Ronald Reagan: Beloved by the Media

by Mark Hertsgaard
The Nation, Jun 28, 2004

Ronald Reagan lived a charmed life in many respects, and none more so than in his relationship with the American news media. Their adoring post-mortem coverage was completely in keeping with how they treated Reagan during virtually his entire presidency. Indeed, Reagan's accomplishments as president are impossible to understand without recognizing the way he and his advisers turned the American media, especially television, into a national megaphone for his policies.

Most obituaries of Reagan have noted the decisive role that public relations played in his White House, and it's true that the former actor's PR apparatus pioneered or perfected many of the news management techniques now taken for granted by the U.S. press and public alike. The media's own complicity in the process has generally gone unmentioned, however, perhaps because it is journalists who write the obituaries. Although the Reagan White House did not shrink from censoring news, most famously during the 1983 invasion of Grenada, the taming of the media during the Reagan years was mostly self-inflicted.

Reagan's own advisers admitted as much. Reagan was called the Teflon president because blame never stuck to him, an outcome reporterrs attributed to his sunny personality. But David Gergen, the former White House communications director, told me, A lot of [the teflon] came from the press. They didn't want to go after him that toughly. Ben Bradlee, the former executive editor of the Washington Post, agreed: We have been fairer to Ronald Reagan than to any president since I've been at the Post.

In On Bended Knee, a book about the press and Reagan based on interviews with scores of journalists, news executives and administration officials, I documented numerous cases of self-censorship. The management of CBS News, allegedly the most liberal of America's TV networks, ordered its Washington bureau and in particular White House correspondent Lesley Stahl to tone down criticism of Reagan because ordinary Americans supposedly didn't want to hear it. At The New York Times, correspondent Raymond Bonner was pulled off the Central America beat after his expose of a civilian massacre by U.S.-trained forces angered administration officials and their right-wing allies at The Wall Street Journal editorial page. A camera crew for ABC News filmed troops on their way to Grenada and got confirmation of the impending invasion from U.S. officials in the region, but their executive producer in New York trusted an off-the-record denial by the Pentagon more than he trusted his own reporters and killed the story.

But the friendly coverage of Reagan usually had less dramatic explanations. One reason was technical: Reagan and his PR apparatus knew how to get their desired message across while satisfying the media's appetite for interesting stories and appealing visuals. The apparatus understood the value of repetition— in an information-saturated society, only messages that get repeated can pierce the static and register on the public consciousness—and they pursued it with discipline and skill. Reagan's PR was planned months in advance and fine-tuned every morning in meetings that set the line of the day that the administration's spokesman would duly repeat to reporters. The settings of the president's public appearances were carefully controlled so he stood before flattering backdrops and too far away for reporters to ask questions.

A second, more profound source of the friendly coverage was ideological. In the United States, the media shape mass opinion but tend to reflect elite opinion, and most of the nation's elite either supported or were afraid to criticize Reagan. This was true not only of the executives who employed the journalists covering Reagan but also of most Democrats in Washington. Because the doctrine of objectivity prevents American reporters from saying the sky is blue without citing an official source, the reporters look to the opposition party for quotes and perspectives to counter the White House's claims. The coverage of any president therefore tends to be only as critical as the opposition party is. The failure of Democrats to criticize Reagan meant he faced relatively uncritical coverage (just as Republicans' aggressiveness later led to relatively tough coverage of Bill Clinton). This dynamic was especially helpful to Reagan on foreign policy, where Democrats feared that any criticizing would make them look insufficiently tough. Thus when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev unilaterally halted nuclear testing and invited Reagan to do the same, the halt went unreported in the United States until Gorbachev extended it a second and third time, when it was finally mentioned but dismissed by ABC News correspondent Sam Donaldson as nothing but propaganda.

In the American system of checks and balances, it is not the media's job to be for or against any president, but it is their job to make the reality, rather than the spin, of the president's policies clear so citizens can intelligently decide whether to support them. This, the American news media largely failed to do during the Reagan years. Ronald Reagan was no mere media creation, a puppet who delivered lines on behalf of backstage handlers. He was a canny politician and gifted leader who intuitively understood the political power of the media and exploited it to the fullest. He had a clear vision of where he wanted to take the country and he communicated it with optimism, conviction and humility, which allowed him to reach beyond his right-wing base and gain support from the middle third of the electorate without whom no American president can govern successfully.

Reagan went on to transform the underlying assumptions of American politics so decisively that his anti-government, pro-market views still dominate policymaking a generation later. His deregulation of broadcasting gave rise to today's monopolized media industry, while his attacks on the supposed bias of the press has journalists bending over backward to prove they're not liberals. Because he changed the world so profoundly, Reagan will be remembered as one of the two or three most important presidents of the 20th century. But he could he have accomplished none of this without the American media, which having glorified him in life have now deified him in death.