Journalistic Necrophilia

This week's outpouring of fawning, adultatory haigiography is but the latest example of journalistic laziness that has been with us for years.

"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 [for Presidents] Carter or Ford." And as Hertsgaard says now, "The taming of the media during the Reagan years was mostly self-inflicted."

Michael Deaver, Reagan's renowned image-maker, wrote in his memoirs that until the Iran-Contra scandal broke in November 1986, Reagan "enjoyed the most generous treatment by the press of any President in the postwar era. He knew it, and liked the distinction."

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"Coming out of Watergate, there was a feeling within the press that we'd gone too far," says Robert Parry, who covered the Reagan administration for the Associated Press and Newsweek. He left the weekly, he says, after it refused to let him aggressively pursue what subsequently became the Iran-Contra scandal. "There was a feeling we should be more respectful on how we [went] about things and there were places we really shouldn't go."

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While it's true that the Reagan White House raised uncritical presidential press coverage to an art, it received a helping hand from a self-conscious press corps. As Hertsgaard wrote, "Relieved by the departure of Jimmy Carter, gulled by false claims of a right-wing popular mandate, impressed by Reagan's recovery after being shot and seduced by his sunny personality and his propaganda apparatus' talent for providing prepackaged stories boasting attractive visuals, the Washington press corps favored the newly elected President with the coverage that even his own advisers considered extremely positive."

"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 [publisher] 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."

Newsweek wasn't alone. When the Iran-Contra scandal broke (exposed by a Lebanese newspaper, not an American one), newspaper editors and TV anchors around the country -- including CBS's Rather -- cautioned their staffs not to repeat the "excesses" and "mistakes" of the Watergate era, according to a Dec. 5, 1986, article in the New York Times. It was almost as if news executives were demanding passive and restrained reporting. Respected, centrist "NBC Nightly News" commentator John Chancellor seemed to speak for many in the national press corps in early 1987 when, breathing a sigh of relief when it appeared the worst had passed for Reagan on Iran-Contra, he said, "Nobody wants [Reagan] to fail. Nobody wants another Nixon." Although severely damaged by Iran-Contra -- he suffered the most precipitous drop in presidential job approval ratings on record -- Reagan was able to rebound to the point where his reputation, among the press at least, now borders on sainthood.

The only consolation in the collective blowjob the media is giving Reagan's corpse is that perhaps once his body's in the ground the press will realize they've gone too far. At that point maybe, just maybe Karl Rove's strategy of "Sainthood by Association" will backfire as the mainstream conservative media decides that a little balance is in order after 24/7 Reagan love-in.