This 1984 article on Reagan\u2019s relationship with the media is interesting, you should read it. I was starting to just pick some paragraphs to dump here, but in excerpting you\u2019re kind of imposing your own logic and it was starting to be a #same as it ever was one that I don\u2019t think is really right.
It certainly presages Trump in a lot of ways, some of them more direct - the way he feels no obligation to respect the press\u2019s self-importance and the way his supporters back him in this and roll their eyes.
Their intention from the start was to keep the press from calling the shots: No longer would reporters be the arbiters of what constitutes a crisis, nor be the judges of a President’s responsibility\u2026 [m]any people outside the Government appeared to share the view expressed by Secretary of State George P. Shultz: “It seems as though the reporters are always against us. And so they’re always seeking to report something that’s going to screw things up.” Many Americans apparently view the problem of withholding access as a defeat for the press, with little concern for the loss of information to the public.
And, like
The Administration, for example, has the stated objective of loosening Federal regulations and limiting remedies in various areas of Government, including the environment and civil rights. The press has frequently pointed to that undisputed fact when Mr. Reagan insists that he has strengthened civil rights and environmental regulations. Last summer, he asserted at a news conference that “no Administration has done more than we have done” to combat racial and sex discrimination.
But the other hand a big part of this is how good Reagan was at staying disciplined and on-message, allowing him to effectively control media focus, often in themed weeks. Compare the Trump-era running press joke of \u201cinfrastructure week\u201d.
(One point worth making - though both screen celebrities, Reagan\u2019s film career prepared him to take direction, speak lines someone else wrote, take on projects agents and executives pushed; while Trump\u2019s media background is reality TV, where you throw everything you have at the wall and cut it down to what sticks in editing)
And part of it\u2019s the underlying terrain - if you\u2019ve got proto-#Resistance press pietists on one hand and proto-Trumpian populists making wanking motions with the other, there\u2019s a clear implicit understanding that the latter are the overwhelming majority, if not the true volk, and the press are proper to accommodate themselves to that.
The press is also under fire from another quarter. Many of the President’s critics assert that news correspondents have failed to expose his faults and failures. In fact, the press has consistently reported on these matters, but they do not seem to be a major concern for the voters.
Part of it is… I suppose this is a really 2010s thing to think, but you really notice the absence of, say, women, minorities, and leftists in this article. If the press sees itself as in conflict with the Republican President, there\u2019s no suggestion of articulation with any other forces that might feel the same of themselves.
From an idealist angle you can put this to stronger midcentury Sulzbergerian norms of press neutrality, either approvingly as evenhandedness or dismissively as the \u201cView from Nowhere\u201d. From a more materialist angle, well, the 1984 press was, more than in the \u201890s let alone now, a white, male, not-poor, pre-68-matured, straight-presenting institution, all Reagan-friendly demographics.
In the \u201970s, the Democrats thought adding women, racial minorities, the young and college-educated professionals to their coalition would give them an electoral lock forevermore. For one, they took their white labor backbone for granted, but for two it took a while for those groups to understand themselves as a team, let alone a tribe. There were major \u201880s-era gaps between the Atari Democrats and the \u201cRainbow Coalition\u201d, overlooked in retrospect \u2018cause both were irrelevant losers until the DLC/New Democrats/Clinton machine worked up a watered-down synthesis (largely symbolic after the Dems lost Congress in \u201994, anyway)
And then there\u2019s stuff that fits together at angles you don\u2019t expect - here\u2019s a distinctly Reagan-unfriendly source offering complaints about horse-race journalism, framed as putting him in the same position of Reagan against the media:
The rules of engagement have also led to antagonism between the news media and [Carter VP and 1984 Democratic sacrificial goat for President Walter] Mondale. Like sports writers, political reporters are obliged to assess the chances for victory or defeat. While Mr. Mondale tries to get his message out, reporters are trying to tell their readers, viewers and listeners why they think he has had trouble getting his message out.
“Every morning I almost hate to pick the paper up - what’s this bum done today?” Mr. Mondale told The Washington Post last month, referring to himself. “The way that they analyze you, once you’re nominated for President, is without parallel.” Complaining that reporters seemed to be holding him to their own standard of performance, he said, “There’s a whole industry that dissects everything, every part of you every day, and you’re measured against this media thing. Not against who you are or what you said.”
Both Max Headroom and David Byrne\u2019s band referred to the then-hot notion of \u201ctalking heads\u201d - television anchors and commentators and celebrities, shot in neck-up closeup, who seemed to be displacing public intellectuals even as they seemed to operate within a fame/beauty/charm showbusiness ecology more than any world of ideas. From Neil Postman to Bloom County, this was a huge, civilizationally apocalyptic complaint about the \u201880s that I\u2019m just not sure what to do with today.
And then it goes on from there, longer than you expect, laying out historical background. The only thing I can think to add, they mention historical complaints about the press in previous administrations, but kind of assume you, the 1984 reader, will get that.
The thing is there was a broad sense that the New/intellectual/chattering class, after seething through the \u201860s furious about Vietnam and the slow pace of Establishment reform, tasted blood with Nixon - they convinced the country to share their assessment of him [crook, tyrant] and by so doing depose him. And that with that taste of blood they had set out to undermine the subsequent presidents \u2013 Ford [hapless bumbler] and Carter [naive ditherer] \u2013 all the while, for lack of any central controlling authority, through the \u201870s the country was falling apart. We let the press run wild, dominate the elected executive to run the country for a decade and they made a mess of it, time to rein them in.
And there\u2019s not that sense anymore. The three straight Republican presidential terms, shading into Clintonian centrism, were a bop on the nose that taught the lesson, but it\u2019s worn off. And by Bush the Younger, those classes got back to seething. Obama gave \u2018em pets. Obama gave \u2018em so many pets and so many treats and they wagged their tails but that hand\u2019s not feeding anymore and they\u2019re looking to bite again. (Like they were in the early \u201850s before McCarthyism bopped them on the nose?)
Or wait, maybe that\u2019s an argument that there is that sense anymore. God knows Republicans were bitching about the press catching \u201cBush Derangement Syndrome\u201d in the \u201800s. And my sense and a lot of others is that something did come loose at least by 2010. But the sequences aren\u2019t lining up \u2013 a lot of the Flight 93 election vibe was really about the press, or the academy, about the intellectual world more than the electoral, but it wasn\u2019t a sense that \u201cthey\u201d\u2019d already led us into a \u201870s-analogue collapse that \u201cwe\u201d needed to undo, it was that they were ABOUT TO lead us into one that we might not be able to get back out of.
Or maybe it recursively feeds back into that \u201cshifting terrain\u201d bit, that \u201cwas a broad sense\u201d is an aggregate but even if people in similar structural positions have similar takes the aggregate changes in accordance with changes in both what takes a given position has and who/how many are in each position so it\u2019s not a useful variable for understanding things, a multi-body correlation of forces problem. And maybe I\u2019m just stretching a parallel past the breaking point when I opened this post by saying things don\u2019t parallel cleanly.
I dunno. Do read it, though.
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