Presswatch/One Last Zing

...Well, trust me...

...Smile, joke, ignore the barbs, and go about your business...

...Reagan was astonishingly popular even at the pit of the recession in 1982...

...the consultant joked...

...However seriously you take the ideological realigning that has taken place in the press, there is one aspect of it that is lovely to look at...

...What do you think it'll be like to work for Helms...

...The clash of views in the nation's media, overall, is nearly even, and that is healthy...

...Now, I'm not arguing that the majority of Reagan enthusiasts like him despite his ideology...

...In much of the media, conservative opinion-makers are either even or pulling ahead of their rivals, both in audience and impact...

...he is calm...

...It used to be that conservatives felt embattled by the media, paranoid about liberal reporters in pursuit of them, and fearful that conservatives could never gain power in America so long as liberals controlled the media...

...Have you ever listened to National Public Radio, watched the news shows on the TV networks (especially CBS), or read the news sections (not the editorial pages) of the major national newspapers, namely the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal...

...This is crackpot talk...

...is euphemistically known as the "adversarial relationship" that reporters maintain toward those in authority...

...it's true...

...Those in power became the enemy, never to be believed, always to be reviled...

...But when a Washington political consultant talked recently to a CBS official about Helms, he found the network fellow worried about his job...

...he answers with themes...

...Among conservatives, the conventional tack is to downgrade the significance of Reagan's personality as a factor in his popularity...

...Reporters are fevered...

...Haven't I done enough harm...

...Let somebody else get a reputation as a cheap scold and TAS's designated enemy of the First Amendment...

...PRESSWATCH ONE LAST ZING by Fred Barnes Please restrain your excitement, but there is good news and bad news...

...The bad news is that I've got a few parting thoughts...

...Not quite, Milt...

...But do people really need to know all the useless information that passes for news...

...The small stuff always seemed to capture my attention, like the press bludgeoning of supply-side economics and the media hysteria over cuts in social-spending programs...

...He believes in something, and he is willing to act on this belief...

...And lots of them like it even if they don't agree with Reagan on many of the things he believes in...

...They call him detached, out-of-it, an excessive delegator of authority...

...How come...

...Do you think he'll really be able to buy the network...

...Why bother...

...Ronald Reagan did this, and it's no small achievement...

...Well, sorry, but the fabled Reagan personality has played a part, especially in subduing the press...

...There's been a swing toward conservatism...

...Remember, those of you who may question this, there hadn't been a popular success in the White House since John F. Kennedy, and I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt...

...In truth, he has about as much chance of gaining control of CBS as Jimmy Carter does of being elected President again...

...you ask...

...They try to mug him with "facts...

...Reagan's approach is never to bicker with the press, never to treat the media as a foe...

...Yet he triumphed where Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter failed so miserably...

...They want the success of his presidency to be seen as the result of conservative principles applied judiciously, not of a pretty face shown to good effect on television...

...The events were the Vietnam war and the Watergate scandal, and they took the media's traditional stance of skepticism and turned it into what Fred Barnes, former national political correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, is now a senior editor at the New Republic...

...Now, the press is embattled, paranoid, and fearful...

...Having left the Baltimore Sun (a very fine newspaper, by the way) and joined the New Republic, I'm putting some limits on my press bashing...

...Probably, but there are a few large phenomena that occurred over the last few years that I never got around to taking notice of...

...It works...

...Certainly most reporters believe this...

...And there is more where that came from...

...Conservatives, particularly religious ones, have been so stymied in their efforts to be paid even minimal attention by the establishment media that they've had to go to the extraordinary trouble of setting up their own counterculture media...

...But there was more to it than that...

...Robert McCormick has the right-wing viewpoint been more prominent in American journalism," he wrote...

...Does this vignette sound too good to be true...

...And the best part is that this leaves time for the more important things in life- God, family, and basketball...

...Unlike Reagan, yuppies aren't in the forefront of the anti-abortion movement and don't clamor for voluntary school prayer, yet they are crazy about the guy...

...You know, buy up the networks and major newspapers and pressure public TV and radio into hewing to the right ideological line...

...People recognize this trait...

...Anyway, it's more than a coincidence that Kennedy's presidency was the last before two events transformed the attitude of the press...

...Worse, they are made to believe by the nation's overeducated class that they need to keep up hourly with the flow of events in the world...

...But he doesn't seem to understand what this suggests...

...For those repelled by the slurs against America's journalistic establishment and its selfless practitioners that have often appeared in this space, the good news is that your long nightmare is over...

...You ought to hear political reporters sneer at the people who aren't political junkies but are mere casual voters, like most Americans...

...One was that a President managed to dodge all the bullets fired by the Washington press corps, run the country successfully, and sustain remarkable personal popularity...

...Along the way, in the 1980s yet, some important things happened...

...Not at all...

...There's the additional advantage of not having your brain cluttered with worries about non-existent perils such as toxic waste and news that isn't new like Yassir Arafat's latest cynical muttering about peace in the Middle East...

...People are bombarded from morning to night with the stuff...

...This is the role reversal...

...Reagan simply had something others didn't...

...There is hushed talk in the press about a right-wing campaign to take over the media in this country...

...And given the additional factor of the longstanding bias against conservatives-most journalists are liberals, after all-it's easy to imagine what Reagan faced when he entered the White House...

...So much for the good news...

...Nobody asked me to anoint a successor, but I think Ariel Sharon has the requisite objectivity about the press to handle the job...

...That notion, bandied about last year by the media, is a liberal fantasy...

...No longer...

...There's been some change, but not that much...

...Not since the days of William Randolph Hearst and Col...

...But it's hardly what Milton Gwirtzman cracked it up to be in an op-ed piece in the New York Times last March...

...Better than any politician in America, Reagan uses the frenzied press mob as a foil...

...If they don't, they've failed the test of good citizenship...

...Two things really, conviction and personality...

...Just kidding...

...There's no right-wing conspiracy, of course...

...These folks are deemed frivolous...

...The national esteem for him endured the tragic loss of hundreds of Marines during the bollixed Lebanon adventure...

...Less clearcut than Reagan's knockout of the omnivorous Washington press corps is the shift away from the dominance of liberal thinking in the media...

...people see him as a leader...

...Folks at CBS are trembling at the thought of Jesse Helms's quixotic stab at taking over that network...

...Gwirtzman correctly points to new outlets that give conservatives more of a voice in the media-USA Today, the religious broadcasters, the Washington Times...

...Looking at most any newspaper for a few minutes every day or catching news highlights on radio or TV is enough to keep most people abreast...

...Why, they may not be worried about "nuclear winter" or may not know which presidential candidates took PAC money and which didn't...

...the national conservative trend has been too strong not to have touched the mainstream press...

...The economic recovery and the lack of a lingering, losing war helped...

...One final thought: There is too much news these days...

...the official replied, his voice quavering...

...For most people, the nice thing about Reagan is that he is a President who believes not only in something, but in the right something...

...But I love it...