Hertsgaard, Mark. On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988. 408 pages.

Mark Hertsgaard interviewed 175 key figures in the Reagan White House and the media, and reviewed every evening newscast from the three major networks from January 1981 through February 1988. He believes (and almost everyone he interviewed agrees) that Reagan was given a free ride. The fundamental problem, Hertsgaard concludes, is "that the press was part of, and beholden to, the structure of power and privilege in the United States."

The invasion of Grenada, the nuclear freeze movement, and U.S. policy in Central America, are three of the numerous examples of press ineptitude examined by Hertsgaard in separate chapters. During these years, big-name reporters all knew that a poorly-informed Reagan, with his finger on the button, couldn't handle policy questions without his cue cards. He issued remarks about the "evil empire" and the feasibility of limited nuclear war, and joked about "the bombing begins in five minutes." But these reporters felt that Reagan was too popular, and criticism would be dangerous for their careers. Above them loomed the owners of the press, for whom nuclear brinkmanship meant nothing as long as corporate profits were booming. After the 1987 stock-market crash, for example, Time magazine editorialized for the first time that their beloved Reagan was "befuddled,""dodder[ing]," "embarrassingly irrelevant," and had "stayed a term too long."
ISBN 0-374-25197-5

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