Salon: Reagan Porn

[kskiska]

The "liberal media's" unprecedented 24/7 gushing over a controversial and divisive president caps a quarter-century of fawning.

(snip)

"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 today's media fawning over Reagan is nothing new. The uncritical treatment of the 40th president by most of the press 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 Carter or Ford." And as Hertsgaard says now, "The taming of the media during the Reagan years was mostly self-inflicted."

more…
http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/06/11/media/index.html

[KissMyAsscroft]

1. Whores....

The media has it backwards.

[the Kelly Gang]

2. maybe they need to laud RR so much, because the present

incumbent is so truly awful.

[kskiska]

3. They consciously let him walk on Iran-Contra

"We used to do a fact-checking exercise after his press conferences at AP," says Parry, referring to Reagan's tendency to manufacture or wildly misstate facts and figures. "And we got such hostility from David Gergen at the White House, and publishers who didn't like it, that AP backed off and dropped it. That was one of the ways we were not as tough or as skeptical as we should have been." (In that worshipful 1986 Time cover story, Morrow wrote, "Reagan committed so many press-conference fluffs that eventually no one paid that much attention anymore, assuming that that was just the way Reagan was. Who cared? The results seemed to come out all right.") When covering early developments in the Iran-Contra affair for AP, Parry experienced that timidity firsthand. When he went to Newsweek in 1987, "it soon became clear they didn't want to pursue the Iran-Contra story much at all. They didn't want another Watergate -- that's the way it was put. The magazine was owned by the Washington Post, and although people look back on Watergate as a crowning achievement, it was a very unpleasant experience to live through, and Katharine Graham didn't want to go through it again. So the feeling at Newsweek was, Let's just take what the White House is telling us, the 'mistakes were made' explanation."