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June 9, 2004
"Nobody heard what you said." Lesley Stahl's Fable About Reagan and the Press.They don't care what we say, only what shows on television. Just as Reagan doesn't care if what he says is true. Lost in the visuals, seduced by an actor, the American people don't care about the "tough" reporting we've done. Such was the sense of bafflement in the Washington press corps-- then. But some of the ideas that produced it are still floating around today.About Ronald Reagan and the press, the story that is told more than any other comes from CBS News correspondent Lesley Stahl, who covered the Reagan White House. There are many versions of it floating around because so many different speakers have appropriated the story. (For a sampler, go here… here… here and here .) A fitting title for Stahl’s tale is, “Nobody heard what you said,” which is also its punchline. The best version I could find online is—no surprise—from Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler, who had occasion to visit with the story in 2000, sixteen years after the events described. In 1984, Stahl had produced an extended report for CBS trying to document the contradictions between what Reagan said and what he did. It showed him speaking at the Special Olympics and at a nursing home, and reported that Reagan had cut funding to children with disabilities and opposed funding for public health. I’ll let Somerby tell the rest: Dick Darman clued in Lesley Stahl—it’s all about the pictures. During the 1984 presidential campaign, Stahl aired a lengthy report on the CBS Evening News; it was broadly critical of President Reagan. In her recent book, Reporting Live, Stahl described her thoughts as the piece went to air: And that’s the story, Lesley’s Parable. As the Howler wrote: “The anecdote has become quite famous.” But why? Part of my reason in writing about it is to ask of PressThink readers: what do we think of this story today, during a week when the country looks back across Reagan’s life? And why did you think the story resonated so well? (Hit the comment button if you have an idea.) When I have heard Stahl rehearse it out loud, she usually says to the White House official who is calling to “congratulate” her, not just “come again?” but, “come on, that was a tough piece.” That little protest, from the self-respecting journalist inside, adds something essential, I feel. So does her fear that White House sources would be so angry with the report they would try to punish her— “freeze me out.” The image of her unaware self, preparing a report so lengthy, so hard hitting that it might wreck relations with the White House, tells us that the parable is about journalism. In it, the gods of the press, invoked by certain magic words—watchdog reporting, in-depth treatment, and above all toughness—fail the believing journalist. If you could do everything right by the newsroom gods, and it didn’t matter, then how powerful are your gods, really? The story is famous for many reasons. (There have to be multiple reasons to drive so many different authors to it.) From an amusing anecdote about rivalry among Washington insiders, in which a gotcha story about Reagan becomes a gotcha for the journalist herself, there grew a portrait of press futility during the Reagan years. And since Reagan was regarded by official Washington as the master of poltical television, the code for which is “Great Communicator,” the parable is also about the power of TV. It’s about the American voter’s seduction by television, and the transformation of politics in the media age. It’s the pictures, stupid. “Nobody heard what you said.” I was in graduate school when it is said to have happened, and I probably swallowed the common reading at first, but by the end of the 1980s the story looked more suspect. I think far less of it now. Did the events in question occur? They probably did, more or less as Stahl said. But then something else happened. Her story became a way to “explain” Reagan and his political success. But it wasn’t a story about politics at all. It told how pictures had, in a sense, repealed politics, leaving political journalism all but impotent. The story seemed to explain why the Washington press had such a hard time knocking Reagan off stride by reporting about his vacant style (forgetting the name of a cabinet member), or his abuse of anecdote (taking stories from the movies without realizing it) or the contradictions in his record (cutting the budget for programs he later celebrated.) “Major newspapers would run stories on all the facts he had mangled, a practice that faded as it became clear that most Americans weren’t terribly concerned,” wrote Howard Kurtz this week, “The media dubbed him the Teflon president, and it was not meant as a compliment.” This is an apt summation of the conventional wisdom captured in Stahl’s “a-ha” moment. A puzzle had been solved. Put crudely (but then it’s a crude story) how could Ronald Reagan, intellectual bumbler and fact fumbler, be so popular? The Parable gives an answer: They don’t care what we say, only what is shown on television. Just as Reagan doesn’t care if what he says is true, as long as it makes a great story. And by extension the American people don’t care about the “tough,” factual reporting we’ve done on Reagan (“five minutes and 40 seconds, practically a documentary!”) because they are lost in the visuals, seduced by a simpler story line than the press could offer by recounting the facts. “We had the facts, he had the audience.” This sums up a common view of Reagan in the press at that time. And the visuals: Reagan had those too. The people around him—especially aide Michael Deaver, the one Nancy Reagan trusted, and David Gergen, whom all presidents trust—were said to be masters of the irresistable camera angle, the winning picture that will “stick” in people’s minds. Deaver wrote about it in Behind the Scenes (1987): When the economy started to pick up toward the end of 1980 we were searching for any development that we could showcase to reflect a good trend. I had the president fly to Fort Worth…and he made an announcement at a housing development there, surrounded by a bunch of construction workers in hard hats. You only get forty to eighty seconds on any given night on the network news, and unless you can find a visual that explains your message you can’t make it stick. For things like that he was called a wizard by the press, and the Reagan team was said to be super-skilled at controlling the pictures. “Nobody heard what you said” was, and is still today, one of those television age tales that makes the listener feel smart, knowing, media savvy, up-to-date. And while you’re feeling smart with it, you absorb ideas about Reagan, politics and the media that, over time, make you dumber and likely to be dumbfounded by Reagan’s success— to say nothing of his standing as pivot point in American politics. The best questioning of Lesley’s Parable comes from press scholar Michael Schudson in his book, The Power of News (1995). “Stahl, on reflection—but not, I think, on very much reflection—came to believe that the White House was probably right: all she had done was to assemble, free of charge, a Republican campaign film, a wonderful montage of Reagan appearing in upbeat scenes.” Schudson was suspicious of the story’s circulation, and of writers who saw in it “powerful evidence of the triumph of pictures over words and emotion over rationality in American politics.” Like me, he began to see the story everywhere. He writes: “It is a major piece of evidence for New York Times reporter Hedrick Smith’s conclusion that the eye is more powerful than the ear in American politics; it opens journalist Martin Schram’s account of television in the 1984 election; it is cited to similar account by Washington Post columnist David Broder and communications scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson.” Schudson calls it “telemythology,” which always involves a will to believe, that “Ronald Reagan’s mastery of television led to his mastery of the American public.” This connected to another strong belief among Washington elites “that the general public can be mesmerized by television images,” which in turn connected to Schudson’s notation: “Many journalists shared a kind of ‘gee whiz’ awe at the media skills of the White House” under Reagan. This is exactly the tone in Stahl’s story. Worse than that, he wrote, was the “assumption that gullible others, but not one’s own canny self, are slaves to the media.” This belief— the “third person effect,” as scholars call it—“is so widespread that the actions based on it may be one of the mass media’s most powerful creations.” These, then, are some of the ideas-in-waiting that helped turn anecdote into revelation. Part of the “pop” in the story is how its interlocking beliefs snap into place:
All of which might be termed Reagan’s legacy within press thinking. It led to Stahl’s exasperation: we don’t stand a chance against this! Ted Koppel is quoted in a BBC report this week as having once taken a slightly different tack: Ronald Reagan has this wonderful communicator’s ability to convey to the public: “I know you’re smarter about some things than I am, and I know there are some things we both perhaps don’t understand as well as we’d like. I know that experts drive you crazy like they sometimes drive me crazy. Let’s see if we can get right to the heart of this issue. We’re talking about freedom, the American way, evil empires, patriotism, some of the old eternal values that seem to have been shunted aside.” Ronald Reagan rarely, if ever, talks over the public’s head. The public clearly responds very positively to that. Over their heads. Is this not a fear in Washington journalism, especially at the networks? If we do serious, challenging, in-depth reporting; if we explore the connections and complexities of politics; if we try to show what is actually going on rather than the parade of surface events, we may wind up with an account that is “over the public’s head.” Reagan didn’t seem to have that problem. So when the press called him the Great Communicator, part of what it meant was: greater than us! “The public clearly responds very positively to that.” But think about it: let’s see if we can get right to the heart of this issue—Reagan’s gift, according to Koppel—is exactly what a good journalist is supposed to do. It takes a keen understanding of politics and what’s at stake; it takes a keen understanding of people and what they care about, to do this particular thing well. Maybe Reagan understood more of politics than the press did, even though the press had better facts. Maybe he was a better explainer in some ways, a better broadcaster in others. Just how much of a puzzle Ronald Reagan—and covering Reagan—was for the news establishment is audible in this passage from Mark Hertsgaard’s 1988 book, On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency. (A few excerpts here.) “I don’t know how to explain why he hasn’t been as vulnerable to the onslaught of the American press as some previous Presidents; it is a hard subject for me,” said ABC News executive vice president David Burke. Agreeing with Ben Bradlee about the extraordinary kindness of Reagan’s press coverage, he continued, “I wonder why. It isn’t because he intimidates us. It isn’t that he blows us away with logic. So what the hell is it?” Now that’s befuddlement. We don’t have a category for this guy as good press getter, so why he is getting good press? Burke, a former top aide to Senator Edward Kennedy, finally settled on a variation of the Great Communicator theory, long favored by journalists and White House aides alike for explaining Reagan’s positive public image. The key, in this view, was Reagan himself. His personal gifts-an amiable personality, sincere manner, perfect vocal delivery and photogenic persona-made him the television era equivalent of the Pied Piper of Hamelin; he played a tune so gay and skipped ahead so cheerily that others could not help but trust and follow him. To attack such a man was unthinkable. “You just can’t get the stomach to go after the guy,” explained Burke. “It’s not a popularity thing, it’s not that we’re afraid of getting the public mad at us. I think it is a perception that the press has in general of Reagan, that he is a decent man. He is not driven by insecurities, by venality, by conspiracies and back-room tactics.” “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” What the press has to use against presidents is the onslaught of bad news— a wave of critical coverage. In this sense it can “go after the guy,” it can hammer the White House, except when it is unable to go after the guy because he’s either an “amiable dunce,” as Clark Clifford said, or a “decent man,” who is not necessarily aware that what he says isn’t true because…. well, he believes it! “The reason that Reagan was persuasive, I came to understand, was that he had first persuaded himself of the truth of his utterances,” wrote David Broder on Monday. “Much later, when someone hung the title The Great Communicator on Reagan, I thought to myself, ‘It should be The Great Persuader.’” Broder’s first thought fits entirely within the universe of Lesley’s Parable. Reagan was convinced he was a big suporter of the Special Olympics, and didn’t care, probably didn’t know, that he had actually tried to cut the budget for such things. The TV pictures show him “caring,” nobody hears the reporter’s words, and the whole package is misleading but highly persuasive. Deception begins with Reagan’s self-deception. But Broder’s second thought, “not the great communicator, the great persuader,” and not of himself but of others— this points in a different direction. For to persuade is not only a difficult feat, it is in many ways the essence of presidential politics. Certainly it gets to the heart of Reagan’s success. When Bill Clinton, a Democrat, announced in 1996 that “the era of big government is over,” we heard the proof of that success. Another name for it is rhetoric. But the “rhetorical presidency,” which is a school of thought among political scientists who study presidents, is likely to be among the least well-covered because the journalist’s tacit code of understanding states that “rhetoric” is merely what you put over on people. “That may be the rhetoric, the reality is…” has a deep foundational hold in the press. After all, it identifies the journalist with truth-telling, and sets out what a “tough” reporter like Lesley Stahl should try to do: contradict the rhetoric with dug-up facts. What could be more common sensical than that? Meanwhile, because Ronald Reagan was so good at persuasion “changes that would otherwise have been impossible to imagine did happen,” Broder wrote. “And the world is profoundly different because of him.” “Nobody heard the words” is spectacularly wrong about Reagan. His words, and the way they connected, were the source of his power. The eye over the ear is wrong about Reagan. Sure, he always looked good, but compared to his oratorical command his command of imagery—and Michael Deaver’s command of wizardry—are ordinary and nothing more. The public is mesmerized by images… is wrong about the public, and about Reagan. He spoke to the nation about the most basic things in politics, which are also the most profound, without going over its head. This is far more mesmerizing, as I saw for myself last weekend when C-Span replayed his farewell speech to the 1992 Republican convention. He was saying how Americans must remember that, wherever we come from, “in the eyes of god we are all equal. ” I was about to say to myself, in good liberal fashion, “maybe so, but I would rather it be stressed we are all equal in the eyes of the law,” when Reagan continued his thought. It’s not enough to be equal in god’s eyes, he said, we must also be equal “in the eyes of each other.” Looking at him, I believed it. That is a very good statement of the democratic creed. It is not necessarily a comforting statement to Republican partisans. And it is a far more interesting and challenging statement than: we need equality before the law. (Although I would not say more important.) Equal toward each other. This is not a principle the Washington press cared to follow with Reagan himself. The amiable dunce, the Teflon president, the Great Communicator, the cowboy, the lazy and forgetful and quite possibly senile man, the self-deceiver, the decent fellow who doesn’t know much but puts on a great show, the bumbler—- none were at all adequate. They sound even duller now. Not only did ideas like these under-estimate Reagan, and his political gifts, in almost criminal fashion; they also separated journalists from the majority of the country that eventually warmed to Reagan. Thus, Lesley Stahl with her parable was reckoning at too great a distance from the Americans she herself had tried to persuade in her “documentary in Evening News terms.” In swallowing, whole, Darman’s cynical and self-serving lesson, “nobody heard what you said,” she was waving bye-bye to her viewers’ intelligence, but then flattering the listeners to her story, with its savvy take on media age politics, its illusion of deep insight, its phony a-ha moment, its superficial tone of despair. It never ocurred to Stahl, I think, that getting her to split the public in her mind—those gullible viewers vs. we savvy listeners to her story—might have served Darman’s purposes all along. There’s a simpler explanation for all this, and some are content with it. Journalists are east coast establishment, big government liberals. Reagan was a west coast conservative who believed that government was the problem. They couldn’t understand him because they weren’t anything like him in their basic beliefs. So they blamed it on television, and credulous Americans. No doubt this has something to do with it, and one could argue that the birth of Fox News Channel was right there. For better or worse, Reagan was a man of large ideas. Ted Kennedy said it: “It would be foolish to deny that his success was fundamentally rooted in a command of public ideas.” But do journalists really believe that big ideas count in politics, and do they know how to cover them? I would say no, in general they don’t. All of Reagan’s skills and strengths were tied up with the rhetorical presidency. But are journalists equipped to even understand what that is— the crafting of virtue, the search for the responsive chord? I would say no again. Reagan had mastered the symbolic part of politics. And while most journalists know that a peculiarity of the American president is to simultaneously represent the glory of the nation and head the government (two different jobs in most democracies, including the one in Iraq we are trying to create) which of these two do they regard as real, and as their informational quarry? In which realm do you win Pulitizers and Duponts? Well, it’s the second: head of government. But if you are looking for Ronald Reagan, in particular—his substance, as a politician—then it’s wiser to start with the layered symbols of American democracy, and his mastery of their language for purposes political. The material was all there in Reagan’s America by Garry Wills (1987), published while the Gipper was still in office. Smart journalists read brilliant books like that. But they cannot easily change the press so that it reflects an enlarged understanding. Along with “yeah, that’s the rhetoric, but the reality is….” the press has a nearly foundational belief that symbols must be opposed to substance. For understanding Ronald Reagan that is a hopeless formula. His greatest words, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” were just words (it was a symbolic request) and yet they shine now as a deed, and reveal for us how an actor-turned-president became president-as-world-actor, making new facts. Reagan, you see, had great political imagination, something that to this day the press does not see lacking in itself. Lesley’s dim parable is finally about that. After Matter: Notes, reactions & links…. So what do we think… of Stahl’s story today, in this week where we glance back at Reagan’s life? Hit the comment button if you have thought. William Powers in the National Journal (June 11): There’s a part of him that few in the media have ever understood well, and fewer still knew how to cover, though it drove him to the presidency and was responsible for the immense popularity we witnessed this week….I’m talking about Reagan’s charisma… Political reporters are supposed to care about concrete real-world stuff like polls, war chests, swing states, and, of course, the issues. What political reporters are definitely not supposed to care about, not too much anyway, is the charisma of political figures— the strange personal magnetism that allows certain rare people like Ronald Reagan to capture the public’s imagination and affection….That Reagan was a Hollywood celebrity, and had the charisma that goes with that trade, caused a lot of media people to deeply underestimate him, when he was running for president and afterwards. Michael Schudson wrote this in an e-mail to PressThink: “Lesley’s Parable.” Exactly. Used to show that a picture’s worth 10,000 words…. There was such a powerful belief that Reagan’s TV magic bowled over the American public that journalists wrote that — over and over — even when (1981-late 1983) his approval ratings were lower than for any other newly elected president since WW2. The press was convinced for various reasons of Reagan’s popularity, but among them the fact that the press had not initially taken him seriously, they thought he was all surface and no substance and so they were willing and eager to believe that surface and glitz is what won him his popularity. Not so. (1) He wasn’t very popular in those first years and (2) He was making REAL headway in his policies. R.W. Apple in the New York Times (June 11): “It could be argued that Mr. Reagan’s greatest triumphs came in his role as chief of state rather than as chief of government.” Charles Krauthammer in Time: “The ungenerous would say he had a great presidency but was not a great man. That follows the tradition of his opponents who throughout his career consistently underestimated him, disdaining him as a good actor, a Being There simpleton who could read scripts written for him by others. In fact, Reagan frustrated his biographers because he was so complex — a free-market egalitarian, an intellectually serious nonintellectual, an ideologue with great tactical flexibility.” I agree about the “so complex” part. Krauthammer also quotes Edward Kennedy: “… Whether we agreed with him or not, Ronald Reagan was a successful candidate and an effective President above all else because he stood for a set of ideas. He stated them in 1980—and it turned out that he meant them—and he wrote most of them not only into public law but into the national consciousness.” In contrast there is this from former Congresswoman Pat Schroeder in USA Today (June 6): “Americans are optimistic by nature, and they loved that Reagan believed to his core in the American Dream. If someone accused him of hurting college students by cutting loans, President Reagan could be seen on the nightly news writing a personal check to a struggling student.” That’s Lesley’s Parable, still working. James Lileks: “We didn’t hate Reagan; we viewed him with indulgent contempt, since he was so obviously out of his depth. I mean, please: an actor? As president?… He was in a movie with a talking monkey, for heaven’s sake. That was all you really needed to know. ‘Bedtime for Bonzo,’ you’d say with a smirk or a conspicuous rolling of the eyes, and everyone would nod. Idiot. Empty-headed grinning high-haired uberdad. Of course he was popular among the groundlings. It would be laughable if it weren’t so typical— he was just the sort of fool the voters could be trusted to elect.” David Corn of the Nation wrote this “cheat sheet,” as he calls it, for the worst of the Reagan Years.
Posted by Jay Rosen at June 9, 2004 6:57 PM
Comments
Jay, Thanks for posting about this - I've read inklings about it here and there, but never seen detail to this extent. I'm also happy to see that you posted it this week, when everywhere else seems to be stuck on the other side of the commentary. I'm in my late 20's, so Reagan is really the first President I'm familiar with. I've read alot about his repoire with members of the press, and have also heard a lot about the "teflon" aspect of what you mentioned. One of the guests on a radio show I was listening to today mentioned that he remembered some reporter going into a press conference with something he planned to "nail" the president on. He described what happened as being "flicked off" like a bug on the President's jacket. It's interesting to hear that someone could really have engaged the American people to the level that Reagan had, where the press corps wasn't able to stir up as much as they thought they could - or could today, even. Was it just a charismatic attribute that Reagan had, or was it just the ability to change topics to make things more positive at will that made him come off so positive to so many people? Astute observation, Jay. I'll add what I always add to your essays, that to understand the herd today, one must fairly examine the writings and thoughts of the father of modern journalism, Walter Lippmann. His complete rejection of symbols is well-documented as is his lack of respect for everyday people. "Professional" journalism will never — could never — understand a guy like Reagan, so the best they can do is validate their own illusions with the stuff of which you wrote. Thanks for your thoughts. Posted by: Terry Heaton at June 9, 2004 8:20 PM | Permalink Some thoughts...a bit inchoate... Yes, Jay...rhetoric. Reagan and/or his handlers understood speech-act theory on some level--J. L. Austin's old-but-still-useful theory of the illocutionary act: that to *say* something is to *do* something. John Searle has added to the theory as have I in my dissertation. I re-theorized the illocutionary act to account for the role of rhetoric. All the elements of the rhetorical situation (pictures and sound especially in electronic media) are important in understanding the persuasive intent of a statement (illocutionary act) and its results (perlocutionary act). I first encountered the Stahl anecdote in James Fallows' Breaking the News. I believe rhetoric scholar Roderick Hart also discusses it in his book Seducing America, an argument that claims, among other things, that Americans are now "incapable of thinking past their eyes." I fall somewhere between Schudson and Hart because rhetoric is ALWAYS open to reevaluation. It does not stop persuading. We are still watching and listening to Reagan--especially this week. That means he's still open to interpretation. He's still speaking; he's still doing. So it's neither as simple as Hart claims, nor is it as mythological as Schudson claims. The questions to ask (as you do in this essay): How did we *act* in regard to this anecdote and the spin put on it by the various rhetors? What were the rhetors doing? And what did we doing as a result? When we act in the world because of the rhetorical performance of another, we make an intention real. So did the audience hear Stahl? I'd say some did--particularly those critical of Reagan. Others, perhaps more enamored of his policies, did not. Rhetors have intentions, but so do auditors (so "making it real" is always complicated). And it's awfully difficult for the former to control the latter. The connection between the illocutionary act and multiple perlocutionary acts is always more complicated than is possible to portray in an anecdote--itself a rhetorical performance. Jay wrote, "It's not enough to be equal in god's eyes, he said, we must also be equal "in the eyes of each other." That is a very good statement of the democratic creed. It is not necessarily a comforting statement to Republican partisans. And is a far more interesting and challenging statement than equality before the law (although I would not say it is more important.)" Pardon me if I read something unexpected and unintended into what you wrote in this paragraph, but bear with me if I use it as an example. Reagan's answers to journalists were often not quite what the journalists expected. Journalists were looking in all the same places. The unexpected nuances were hard for them to parse. Missing the meat of the matter ever so slightly, reporters failed to grasp the value of what was being said. They tended to jump to unrepresentative conclusions. You suggest "That is a very good statement of the democratic creed. It is not necessarily a comforting statement to Republican partisans." You miss that many Republicans, along with Ronald Reagan, believe that it is a core Republican value. "Equal" is a fair subject to differentiate Republicans and Democrats. For instance, which party tends toward equality of opportunity and which one towards equality of result? Which version tends toward the litigious solutions to the subject? No wonder many reporters seem discomfitted. No wonder it still doesn't seem to make sense to them. Thanks for helping make the point. My experience extends backwards to growing up on Nixon, so my experience of Presidents in general is cynical, skeptical, and mistrusting. Posted by: H gladney at June 9, 2004 10:59 PM | Permalink H gladney - so maybe he just had a really good speechwriter.
Posted by: Anna at June 10, 2004 12:00 AM | Permalink Thank you, Anna, you've got it exactly! Posted by: H gladney at June 10, 2004 1:47 AM | Permalink Perhaps Leslie Stahl needs to get a clue that what a Republican PR man says isn't necessarily the truth or the reality. Posted by: Cathleen at June 10, 2004 9:14 AM | Permalink Fascinating post, Jay. I want to come at Lesley's Parable from a different angle—the amazing credulity Stahl displays at the end of it, of which nobody seems to have offered an account. Why should she have taken Dick Darman's reaction at face value? Which is more plausible, intuitively: that the White House had no negative reaction to Stahl's reporting, no desire to make her change her tune—or that Darman phoned Stahl exactly in order to set a confidence trap for her? Credit where it's due, Reagan's guys knew how to play the press. Give Stahl the freeze after her piece, and no matter what pain you cause you've given her, and her colleagues, confirmation that the report drew blood. How much more effective a tactic to stop her in her tracks? "Not only didn't you hurt us, Lesley, you made propaganda for us." And Stahl is deflated, and pre-empted, and the crucial social mechanisms by which reports become stories in the press, with life and momentum, is short-circuited. "You can't win, Lesley, so why put up a fight?" I've always thought—and this week's hagiographical media orgy tends to confirm it—that the press didn't so much communicate the Reagan mystique (to the electorate), as incorporate it into its own self-understanding. Which I take to be the real burden of Lesley's Parable. Darman is promoting a potent and debilitating myth in the story: his message is, We own your medium. We understand you better than you understand yourself, and in the service of that understanding we have a weapon you will never be able to counter. The media's myth of Ronald Reagan, which the Reagan operation consciously sold and never stopped selling, was that Reagan possessed some set of ineffable qualities, some mystical ability to manifest through the lens, that made him not just impervious to critique (the Teflon President), but actually able to turn the tools of critique against itself. (It's an explicitly political reappropriation of the myth of the Hollywood star.) Perhaps nothing in modern American life is more mystified than the relationship between performer and audience in the mass media. The primary target of the Reagan myth was the press itself, which was fed—and swallowed—a story about its own displacement, of its loss of contact with, and sway over, its mass audience. Reading A1, the NY Times front page project Lesley's Parable is best experienced in pictures as well as words - it is dramatized and illustrated by video clips in Bill Moyers' still excellent Illusions of News documentary from the late-1980s. I show it every year in my Television and American Culture course, and I believe that, as presented by Moyers, Stahl, Deavers, Gergen, and in the actual story, it's hard not to agree with. The point made in the video isn't that eyes always beat ears, but that when there's dissonance between the two, the eyes win. Reagan certainly often won with his speech, but Moyers makes the point that in reporting the news, TV producers accidentally reinforced the message with pre-made photo-ops. The answer isn't to give up trying to offer commentary or analysis, but to question whether a shot of a public official in a flag factory is "newsworthy" footage. Stahl makes the point that even though she knew it would undermine her analysis, she herself could not pass up the glossy visuals provided by the White House. While it's not the only media lesson from the Reagan presidency, it's still quite a valid one. Posted by: Jason at June 10, 2004 2:11 PM | Permalink My brain is beginning to ache. The explanations here seem too much like the wheels-within-wheels explanations for the retrograde motion of the planets Mercury and Mars. I'm not ready to concede such complexity. It's as if people are suggesting we don't know what we don't know and don't know we don't know it. And the White House did and played us for it. Isn't there a simpler explanation? This is probably the most interesting piece on Reagan I have seen since he died. I like this insight in Michael's comment, "The media's myth of Ronald Reagan, which the Reagan operation consciously sold and never stopped selling..." I've always suspected the same of the Bush Admin. and the 'affable idiot' meme. It's the classic B'rer Rabbit morality tale, convincing the enemy to throw you in the briar patch, which is exactly where you want to be. Jay is right: Fox News, for all of it's obnoxious network-of-the-people posturing, was indeed an inevitable reaction to the chasm between the traditional East Coast media elite and the average American (the popularity of conservative/libertarian blogs is also an interesting by-product of this chasm.) Americans, by and large, are practical people with little interest in strained nuance and no patience for needless hand-wringing and smug academic condescension. Fox News is a classic Hegelian antithesis, which should give us hope that a synthesis is on the way. I was writing for film reviews and entertainment copy for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner during the Reagan years. Everyone at the paper -- and everywhere else in the "mainstream" media -- knew he was out of it -- and they covered for him. And by "out of it," I don't mean "sometimes forgetful" or "occasionally incoherent" in his statements and answers to questions. I'm talking Out to Lunch. Alzheimer's had set in long before he left office AND THEY ALL COVERED FOR HIM! Why? That's a question no one is rushing to answer. I have my own theories, but airing them doubtless risks my getting shipped off to GitMo as a "terrorist." That's the climate of our oh so famously "free press" these days. Posted by: David Ehrenstein at June 10, 2004 5:33 PM | Permalink David: I think the question of when Alzheimer's began for Reagan is actually a very important one. I have no idea what the right answer is. It would not surprise me if it's earlier than the official word. Nor would it surprise me if the press held back from declaring it so. It would have been a very difficult thing to do. Michael: I agree that Stahl was far too credulous in accepting that claim: "nobody heard what you said." Since it's my weblog and I can do this, I added a sentence about it. It never ocurred to Stahl, I think, that getting her to split the public in her mind--the gullible viewers vs. savvy listeners to her "get this" story--might have served Darman's purpose all along. Michael says maybe "Darman phoned Stahl exactly in order to set a confidence trap for her." I would call it a lose-confidence trap. Hey, did anyone else notice the audacious power grab barely hidden in Michael Deaver's casual recall: "I had the president fly to Fort Worth..." Deaver, the master image maker, has Reagan fly around to places for him. Hear it yet? Your thoughtful remarks sent me in search of online mentions of Mark Hertsgaard's book about Reagan and the media -- On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988. The excerpts here [ http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald_Reagan/On_Bended_Knee.html ] are worth a look. One example: p51 Posted by: Staci D. Kramer at June 10, 2004 6:58 PM | Permalink As much as I'd like to blame television as a medium for Reagan's Stahl-busting, it may not be so simple. Isn't more a case of the futility of crying out "The Emporer Has No Clothes!" - whatever medium is involved. Because the screech, TEHNC, is really an appeal to objectivity, and as many have noted, from various perspectives, objectivity doesn't work! Posted by: Panopticon at June 10, 2004 7:14 PM | Permalink Jason makes a few excellent points, and they do broaden the possible readings of Stahl's story. I want to be clear that I am not against anyone writing, speaking and teaching about it. On the contrary, I think it should be taught as an episode in... well, in something. Jason notes, for example, that Stahl admitted "in reporting the news, TV producers accidentally reinforced the message with pre-made photo-ops." This is straight to the point. The conflict she should have paid attention to is not words vs. pictures or Stahl & the press vs. Deaver & company, it was between good and bad ideas in the use of video as "information," and of course between a commercial formula and the requirements of journalism. The Stahl story is still important. It is also revealing of a very limited press mindset. I wouldn't call it a "power grab,' Jay. This was actual power that Deaver had. Leave us not forget Deaver was the metteur en scene of Bitburg. He saw Triumph of the Will and had Reagan copy Hitler's movements at the wreath-laying ceremony precisely -- as the same Nazi hymn ("I Had a Comrade") played in the background as it did in Riefenstahl's film. Comparasions to Hitler are often glib, I know, but in this instance it's quite unavoidable. Posted by: David Ehrenstein at June 10, 2004 8:24 PM | Permalink "Worse than that, he wrote, was the "assumption that gullible others, but not one's own canny self, are slaves to the media." Jay, one pattern of argument I've seen in several items seems to run like this (forgive a slight parody for effect): "While more than 50% of people think they're above average, the Egghead says this cannot be so. In making that statement, the Egghead is *anti-democratic*. He thinks he knows more than the population at large, that he has some special knowledge. He then pats himself on the back for his cleverness, for telling himself how much smarter he is than the common man". [etc, etc, and so on] But in general, more than 50% of the people *can't* be above average. Some are *wrong*. Some of those people have an inflated idea of their own abilities. This is just a fact, regardless of whether or not it is elitist to point it out. By definition, if there is a difference between what is *popular*, and what is *accurate*, then the people who are accurate are against the crowd and common belief. Attacking this via a pseudopopulist criticism doesn't change it. I think this piece has actually skirted around the key implication it's trying to engage: Propaganda wins over facts. To wit: "Nobody heard the words" is spectacularly wrong about Reagan. No, that's not what it meant. It meant "Nobody heard YOUR message, the boring, dull facts - they heard OUR message, the happy talk, it's morning in America, balloons, children and cute puppies". Yeah, that's a very large idea. And Reagan was spectacularly good at it. Doesn't make it true, no more than any idea which is emotionally appealing but false. Now, I *know* the counter-argument, of pointy-headed intellectuals who don't trust The People. Recursively, this is another accurate vs. popular debate ... Posted by: Seth Finkelstein at June 11, 2004 6:48 AM | Permalink So who leads the geese in a flock? And as an reporter goose, what is *your* responsibility? If Reagan was the goose in front saying "Turn Right", the flock wasn't necessarily going to turn right. Not without enough support from other geese in the wedge. Reporter geese, have a responsibility to convey to others what the front goose said, including why he thought it might be a good idea, balanced by other factors that help put that idea in context. Then they have a responsibility to sort through the rest of the honking to find worthwhile threads that help sift out compelling insight where to head and why. While Reagan had serious inconsistancies, he was able to pick up and dust off several worthwhile but overlooked threads people rediscovered to be important. More often than not, the coverage doesn't do that. It dwells on the pedantic. Listen to national news' one sentence closing zingers. More often than not they convey irrelevant drama. Back to you, Wolf. My personal observation is that there is far more gushing deification of Reagan by the press than there is in 'real life.' I might remind you that Reagan's approval ratings stayed in the 50's during his presidency, and in a recent poll only 20-some percent of those polled thought he was the 'bestest President...ever!' That wasn't even a plurality. As a lay person, it appears that some of y'all labor under the misconception that 'journalism' today isn't for the purpose of delivering eyeballs to your sponsors. Posted by: Cynic at June 11, 2004 10:10 AM | Permalink > David Corn of the Nation wrote this "cheat sheet," as he calls it, for the worst of the Reagan Years. Can't disagree with most of it... and I'll leave it up to the Wall Street Journal to match it one-for-one with Bill Clinton's years. But Corn included “Facts are stupid things." and to anyone who has read Charles Dickens' "Hard Times" (or at least look at the sparknotes), facts *are* stupid things because they can be true but misrepresent. Page 1, paragraph 1, Dickens' Gradgrind: “NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!” If you value insight, read G.K. Chesterton's introduction at that same URL. Just don't confuse Chesterton's "Liberal" with today's liberal, who deserves to be tarred with the brush as much as today's bastardized conservatives do. Paraphrasing CNN's Bernie Shaw moments ago: I think we [media] failed our viewers... because in retrospect I know I certainly missed a lot. Thanks, Jay - I'd never heard Lesley's Parable, but it fits everything else I've heard. I'd agree with some of the folks above - why take Darman's word? I think the image vs. the reality eventually did catch up to the Reagan presidency in a couple of ways. One was that the stories of people being adversely affected by budget cuts and the like eventually came through, and the second is that everyone became savvier about image projection, and now opposing sides play positive images off against each other. No one side truly dominates now. I think that's one reason why the Bush presidency - which this week became far more explicitly "like Reagan's" than it had up to this point - doesn't seem to be doing as well with the engineered image. In the Reagan era, people didn't comment on the stagecraft; that was the genius of it. Now, the code-word backdrops, the appearances with black children, the choked up delivery are reviewed as performance first, politics second. Sometimes we view that as being top the detriment of politics; but it may, in fact, be to the benefit of deconstructing performances and taking some of the power away from a simple image. And, frankly, it may be as well, that what was anomalous about the Reagan team was that they did the image thing better than anyone has before or since. Reagan was a skilled public speaker with a sense of filmic storytelling, aided by a set of disciplined image makers on his communications team. All of that started coming apart unde George H. W. Bush, a weaker speaker, with less flair for images. Clinton, while a great speaker with a sense for the stirring image, was not as controlled in his personal life. And George W. Bush is a poor speaker with a reactive communications team that doesn't put out distracting, pointless positivism to confound negative press. It just be as simple as Reagan was good at it and no one else is. But I think it's only in the last ten years that the press and the public has caught up to the Regan image makers. Reagan moved us, more than anything, I think, into the modern communication age, for better and for worse. I think we are beginning to figure out how to make the better of it. Posted by: weboy at June 11, 2004 4:00 PM | Permalink And now a few choice words from a TRULY Great American : Jimmy Breslin Posted by: David Ehrenstein at June 11, 2004 10:20 PM | Permalink Seth: Pseudo-populist criticism? Ouch-a-roo. I'm not a populist, although I think it's important to understand how powerful a force populism is in American politics. When I criticize someone in the elite reaches of the news media, like Lesley Stahl, for her view of Americans "out there," it's not because I think those Americans, being the mighty populace, must be right, good-hearted, wise or victorious in the end. "They're entranced by the images," the victims of propaganda, seduced by Republican spin, the unfortunate product of their own shrinking attention span, is just a bad way of looking at the people you are pledged to inform. For one thing, it causes you to be incurious about them. It over-simplifies. And it corrodes a democratic sensibility, which people like Stahl, because they are an elite, badly need. Populism seeks to mobilize resentment against certain groups of elites; this is not my project as a critic. At least, I don't think it is, despite whatever frustrations I might have, say, with an editor at the Los Angeles Times. I am interested, however, in what a more responsible, responsive, nuanced and creative "craft elite" looks like in journalism. How it might arrive at a more democratic sensibility is one thing PressThink is about. And this is what leads me to object sometimes to anti-democratic attitudes and habits I spot in the higher reaches of journalism. A craft elite doesn't have to be elitist in its outlook, though many are. It will breed arrogance and become insulated, however, without vigorous criticism. One of the places that kind of critic must reach is into the "democratic imaginary" in Big Journalism--or in a given journalist. I try to find stories, things that happened in journalism, where the events under scrutiny in the post are some kind of gateway to professional journalism's peculiar ways of imagining--one might also say "imaging"--American politics, democracy and the great public out there. One of the best places to look for that is a journalist's attitudes about the audience. It is my belief that for a critic of the press, this whole area--the democratic imaginary, both tacit and stated in journalism--is where you start to strike gold. Weboy: I agree with you when you say, "it's only in the last ten years that the press and the public has caught up to the Regan image makers. Reagan moved us, more than anything, I think, into the modern communication age, for better and for worse. I think we are beginning to figure out how to make the better of it." We'll know we are in the next phase of that age when we begin to treat symbols as realities in their own right, but not because "other people" are seduced by them (which leads to savvy formulae like, "that's the perception and perception is reality.") Rather, it's that symbols, images, rituals are part of what we require to know ourselves, to conduct politics democratically, and to call down the better angels of our messy nature. Symbols are dangerous, yes, and made for misuse. So are words. So is the law. So is a free press. I find it fascinating how many people here think that Reagan fooled the people and the press, but now the press is catching on and can't be fooled that way again. I see it far differently. The press of Reagan's era was clearly hostile to his policies and desperate to find a handle on him. After all, he was the first interesting Republican president since the press had added Nixon's scalp to their belt. Scalp hunting had become the latest craze - everyone wanted to be a Woodward or Bernstein - at least when the president was Republican. But Reagan was far smarter than the press - he simply ignored the game. He spoke directly to the people in a way that normal press filtering failed to block. He also had an ability to sense the heart of an issue, and address it, and to hell with the details. I think this is one of the reason for his mixing of fiction and reality - if one is telling a parable (a Reagan parable), the reality of the story is not interesting - only the state it creates in the mind of the listeners counts. And if one thinks this way, details are not critical to remember, either. As one so obviously considered by the commenters here still as an amiable dunce or suffering from early Alzheimers, he seems to have been terribly successful. From defeating the Democrats in their effort to prevent his fights against communism in El Salvador and Nicaragua, to destroying the Soviet Union, while having the flexibility to personally propose and get agreement on drastic changes in the cold war nuclear stance, to instituting supply side economics, he was very good at getting what he wanted. And he did this in the face of a press that was out to get him (Leslie Stahl for example, and others according to personal correspondence between a White House press corps member and myself), and a house totally controlled by the Democrats. So this amiable dunce, with early Alzheimer's, defeated the eastern liberal elite (I use that term advisedly), achieved significant arms reductions by building weapons, defeated the Soviet Union using a variety of coordinated tactics, altered the welfare state in a way that Clinton later followed, and did so while literally sleeping in some cabinet meetings. This leads to an obvious conclusion - as a president, Reagan was masterful - he was remarkably good at the job. I realize that many in the press believe their job is to "get" the president - especially if he is Republican. It is a bizarre viewpoint that is very obvious (probably one reason that only about 25% believe the press, according to the latest poll). The focus lately on Abu Ghraib is an example of this - objectively that story is not very important for many reasons. For example, anyone who has served in the American military has suffered worse humiliation (although without the homoerotic imagery that were shown so many times by the media). Those of us who went through SERE school were literally tortured by experts. Abu Ghraib was a one day event, indicative of a failed military unit, which was already under investigation which had long been known to the press, and which suddenly became a story so important that the New York Times ran it on the front page for 28 days straight - only when those photographs appeared. The complaints voiced this week by major media personalities that Reagan's death is forcing them to stop covering the "important" story of Abu Ghraib are telling. This is a minor story (does anyone doubt that military units occasionally have discipline problems, and in a war situation, that results in actions involving the enemy?) with its only drama being the bizarre photographs. Reagan was a teflon president because he could simply shrug off these kinds of orchestrated attacks posing as news coverage that the public "has to know" (even though polls show that 3/4ths of the public is utterly fed up with the story). Bush does not have the same gifts, and hence is a better target for such tactics. Posted by: John Moore (Useful Fools) at June 12, 2004 4:19 AM | Permalink Jay: "symbols, images, rituals are part of what we require to know ourselves, to conduct politics democratically, and to call down the better angels of our messy nature." Love the phrasing. It's a useful point of view. My thought is process-oriented -- much different than the static stuff that often passes for education in schools. It allows... no, it requires... dynamic thinking about thinking about thinking, where symbols are metaphors that help respond "up one level." That process is a double-edged sword that is constructive or destructive and you can never guarantee which of the two. When Nietzche said that convictions are a greater threat to truth than lies, he could have had journalists in mind. (But don't suggest that to a journalist, because, as Seneca said, people will concede greater beauty or strength, but never better judgment.) I don't know Reagan, and don't pretend to, but looking over recent anecdotes, you get the sense that earlier he read widely and well, from Marx on down, to refine his pruning algorithms for sifting out the unprincipled, inappropriate and misdirected. While his administration made mistakes -- handfuls of them pointed to in your links -- and while he did, too, there is enough worthwhile that Kerry, Bush, AND everyone covering them ought to re-examine how they operate. --- Confucius divided people into three groups: 1) Those who intuitively knew "The Way" -- saints; 2) Those who could learn it -- he considered himself one; 3) Those who never would learn and who needed ritualistic rules. [Personally, I hope I'm in group two, from 2500 years of writing by such thinkers, I've distilled a handful of useful "simple wisdoms" to help my decision-making, but that's for other times and places.] Those who are obliged to live by fixed rules, because they can't see anything more, might not easily understand how to perceive "the way" each step along a life. Reagan did, as evidenced by the particular funeral accolades generally accepted by all (Condeding his administration sometimes misstepped). Those trying to make sense Reagan -- and their coverage of him -- might more fruitfully look at the core wisdoms that helped his decision-making. They might also fruitfully look at their own, because they seem flummoxed with the unsatisfactory understanding they are able to sift from the evidence using what they've got. Stahl's error was to believe that a mere ideological critique of Reagan could be effective. Reagan's power - the sheer strength of his ideological message- came from his trans-ideological appeal: he was just an all American great guy. Ideology as such is unworkable to the extent that it does not appeal to something beyond itself. To bridge the gap between mere ideas and a powerful ideology, you use symbols. A critique that only remains at the level of the idea, or of objective fact, will fail. Symbols are irreducible to static, factual meaning. As such they are quite handy for patching up rifts in the social fabric - they can be used to bring together groups of people who are disparate at the level of the idea, resolving political impasse. Making the Stahl defeat a case of "words vs. images" misidentifies (euphemistically perhaps, telegenically maybe) the real opposition: reason vs. symbolization. Or thought vs. intuition. This is getting messy now. On the other hand, I just don't get it: Reagan never appeared to me to be anything more than a red-crested reptilian liar. Posted by: panopticon at June 12, 2004 1:54 PM | Permalink I would like to clarify something in my earlier post: I used the word "opposition" to describe the relationship of reason and and the symbolic, when they are in fact complementary; the problem in a critique is when they are seen as exclusive, or in opposition. Posted by: panopticon at June 12, 2004 5:22 PM | Permalink I would also like to suggest that the explanation above does not mean that in order to be effective, Stahl or the press should have criticized Reagan on the symbolic level. What may be the real problem is that the press has lost its own symbolic mandate, as a causalty of the move towards objectivity. Journalists like Michael Moore who make no attempt at objectivity partake of the same power as Reagan. When people from the right and the left criticize Moore's minor factual flubs, they just don't get it. Like Reagan, he's correct enough of the time, has a set of heartfelt beliefs of various levels of complexity and incomplexity, and he understands the power of the symbolism (although a certain heavy-handedness is sometimes present). Posted by: panopticon at June 12, 2004 5:50 PM | Permalink Mark A. York Perhaps if the story was kept in context, which is the real need for serious interrogation techniques against those who are killing our people, I might believe you. But 28 days of continuous front page stories in the New York Times, with a total of 60 front page stories? Hardly. And if the story was so important, why did it take the release of those photos to make it so – they were taken in November, 2003 and the investigation announced in January, 2004.. Our "investigative" press didn't bother to follow up. Why did this story eclipse the decapitation of Nick Berg? The main problem in Abu Ghraib was the behavior of a few members of a single unit, and perhaps a few in military intelligence in failing to supervise properly. Since you mentioned legacies, keep in mind that many specialties required to occupy a country were moved to the National Guard under Clinton, specifically to make it more painful to US citizens when the US occupies a country. Do you suppose the requirement to call up the Guard might have resulted in a less disciplined unit? Should we examine why the National Guard rather than the regular army was providing the guards for the wing of the prison reserved for terrorist suspects? That the President authorized the use of coercive interrogation, including torture where legal, in this level of war, is a story. A reasonable story would examine the rationale, the history, and the context, which includes the probability of mass casualty attacks at any time against the US. In many ways, this reminds me of the behavior of the press and the Church committee in the ‘70s – hearings which destroyed CIA’s HUMINT capabilities and created incentives for CIA employees to avoid many effective techniques. Clinton made this worth by making it effectively impossible to recruit the kind of agents needed in a terrorist war: those with blood on their hands. Now we are seeing the media run a narrative as if we weren’t in a war, but a kindergarten scandal. Isolated failures of treating our enemy properly eclipse the behavior exhibited by the enemy himself. The focus is on scandal, not the methods and requirements for intelligence in a guerilla war fought by terrorists in some cases armed with weapons of mass destruction. Furthermore, the Abu Ghraib case is blurred with overall US response to Al Qaeda in many countries. Why hasn't there been a recent story on US military training, including SERE school? I put a report on my SERE school experience 37 years ago here, but had to redact the torture and related portions after being informed that the details were still accurate (and hence of use to our enemies) 37 years later. I wish the press were as responsible. Our military training has obvious ties to this. How different would the public opinion be if they knew that we used worse (although not as sexual) techniques on our own soldiers, in boot camp – continuous and often extreme humiliation, and in SERE school, genuine torture? Why is there an absolute assumption that the use of humiliation prior to interrogation is wrong in a guerilla war? This is only a scandal if one assumes that the high levels of the pentagon did something seriously wrong and will get away with it without the constant drumbeat from the press. I have yet to see evidence of that. There was no cover-up (except that the pictures, properly, were classified SECRET/NOFORN). That members of the press had no problem publishing pictures that put our troops and all of us in greater danger is itself damning. One could argue that SECRET/NOFORN classification was part of a cover-up. But that would be specious, since there were two legitimate reasons for the classification: The release of those pictures would clearly provide propaganda opportunities for those who would obstruct our war on terror and the terrorists themselves and will do so for years; how many Al Qaeda recruiting sites and samizdat will contain the worst of those photos? The release of those pictures will make it more difficult to prosecute those who committed crimes in that action (there is a military law equivalent to a poisoned jury). Furthermore, how often does the press report how the story reached 60 Minutes II? The pictures were apparently released by an uncle of one of the accused, since Col. David Hackworth, creator of the notorious Tiger Force, a popular pentagon critic with a huge chip on his shoulder brags on his web site that he facilitated the connection. Is that a story? How often to we hear the motives of the "leakers?” Aren’t the motives of leakers themselves a story? The public does *not* have the "right to know" anything (check your Constitution), but the press does have a freedom to print what it wants. It is very telling that the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists has not a word about protecting the nation that guarantees that freedom of the press. I'll bet the public would be shocked to know this. But back to the significance of the story. What is the purpose of repetitive coverage? Does it make journalists happy to know that most viewers and readers don’t want to hear any more, and now only about 25% trust the main stream media? Do you suppose the constant banging away on this story is increasing or decreasing this number? Can anyone supply the slightest answer to the argument that the media is working actively to prevent the election of George Bush, and this is one of its tactics? Does the media forget there is another player in this game – John Kerry – whose faults and cover-ups are ignored, no matter how credible the source? That the Boston Globe has yet (as far as I know) retracted its report on Kerry claiming he received an honorable discharge in 1970? How many have reported that he conducted anti-war activities while on active duty (by flying an anti-war activist, Walinski, to rallies)? How many have reported that, contrary to the previous version of his published biography, he was a sworn officer in the Naval Reserves during all of his anti-war activities including his two meetings with the communist Vietnamese? How many have reported or even investigated the charge that his group, the VVAW, actively coordinated with the North Vietnamese while Kerry was still a featured speaker at their rallies? Is this allegation more or less important than one more Abu Ghraib story? Is there just not enough room to report this? Is one more AG story more important than a Kerry's cover-up of his military record? Without access to lexis/nexis, I believe that has never been reported? Does anyone believe that Bush quietly changing his military biography would go unreported? How many remember the outrageous and uninformed charges of Deserter and AWOL that were made? How many realize the number of veterans who, knowing the absurdity of the charges and questions, came to the realization that the main stream media was ignorant of military matters and on a witch hunt? I have certainly had a large number contact me because of that behavior. Kerry has based much of his credibility on his Vietnam "war hero" record, but there are many serious charges about him from former comrades-in-arms and commanders.? Where have these charges been reported or investigated? Is one more Abu Ghriab story more important than investigating and reporting on these allegations? Are the Swift Boat sailors who oppose Kerry (who number far more than those who support him) not worthy of coverage, when there have been a number of stories about the small group who support him? Should AG push all this out of the news? Is one more AG story more significant than the historic action of Kerry’s entire former commander chain, who unanimously pronounced him unfit to be a Commander in Chief? That story that gained only a few column inches, probably far from the front page. CBS Evening News (May 4, 2004( turned the story into a skillful hit job, painting the veterans as "unleash[ing] decades of bitterness," but painting the organizers as tied to the Bush Campaign. The overall tone of the piece is summed up in the last quote: "It smells like another dirty trick from the Bush-Cheney machine." Overall, the reporting of the event was relatively accurate, but played down the importance and historical significance. Guilt by association was alleged by the Kerry campaign and repeated uncritically (or embellished) by the reporters. Is one more AG story more important than the surprising charge by one of Kerry's commanders that he and fellow officers manipulated the system to get Kerry out of Vietnam, because they considered him too willing to kill civilians? Could this "manipulating the system" mean giving him his first purple heart - an action which is a mystery to Kerry's commander at the time and the medical report for which was not put on Kerry's web site? Has anybody even checked to find out? Is one more AG story so important that the fact that over 200 Swift Boat veterans challenged Kerry's fitness to be CIC? Has anyone investigated how many times Vietnam Veterans (other than controversial MIA activist Ted Sampley) have come forward to challenge the qualifications of another Vietnam Veteran. I know of no cases from Vietnam or any other war. Is one more AG story more important than the fact that Kerry’s picture, as of June 2, 2004, was hanging in a room in the Saigon War Remnants Museum dedicated to those foreigners who helped the communists win the Vietnam War? Every American knows about Abu Ghraib. I have yet to meet anyone other than fellow veterans who are aware of any of these important stories about Kerry’s chosen campaign theme. The main stream media should be ashamed. One story is being hyped way beyond its importance, while a number of other significant stories are being ignored or downplayed. Is it unreasonable to suspect that the reason for the hyped story is its potential to harm George Bush (with collateral damage to America ignored ), while the many others are not important because they have the potential to harm John Kerry? Mark York asks a rather strange question:As for elite reporters, are we saying here that Stahl is elite and Reagan isn't? No, we are discussing Stahl. The question of whether Reagan was elite is a different issue, and frankly, a fairly complex one. It also is utterly irrelevant. And frankly, I am not particularly interested in discusssing Reagan. A great man is dead. The press was upset that his remembrance took time away from the Abu Ghraib dance. Ronald Reagan will be fondly remembered when everybody now in the press is forgotten. That's enough for me. My only interest is in my question to Jay two paragraphs down. In a related vein, here is an answer to Dr. Rosen’s comments regarding complaints about News Bias. The fact that he gets approximately equal numbers from left and right complaining about bias is not in any way proof that the media is in the middle of the left/right axis, for two reasons: the result is consistent with the theory that the hard left (who tend to be more politically active than the right) writing letters complaining because the media is only liberal, not hard left, while the totality of the right views the media to be to the left; also, the sample is unscientific. I would be interested in Dr. Rosen's answer to the following: which of the items in the “cheat sheet” by David Corn are believed by the main stream media (as represented or analyzed by Dr. Rosen) to be negatives? I think it would be an interesting piece of information. I don't ask this to debate, but simply out of curiosity. Finally, there are many major aspects of the war on terror that need exploring in an honest and investigative way – for example, what is the true policy towards Saudi Arabia and what are the alternatives. I don’t mean silly stories alleging policy formed by relationships between former oilmen and Saudis, but substantive policy analyses. What is the true threat from Iran? What are the scenarios as Iran approaches nuclear capability – what would or could the US do? What would or could Israel do? What would be the repercussions in the War on Terror? What would happen if an anonymous nuclear weapon suddenly exploded in Washington, DC or Manhattan or Lawrence, Kansas? What are the plans for this sort of event? What do experts think the response of Americans and its government would be? What if this happens when Iran is known to possess nuclear weapons? Will our ABM system protect us against North Korean ICBMs? Iranian ones 2 or 3 years down the road? If not, why not? Is it possible to do so (including the issue of using nuclear warheads on the system, as the Russians do on their currently operational ABM system surrounding Moscow). Will we hear any analyses of these issues, or is Abu Ghraib all consuming? Posted by: John Moore (Useful Fools) at June 12, 2004 6:17 PM | Permalink Golly , John - perhaps a link to your duplicate blog entry could save some column space here. I would like to address my own earlier comment about not being able to understand Reagan's appeal. I think the error I made, and still tend to make, is to focus on the disjunction between the signifier (red-crested reptilian liar) and the signified (Amercian values). It seems to me that Reagan was a political man in the fullest sense, and that the error in focusing on his personal, private authenticity in contrast to his public role and his symbolic role, is essentially an anti-political perspective. That's why attempts to forefront this disjuncture have no political effect: Reagan's gift was his ability to fight the trend towards depoliticalization in the broader culture, where the symbolic is rejected because it doesn't conform to the facts, or is too imprecise. But this imprecision is exactly what gives the symbolic the power to make people "take a side" of the faction that most effectively uses the symbolic in conjunction with its ideology, even when that ideology is not transparently identical to their own. Posted by: panopticon at June 12, 2004 7:49 PM | Permalink OK. And I would add that the weakness and vulnerability of Clintonion politics resulted because he came out of the left where "the personal is the political". "I feel your pain" is an anti-political creed that appeals to notions of |
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