Boehert (Salon): Reagan Porn

[kaitykaity]

(It's premium, but if you click through the free day
pass you can read the whole article. It's worth the time.)

http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/06/11/media/index.html

Reagan porn
The "liberal media's" unprecedented 24/7 gushing over a controversial and
divisive president caps a quarter-century of fawning.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Eric Boehlert

June 11, 2004 | The media's weeklong coverage of the passing of President
Reagan has produced some of the most rapturous remembrances in modern times.
Given Reagan's long illness, few expected the gloss to be pierced by
examinations of his past as an FBI informant, his support for the apartheid
regime of South Africa, America's covert alliance with Saddam Hussein, or the
killing fields of Central America. Nonetheless, the sheer volume of media-stoked
adoration has been a bit startling to those who are keepers of the flame of
objectivity.

"I think when somebody dies there's a tendency for the press to view them
through rose-colored glasses. It's only polite," says Alex Jones, director of
the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard
University. "But I think they're doing a great disservice by making this totally
positive and uncritical coverage. In fact, Ronald Reagan was a very
controversial president, and journalists should be trying to offer something
that resembles an honest look back at Reagan's administration."

By midweek, a few news organizations, including the Los Angeles Times, New York
Times and Washington Post, had at least addressed some of the more controversial
aspects of Reagan's public life. But for the most part, the reports,
particularly on the 24-hour news channels, remained uniformly worshipful, as the
elaborate funeral cortege, orchestrated after years of planning by Reagan's old
image-makers, marched through the entire week, accompanied by rhetorical
flourishes.

"Ronald Reagan is a sort of masterpiece of American magic -- apparently one of
the simplest, most uncomplicated creatures alive, and yet a character of rich
meanings, of complexities that connect him with the myths and powers of his
country in an unprecedented way," trumpeted Time magazine. "He is a Prospero of
American memories, a magician who carries a bright, ideal America like a
holograph in his mind and projects its image in the air."

EDITED BY ADMIN: COPYRIGHT