Hertsgaard, Mark

New York. 1988. Farrar Straus Giroux. 1st American Edition. Some Foxing On Top Edge, Otherwise Very Good in Slightly Worn Dustjacket. 0374251975. 408 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Tom Stvan. Jacket photograph by Dirk Halstead/Gamma-Liaison. keywords: Politics America Journalism Meida Ronald Reagan. FROM THE PUBLISHER - In ON BENDED KNEE: THE PRESS AND THE REAGAN PRESIDENCY, Mark Hertsgaard presents a history and an indictment of the relations between the major news media and the Reagan Administration. Based on more than 175 interviews with most of the key figures in the White House and the press, and on a comprehensive analysis of newspaper and television coverage of such stories as the Iran-Contra Affair, the invasion of Grenada, the arms talks, and Reaganomics, this book exposes one of the great scandals of recent U.S. politics - how the press, both through government manipulation and through voluntary self-censorship, abdicated its responsibility to report on what was really going on. Indeed, as Hertsgaard reveals, there were many instances of network and press executives at CBS, The New York Times, and elsewhere, stifling their own reporters. ON BENDED KNEE is a sobering, important book. For seven years, the news from Washington has been presented in such a way as to make it virtually impossible for a citizen to make sense of what has really been going on in America: the collaboration of White House ‘spin control' and the press's own subservience has seen to that. And this trend will not simply dissipate with a new administration. The lasting value of Mark Hertsgaard's work is his exposure of this unhappy collaboration to a public that will need to think very skeptically indeed about the news from Washington in the years ahead. inventory #12066 ISBN: 0374251975.