On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency

From Library Journal
During the Reagan years, the White House Press Corps has "functioned less as an independent than as a palace court press," according to Hertsgaard. Basing his arguments on hundreds of interviews with important administration leaders and reporters, Hertsgaard convincingly portrays the White House press as noncritical and sycophantic. As members of the same power elite that they write about, White House reporters more often than not agree with the President's policies. In addition, they have been reluctant to strongly criticize Reagan for fear of being cut off from the flow of information and of losing their privileged status.


On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency
by Mark Hertsgaard
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988

From Amazon.com

ON BENDED KNEE: THE PRESS AND THE REAGAN PRESIDENCY is (now) a historical snapshot and a thorough analysis of that emerging picture. The focus of attention is upon the exact relationship between (not surprisingly) the press apparatus of the Reagan Administration and the press itself. And his conclusion — that Reagan faced a press that rarely even thought about trying to draw blood — is something that any Reagan supporter would find hard to argue. After all, author Mark Hertsgaard even gets some quotes from Reagan Administration officials who basically agree with his argument.

ON BENDED KNEE was published in 1988 (the book mentions the on-going Presidential campaign of that year, but seems blissfully unaware of its conclusion), and the main feature separating this political book from political books of today is that there appears to have been actual research put into it. While some modern books seem content to rest their conclusions on the backs of half-remembered interviews on CNN or from rumors they gleamed off the Internets, Hertsgaard interviewed over 175 persons. Persons from both the press and the Reagan Administration.

It's these interviews that drive the book. Hertsgaard's technique is to proceed chronologically, letting the quotes build up an individual story, and then inserting his own analysis to show how these specific events fall into an overall pattern. Hertsgaard spends time analyzing both the construction/distribution of the Reagan "message" and how that message was parsed by the media. The pattern seems eerily similar to the post-9/11 coverage of today's government and those parallels will seem obvious and ominous.

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— Andrew McCaffrey, Amazon.com, Aug 2005

more at:

http://www.markhertsgaard.com/books/101

The corporate media's hagiography and historical revisionism of the Reagan era is bad enough, but for Democrats to play into it is inexcusable.