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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
The "liberal media's" unprecedented 24/7 gushing over a controversial and divisive president caps a quarter-century of fawning.
Jun 11, 2004 | The media's weeklong coverage of the passing of President Reagan has produced some of the most rapturous remembrances in modern times. Given Reagan's long illness, few expected the gloss to be pierced by examinations of his past as an FBI informant, his support for the apartheid regime of South Africa, America's covert alliance with Saddam Hussein, or the killing fields of Central America. Nonetheless, the sheer volume of media-stoked adoration has been a bit startling to those who are keepers of the flame of objectivity.
"I think when somebody dies there's a tendency for the press to view them through rose-colored glasses. It's only polite," says Alex Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. "But I think they're doing a great disservice by making this totally positive and uncritical coverage. In fact, Ronald Reagan was a very controversial president, and journalists should be trying to offer something that resembles an honest look back at Reagan's administration."
By midweek, a few news organizations, including the Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Washington Post, had at least addressed some of the more controversial aspects of Reagan's public life. But for the most part, the reports, particularly on the 24-hour news channels, remained uniformly worshipful, as the elaborate funeral cortege, orchestrated after years of planning by Reagan's old image-makers, marched through the entire week, accompanied by rhetorical flourishes.
"Ronald Reagan is a sort of masterpiece of American magic -- apparently one of the simplest, most uncomplicated creatures alive, and yet a character of rich meanings, of complexities that connect him with the myths and powers of his country in an unprecedented way," trumpeted Time magazine. "He is a Prospero of American memories, a magician who carries a bright, ideal America like a holograph in his mind and projects its image in the air."
What's telling is that that passage wasn't published this week. It comes from a cover story dated July 7, 1986, written by Lance Morrow. The 3,700-word essay serves as a critical reminder that, despite conservative charges of its liberal bias, the press has been fawning over Reagan for years. And this week's uncritical treatment of the 40th president is a natural culmination of what has been going on for the past quarter of a century
"The rules were different for him," notes Walter Pincus, veteran reporter for the Washington Post. "Reagan got all sorts of passes from the press."
That's not simply Pincus' opinion. Reagan's closest aides were saying the same thing in real time, back in the 1980s. David Gergen, Reagan's first communications director, is quoted by Mark Hertsgaard in his 1989 book, "On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency," as conceding, "A lot of the Teflon came from the press. They didn't want to go after him that toughly." Gergen added, "There is no question in my mind there was more willingness to give Reagan the benefit of the doubt than there was [for Presidents] Carter or Ford." And as Hertsgaard says now, "The taming of the media during the Reagan years was mostly self-inflicted."
Michael Deaver, Reagan's renowned image-maker, wrote in his memoirs that until the Iran-Contra scandal broke in November 1986, Reagan "enjoyed the most generous treatment by the press of any President in the postwar era. He knew it, and liked the distinction."
In June 1986, Reagan gave one his more rambling and confusing performances at a press conference, after which aides were forced to "clarify" his comments on everything from the future of the Challenger space-shuttle program to the status of the SALT II treaty. Yet a White House aide marveled to the Los Angeles Times about "how easy the press was on him," saying that reporters treated Reagan "almost reverentially." The aide added: "He's gone from the Teflon President to the boomerang President. Nobody wants to throw anything at him, because it comes back and hurts them."
