....it was one of Gergen's guiding assumptions that the administration simply could not govern effectively unless it could "get the right story out" through the "filter" of the press.Gergen was one of Reagan's PR "killers"
if you haven't read On Bended Knee, by Mark Hertsgaard, try the long excerpt at his own site, which places into stark relief the sleazy PR tactics to which these undescribables resort, as well as the utter fealty to which the media subjected themselves. I read this when it came out, and to go over this site today makes it SO obvious what this country faces today. It's very sad, because the media are even MORE compliant, MORE concentrated, MORE arrogant, than they were fifteen years ago.
is this inFURIATING, or what???
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald_Reagan/On_Bended_Knee.htmlWe have been kinder to President Reagan than any President that I can remember since I've been at the Post."
So said Benjamin C. Bradlee, executive editor of The Washington Post, some four months before the November 1984 re-election of Ronald Reagan. Three years later, after the Iran-Contra affair had shattered Mr. Reagan's previous image of invincibility, I asked the legendary editor if he still stood by his statement. He did.
Stressing that this was "all totally subconscious," Bradlee explained that when Ronald Reagan came to Washington in 1980, journalists at the Post sensed that "here comes a really true conservative.... And we are known-though I don't think justifiably-as the great liberals. So, we've got to really behave ourselves here. We've got to not be arrogant, make every effort to be informed, be mannerly, be fair. And we did this. I suspect in the process that this paper and probably a good deal of the press gave Reagan not a free ride, but they didn't use the same standards on him that they used on Carter and on Nixon."so much more here.....and it points out just how much worse things are in the media than one can imagine. it goes downhill from the above quote, btw, if you can believe it