“The media’s weeklong coverage of the passing of President Reagan has produced some of the most rapturous remembrances in modern times,” complains Salon‘s Eric Boehlert:
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 coverage, 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.
Was the media’s coverage more hagiography than history? National Public Radio’s ombudsman Jeffrey A. Dvorkin observes that, in his shop at least, the line of objectivity occasionally was crossed. “Some reports,” wrote Dvorkin, “felt more like eulogies than the clear-eyed journalism listeners expect from the public broadcaster.”
Boehlert suggests that the outpouring of praise for a man whose presidency was marked with its share of controversies is the result of something other than a hankering for the warm and fuzzy era of “Morning in America.” “It is clear that the conservatives’ attacks on the press for having a liberal bias are once again having the desired effect. And once again they’re working to Reagan’s — and the Republicans’ — benefit,” he writes.
A poll released in late May by the Pew Research Center found, sure enough, that there are far more liberals than conservatives in the nation’s newsrooms, and Boehlert quotes Robert Parry, who covered the Reagan administration for the Associated Press and Newsweek. According to Parry, the media’s blissful coverage this week “serves a strategic function. When the press is under attack for being liberal, the logical response is to prove you’re not.” And the way it tried to prove it is not, as Boehlert sees it, was by rolling over: “If ever there’s been a time when the press handed the reins over to the Republican sensibility, it was this week.”
The editors of The Nation sound a similar note on the coverage:
It’s as if Gore Vidal coined the phrase ‘United States of Amnesia’ for the moment of Ronald Reagan’s death. Journalists, commentators and politicians gushed about this ‘optimistic’ man of ‘vitality’ who demonstrated a profound ‘love of his country’ and single-handedly revived ‘patriotism.’ Most of the media coverage was a romanticized hail-to-the-chief celebration of a majestic figure rather than a realistic examination of what this man did for, or to, the country and the world.
If there’s anything encouraging about all this, it’s the swiftness with which the press has already begun its self-examination. In addition to Salon, The Nation and NPR wringing their hands, today on “Romenesko,” the Poynter Institute’s daily online compilation of industry news, gossip and memos, half a dozen other pieces raising the same questions, and supplying various responses from news executives, are linked to.
MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann, for one, thinks the news this time is how swiftly the press has turned on itself, how quickly the criticism surfaced. Olbermann anchored about four hours of the cable channel’s Reagan coverage Saturday, and he’s clearly startled by criticism that he and others were too fawning in their reports. “(It’s) the quickest beginning of critical analysis in history,” he told the St. Petersburg Times. “What you’re seeing is the quickest shift in media coverage and general tone in the death of a popular president I’ve ever seen.”
At the liberal media analysis group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, analyst Steve Rendall identified the pattern we’ve seen this week as one of slavish devotion, followed by instant remorse: “We’re seeing a regular syndrome,” he told the Times, “… a media that is far too uncritical of the powerful, coming out afterward like a drunk on a bender, saying ‘Woe is us, we didn’t ask enough tough questions.'”
It isn’t too late, guys.
–Susan Q. Stranahan
Susan Q. Stranahan wrote for CJR.