he died, and his service was attended by 42,000 people , including Clinton and former presidents Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush. I'm just wondering how a man that had spent the last decade of his life redeeming himself could have such a negative public opinion today.
Modern scholarship does not remember Richard Nixon as a joke, and this has little to nothing to do with what he did after his presidency. He and his close adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger ushered in a new age of Cold War foreign policy by relaxing relations with the Soviet Union and opening relations with the People's Republic of China. The arms reduction treaty that he signed with the Soviet Union in 1972 marked the high point of the period of Detente. Nixon also expanded the scope of the American war in Vietnam but also later brought an end to American involvement in the conflict. Scholars and politicians have both praised and criticized literally every single one of these foreign policy initiatives, but no one doubts the immense role that Nixon played in the evolution of American foreign policy. In my experience, scholars have shown less interest in his domestic successes, such as overseeing the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, but, importantly, they do not posited Nixon as a failure at home to counterbalance his successes abroad. Indeed, Nixon won the 1972 elections by one of the greatest landslides of all time, indicating how successful he seemed as a president to America at the time.
Criticism of Nixon centers on his illegal activities as president. No matter how hard he tried to rehabilitate himself, the fact remains that he used his power as president to enforce his political will on the nation. He used the FBI and the CIA to combat political figures that opposed him, he spied on these same people, and he oversaw the illegal break in of the Democratic Party headquarters at Watergate. When all of this came to light, he tried to use the presidency to avoid prosecution. When the courts discovered that Nixon had been tapping all phone calls in the White House, they ordered those tapes to be turned over; Nixon subsequently deleted portions of those tapes before doing so. Even then, the tapes implicated him in the crimes that he thought he could commit as president. And while Congress did impeach Nixon, he never received any legal punishment for his crimes--after he resigned, his successor Gerald Ford pardoned him for all that he had done. No serious scholar perceives Nixon as a "joke." They do, however, tend to portray him as a shady and power-hungry individual who perceived himself as above the law and who was willing to accomplish his goals by any means necessary. Far from a "joke," scholars show more interest in Nixon, a president of enormous successes and failures, than many of the other presidents of the twentieth century.
(As a side note: We aren't really supposed to talk about events today, or even in the past twenty years, and so I haven't addressed the component of your question asking about Nixon's presentation in the media today. Nevertheless, I want to ask--you aren't referring specifically to Futurama's Nixon, are you? It seems that that particular representation acts as a primary exposure to Nixon for many people today.)
I guess if you love the way things are today you might say Nixon is "regarded as a respected elder statesman, with a great political mind and an excellent memory."
I hated the public Nixon then and I hate the public Nixon now even more. I concede that the private Nixon who revealed himself in the 1980s could be witty and charming but the public Nixon between 1970-74 was a monster. In those days, we thought the best way to deal with political monsters, like Nixon, was to laugh at them. Think of Mel Brooks's The Producers (1968).
Those of us who were both young and became politically aware between 1965-74 carried our opinions of Nixon with us as we moved on, and usually up, in life.
For example, the NYT's Gail Collins, myself and millions like us were out in the streets against Nixon between 1970-74. Now Collins and myself could not be further apart politically; Collins is in the bag for Hilly and I'm in the bag for Trump, but to this day I think we would still agree that Nixon and Nixonism were quite evil and inflicted irreparable damaged on the Republic.