Stenographer to Power: The Reagan Presidency and the Media

I produced this paper in a class on the American Presidency in my third year as an undergrad. This paper got me into the Master's Program at NYU. I have no idea why.

With his inauguration in January, 1981, Ronald Reagan and his administration initiated some of the most sweeping changes in the federal government since Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Reagan, however, was intent on dismantling the New Deal, seeking to minimize the role and size of the federal government, as well as enacting economic legislation that “set in motion one of the greatest government-engineered transfers of wealth in modern U.S. history.”[1] After the Reagan Revolution, both the share of total after-tax income and the share of wealth declined dramatically for the majority of Americans, while large corporations and the wealthiest citizens made large gains.[2] The enactment of his economic package effectively ended the trend toward the reduction of the gap between the richest and the poorest Americans that had been narrowing since the end of World War II.[3] Reagan’s White House Director of Communications from 1981 to 1987, David Gergen, pointed out that the country was not ready for the conservative message of reduced social spending (with reduced taxes) and the radical increase of military spending[4] that the ideologues in the administration were determined to push. Yet, we are left with the image of Reagan as a beloved and popular leader who succeeded in passing his economic programs and shifting the spectrum of political discourse in the United States to the right. This achievement was not natural or accidental, but the product of concerted exploitation of an acquiescent media and a toothless opposition party by Reagan’s skilled communications team.

The Media
“The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people.”
Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black[5]

The media culture, print and television as well as radio and magazines, was a very different beast from the adversarial force that brought Watergate to light, that dogged Gerald Ford and especially Jimmy Carter in turn, hog-tying their administrations. The persistent rightward shift of an increasingly profit-driven media, the reliance on official Washington as the only relevant source for news stories, as well as the reluctance to play executioner to yet another administration made the atmosphere conducive to manipulation by the media-savvy Reagan administration, effectively reducing the press to the position of “stenographer to power.”[6]
“…The influence of news reports goes well beyond relaying facts. The key to this power is selectivity. By reporting certain things (President Clinton’s injured knee) and ignoring others (President Roosevelt’s crippled legs), the media suggest to us what’s important.”[7] By choosing where to focus attention, the media can influence the national agenda. During the Reagan era, those whom the press considered important and worth quoting as sources were official Washington – White House spokespersons, members of Congress, sometimes academic specialists.[8] Relying almost solely on these official sources could put a journalist in the position of having to choose between protecting a valued political insider or having to bite the hand that could feed him his next story. A journalist facing deadline pressure everyday would find it more time consuming to research an issue on his or her own, especially when information for a particular story is conveniently available and attractively packaged by press secretaries.[9] The Democrats were in no position to supply a dissenting opinion for the media to quote, having just lost the presidency partly because of the fractures within the party, partly due to their fear of being portrayed as “liberal,” “tax-and-spend”, or, the worst, “soft on Communism” – epithets that seem to be eagerly attached to those who question the policies of powerful conservatives.[10] According Lesley Stahl, White House correspondent for CBS News, the relatively favorable treatment accorded the Reagan administration was because Congress “ha[d] not been a source for the press in the whole Reagan administration. They don’t want to criticize this beloved man.”[11] In contrast to its reputation for aggressive investigation, the “fundamentally passive”[12] nature of the national media corps worked against independent reporting as journalists waited for the declawed Democrats to provide a dissenting voice.
The myth of left-wing bias in the national media was given lie by the gentle coverage of the Reagan administration, especially early in his presidency. “The fact that network journalists ranked in the top 2 percent of the nation’s population by income…was not easily squared with the supposition that the media were an institution dominated by liberals.”[13] However, more important than the centrist positions of the newscasters themselves[14] were the profit-oriented focus and demonstrated conservative values of the editors and owners of the nation’s media. News editors were increasingly expected to attend to strategic planning and marketing as employees of the consolidating conglomerates that were consuming the organs of information on which the electorate was expected to depend for unbiased political information.[15] One of those proprietors of information, Associated Press president and general manager Keith Fuller, displayed his personal conservative bias a week after Reagan’s inauguration:
We don’t believe that the union of Adam and Bruce is really the same as Adam and Eve in the eyes of creation. We don’t believe people should cash welfare checks and spend them on booze and narcotics. We don’t really believe that a simple prayer or a pledge of allegiance is against the national interest in the classroom…But most of all, we’re sick of your self-perpetuating, burdening bureaucracy weighing ever more heavily on our backs.[16]

Since there appeared to be few liberals providing a reasoned, liberal basis for questioning Reaganism, it would have been extremely foolish for the media chiefs to challenge an administration as pro-corporate as Reagan’s. As Columbia University’s Michael Janeway argued, with “the ascendancy of the corporate profit imperative in the news business…depth, breadth, and authority suffered.”[17] Fifty large corporations owned or controlled a majority of media outlets in the United States in 1981; by 1987, the fifty had become twenty-nine.[18] The Federal Communications Commission, which had been created in 1934 to regulate the media in the public’s interest (defined as having “diverse and antagonistic sources” to provide the public’s information),[19] under Ronald Reagan had decreased that diversity by changing the long-standing 7-7-7 rule – whereby one owner was allowed to own and operate seven television stations, seven AM radio stations, and seven FM radio stations – to a 12-12-12 rule, nearly doubling the owned-and-operated stations that were the source of the networks’ “vast wealth.”[20] This concentration of media into fewer hands not only increased the profits of the corporations but also decreased the diversity of information available to the public: “As long as we have one newspaper and only three or four TV stations doing news in most cities, we cannot rely solely on the marketplace to protect journalistic ethics.”[21]
The members of the media were becoming more reticent about being perceived as the hangmen at the decimation of yet another presidency. Collectively they felt that the country was exhausted by inflation, energy crisis, continuing Cold War tensions, and revelations of governmental wrongdoing from Nixon’s Watergate to Carter’s Bert Lance scandal. David Gergen observed:
The press in general was worried as Reagan came into office that they had been an unwitting participant in the destruction or downfall of at least two Presidents, and that they felt that the public was not sympathetic to their role. They were worried about losing viewers, losing audience, losing public support and being regulated. All of those were legitimate fears.[22]

Journalists were also reluctant to skewer a man that they liked personally. After the failed assassination attempt in 1981, Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan noted, “…those who were meanest about him lost the quiver of their meanness, because you can’t be mean to such a gallant old man without seeming churlish or childish.”[23] Since he was perceived as so popular personally with the public, the press and broadcast news also wanted to avoid the appearance that they were “hounding the President in an undignified manner, instead of pursuing presidential accountability. This was a problem the Reagan administration did its best to magnify.”[24] Maynard Parker, editor of Newsweek, agreed that Reagan’s sunny personality could influence a journalist to be gentler on the President “for the reason that most reporters covering him genuinely like the man and find it difficult to be as tough as they might like.”[25]

The Administration
In a country where politics had increasingly become a contest of images rather than ideas, there was a certain bizarre inevitability about a B-grade movie star finally being elected President.
Mark Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee[26]

These were the circumstances presented to the public relations machine that surrounded Ronald Reagan. Michael Deaver, who had worked with Reagan from his time as governor of California and as his White House Deputy Chief of Staff until 1985, said, “Underlying our whole theory of disseminating information in the White House was our knowledge that the American people get their news and form their judgments based largely on what they see on television.”[27] This reliance on image could frustrate the ideologues in the administration. David Stockman, Reagan’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget and the architect of Reagan’s supply-side economic plan, used to race against evening news time when all attention turned to the network newscasts. “That was how they operated. Reality happened once a day on the evening news.”[28] The Reagan presidency’s media relations staff appears to have used consistent methods to control the President’s image: restrict access to the President, “manipulation by inundation,” use of “lightening rods” in the administration to protect Reagan from being associated with bad news, and the consistent repetition of message (either with accurate or misleading information).
According to Sam Donaldson, the White House correspondent for ABC News during the Reagan administration, access to the President was purposely kept to a minimum because “he display[ed] abysmal ignorance about current events.”[29] The Deaver Rule, whereby the networks were strong-armed from asking Reagan questions during any Oval Office photo opportunities with a foreign leader present (and which prompted a short-lived revolt by the networks) effectively muzzled the press during the one opportunity to directly question the President that was left to them.[30] Ronald Reagan held press conferences less frequently than any other prior modern president, perhaps because he was more comfortable with scripted and stage-managed events rather than with the risk being thrown off by an unexpected question or challenge. Michael Deaver had seen the effect of derailing “The Rhythm Candidate” while Reagan was running for governor of California:
…but just as we turned our back, an NBC reporter asked Reagan about the California ad…The rage was back…he went into one of those endless let-me-tell-you sort of sound bites that make any campaign manager’s hair stand on end. The rosy cheeks and the luring smile were gone, replaced by a purple tide and quivering lip…I was seeing The Rhythm Candidate up close and in person for the first time, and it was not a pretty picture. It would take us days to get the man back on track…[31]

However, this lack of access did not mean that Reagan would be absent from the airwaves. The networks’ demand for video of the President tilted the balance of power toward the White House, so much so that Deaver stated bluntly, “They had to take what we were giving them.”[32]
What the White House was giving the media was characterized by Deputy White House Press Secretary Leslie Janka as a “well-packaged, premasticated story in the format they want” so “they’ll go away. The phrase is ‘manipulation by inundation.’”[33] Journalists were given comfortable facilities, food, and attractively packaged stories, making it unlikely that they would break ranks with the rest of the Washington press corps and generate their own stories. “I had reporters…tell me ‘Jesus Christ, how can I write a nasty story,’” noted Joanna Bistany, Deputy Assistant to President Reagan.[34] By learning from the Nixon administration’s mistakes – making an enemy of the press, withholding news – Reagan’s people sought to domesticate the press, feeding them images that would further the White House’s agenda while restricting direct access to the President so it was difficult to generate stories on their own.
In fact, the format of television news, with its dependence on image over substance, was perfect for the White House public relations team. If the information provided by the average television news story were transcribed to written copy, no one story would fill even one-third of a page.[35] So the words that the President spoke were secondary to the images that were broadcast every evening, images that “strengthened the overall impression of control, comfort, and security.”[36] For a man who had spent so many years in Hollywood, delivering a memorized script came naturally. According to Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, “What unnerved reporters who spent considerable time with Reagan…was not his misstatements but his proclivity for repeating the same memorized answers over and over again in the manner of a mean who is saying them for the first time.”[37] Michael Deaver described the method that was used to further the Reagan agenda:
We would take a theme, which we usually worked on for six weeks – say, the economy…The President would say the same thing, but we had a different visual for every one of those stops. They see the President out at an auto plant because imports are down and American cars are up. They see the President at a high-tech plant in Boston because high-tech means jobs. Pretty soon it begins to soak in, pretty soon people begin to believe the economy is getting better.[38]

In 1984, Lesley Stahl experienced the visuals-above-substance philosophy of the Reagan administration when she aired what she considered to be a hard-hitting piece illustrating how the White House used “lightening rods” – administration officials that could deliver bad news and take the heat for unpopular policies or outcomes. While bluntly charging the President with manipulation and hypocrisy, Stahl showed video clips of Reagan with Special Olympics athletes, the elderly, and relaxing at his ranch, while he allowed others to break the news that budget cuts would decimate services for those with special needs and housing for the elderly. When the Marines were pulled out of Lebanon in response to the bombing of their barracks, Reagan went to his ranch and allowed others to make the announcement. Expecting the White House to react negatively to such a blunt piece, Stahl was stunned to receive a call from a senior White House official praising the story, saying, “Lesley, when you’re showing four and a half minutes of great pictures of Ronald Reagan, no one listens to what you say. Don’t you know that the pictures are overriding your message because they conflict with your message? The public sees those pictures and they block your message…it was a four-and-a-half minute free ad for the Ronald Reagan campaign for reelection.”[39]
David Gergen articulated the lightening-rod philosophy in military terms, likening the President to a four-star general who had to be protected in battle, even if it meant bloodying a few lieutenants.[40] James Watt, Reagan’s first Secretary of the Interior, became the environmentalists’ whipping boy when the business-friendly Reagan White House began undermining previous pro-environment policy. David Stockman was vilified for the more mean-spirited outcomes of the social spending cuts that, along with tax cuts and massive increases in military spending, were part of the Reagan Revolution. Reagan was able to stay above the fray because he was kept from answering for the effects of his policies on people, and his beloved image was maintained.
The principle of consistent repetition of a simple message made use of Ronald Reagan’s natural talents, honed as a pitch-man for General Electric in the 1950s, as well as the media’s desire not to be seen as hounding the President. In fact, except for a period in 1982 when the networks spent almost as much time correcting Reagan’s “gaffes” as they did reporting them,[41] – and which incidentally coincided with some of his lowest personal approval and job performance ratings[42] – this reticence on the part of the media was the perfect atmosphere for the President’s “shameless” repetition of “statements and stories shown to be false or misleading.”[43] Factual disputation of questionable statements was offered once and then dropped, while Reagan would continue to repeat the challenged statements as fact. It is doubtful, though, that Reagan was technically lying when he would state that the Russian language had no word for freedom, that his administration did not trade arms with fundamentalist Iran for the return of hostages,[44] or that his tax policies were “more beneficial [to] people at the lower end of the earning scale than to anyone else” [45] since lying requires the intent to convey false information. Lou Cannon noted, “The more Reagan repeated a story, the more he believed it and the more he resisted information that undermined its premises.”[46] However, the false and misleading statements were still repeatedly presented as fact.
The President was a master at the simplification so necessary to televised news. His “narrative line nearly always involved clear choices between two opposite alternatives,” always remembering the “importance of providing good visuals, usable copy, and” that “‘television thrives on simplicity.’”[47] Reagan included the audience in the “we” of his optimistic vision of an America of shared values, where hard work would always be rewarded and a thriving country required only the removal of the dead hand of government. Those who questioned his premises were excluded as “they,” an opposition that was “politically motivated, selfish, and self-interested, as people who love obscure, complex theories and programs.”[48] The repetition of simple ideas and facts – real or imagined – was the basis of Ronald Reagan’s reputation as the “Great Communicator.”
His most adoring followers did not necessarily view this massive control of the President’s image as something as sinister as manipulation. They felt that they were letting the public see the “real” Ronald Reagan, unfiltered by a negative press. As Michael Deaver said, “Even though I had worked with Reagan for nearly fifteen years when he ran for president again in 1980, I was still looking for new ways to let the American people see him as I did. I was convinced that if the voters could get an unvarnished look at Reagan, they’d pull the lever for him every time.”[49] He waxes poetic about the man he served for thirty years, “He knew that better times were ahead because ‘after all, we’re Americans.’ The nation cried out, and a guy named Ron answered the call…Clearly, Reagan was the right man at the right time, and history will bear his name triumphantly.”[50] A Reagan speech writer, Peggy Noonan, adds a quasi-religious devotion to her biography of Ronald Reagan. While describing the notes Reagan wrote during his recovery from the assassination attempt, one almost feels she is describing the relics of a saint:
But mostly there was the extraordinary thing going on in the recovery room, where he did something else regular people don’t do. Ronald Reagan, intubated, postoperative and recovering from shock and trauma, started writing funny notes to people…they had a kind of magical effect on the people there…
So we all heard about the famous notes, but in time a funny thing happened. They started disappearing. Some people held on to them….But when Nancy Reagan realized that they were authentic history, that they contained within them the moment the American people started to understand Ronald Reagan, she got them back.
…It was an eight-by-twelve-inch manila envelope. Inside were the notes, the real ones. I held them in my hands in the sun as the birds sang.[51]


The Reagan/Media Legacy
In researching the relationship between Ronald Reagan and the media, one gets an almost eerie feeling that Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s close advisor and architect of his winning campaigns for governor of Texas and his arguably winning campaign for President of the United States, is reading the same page. There are almost verbatim phrases uttered and methods implemented by the Reagan administration and the Bush administration. Consider the following pairs, separated in time by approximately twenty years, the first of each pair referring to the Reagan era, the second to George W. Bush’s era:
“One of David Gergen’s pet theories about news management held that a White House could not hope to govern successfully unless it could get its version of reality through the ‘filter’ of the press and out to the American public.”[52]
“There’s a sense that the people in America aren’t getting the truth,” Bush said recently. “I’m mindful of the filter through which some news travels. And sometimes you just have to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people. And that’s what we will continue to do.”[53]

“And Stockman himself boasted of repeatedly employing the Evans and Novak syndicated column, which he described as ‘a kind of supply-side dartboard [that] you could use to stick somebody in the forehead fast, if you had to.”[54]
“Newspaper columnist and CNN co-host Robert Novak said Monday that while he learned the identity of a CIA operative from administration officials, there was “no great crime” and that he was not the recipient of a planned leak.”[55]

“The problem was they knew nothing about the true substance of domestic governance. The California crowd – Mike Deaver, Ed Meese, Lyn Nofzinger – consisted of personal retainers and electioneering hands…they were illiterate when it came to the essential equation of policy.”[56] “They never read anything. They lived off the tube.”[57]
“Prof John J DiIulio Jr, former member of Bush administration, says White House values politics over domestic policy, lacking both policy experts and apparatus to support them, interview with Esquire magazine; says it has failed to achieve ‘compassionate conservative’ agenda; cites power of Karl Rove, Bush’s chief advisor.”[58]

Ronald Reagan’s legacy of media manipulation is alive and well in the George W. Bush White House. Simple, repetitive messages paired with attractive visuals – as in the “Mission Accomplished” official end to the Iraqi war on the aircraft carrier where the flight-suited Mr. Bush had just landed for the announcement – as well as minimized press conferences and unscripted interaction between the President and the media are ongoing features of the Bush administration and provide an attractive veneer to the continued decimation of the American political and economic system that was begun under Ronald Reagan.
President George W. Bush – the truest disciple of Reaganism – started with the destruction wrought by that political philosophy during two decades and raised the barrier even higher for revivifying the institutions of democracy. He further entrenched plutocratic governance by increasing the role of big money and corporate America in the government’s policymaking process. Through tax reductions that disproportionately benefit the nation’s most affluent people, Bush’s policies have moved the nation toward an ever increasing maldistribution of income and wealth and a further unraveling of the social safety net underpinning economic security, not only for poor people and those who are nearly poor but also for the broad middle class.[59]

It will take the outcome of the 2004 presidential election to see if the Reagan public relation methods still hold.


[1] Mark Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee, (Schocken Books, New York, 1989), p. 105
[2] Walter Williams, Reaganism and the Death of Representative Democracy, (Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C., 2003), p. 44
[3] Williams, p. 46
[4] Hertsgaard, p. 107
[5] Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, The Elements of Journalism, (Three Rivers Press, New York, 2001), p. 113
[6] Hertsgaard, p. 66
[7] Gary Wasserman, Wasserman’s Basics of American Politics, (Longman Publishers, New York 2002), p. 225
[8] Hertsgaard, p. 66
[9] Ellen Grigsby, Analyzing Politics, (Wadsworth/Thompson Learning, New York, second edition, 2002), p. 209
[10] David Brock, Blinded by the Right, (Crown Publishers, New York, 2002), p. 44
[11] Hertsgaard, p. 68
[12] James D. Torr, Editor, Ronald Reagan, “The First True Television President” by Mary E. Stuckey, (Greenhaven Press, Inc., San Diego), p. 178
[13] Hertsgaard, p. 82
[14] Joe Conason, Big Lies, (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2003), p. 40
[15] Hertsgaard, p. 89
[16] Hertsgaard, p. 100
[17] Williams, p. 178
[18] Hertsgaard, p. 77
[19] Hertsgaard, p. 181
[20] Hertsgaard, p. 181
[21] Kovach, p. 181
[22] Hertsgaard, p. 171
[23] Peggy Noonan, When Character Was King, (Viking Penguin, New York, 2001), p. 193
[24] James D. Torr, Ronald Reagan, “The First True Television President,” by Mary E. Stuckey,
p. 178
[25] Hertsgaard, p. 49
[26] Hertsgaard, p. 46
[27] James D. Torr, Editor, Ronald Reagan, “The Myth of Reagan as a Great Communicator” by Wilbur Edel, p. 178
[28] David A. Stockman, The Triumph of Politics, (Harper & Row, New York 1986), p. 5
[29] Hertsgaard, p. 27
[30] Hertsgaard, p. 140
[31] Michael K. Deaver, A Different Drummer, (HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2001), p. 66
[32] Hertsgaard, p. 51
[33] Hertsgaard, p. 52
[34] Hertsgaard, p. 42
[35] Grigsby, p. 209
[36] James D. Torr, Editor, Ronald Reagan, “The First True Television President” by Mary E. Stuckey, p. 214
[37] James D. Torr, Editor, Ronald Reagan, “The Myth of Reagan as a Great Communicator” by Wilbur Edel, p. 178
[38] Herstgaard, p. 48
[39] Wasserman, p. 233
[40] Hertsgaard, p. 32
[41] Hertsgaard, p. 139
[42] James D. Torr, Editor, Ronald Reagan, “The Myth of Reagan as a Great Communicator” by Wilbur Edel, p. 185
[43] Hertsgaard, p. 73
[44] Hertsgaard, p. 138
[45] James D. Torr, Editor, Ronald Reagan, “The Myth of Reagan as a Great Communicator” by Wilbur Edel, p.180
[46] Williams, p. 57
[47] James D. Torr, Editor, Ronald Reagan, “The First True Television President” by Mary E. Stuckey, p. 211
[48] James D. Torr, Editor, Ronald Reagan, “The First True Television President” by Mary E. Stuckey, p. 214
[49] Deaver, p. 72
[50] Deaver, p. 123
[51] Noonan, p. 187
[52] Hertsgaard, p. 105
[53] ABC News Online, October 25, 2003, http://abcnews.go.com/sections/Nightline/Politics/media_bypass031025-1.html
[54] Hertsgaard, p. 122
[55] CNN.com, “Inside Politics,” October 1, 2003, http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/09/29/novak.cia/
[56] Stockman, p. 12
[57] Stockman, p. 7
[58] New York Time Archive, December 2, 2002,
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50913FB355C0C718CDDAB0994DA404482
[59] Williams, p. 269