Reagan: Making the Myth, Forgetting the Man

"Suddenly, our news networks resembled religious broadcasters with a Pravda-like, Soviet echo. In many ways this was consistent with the way Ronald Reagan was treated when he was in office. C.T. Hanson, a one-time Washington editor of The Columbia Journalism Review used this frame in an analysis of the same man decades ago, writing then:
"The White House Press served with unusual frequency during Reagan's first two years as a kind of Pravda of the Potomac, a conduit for White House utterances and official image mongering intended to sell Reaganomics."
The best book written in that period on a most deferential White House press corps was called "On Bended Knee." Needless to say the Reaganauts praised their captive media. Lynn Nofziger, Reagan's campaign press secretary said in March 1982, "Overall, I don't have any real complaints about the way the press covered this administration."
Indeed. . . .
This all flows out of the widely held perception that Reagan was a popular president because he restored our confidence in a mythic America after the decline of Nixon, the folly of Ford, and the "malaise" of Carter.
The networks clearly wanted some of that popularity to rub off on them as they pandered to the audience with what were essentially apolitical or even anti-political profiles of a master politician who supposedly was popular because of his plainspoken personality. There was little in the coverage that deviated from that self-fulfilling perspective. There was little that explained how constant positive TV coverage of the kind we were seeing constructed and reinforced the image of Reagan as superhero.
Just as Reagan often invented stories that were traced back to movies he saw, many in the public do the same when they respond to him.
Last night, I heard Noam Chomsky on Air America say that educated people tend to be the most indoctrinated, and that the people who convey propaganda have often propagandized themselves first. In short, they believe their own hype."