On Bended Knee; The Press and the Reagan Presidency

New York: Schocken Books, 1989. Revised Edition. Presumed first printing thus. Trade paperback. very good. 25 cm. xxiii, [1], 408 pages. Wraps. Occasional footnotes. Appendices. Notes. Index. Mark Hertsgaard (born 1956) is an American journalist and the co-founder and executive director of Covering Climate Now. He is the environment correspondent for The Nation, and the author of seven non-fiction books, including Earth Odyssey (1998) and Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth (2011). He has covered climate change, politics, economics, the press, and music since 1989. His best-known work as an author is On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency (1988), which described the way the Reagan White House "deployed raw power and conventional wisdom to intimidate Washington's television newsrooms." He has also written for magazines and newspapers such as The Guardian, Vanity Fair, Scientific American,Time, Harper's, and Le Monde. He has been a commentator for the public radio programs Morning Edition, Marketplace, and Living on Earth, and taught writing at Johns Hopkins and the University of California, Berkeley. Derived from a Kirkus review: An audit of the Reagan Administration and the generally good press it has enjoyed. Instead of taking the President and his aides directly to task, however, Hertsgaard focuses on the fourth estate's presumptive sins of omission and commission. He charges that broadcast and print journalists have consistently accorded Reagan the moral equivalent of kid-gloved treatment, even during the height of the Iran-contra scandal. The author attributes this putative failure to disclose what's really been going on at the White House in about equal measure to self-censorship and to the slick news-management skills of presidential staff. As a practical matter, Hertsgaard regards most White House correspondents as tools who have betrayed their public trust to expose supposed assaults on constitutional government. The author is more apt to quote media critics whose views he finds agreeable than to cite examples of adulatory coverage or overlooked opportunities. Beyond implying that the press is duty-bound to be adversarial, moreover, Hertsgaard makes no systematic effort to define the terms of its accountability. Derived from a Publishers Weekly article: Based on some 175 interviews with top administration officials, senior journalists and news executives, plus analyses of newspaper articles and television stories, Hertsgaard argues that the Reagan White House not only tamed the media but transformed it into ``a willing mouthpiece of the government'' in its coverage of issues ranging from economic policy to arms control. In addition to providing examples of the media's ``accommodating passivity'' on major issues, he contends that the Reagan propaganda apparatus chose the First Lady's pet project (i.e., the dangers of drugs) for her to draw attention away from her lifestyle. Hertsgaard also claims that evidence suggests a 1980 deal with Iran to delay the hostage release until inauguration day, and that this alleged deal was the genesis of the Iran-contra affair. But these are mere sidelights in this charge-packed attack on the media's ``subservience to state authority'' and the ``witless malevolence'' of recent presidential image-making. Hertsgaard's most controversial indictment is that the nation's press lords deliberately reined in their troops.