Looking back, former Washington Post political columnist and historian Haynes Johnson says the press, in addition to genuinely liking Reagan as a man, was acutely aware of the charges by conservatives that it had a liberal, unpatriotic bias. And that defensiveness translated into deferential treatment. "The press wanted to bend over backward not to be seen as part of the liberal establishment agenda," says Johnson. "I was conscious of it myself."

"Coming out of Watergate, there was a feeling within the press that we'd gone too far," says Robert Parry, who covered the Reagan administration for the Associated Press and Newsweek. He left the weekly, he says, after it refused to let him aggressively pursue what subsequently became the Iran-Contra scandal. "There was a feeling we should be more respectful on how we [went] about things and there were places we really shouldn't go."

Against that backdrop this week's unprecedented and at times baffling coverage begins to make some sense. "There's a lot of deification going on. And it's around the clock," Johnson remarked.

There's undoubtedly something moving and necessary about the pageantry of a nationally televised memorial for a president who has died, even if that means broadcasting, for a solid hour, the picture of a 747 sitting motionless on the tarmac at Point Mugu Naval Air Station in California, as cable outlets and the four major networks did on Wednesday. But the vast majority of coverage this week had little or nothing to do with the official service. Instead, television offered up an endless stream of chatter about optimism, communication, leadership and personality -- mostly without discussion of the historical record. With such a huge swath of Reagan's public and private life apparently deemed off limits by the press -- from the Wall Street crash of '87 to Reagan's often distant relationship with his own children -- the coverage after the first 24 hours morphed into a news-free echo chamber. Clips and quotes from Sunday's coverage were indistinguishable from the ones airing two, three and four days later.

For example, on Monday night, PBS's Charlie Rose interviewed Reagan's former secretary of state, George Shultz, who told a lengthy anecdote about how Reagan had once added a few common touches to improve an important foreign-policy speech Shultz was set to deliver. On Tuesday night, Rose's program aired archival footage of previous guests discussing Reagan, and there was Shultz, from a 2001 appearance, telling Rose the exact same anecdote in the exact same language.

USA Today suggested that this week's intense coverage simply "reflect[s] America's fondness for him." But there seems to be something else at work. After all, President Clinton left office with higher approval ratings than Reagan did, and a USA Today poll last year found that more Americans consider Clinton to be "the greatest" president than think Reagan was.

Does anyone think that if Clinton were to die in the current media climate, his critics and criticism of him would effectively be banned from the airwaves? If anyone does, perhaps they should tune in to CBS, because news anchor Dan Rather told the Philadelphia Inquirer this week that since Reagan was "a twice-elected, two-full-term president, ... [this] is not the time for a seminar on his strengths and weaknesses."

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