Reflection on Propaganda
Reagan’s Reelection: How the Media Became All the President’s Men
The politics of 1984 describe a future in which Americans are lied to and manipulated by ruthless political propaganda
ByWILLIAM GREIDER
"The single most important political event of the 1984 presidential campaign, aside from the economic recovery, was produced by Roone Arledge and his associates, which made it all the more persuasive, because it was not identified as part of anyone’s campaign. The event was the star-spangled Olympic games.
ABC’s coverage... created from nothing more than the moving pictures of inconsequential athletic contests, was a potent primer for the themes that Ronald Reagan would evoke in his fall campaign. America is strong and feeling good; don’t listen to that negative whining about Central America or Lebanon or the nuclear-arms race. Through the fall, this feel-good sentimentality would wrestle for American minds with the nasty facts about Reagan’s inept foreign policy, but it was no contest. The facts lost.
During the 1980 campaign, another of Arledge’s bold strokes had a profound effect on the popular political consciousness — and severely damaged the Democrats. When Iranians kidnapped Americans in Tehran and held them hostage, ABC decided to seize the story and hammer away at it in the tradition of William Randolph Hearst. The network devoted to the crisis a nightly broadcast tagged America Held Hostage...The politically charged slogan invented by a television network — America Held Hostage — was central to the destruction of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. The television news managers would argue, of course, that they do not make the news but simply cover events with zest. True enough, but Arledge and the others decide which stories to cover, which metaphors to repeat and which realities to ignore. Very few Americans realize, for instance, that Ronald Reagan has his own ”hostage crisis” in the Middle East — three Americans kidnapped by pro-Iranian Muslims and held somewhere in Beirut — which inhibits his ability to retaliate against terrorists, just as Jimmy Carter was inhibited from retaliating against the Iranian government.
