Hertsgaard,M. On Bended Knee. 1988
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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