SPUN IN CIRCLES: THE PRESS CORPS AND REAGAN’S REYKJAVIK
CHALLENGE
by
Lee Hudson Teslik
Presented to the
Committee on Degrees in History and Literature
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts
with Honors
Harvard College
Cambridge, Massachusetts
March 1, 2005
1
Word Count: 17, 824
2
Contents
Introduction…………………………………..4
Section 1……………………………………..12
Section 2……………….....………………....21
Section 3………………………………….....31
Section 4………………………………….....36
Section 5………………………………….....44
Section 6………………………………….....48
Section 7 (Conclusion, part 1)……………...61
(Conclusion, part 2)………………64
Bibliography…………………………..........69
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On July 25, 1986, Ronald Reagan sent a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev.1 It was the
first contact between the two leaders since the deadlocked Geneva summit of 1985,
where Reagan had first met the Soviet General Secretary, and where the two leaders had
discussed potential reductions of nuclear stockpiles but failed to reach an agreement. The
letter was Reagan’s attempt to renew negotiations—in it, he invited Gorbachev to
Washington to discuss the terms of a potentially sweeping nuclear disarmament treaty.
Reagan felt there was cause for optimism. “Well, we finally came up with a letter to
Gorbachev that I can sign,” he wrote in his diary, several days before sending the letter.
“In fact, it’s a good one and should open the door to some real arms negotiations if he is
really serious.”2
Gorbachev did not respond to Reagan’s letter for three months. In the meantime,
Soviet-American tensions heightened. In late August, the FBI arrested Gennady
Zakharov, a Soviet physicist working in New York at the United Nations, on charges of
espionage. Soon thereafter, the KGB arrested Nicholas Daniloff, the Moscow
correspondent for the U.S. News & World Report, on similar charges, apparently to use
him as a bargaining chip for Zakharov’s release. Reagan was caught in a political bind.
Releasing Zakharov risked appearing diplomatically weak, but public sympathy for
Daniloff was mounting due to extensive news coverage of the reporter’s apparently
1
Reagan scripted the letter with the help of a special committee including Secretary of State George Shultz,
White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, and the National
Security Council Chair, Vice Admiral John Poindexter. According to one Reagan historian, its primary
source was a letter prepared for Poindexter by Assistant Defense Secretary Richard Perle [Lou Cannon,
President Reagan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991) 761]. The letter was formulated over the course
of more than a week, but was dated and sent July 25.
2
Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 666.
4
unjustified abduction. So when, on September 19, the Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard
Shevardnadze visited the White House and delivered Gorbachev’s response, proposing a
meeting in London or Reykjavik, Iceland, to prepare for a summit in Washington, Reagan
seized the opportunity for all its political potential. The President immediately accepted
Gorbachev’s offer, “opt[ing] for Iceland,” as he put it in his diary.3 Shultz and
Shevardnadze then set the terms of a hostage swap, the announcement of which was
postponed several days so as to coincide with the news of a planned Reykjavik summit
(Reagan correctly assumed that the political accolades he would win for setting a summit
date would offset losses from the Zakharov-Daniloff exchange, which was indeed almost
unanimously interpreted as a victory for Gorbachev.)4
Spirits were high leading up to the summit, and few in the West Wing considered
the possibility of negative fallout from the scheduled meetings, which were scheduled for
the weekend of October 12-13, 1986. Lou Cannon, a Washington Post White House
correspondent and Reagan biographer known by both colleagues and competitors as the
most well-connected and knowledgeable presidential reporter of the era,5 claimed that
enthusiasm about having skirted the Daniloff political crisis ran so high that Reagan did
not prepare adequately for Reykjavik. “Reagan…was brimming with confidence in
September. [White House Chief of Staff] Don Regan and [National Security Council
Chair, Vice Admiral John] Poindexter raised no caution flags. The mood in the White
3
Reagan, An American Life, 669.
Serge Schmemann, the Moscow bureau chief of The New York Times, wrote that “[Reagan] got his man
home, he set a precedent that would make Western governments think twice about arresting Soviet spy
suspects, and he could take credit for arranging a superpower meeting and so salvaging the East-West
dialogue.” [Serge Schmemann, “Summit Diplomacy: Who Won and Who Lost; Keeping Score: A
Limited Success for Gorbachev,” New York Times, 1 October 1986, sec. A, p. 1].
5
Mark Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988), 47.
4
5
House was so secure that no one even bothered to prepare a fallback position that could
be cited should the Reykjavik summit prove a bust.”6
Whether Reykjavik was in fact a “bust” is a question riddled with complications.
The story of the summit’s particulars is elusive. Due to a news blackout of
unprecedented scope enforced by the summit’s delegates, it was understood that the press
simply didn’t have the access needed to produce a comprehensive account of the
summit’s proceedings. And equally, in light of a massive public relations campaign
launched immediately following the summit, it was assumed that everybody—literally—
with an intimate knowledge of the meetings, who then shared an account thereof, was
bending the facts to his or her own advantage. Nor is there necessarily much to be gained
by analyzing the summit’s influence on Soviet-American relations, or nuclear nonproliferation efforts, even if new information on the summit’s particulars could be turned
up. Simply put, the precise details of the summit are now of limited historical relevance.
Though no arms agreements were made at Reykjavik, an Intermediate Nuclear Forces
(INF) treaty between Reagan and Gorbachev was signed a little over a year later, in
December 1987—and more generally, Americans and Soviets would, in the end,
reconcile their differences. Whether Reykjavik marked a moment of progress or a
stumbling block in this larger diplomatic success story—i.e. whether the summit was a
“success”—is a question beyond the scope of this essay.
The purpose of this inquiry therefore is not to get at the slippery facts of the
summit itself. Rather, I intend to examine the ways in which the slipperiness of these
facts was interpreted by the American journalists covering the summit—Cannon and his
peers—whose ostensible calling was to get at some kind of verifiable truth, and who
6
Cannon, President Reagan, 764.
6
consequently had the most to lose when they proved ill-equipped to do so. In the wake of
the Reykjavik summit—during the editorial course of the Reykjavik news story—
journalists encountered the inaccessibility of the Reykjavik story, became frustrated with
it, grappled with it, and gradually, grudgingly and cynically, came to terms with it. This
coming-to-terms was reflected in their changing understanding of their own profession,
and consequently, in their work. It was reflected in the words they chose to describe their
interactions with the President and his advisers, and the words they chose to describe
themselves. The ultimate relevance of Reykjavik, then, lies not in the political details of
the summit itself, but the cultural effects of its fallout—and specifically one particular
cultural consequence, a linguistic one, the effects of which are felt to this day in the way
English-speaking peoples write and think about their elected officials. Reykjavik’s
legacy is the legacy of “spin.”
“Spin” and “spin doctor” were not new words in 1986. The terms have a
convoluted history and etymology, the details and significance of which will be examined
later. For now it is enough to note that “spin,” as a political colloquialism, first appeared
in a major newspaper in 1978, in the British paper The Guardian.7 “Spin doctor”
followed suit in 1984, first appearing in a National Public Radio report by Linda
Wertheimer on the first Reagan-Mondale debate, then turning up in both the New York
Times and the Washington Post within three weeks’ time. The terms, however, were
relegated to the fringes of the journalistic vocabulary during the earliest years of their
existence. “Spin doctor” appeared only four times in major United States newspapers
before October 11, 1986, the first day of the Reykjavik summit, and “spin” appeared only
In an article commenting, interestingly enough, on American politics: “The CIA can be an excellent
source [of information], though, like every other, its offerings must be weighted for factuality and spin.”
[Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd Ed., s.v. “spin doctor”].
7
7
a handful more.8 Reykjavik was the linguistic turning point. In the aftermath of the
summit—which saw a great deal of “spinning” by both American and Soviet political
insiders—the terms increasingly crept into daily usage and, significantly enough, lost the
quotation marks in which they had frequently been couched. Two years later, by the time
of the 1988 Bush-Dukakis elections, the terms were rhetorically established (and what’s
more, popular). At stake here is just how this transition took place, what role Reykjavik
played, and what cultural significance can be attributed to the popularization of these
terms at this specific historical juncture.
These are questions no historian has previously tackled. This analysis will
therefore rely heavily on documentary evidence: news-clippings and magazine articles
which analyzed the summit and its aftermath in terms of “spin,” and later, a flurry of
books and articles which questioned the evolution of the complicated relationship
between the press and the executive office. The ideological shifts surrounding
Reykjavik—which motivated the popularization of the term “spin” and which then,
circularly, were propelled by it—are still underway. Reykjavik’s significance was as a
catalyst, provoking new questions among a small group of elite journalists such as those
at the New York Times and the Washington Post—that is, those with general expectations
of access to internationally significant political events. Reykjavik was ideologically
jarring, but its immediate implications only confronted this small group of reporters. The
documentary analysis provided in this essay, then, is limited in scope to America’s most
Probably fewer than twenty, although given the many alternative meanings of the term “spin,” it is more
difficult to be fully confident in the comprehensiveness of archival searches. The term “spin doctor”
appeared only four times in the 53 “Major Papers” archived on Lexis Nexis’s database.
8
8
prominent news sources, relying almost exclusively on a small group of newspapers
based in major, mostly north-eastern, urban markets.9
This essay deals primarily with documentary evidence. To contextualize these
sources, it is necessary first to revisit the circumstances of the summit itself, to
understand the stakes involved both for those trying to get at the facts (the press) and
those trying to obscure them or limit access (the politicos, both American and Soviet,
involved with the summit and concerned with its public reception). This is the purpose of
the first section of this essay. The second section turns to the etymology and meaning of
“spin,” contextualizing the term within a brief history of the idea of objectivity, and
questioning what the term replaced, both linguistically and ideologically. The third
section takes the history of the Reykjavik summit into the preliminary “post-summit”
phase, questioning why a positive public reception of the summit was so important for
the Reagan administration, examining the early stages of what administration officials
themselves termed the “most extensive public relations campaign” of Reagan’s
presidency to that point, and reflecting on why the elite press generally took a stance of
casually acknowledging this campaign as it unfolded, without trying to undermine it or
even worrying too much about it. The fourth section describes the resounding success of
this public relations campaign, and the press’s coverage thereof. The fifth section takes a
step back to contextualize the press’s understanding of this public relations campaign in
9
While in a longer essay, the reactions of other, smaller and more regional news sources could be
accounted for, those sources are outside the purview of this project. Similarly, I have only very briefly
addressed the question of television media, popular understandings of which certainly played a role in the
shift of press consciousness surrounding the Reykjavik summit. I have tried to touch upon the most
fundamental aspects of this role, but in the name of brevity have had to omit a more developed analysis of
television news coverage of the Reykjavik story. In terms of the development of the term “spin,” a selfcontained narrative is accessible purely through analysis of the coverage of elite print media, and rather
than diluting my argument in an attempt to cover all media bases, I have focused my attentions on an indepth analysis of this print narrative.
9
the context of public relations campaigns both before and after it. This provides a
framework for section six, which is an analysis of the press doing something, following
Reykjavik, which it had never done before: covering itself being “spun,” in those terms.
This section proceeds to question how this moment fits into a broader ideological shift
among the elite members of the press corps, analyzing a thematic shift in Reagan
literature hinged around the Reykjavik summit and relating this shift to the meteoric rise
in popularity of the term “spin,” both in the summit’s immediate aftermath and the weeks
and months to follow. Finally, my two-part conclusion takes up, first, the specific
ideological and linguistic shift which followed Reykjavik, and then, more broadly, how
this shift fits into a larger understanding of the press’s shifting self-consciousness,
including a brief analysis of where these ideas stand today, and where they might
logically proceed.
I argue that the newly prevalent term “spin” was a product of the elite press’s
reconsideration of its relationship with the American government, and that it in turn
spurred further questioning. It became much harder, in a post-spin world, for the press to
consider itself, as it had for decades, the “fourth branch” of the American government.10
But paradoxically, it also became much harder for the press to launch an outright attack
on the government. “Spin” created a linguistic middle ground between terms previously
used to describe similar activities: “news management” or “public relations” on one end
of the linguistic spectrum, and “propaganda” on the other. “Spin” was originally
intended to split the difference between these extremes, but gained such rapid popularity
as to become an umbrella term which encompassed the entirety of this spectrum. In the
10
Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic
Books, 1978), 172.
10
process, it became a dangerously ambiguous term. It served not only to distinguish—to
draw a middle-ground between “news management” and “propaganda”—but to replace,
swallowing up the terms the meanings of which it was supposedly splitting. Particularly
interesting in terms of the ideological trajectory of the press corps is how “spin” replaced,
in all but the most extreme circumstances, the term “propaganda,” which given its Soviet
connotations had previously served as a chilling indictment of the practice of “guiding”
the news. By replacing “propaganda,” “spin” seemed to excuse the practice it was
initially meant to condemn.
In doing so, the term “spin” ultimately served to undermine the press’s authority.
But in positing this claim, one comes upon a problem of causality. Did “spin,” a term the
press created, turn on its master, planting seeds of cynicism in a structure reliant on
notions of objectivity, thereby poisoning its idealistic infrastructure? Or was the term
popularized only in reaction to a process of self-exploration in which the press, much to
its dismay, found itself far less powerful than it had previously assumed, and sought a
new vocabulary that could somehow excuse this impotence? Each scenario is right to an
extent, and clearly each feeds the other. In seeking a dominant cause, however, the latter
seems more compelling. The press’s shortcomings had been exposed in the past, after
all, and by 1986 it was not exactly a shocking revelation that presidents sometimes tried
to deceive the public. What was new was the idea that maybe, at the end of the day, the
press did not have the power or access needed to turn up the truth, no matter how fervent
its efforts; that maybe, in a more efficiently run administration, Woodward and Bernstein
would never have had the chance to succeed. And it is here that Reykjavik becomes
11
relevant. For it was at Reykjavik that the press, for the first time, reported its own
inability to get at facts, and did so using this new, divisive word, “spin.”
On October 12, 1986, the circumstances at the Reykjavik summit were bleak, at
least meteorologically. It was cold and rainy. It had been that way all weekend. But the
outlook for the summit ahead was contrastingly bright. That morning, the New York
Times had run an upbeat front page “News Analysis” (alongside a picture of Reagan and
Gorbachev sharing a light-hearted moment of laughter) in optimistic anticipation of the
summit’s final day. “Areas of Agreement Appear to Take Shape As Summit Leaders
Seek Concrete Results,” a headline ran. But now, roughly twelve hours after the Times
had gone to press, the meetings were over and Secretary of State George Shultz had his
head in his hands.
*
1
*
The Reykjavik summit was never intended to solve the problems of a polarized
world, but it was expected to be a decisive step in the right direction. There were a few
concrete resolutions which a consensus of talking heads thought the weekend of meetings
was likely to produce. Foremost was the hope that a date would be set for a full summit,
sometime the following spring, in the United States. Beyond that nobody really knew
what to expect. But when two working groups were established on the summit’s opening
day, one on arms control and the other on human rights and other issues, hopes were
sparked that more immediate results might be in the works. The Times reported that the
two sides appeared to be “crystallizing areas of agreement,” but reiterated that “the
12
principal test of the meetings [was] whether Mr. Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev [would]
agree to meet again in the next several months.”11
The human rights issues pertained to the opening of emigration channels for
Soviet Jews. Soviet emigration policy was highly restrictive in general, and Jewish
communities had been particularly affected mainly because they had been among the
groups most inclined to leave. The government had liberalized its policy in the late
1970s, and in 1979 a record number of more than 50,000 Jews had flocked from the
country. But during the early 1980s the number of Jews emigrating had declined
precipitously. The Soviet government claimed that most of those who had wanted to
leave had already left, but there were complaints from Jews already abroad (some highly
publicized) that family members wishing to leave the country still could not. Jewish
protestors descended on Reykjavik’s Hofdi House, a reputedly haunted former private
residence often used for Icelandic state receptions,12 where the summit’s meetings were
scheduled to take place. There was a Sabbath service in which protestors from the U.S.,
Western Europe, and Israel joined with Icelandic religious leaders and displayed pictures
of Soviet Jews who had been jailed and denied permission to leave the country.13
But according to the Times, “[t]he demonstrations probably went unnoticed by
President Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev.”14 And despite the President’s assertions to the
contrary, few suspected that human rights held equal priority as arms control for the
principle participants of the summit. As The Economist put it, “it was the possibility of a
Leslie H. Gelb, “A Quest for Compromise,” New York Times, 12 October 1986, sec. A, p. 1.
Cannon, President Reagan, 765.
13
Un-bylined, “Iceland Protests: From Jews to Hare Krishna,” New York Times, 12 October 1986, sec. A,
p. 9.
14
“Iceland Protests,” sec. A, p. 9.
11
12
13
deal on nuclear weapons that brought the two leaders together,”15 and if one was to
assume that, given the working groups, there would be a push for real results at
Reykjavik, the success of that push would be dependent on arms control. Here again
there seemed cause for optimism. In a separate article, the Economist outlined the
“elements of a possible accord” as follows:




A limit of 100 missile warheads for each side in Europe
Limits on Soviet medium-range missiles facing Asia, with Washington retaining a
right to deploy an equal number in the United States.
A freeze on shorter-range missiles in Europe
Provisions for full verification of the terms16
The likeliest advance seemed to be the outlines of a deal on medium-range missiles
which would give the two countries “nuclear equality” in Europe. But really anything on
top of an agreement for a future summit was just icing on the cake: “It will be fine if the
two men simply settle for a mind-clearing, date-fixing exercise—if they talk bluntly but
amiably, set the date for a proper summit later this year or earlyish next year, but
otherwise announce no specific agreement,” commented The Economist.17
If all these predictions seem a little hazy, they were. In an Orwellian maneuver,
both sides at Reykjavik had agreed to ban the press from the summit.18 Moreover, they
refused to engage reporters by telephone or any other means during the proceedings. A
no-holds-barred blackout. The press, naturally, was outraged, but had little recourse but
to scramble for leaks and scraps. Oddly, the terms of the pact incited bickering even
among those who had drafted it. Larry Speakes, President Reagan’s White House
Un-bylined, “Warming up for Iceland,” The Economist, 11 October 1986, p. 44 (U.S. edition p. 40).
Un-bylined, “The Road from Reykjavik,” The Economist, 11 October 1986, p. 14 (U.S. p. 14).
17
“The Road from Reykjavik,” p. 14.
18
This was an unprecedented move by the summit delegates—the press had been allowed limited access to
the 1985 Geneva summit, and at least one (anonymous) reporter covering the Reykjavik summit criticized
the terms of the its press ban as “arbitrary.” [Gelb, “A Quest for Compromise,” sec. A, p. 12].
15
16
14
spokesman, announced changes in the president’s policy on nuclear testing the night of
Friday the 11th, and the Soviets balked. “I don’t understand why they agreed to the
blackout and then at the very last minute, they announce what is going to be put on the
table at Reykjavik,” commented Yevgeny M. Primakov, the head of a Moscow
economics and foreign affairs institute and a Reykjavik delegate.19 Speakes responded
that the ban only took effect at 10:44 A.M. Saturday morning, Reykjavik local time,
when Reagan and Gorbachev first sat down to talk. The Americans also mounted
something of a counter-smear campaign, challenging the appropriateness of a comment
by Georgi A. Arbatov, a Kremlin advisor. Arbatov called an American proposal to
gradually implement limitations on nuclear testing “a trick.” An unnamed U.S. official
told the Times that Arbatov’s comments were “a clear violation” of the pact.20 But
despite the volley of accusations, the paper reported that “the lid on the substance of the
talks appeared to remain tight.”21 The press was an outsider at Reykjavik, there was no
getting around it.
When the papers came out on Sunday, then, reporting the formation of the
working groups, commentary as to what these groups might be expected to accomplish
was highly speculative. It was known that the American team in the group on arms
control was to be headed by the Reagan administration’s top arms advisor, Paul Nitze,
and that the other group would be headed by Rozanne Ridgway, the Assistant Secretary
of State for European and Canadian Affairs. The Soviet delegations were headed,
respectively, by Viktor Karpov, who also negotiated the Geneva arms talks, and
Un-bylined, “No-News Pact Appears to Be Holding,” New York Times from Associated Press, 12
October 1986, sec. A, p. 10.
20
“No News Pact Appears to Be Holding,” sec. A, p. 10.
21
“No News Pact Appears to Be Holding,” sec. A, p. 10.
19
15
Aleksandr Bessmertnykh, a Deputy Foreign Minister.22 It was also known who the
primary delegates were under each group leader. But beyond that, Sunday’s news
articles covering Saturday’s events were entirely devoid of substantive information on the
details behind the groups’ formations, or their specific agendas. Speakes said only that
Saturday’s talks were “businesslike,” and that the “leaders thought [splitting into working
groups] was the appropriate way that they should proceed as a result of their
discussions.”23 And yet, despite the lack of hard information about the working groups,
they seemed a positive step, a step towards concrete progress. So Sunday’s headlines
were cheery, and by all indications it looked like Monday’s might be even more so.
Of course, it wasn’t to be. The details of what actually happened on the final day
of the summit remain fuzzy to this day, and from the perspective of the press covering the
story at the time, they were simply impenetrable. Even delegates who, weeks or months
later, revealed glimpses of Saturday’s proceedings have remained surprisingly tightlipped
about Sunday’s.24 The press covering the story as a news event did, of course, know the
Bernard Weinraub, “Work Units Set Up,” New York Times, 12 October 1986, sec. A p. 1.
Weinraub, “Work Units Set Up,” sec. A p. 1.
24
A week after the fact, the Post’s David Hoffman produced a retrospective on the summit. By that point
public opinion had swung (or been swung) so decisively in the administration’s favor that insiders were
willing to speak more freely about the specifics of Saturday’s proceedings (while for the most part
remaining silent about what happened Sunday). The working groups, it seems, were in fact formed only
because of unexpected progress made during Saturday’s negotiations. Hopes had been stirred that the two
sides would go far beyond using Reykjavik as a “base camp” for a second summit, as Reagan had privately
predicted (and various newspapers had publicly expected), and that real progress on arms reductions might
be at hand.
Gorbachev, stating that he had no desire to talk around matters, had opened the meetings by
unexpectedly laying out a new proposal which built upon previous calls he had made for a 50 percent
reduction in ballistic warheads. Reagan, enticed by what would surely have been a huge public relations
coup—immediate and sweeping arms reductions—but also wary of a trap, broke to privately discuss the
matter with a small group of advisers in “the bubble”—a small room made of transparent, sound-proof
plastic, which secured the leaders from electronic eavesdropping. The U.S. team was eager to get concrete
results. “I think in any negotiation, anything you can get in your pocket, you want to get in your pocket,”
Shultz told Hoffman, describing his reasoning during that critical meeting with the President. So Reagan
went back and proposed that the two sides form working groups to hammer out the details—to make this
treaty happen.
22
23
16
end results. But as for how “what happened” happened, they were left to guess. By
Monday, it was clear that no deal had been reached. Just looking at the headlines, the
divide between Sunday’s optimism and Monday’s gloom is marked. “NO U.S. SUMMIT
DATE,” the Times ran as its lead story, with the nebulous sub-headline: “Effect on Ties
Unclear—Understandings Cited on Certain Issues.” The Post took a more solid position:
“NONEXISTENT WEAPONS UNDID SUMMIT: Both Leaders Ruled Out Further SDI
Compromise.” And both papers ran scathing editorials. In a piece entitled “Derailment
What happened next is the stuff of primetime television drama. “We were really given very little
instruction,” Nitze remembered. “We were told to go out and do battle.” The working groups (or the one
on arms control, at least—the only one the delegates seemed overtly concerned with) worked late into the
night, each side attempting to break the other down. “I thought I could outlast you,” the Soviet Army’s
Chief of Staff, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, later told Nitze (who was 79). Both groups were in favor of
50 percent reductions. The only complication was that such reductions could potentially lead to unequal
limitations (the worse side of which bargain was the American). “At 1:30 in the morning, we explained to
the Soviets that we could not accept 50 percent reductions that resulted in unequal ceilings, but we could
accept 50 percent reductions that led to equal ceilings,” Richard Perle, the American Assistant Defense
Secretary, told Hoffman. A formidable snag. Leaders of neither side felt they had the requisite authority to
make an impromptu revision of the deal (Reagan, Gorbachev, Shultz, and Shevardnadze had retired to their
private rooms hours earlier). So they adjourned at 1:45 a.m. to run things by their bosses. Sometime
around 2:30, Nitze got what he needed: “Why don’t you just go in there and do it,” Shultz told him. “You
have our full authority.” Apparently Shevardnadze invested Akhromeyev with comparable say-so, and
things fell quickly into place when discussions resumed, at 3. Akhromeyev accepted equal ceilings and,
according to Perle, “we then sought to translate that principle into specific agreed numbers—much of the
rest of the night was spent on that.”
In the technical debate which ensued over managing the world’s most advanced weapons, there
was, absurdly enough, a technological stumbling block. “We had a typewriter and a typist who could
produce drafts,” Perle said, “but we didn’t have a Xerox machine at the Hofdi House. The Soviets had a
supply of carbon paper. When they produced a draft they could produce it in ten copies. We were unable
to produce more than a single copy. So they depended on low technology, and they had what they needed.
We depended on high technology, and we didn’t. There may be a lesson in that.”
By 6:30 a.m., a framework for sweeping progress had been put on (carbon) paper. Specific
numbers had been agreed upon. The overnight meeting “was a tremendous success,” Nitze recalled. “It
really was a first class negotiation.” The agreement would reduce 30 to 40 percent of intercontinental
ballistic missiles, as well as nuclear submarines and heavy bombers which could be used to transport and
deploy these missiles. If it wasn’t 50 percent, it was still far more than either side had realistically expected
going into the summit. Even more surprising—one American delegate reported to have been simply
“stunned”—was Gorbachev’s appeal for further compromise, first thing Sunday morning. The Secretary
General, seemingly out of nowhere, agreed in principal to Reagan’s proposal to eliminate intermediaterange nuclear missiles from Europe, and also agreed to drastic reductions in Asia. And so, according to
Hoffman, “[a] sense of high optimism pervaded the U.S. delegation [on the morning of the final day].
Some officials began quietly drawing up plans for Reagan to appear before reporters at the end of the day.
Presidential spokesman Larry Speakes and his deputy, Peter Roussel, began planning a post-summit media
blitz.” On Sunday morning there was optimism, then, both within the secretive quarters of Hofdi House
and without. (Information for this footnote drawn from: David Hoffman, “Iceland Talks: One Word
Chills Hope; Summit Spawned Startling Concessions Before Final Deadlock,” Washington Post, 19
October 1986, sec. A, p. 1; and Cannon, President Reagan, 763-770.)
17
at Reykjavik,” the Times called President Reagan “cool-handed,” but acidly slipped in
that “Potential agreements eliminate no missiles. Cool-handed turned into emptyhanded.”25 “Each side probably has some basis for finger-pointing,” the paper said, but
“[t]he balance of responsibility aside, the balance of terror remains, and in the wake of
Reykjavik, it seems shakier. Not only did the talks fail to bring substantive progress;
they failed to set a date for the real summit that this one was supposed to prepare for.”26
The Post’s Lou Cannon wrote a pessimistic front-page “News Analysis” under
the headline “Reagan-Gorbachev Summit Talks Collapse as Deadlock on SDI Wipes Out
Other Gains.”27 Cannon isolated what would become the primary talking-point on
Reykjavik in the days to come—President Reagan’s refusal to forsake his dream of a
comprehensive, space-based nuclear shield, a pet-project of Reagan’s known also as the
Strategic Defense Initiative (S.D.I.), or “Star Wars.” Cannon reported that Gorbachev
had made significant compromises in an effort to find common ground, and that the two
sides had been close to a deal which would have made sweeping reductions in the
number of American and Soviet nuclear missiles in both Europe and Asia, but that these
deals fell through in the face of Reagan’s insistence not to compromise on Star Wars.
Secretary Shultz confirmed that, prior to the summit’s collapse, the sides had “reached a
contingent agreement to eliminate all nuclear ballistic missiles within 10 years and also
had made progress on human rights issues.”28 Gorbachev, Cannon reported, was
infuriated by Reagan’s intransigence, saying that the United States had come to the
Un-bylined, “Derailment at Reykjavik,” New York Times, 13 October 1986, sec. A, p. 18.
“Derailment at Reykjjavik,” sec. A, p. 18.
27
Lou Cannon, “Reagan-Gorbachev Summit Talks Collapse as Deadlock on SDI Wipes Out Other Gains,”
Washington Post, 13 October 1986, sec A, p. 1.
28
Cannon, “Reagan-Gorbachev Summit Talks Collapse as Deadlock on SDI Wipes Out Other Gains,” sec.
A, p. 1.
25
26
18
summit “empty-handed,” offering only stale, “mothballed” proposals. After the talks he
apparently told Reagan that “we were missing a historic chance. Never had our positions
been so close together.” In a news conference held before he left Reykjavik, Gorbachev
elaborated: “This has been a failure, and a failure when we were very close to a historic
agreement,” he said. “If you make an inventory of things that have happened, you will
see that we have made very serious, unprecedented concessions and compromises. And
still there has been no agreement.”29
President Reagan’s parting comments, in contrast, were strikingly chipper. “In
several critical areas, we made more progress than we anticipated when we came to
Iceland,” he said at his departure address at Keflavik Air Base. “We made great strides in
Iceland in resolving most of our differences, and we’re going to continue the effort.” As
far as disagreement over Star Wars—which Reagan had called his “peace shield”—the
president was defiant: “the Soviet Union insisted that we sign an agreement that would
deny to me and the future Presidents for 10 years the right to develop, test and deploy a
defense against nuclear missiles for the people of the free world. This we could not and
will not do.”30 Secretary Shultz’s first prepared statement was equally positive. “The
President’s performance was magnificent,” he said at a news conference, hours after the
summit’s meetings concluded. “I have never been so proud of my President as I have
been in these sessions and particularly this afternoon.” Reagan “simply had to refuse to
Cannon, “Reagan-Gorbachev Summit Talks Collapse as Deadlock on SDI Wipes Out Other Gains,” sec.
A., p. 1.
30
Reagan’s comments are taken from a transcript of his address which the Times printed in full. Unbylined, “Mr. Reagan,” New York Times, 13 October 1986, sec. A, p. 10.
29
19
compromise the security of the U.S., of our allies and freedom by abandoning the shield
that has held in front of freedom.”31
Strong words. Also strange words, given that less than two hours before,
according to Cannon, Shultz had reported “in a strained voice…that he was ‘deeply
disappointed’ and no longer saw ‘any prospect’ for a summit meeting in Washington
between the two leaders in the coming months.”32 Not to mention the image of the
stately secretary with his head in his hands, sitting before the press minutes after the
meetings’ final failure, apparently shocked and dismayed at what had just happened—an
image worth a thousand words of newsprint, at least. In the 120 minutes that followed,
Shultz apparently had a dramatic change of opinion as to what he had just witnessed. It
happened so quickly—leaving the Hofdi House, Shultz was “deeply disappointed by this
outcome”; minutes later, as Bernard Gwertzman of the Times put it, he was “eager to
strike a middle ground between disappointment at the lack of final result and the firmness
on the missile defense issue”; and then there he was, at his own press conference less
than two hours after the meetings had broken up, and all “middle ground” had
evaporated: Star Wars, Reagan’s sticking point, was “absolutely essential” to the “basic
security interests” of the “free world.” The president worked “effectively and
constructively,” but in the end “simply had to refuse to compromise the security of the
U.S., of our allies and freedom.”33
Shultz’s comments are taken from the opening statement he made at a press conference in Reykjavik,
excerpts of which the Times printed on October 13. Un-bylined, “Excerpts from Comments by Shultz at
the News Conference in Reykjavik,” New York Times, 13 October 1986, sec. A, p. 9.
32
Cannon, “Reagan-Gorbachev Summit Talks Collapse as Deadlock on SDI Wipes Out Other Gains,” sec.
A., p. 1.
33
“Excerpts from Comments by Shultz at the News Conference in Reykjavik,” sec. A, p. 9.
31
20
Shultz’s pendular swing of emotion was captured documentarily by both the Post
and the Times in the form of quotations, but neither paper ventured to comment more
explicitly on the Secretary’s blink-of-an-eye epiphany. It was pretty clear what he was
up to. Nor was there anything new or particularly noteworthy about it. Shultz was “spindoctoring.” It was a relatively new term for an age-old activity. “Spin doctors,” as
Elisabeth Bumiller labeled them in a Post article two years before (describing Reagan’s
“phalanx” of campaign strategists), were “the advisers who talk to reporters and try to put
their own spin, or analysis, on the story.” But the reporters at Reykjavik, experienced
and cynical in their own right, were hip to Shultz’s game. They simply ignored his spin
(and Reagan’s) and reported the summit as they saw fit—as a failure. Not a single major
newspaper in America reported the Reykjavik summit as a success the day after its talks
deadlocked.34
*
2
*
A month and a half before Reykjavik, William Safire wrote a New York Times
“On Language” column considering the word “spin.” It was the first published analysis
of the word (and, astonishingly, it remains one of the only such analyses to this day).
“Spin doctor is a locution we must keep our eyes on for 1988,” Safire said. Safire offered
an etymological deconstruction of the term “based on the slang meaning of the verb to
spin, which in the 1950’s meant ‘to deceive,’ perhaps influenced by ‘to spin a yarn.’
More recently, as a noun, spin has come to mean ‘twist’ or ‘interpretation’; when a
34
Using the 53 “major newspapers” archived by Lexis Nexis as a reference.
21
pitcher puts a spin on a baseball, he causes it to curve, and when we put our own spin on
a story, we angle it to suit our predilections or interests.”35
The “curveball” explanation has stuck. A recent “Wordsmith: A Word a Day”
mailing featuring the word “spin doctor” gave support to the idea of a baseball-related
etymology:
spin doctor (spin DOK-tuhr) noun
A representative who is adept in presenting a favorable interpretation of events,
utterances, and actions for a politician or some other public figure; one who
manipulates news.
[Spin, from ballgames (e.g. baseball) where spinning a ball helps a player project it in
the desired direction; doctor (expert) or from the verb to doctor (to tamper or
falsify).]36
The political colloquialism “spin” predates is cousin “spin doctor” by six years.
Surprisingly, if the term in fact has its etymological roots in the great American pastime,
it first appeared in the British paper, The Guardian, in 1978 (albeit in an article about
American politics): “The CIA can be an excellent source [of information],” the reporter
wrote, “though, like every other, its offerings must be weighted for factuality and spin.”37
Safire added that “spin doctor” may even have a German/Yiddish predecessor: “‘Kopfverdreher,’ literally ‘head turner,’ metaphorically ‘mind twister’; when I [Safire]
explained to my future father-in-law a generation back that I was in the public relations
field, in which people’s attitudes were modified at the introduction of persuasive
William Safire, “On Language; Calling Dr. Spin,” New York Times, 31 August 1986, sec. 6 (NYT
Magazine), p. 8.
36
From <wsmith@wordsmith.org>, “A.Word.A.Day—spin doctor,” 19 October 2004.
37
Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd Ed., s.v. “spin doctor.”
35
22
arguments [Safire had been a speech-writer and adviser of Richard Nixon’s], he smacked
his head and nodded ruefully, ‘a Kopf-verdreher.’”38
Safire couldn’t have been more prescient in his claim that “spin” was a word to
watch leading up to the 1988 presidential elections, although the term ultimately revealed
more about his press corps colleagues than the spin doctors themselves. Following
Reykjavik, “spin” exploded onto the scene of political reporting. Between October 21,
1984, when “spin doctor” first appeared in an American newspaper (in an un-bylined
Times editorial39), and October 12, 1986, the first day of the Reykjavik meetings, the
word, in its colloquial sense, appeared only four times in major U.S. newspapers
(including Safire’s column). The weeks following the summit saw a precipitous rise in
the word’s popularity, and by 1988, use of the term was nearly an everyday occurrence.
Before considering why the term became so popular—and so popular so fast—it
is important to question what “spin” replaced, both linguistically and, in a broader sense,
ideologically. For as long as there has been a widely disseminated American press, there
have been politicos attempting to influence it. The concept of “news” was invented in the
Jacksonian era, with the establishment of the first American wire service, the Associated
Press, in 1848. The AP took advantage of the relatively new technology of the telegraph
to transmit the bare facts of news stories nationwide, making possible the dissemination
of national news in local newspapers. As the service’s client publications represented a
wide array of political views, the AP strived to submit news stories free from editorial
content, and achieved this to an extent unprecedented to that point in the history of
38
39
Safire, “On Language; Calling Dr. Spin,” sec. 6, p. 8.
Safire credits the editorial to Jack Rosenthal, at the time the deputy editor of the Times’s editorial page.
23
American journalism. The AP quickly became the ideal for “news” journalism.40 It
wasn’t until 1896, however, amidst the most far-fetched debauchery of “yellow
journalism” (in which reporters often placed higher value on writing “literature” than
factual copy), that the New York Times gained prominence by stressing an “information”
model rather than a “story” model of journalism.41 The Times model became a new
standard of journalism which wouldn’t be questioned until the 1960s.42 But through its
claims on at least approximating objectivity, it also opened a Pandora’s Box of
complications. People in positions of power over news collection saw, for the first time,
the possibility to influence what a newspaper’s readership was meant to understand as
incontrovertible facts—the possibility, that is, to fundamentally influence “reality.”
Donald L. Shaw makes this claim in “News Bias and the Telegraph: A Study of Historical Change” and
“Technology: Freedom for What?” in Ronald T. Farrar and John D. Stevens, Mass Media and the National
Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 64-86.
41
Richard Kaplan analyzes this shift in Richard Kaplan, Politics and the American Press: The Rise of
Objectivity 1865-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Kaplan argues that economic and
market forces were the primary spur of the movement towards objectivity in American newspapers.
Previously, papers had adopted a strategy of “specialized, partisan” market appeal. But with the rise of big
industry in the 1870s and 1880s, a new group of publishers discovered that they could sell to a larger
audience if they catered to urban working peoples whom newspaper markets had previously ignored. More
established publications responded by trying to seize back this market segment, for which purpose Kaplan
argues reducing the attention they paid to politics (in favor of less abstract, more metropolis-specific
“news” stories) helped papers such as the New York Times capture back this market segment. For a more in
depth analysis of New York Times’s rise to prominence, see also Elmer Davis, History of the New York
Times 1851-1921, reprint ed. (St. Clair Shores, Michigan: Scholarly Press, 1971). More recently, Edwin
Diamond, a professor of journalism at New York University, has analyzed the “culture of the New York
Times” during the latter half of the 20th century in Edwin Diamond, Behind the Times: Inside the New York
Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
42
Michael Schudson gives a thorough examination of the reexamination of notions of “objectivity” which
took place in America in the 1960s in Discovering the News. Schudson describes how during the sixties,
objectivity in newspapers, which had previously been seen as the very “antidote” to bias, was seen as a bias
in and of itself, a “mystification,” “[f]or ‘objective’ reporting reproduced a vision of social reality which
refused to examine the basic structures of power and privilege.” (160) In other words, the social
infrastructure within which news was gathered must inherently color the way news is reported, and more
simply, what news is reported. Out of this debate, Schudson says, grew a new school of journalism
challenging “straight news” as a style. This school favored “a more active journalism, a ‘participant’
journalism skeptical of official accounts of public affairs.” The most significant fallout from this debate
was the compartmentalization of newspapers into “news” and “editorial” sections, and the injection of more
opinion-driven articles into the front section under the “News Analysis” moniker.
40
24
Exerting this influence was not yet called “spinning,” of course. It was generally
labeled “public relations” or “news management,” although if the practice was carried out
in a way that seemed particularly insidious, it could also be dubbed “propaganda.”43
Obviously, there is a long tradition of politicians trying to influence their constituents.
But the history of the management of information as an organized and publicly
acknowledged function of government is in fact relatively new. As the historian Michael
Schudson explains, “only since World War II has the importance and relative isolation of
a national security establishment and an ‘imperial presidency’ made government news
policy, especially on matters of foreign policy, the symbolic center of the relationship
between the government and the press.”44 And likewise, only since this time have the
government’s attempts at “public relations” or “news management” been subject to the
critical attention of the American press.
In the period leading up to the First World War, the relation between the press
corps and the executive office was markedly different. In 1913, Congress explicitly
forbade government agencies from hiring public relations personnel, and throughout the
1920s, the press was perceived as “the very incarnation of democratic government.”45
Ray Stannard Baker, a former reporter who served as Woodrow Wilson’s aide during the
1919 Versailles treaty negotiations, running the American Press Bureau in Paris,
For a more complete analysis of the connotations of “propaganda” in American society see Brett Gary’s
analysis of how the word “propaganda” weighed heavily on the “liberal conscience” following the First
World War, and how, for the first time, the term’s subject became the focus of academic study [Brett Gary,
The Nervous Liberals: Propaganda Anxieties from World War I to the Cold War (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1999)]. Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson’s Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use
and Abuse of Persuasion offers, in its chapter “Education or Propaganda?”, a discussion of how the term is
understood (and abused) in contemporary America [Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, Age of
Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1992),
261].
44
Schudson, Discovering the News, 163.
45
John E. Semonche, Ray Stannard Baker: A Quest for Democracy in Modern America, 1870-1918
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 169.
43
25
envisioned the media as a kind of “fourth estate,” as essential to the functioning of
democracy as any of the three branches of American government:
One fact stands out at the Paris Peace Conference as distinctive and determining: the
fact that the people of the world, publics, were there represented and organized as
never before at any peace conference. At the older congresses, the diplomats
occupied the entire stage, bargained, arranged, and secretly agreed; but at Paris
democracy, like the blind god in Dunsany’s play, itself comes lumbering roughly,
powerfully, out upon the stage.46
By “publics” and “democracy,” Baker meant the press: he meant American wire
services, newspapers, and reporters, all of which, to him, represented their readerships.
Michael Schudson, analyzing Baker’s vision of American journalism, observes that
Baker seemed to think that “[f]rom that moment on, national policy would have to be
formulated in the presence of public opinion and with the need for public assent in view.”
But as Schudson points out,
Paris did not mark a new era in open diplomacy as decisively as Baker had hoped
[Baker himself expressed disappointment that so many of Wilson’s meetings at
Versailles had, in the end, been kept secret], but it did announce a new relationship
between the press and the government in a way he had not anticipated, for it made
publicity itself a key political issue. For the first time in American foreign policy,
political debate at home concerned not only the substance of decisions the
government made but also the ways in which the government made decisions...the
legitimacy of procedure, as well as the effectiveness of the outcome, became an
issue.47
For Baker, then, and for political journalists of the 1920s in general, the press’s most
fundamental role was to serve a check-and-balance function, to certify and enforce the
legitimacy of government procedure. “News management” and “public relations” were
46
Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson and the World Settlement, 2 vols. (London: William Heineman,
1923), 271
47
Schudson, Discovering the News, 163-165.
26
taboo, even, to an extent, within the halls of government.48 Never since have reporters
enjoyed similar deference from a presidential administration, or similar gifts of access.
For political journalists, the 1920s were a kind of Arcadia.
Franklin Roosevelt was the first to shake the press’s lofty, idealized claim to
broad political access. Roosevelt was a famous manipulator of media, and curtailed press
access to an extent that infuriated reporters, particularly during World War II. In 1935,
Elmer Davis of the Times wrote that:
[T]he Roosevelt administration, imitating big business in the boom years, has set up
in every department a press bureau through which the news is channeled instead of
permitting newspaper men to talk directly to subordinate officials…This was not
wholly unknown in Washington before [Roosevelt] but the present administration has
enormously extended the practice and it has undoubtedly made it harder for
newspaper men to get at the truth.49
When, in 1944, the University of Chicago appointed a Commission on Freedom of the
Press, Henry Luce (who, incidentally, had suggested the Commission in the first place)
charged that “freedom of the press” was no longer evident in America.50 Luce’s refrain
was one that would be heard repeatedly throughout the remainder of the 20th century:
that “big government” manipulated the press not by explicitly lying or censoring, but by
flooding reporters with information—the information that the government wanted
published.
The press’s claims to access would be undermined again by Eleanor Roosevelt,
covering up her husband’s waning health status; then again by Joseph McCarthy’s
48
The congressional act of 1913 is an example. More explicitly, Wilson gave his nod of approval to
Baker’s efforts to make government proceedings more transparent, and to increase press access (even as he
kept his meetings at Versailles shrouded in secrecy).
49
Elmer Davis, “The New Deal’s Use of Publicity,” New York Times, 19 May 1935, sec. B, p. 5. From
Schudson, Discovering the News, 166
50
John Quirt, The Press and the World of Money: How the News Media Cover Business and Finance,
Panic and Prosperity and the Pursuit of the American Dream (Byron, CA: California-Courier Publishing,
1993), 62
27
chilling crack-down on dissident reporters; then again by Dwight Eisenhower’s
“magician” of a press secretary, James Hagerty, who mastered the art of the “pseudoevent” (or fluffed up news story which might be used to distract reporters from more
politically problematic news beats); then again by John Kennedy and his CIA chief Allen
Dulles during the Bay of Pigs fiasco; then again by Lyndon Johnson following the
Tonkin affair and leading into Vietnam; then again by Richard Nixon at Watergate. Elite
members of the press corps responded to each of these challenges in almost exactly the
same way—they accused. They levied charges against the news managers, the public
relations experts, the propagandists. They called them “liars.” They sponsored studies
and decried the declining morality of America’s political leaders. They wrote books
exposing the fundamental failings of America’s elected officials and political institutions.
In short, they protested.
This trend continued with unchecked momentum through the first Reagan
administration, and into the early years of the second. Reagan was perceived as a
showman, a consummate politician, a PR-wizard, hiding behind a dizzying team of
political consultants. Though the president charmed individual reporters in personal
interactions, his administration was seen as unflinchingly hostile to the press corps in
general. Reagan was understood to have limited media access to an unprecedented
extent. During the first few years of Reagan’s first presidency, a veritable deluge of
literature emerged—much more than with any previous president—analyzing the new
administration’s relationship with the press. The dominant theme of these books was
protest—the same kinds of protest the press had always issued when an administration
seemed to be challenging its pursuit of access. A number focused on the rising profession
28
of political consultancy as a divisive force working against the press.51 Others more
explicitly accused the new president of bringing Hollywood to Washington—of turning
the political process into a stage for acting and performance. In the early Reagan years,
the press responded to yet another perceived challenge with yet more complaints,
protests, and attacks—they did what they had done every time they had felt attacked
throughout the 20th century—they blamed the administration. In a post-Reykjavik, postspin world, the press would find their access woes only exacerbated, but they would also
find straightforward blame harder to come by.
The press started using the word “spin” out of convenience. It filled a linguistic
function uncanny in its usefulness. The word split the difference between “news
management” on one hand, and “propaganda” on the other. It had edge, bite. It allowed
the press to speak negatively of the president’s “news management” activities without
going so far as to call them “propaganda.” But the word also wrought unintended
consequences. Instead of working to distinguish, to linguistically clarify, “spin”
ultimately accomplished precisely the opposite effect. It became so popular, so fast, that
it simply swallowed the terms the difference of which it was intended to split. All “news
management,” however mild, became “spin.” Likewise, and far more troublingly, nearly
all “propaganda” also became “spin.” And the term “spin,” despite its bite, clearly
couldn’t condemn as “propaganda” could. “Spin,” then, as it is used today, most
significantly functions to excuse. The use of the word is rhetorically common among
The most interesting of these is Larry Sabato’s The Rise of Political Consultants. “Controversy is raging
about the role and influence of the political consultant in American elections, and properly so,” Sabato
wrote. These consultants, Sabato said, “have inflicted severe damage upon the party system and
masterminded the modern triumph of personality cults [an implicit dig at Reagan] over party politics in the
United States.” [Larry Sabato, The Rise of Political Consultants (New York: Basic Books: 1981), 3-4].
See also: Jeff Greenfield, How the Media Missed the Story of the 1980 Campaign (New York: Summit
Books, 1982) and John Herbers, “The President and the Press Corps,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, 9
May 1982, pp. 45-53.
51
29
political talking heads. The use of “propaganda” is not. If “spin” was originally coined
to distinguish between “news” and “public relations,” and thereby to help the press serve
a check-and-balance function with respect to government procedure—as in Baker’s
model—the word has in turn worked to destabilize this model. The baseball analogy is
apt. “Spin” implies a game, a political game of fooling the press—a game which is for
the most part innocuous, and which, at any rate, is simply a normal part of politics.
Instead of helping the press distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate news
management procedure, “spin” has thus worked towards legitimizing all news
management.
The press was not oblivious to the term’s ambiguity, even at the time it was
introduced. Why, then, would they popularize a term that only undercut their own
authority? If they were sufficiently irked by the brazen “news management” techniques
of the Reagan administration, why not simply label these techniques “propaganda”? If
they wanted to fight back, and had better weapons at their disposal, why not use them?
The answer to each of these questions, in short, is that they couldn’t. To understand why
they couldn’t, it is necessary to turn back to Reykjavik. The press, as it followed the
news story of the summit, became increasingly frustrated with its lack of access. The
reporters covering the story grappled with this inaccessibility—grappled publicly, indeed
grappled in print—and over the subsequent weeks cynically and self-consciously came to
terms with it. For those reporters, this was a distinctly traumatic event. Their ostensible
calling was to get at some kind of truth, and they didn’t respond kindly to assertions that
they simply couldn’t have this truth, that they might as well just guess. Reykjavik was an
event with distinctly embarrassing ramifications for the press, but an event the narrative
30
trajectory of which they were nevertheless powerless to redirect. This embarrassment,
this trauma, was reflected in their coverage. Their only recourse was linguistic. They fell
back on the term “spin.” Its ambiguity served their short-term purposes to a tee, even as
it further crippled their quest for long-term political access.
*
3
*
The news coverage that immediately followed the Reykjavik summit frustrated
Reagan administration insiders, to say the least. The negative portrayal of the summit’s
results was a serious problem. “For the Reagan apparatus, Reykjavik constituted the
most severe nuclear-related public relations crisis of the entire presidency,” explains
Mark Hertsgaard, an expert on the Reagan administration’s relationship with the press
corps. “Disappointment at the outcome was immediate and widespread. Now, a summit
which had failed had to be portrayed as one which had succeeded.”52 Why such urgency?
In the first place, there were congressional and gubernatorial elections approaching, and
in a number of close races Republican candidates had been trumpeting action against
nuclear proliferation under the assumption that allying themselves with Reagan’s cause at
Reykjavik could only strengthen their platforms. Now that strategy had all but blown up
in their faces, and the press, prickly about its exclusion from the summit, was more than
ready to aggravate the administration’s political wounds. On October 14, the Times’s
R.W. Apple Jr. reported that “Politicians Say G.O.P. Has Lost a Campaign Plum.”
“Leaders of both parties said it was clear that President Reagan would not now be able to
52
Mark Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee, 294.
31
give Republican candidates the kind of lift he and they had hoped for,” Apple wrote,
going on, moreover, to describe the efforts the president was making at damage control:
In his address to the nation tonight, Mr. Reagan appeared to be trying to limit
whatever political damage might have been caused by the impasse at Reykjavik. He
said several times that sweeping arms limitation proposals remained on the table, that
agreements were closer than ever, that progress had been made, that he was
optimistic.
‘There is reason – good reason – for hope,’ Mr. Reagan said, in what prominent
politicians termed an effort to suggest that, far from being a failure, the summit
meeting had accomplished a lot.53
Here again, then, the press casually acknowledged the administration’s efforts at “spin,”
apparently not taking them too seriously.
This wasn’t necessarily hubris. In the days immediately following the summit,
the thought of the president making too strong a case that the Reykjavik meetings were a
success seemed a little far-fetched. There was just too much evidence to the contrary.
Almost every newspaper “curtain-raiser” published in the days leading up to the summit
had said, in one way or another, that the ultimate success of Reykjavik would be
determined first and foremost by whether a date was set for a follow-up summit in the
United States. That hadn’t happened, and there were plenty of people who weren’t shy
about bluntly reminding the President of this fact. All three television networks ran
reports on S.D.I. in their nightly newscasts, in a number of instances directly
contradicting statements the President had made and the official U.S. position on
Reykjavik. House and Senate Democrats jumped on the Reagan-bashing bandwagon.
Sam Nunn of Georgia (“perhaps the most influential Democrat in Congress on military
matters,” according to the Times) suggested that he was ready to back away from his
customary support of the President on arms control issues. Another influential Democrat,
R.W. Apple Jr., “Politicians Say G.O.P. Has Lost a Campaign Plum,” New York Times, 14 October 1986,
sec. A, p. 13.
53
32
Colorado’s Senator Gary Hart, said that Reagan had “given up what would have been an
extraordinary achievement in arms control…[for] a very theoretical weapon.” Hart
condemned this as a “very poor bargain.” Representative Les Aspin of Wisconsin said
that Reagan had walked away from “a pretty good deal,” and Ed Markey of
Massachusetts quipped that the president supported “not arms reductions but an arms
race.”54
But the most significant reality checks were not Reagan’s Democratic opponents,
who everybody assumed had a stake in damaging his image, but insiders from his own
administration. Both Secretary of State Shultz and White House Chief of Staff Donald
Regan had shown their cards immediately following the summit, expressing,
respectively, “disappointment” and “anger” at the summit’s “failure.” And the press,
annoyed with its treatment leading up to and during the summit, was eager to seize on
these apparent slip-ups. The one thing the President had working for him was the
shortage of concrete information on what actually happened at the summit. Flora Lewis
of the Times wrote an editorial on October 14 entitled “Reykjavik Riddles” in which she
lamented the total lack of facts available to someone trying to objectively cast judgment
on the summit and its aftermath:
If there is reason for despair at this point, it is in trying to figure out what actually
happened at the Iceland mini-summit and why. A great many unexpected things
happened, the expectable did not, and the upshot was both ‘failure’ and ‘remarkable
progress,’ in the words of Secretary of State George Shultz.
This is Kafkaesque…55
“What is obvious,” Lewis concluded, “is that no single agreement has been reached.” 56
But a lack of solid information enabled the administration to contest even this point, plain
54
55
Apple, “Politicians Say G.O.P. Has Lost a Campaign Plum,” sec. A, p. 13.
Flora Lewis, “Reykjavik Riddles,” New York Times, 14 October 1986, sec. A, p. 35.
33
as it might have seemed. Reagan, in a nationally televised address the Monday following
the summit’s collapse, promised the American people “even more breakthroughs.”57
Gorbachev issued his own (significantly more measured) homecoming proclamation that
the summit was “not in vain,” but also expressed disappointment at President Reagan’s
“lack of political will” and more directly criticized Reagan’s S.D.I. initiative as an
“obstruction to the cause of peace, the epitome of militarist schemes and the
unwillingness to remove the nuclear menace to mankind.”58 Apparently unfazed,
Secretary Shultz, at a press conference that same afternoon, gave the impression that
Soviet misgivings were merely superficial, and that all sides were in agreement about the
successes of the summit: “you’d have to assess the Reykjavik meeting as one that
produced tremendous advances and that is the Soviet view as well.”59
Journalists had no need to accuse Reagan, Shultz, or other administration insiders
of bending facts to their own advantage, of “spinning”—the insiders straightforwardly
admitted as much. In a remarkable article entitled “U.S. Acts to Enhance Image After
Talks”—published October 15, just three days after the summit’s sudden end—the
Times’s Bernard Weinraub summarized:
White House officials, expressing unhappiness over news accounts of President
Reagan’s stance in his meeting with Mikhail S. Gorbachev, have begun one of the
most extensive public relations efforts of the Reagan Presidency.
The officials say their goal is to reverse the emphasis of newspaper and television
reports that, in their view, portrayed President Reagan’s adherence to the Strategic
Defense Initiative as the major reason for the leaders’ failure to agree on a major arms
control accord in the meeting last weekend in Iceland.
Lewis, “Reykjavik Riddles,” sec. A, p. 35.
Un-bylined, “Transcript of President’s Broadcast On Talks With Gorbachev in Iceland,” New York
Times, 14 October 1986, sec. A, p. 10.
58
Un-bylined, “Quotation of the Day,” New York Times, 15 October 1986, sec. A, p. 2.
59
Bernard Gwertzman, “Shultz to Meet Soviet Counterpart For Talks in Vienna in November,” New York
Times, 15 October 1986, sec. A, p. 14.
56
57
34
President Reagan and his key advisers today began a series of interviews and
speeches that, according to White House aides, are aimed at placing the blame for the
outcome on the Soviet leader.60
Weinraub quoted Pat Buchanan, the Director of White House Communications, who
described the administration’s post-Reykjavik public relations campaign as
“extraordinary”:
It’s the most extensive and intensive communications plan I’ve ever been associated
with in the White House. Basically, our story is this. The President made the most
sweeping, far-reaching arms control proposal in history. Gorbachev said ‘No.’ He
made a nonnegotiable demand that the President give up S.D.I. and the President said
‘No.’ 61
The strategy by which Buchanan and his colleagues spread “their story” was one of press
saturation—a simple method which, again, they publicly acknowledged. “We have the
whole story,” Buchanan said. “So Reagan, Shultz, Poindexter and the President are
going on the record in as many forums as we can to tell the story.” White House
Spokesman Larry Speakes reiterated: “It is a part of our policy on this meeting to tell
everything, to be totally open and to answer questions on the record.” Weinraub
commented that this was indeed extraordinary, particularly for this specific
administration, “where most officials…prefer that their comments to the press remain
anonymous.”62
This strategy may well have been conceived as an attempt to limit what was said
about the summit to a tight list of talking points which Reagan’s inner circle could
control, and equally to discredit variant opinions (Speakes cautioned the press: “If you
receive information on a background basis from a senior Administration official, from
Bernard Weinraub, “U.S. Acts to Enhance Image After Talks,” New York Times, 15 October 1986, sec.
A, p. 13
61
Weinraub, “U.S. Acts to Enhance Image After Talks,” sec. A, p. 13
62
Weinraub, “U.S. Acts to Enhance Image After Talks,” sec. A, p. 13
60
35
here on out that senior Administration official may not be plugged into what’s going
on.”)63 But again, the matter of most interest here is not whether the administration
sought to deceive, or exactly how Reagan’s public relations campaign was orchestrated.
What matters more is the simple fact that the press perceived a public relations campaign
in progress. The most prominent reporters and editorialists covering the Reykjavik story
were acutely aware, even as they were in the process of covering the story, that the
information they were being given—the information on which their coverage was
entirely dependent—came to them in the context of a massive public relations effort, and
they assumed that the public, armed with this knowledge, would see through it.
*
4
*
The Reagan administration’s “extensive and intensive communications plan” to
“reverse the [negative] emphasis of newspaper and television reports” following the
Reykjavik summit met with almost immediate success. As early as October 14, the
second news day following the conclusion of the talks (and one day before Weinraub’s
article describing the administration’s public relations strategy), the Times ran a “News
Analysis” by Bernard Gwertzman headlined: “Meeting May Still Yield Success.”
Gwertzman quoted Buchanan, who was already in full “our story” mode, in Reagan’s
defense: “[W]hen the President of the United States says no to a nonnegotiable demand
by the Secretary General of the Soviet Union that he give up the strategic defense of the
United States, I don’t think that’s a failure,” Buchanan said. “I think it was Ronald
63
Weinraub, “U.S. Acts to Enhance Image After Talks,” sec. A, p. 13.
36
Reagan’s finest hour.”64 “[I]t is possible,” Gwertzman posited in his analysis of the
situation, “that the extensive give-and-take in Iceland may open the way for renewed
negotiations and eventual agreements.” The president may have also done well, he
added, by avoiding what some insiders, including the former White House National
Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, were calling a “Soviet trap aimed at forcing
[Reagan] to yield on ‘Star Wars.’”65 The editorial pages, however, were still staunchly
critical of the President’s performance at Reykjavik. The Times ran Flora Lewis’s
stinging “Reykjavik Riddles,” with its accusations of “Kafkaesque” behavior. The Post
ran a melancholy editorial under the headline “Reykjavik: What Might Have Been”
(alongside a more light-hearted lamentation of the summit’s reporting: that CBS had cut
to Reagan’s speech and thereby disrupted coverage Monday Night Football’s RedskinsCowboys game “on three separate occasions,” in one instance causing viewers to miss a
Dallas touchdown; the CBS switchboard apparently logged “hundreds” of related
complaints).66
October 15 saw some opinions shifting in the President’s favor, albeit with
criticisms still prevalent. Perhaps more significantly, articles like Weinraub’s began to
appear, making specific mention of the administration’s public relations campaign. The
Times’s front-page lead ran under the headline “President Hopeful.” Gerald Boyd, who
wrote the article, reported that Reagan saw “a major breakthrough on reducing nuclear
weapons” as “within our grasp,” but qualified the president’s assertion with a comment
that Reagan insiders were apparently “engaged in a public competition to promote their
Bernard Gwertzman, “The Road Ahead: Each Side Blames Other for Failure, But Meeting May Still
Yield Success,” New York Times, 14 October 1986, sec. A, p. 11.
65
Gwertzman, “The Road Ahead: Each Side Blames Other for Failure, But Meeting May Still Yield
Success,” sec. A, p. 11.
66
John Carmody, “Final Edition,” Washington Post, 14 October 1986, sec. E, p. 6.
64
37
own interpretation of the outcome of the meeting in Iceland.”67 The Times also ran a
measured editorial, asserting that “Reykjavik’s sudden breakup does not mean that the
sweeping agreements approached there will go no further,” but wondering, at the same
time, whether Reagan’s “visionary bird in the bush [S.D.I.] is worth the sacrifice of the
Soviet bird in the hand.”68 The Post published a somewhat more pro-Reagan editorial,
saying that Gorbachev had “evidently sought to stampede President Reagan into
foreclosing any eventual deployment of the Strategic Defense Initiative,” but at the same
time calling the summit’s aftermath “dizzying” and questioning “whether there would not
have been better value in a more modest meeting that nailed down what could be nailed
down.”69 On the same editorial page, William Raspberry, a Post columnist, was less
forgiving. Raspberry directly accused the President of “deception”: “Maybe I'm missing
something, but all I saw, while the Dallas Cowboys were scoring off-camera, was a sort
of diplomatic sales scam.”70
The press’s cool reporting of the administration’s public relations campaign didn’t
much dampen public optimism. Despite the reporting of these “papers of record,” polls
showed that by October 16 the American people had, by and large, formed opinions
about Reykjavik, and that these opinions were overwhelmingly favorable for President
Reagan. A CBS News Poll showed that 44 percent of Americans believed that
Gorbachev was “more to blame for not reaching an arms agreement at the Iceland summit
meeting,” as opposed to 17 percent who felt Reagan was more to blame.71 “The
Gerald Boyd, “President Hopeful: Citing Gains on Arms, He Asks Moscow Not to ‘Miss Opportunity,’”
New York Times, 15 October 1986, sec. A, p. 1.
68
Un-bylined, “The War Over Star Wars,” New York Times, 15 October 1986, sec. A, p. 26.
69
Un-bylined, “Beyond Reykjavik,” Washington Post, 15 October 1986, sec. A, p. 18.
70
William Raspberry, “Diplomatic Sales Scam,” Washington Post, 15 October 1986, sec. A, p. 19.
71
Adam Clymer, “First Reaction: Poll Shows Arms-Control Optimism and Support for Reagan,” New
York Times, 16 October 1986, sec. A, p. 11.
67
38
American public’s initial reaction to the Reykjavik summit meeting is quite supportive of
President Reagan and very optimistic about the future of arms control,” the Times’s
Adam Clymer reported. The President’s overall approval rating also jumped, from 64
percent on October 9 to 73 percent on October 14, following his televised speech on the
results of the summit. And tellingly, when asked: “Even though no agreement was
reached at the Iceland summit, do you think that meeting will eventually lead to real
arms-control agreements, or not,” 57 percent of respondents said they though agreement
would follow, and only 31 percent thought the meeting would not eventually lead to
agreements.72
Meanwhile, headlines and editorials in support of the President were popping up
more frequently—even by reporters acutely aware of the administration’s public relations
campaign. “President Is Critical of ‘Liberals’ Who May ‘Chop Up’ ‘Star Wars’” the
Times ran on its front page, on the 16th, with the sub-headline: “Sees Critics Playing Into
Gorbachev’s Hands on Missile Defense Plans.” It bears mention that Gerald Boyd, the
article’s reporter, again prominently mentioned the public relations campaign behind the
President’s new-found support, noting that Reagan’s remarks “were part of a White
House effort to deflect domestic and international criticism from Mr. Reagan’s refusal to
curb the [S.D.I.] program.”73 The same day, the paper published a glowing editorial by
Anthony Lewis entitled “Reagan’s Dream.” “After all the years of fruitless talk about
arms control, of bureaucratic fencing over details, we learned that the two superpowers
can actually make a deal,” Lewis wrote. “We learned that the numbers of nuclear
weapons need not go on endlessly climbing, but can be drastically reduced.” Reykjavik,
Clymer, “First Reaction: Poll Shows Arms-Control Optimism and Support for Reagan,” sec. A, p. 11.
Gerald Boyd, “President Is Critical of ‘Liberals’ Who May ‘Chop Up’ ‘Star Wars,’” New York Times, 16
October 1986, sec. A, p. 1.
72
73
39
three days before, had been a cautionary tale of diplomatic stubbornness. Now it was a
how-to manual for political cooperation?
Once again, the press covered this surprising turn of events, as if in a dead-pan.
“Reagan Triumphs From Failure in Iceland,” ran an October 17 article by Weinraub:
Moments after President Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev concluded their meeting
in Reykjavik Sunday night, its outcome seemed clear. Mr. Reagan was grim-faced,
even angry, and Secretary of State George P. Shultz showed up at a news conference
looking haggard and drained.
‘I have never seen Shultz exude, through his words, the pace of his comments, his
facial expressions, such disappointment and defeat,’ said a key Administration
official. ‘A lot of people saw that. The President was just furious. He was steaming
angry when he came out of that door with Gorbachev. We all felt that we had come
so close to pulling this off, and yet we couldn’t.
As Air Force One left Iceland hours later, White House officials began charting a
strategy for dealing with the political and foreign policy implications of the meeting.
Slowly, their own anger gave way to a more calculating mood. And by the time the
President’s jet landed at Andrews Air Force Base in suburban Maryland, the strategy
had begun to fall into place.74
Weinraub, by using the word “calculating,” came as close as any news reporter had, up to
that point, to criticizing the administration for its public relations campaign. The rest of
the article, however, reads less like a criticism than a profession of canny respect:
By today [October 17], Donald T. Regan, the White House chief of staff, and other
Administration officials were saying not only that the strategy had worked, but also
that public support for ‘Star Wars’—the space-based missile defense program that
was the central source of contention at the Reagan-Gorbachev meeting—was on the
rise and could even turn into an election issue in the next two weeks.75
“Look at the polls,” Regan said. “The American people are behind us.” Then, hubris
having perhaps gotten the better of him, he added: “Why not tell what happened? Why
Bernard Weinraub, “Reagan Triumphs From Failure in Iceland,” New York Times, 17 October 1986, sec.
A, p. 22.
75
Weinraub, “Reagan Triumphs From Failure in Iceland,” sec. A, p. 22 (S.D.I. already had turned into an
election issue in one key race. The Times had reported on October 15 that Ken Kramer, a Republican
candidate for Gary Hart’s Colorado Senate seat, was promoting Reagan’s space shield, and had “challenged
his Democratic rival, Representative Timothy E. Wirth, to take a stand on the subject.” Kramer said in an
interview that the antimissile program represented ‘a fundamental issue’ between him and his opponent.
[R.W. Apple Jr., “Senate Nominee Pushes ‘Star Wars’ in Colorado,” New York Times, 15 October 1986,
sec. A, p. 18]).
74
40
not let it all hang out? Why not?”76 Weinraub analyzed that, “[a]ccording to the strategy
worked out while the Presidential party flew across the North Atlantic, Mr. Regan had
decided to place major Administration officials on the record before virtually any
television, newspaper, magazine or radio outlet that asked for them.” Weinraub
detachedly and even a little admiringly concluded that “[t]he story that the
Administration decided to tell—and is still telling” was “the most ambitious public
relations effort of the Reagan Presidency.”
The Reykjavik news story would be remarkable in itself, particularly given the
almost unqualified success of the administration’s efforts to improve its image in the eyes
of the American people. But what is even more astounding is that the press itself proved
susceptible to the “sales scam” it seemed so intent on acknowledging from an even
distance. By October 19, the positive editorial trend only seemed to gain momentum,
with support for the President now flowing freely from the most rarified strata of the
journalism world. James “Scotty” Reston, the former Times Executive Editor and
Washington Bureau Chief, wrote an editorial criticizing Reagan detractors: “The loudest
critics of the Reagan-Gorbachev Iceland proposals are pulling up these new plants [of
arms compromise] before they’ve had time to take root.”77 On the same day, a new CBS
News poll reported that Americans rated the President’s “handl[ing of] relations with the
Soviet Union” more positively than they ever had before in his presidency. In September
1986, 61 percent of Americans “approved” of Reagan’s approach towards U.S.-Soviet
diplomacy. By the eighteenth of October, that number had shot up to 72 percent.78 And,
in what must have seemed like a knockout blow to those still harboring doubts about the
Bernard Weinraub, “Reagan Triumphs From Failure in Iceland,” sec. A, p. 22.
James Reston, “How to Miss the Boat,” New York Times, 19 October 1986, sec. A, p. 32.
78
CBS News Poll, “Reagan and the Russians,” New York Times, 19 October 1986, sec. A, p. 10.
76
77
41
summit, a star-studded (and bipartisan) team of international relations experts—
McGeorge Bundy, George Kennan, Robert McNamara, and Gerard Smith—published a
dramatic editorial defense of the President’s performance at the summit. “The Iceland
summit meeting offers an opportunity for progress in the reduction of nuclear dangers
more promising than any since the imperfect effort for international control of atomic
energy broke down under Stalin’s rejection 40 years ago,” they opened, ambitiously
enough. Reykjavik’s lessons, they said, were “deep” and “hopeful.” Reagan’s “Strategic
Defense Initiative has proved to be a powerful bargaining lever,” and was “a basis for
progress on arms.”79 The experts’ thesis—that the Reykjavik meetings could end up a
political coup for all parties involved—was tempered by mention of the summit’s
“frustrations.” But these frustrations, it was insinuated, were the result not of
fundamental disagreements between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, but of political
observers (read “the media”) not understanding just how compatible the goals of the two
countries in fact were. The experts cited the need for “a review [of S.D.I.] by
disinterested experts,” a jab at the press corps which, apparently, had proven itself unable
to perform this function.80
This point wasn’t wholly unfounded—clearly the press isn’t immune from
biases—but the comment was understandably infuriating to journalists who had been
responsible for covering the summit: this, in essence, was a recommendation to write
them and their ilk out of the political loop altogether. They were at once being told that
their interpretations of Reykjavik were incorrect and, in a weird kind of circular logic,
McGeorge Bundy, George F. Kennan, Robert S. McNamara, and Gerard C. Smith, “Reyjavik’s Grounds
for Hope: A Basis For Progress On Arms,” New York Times, 19 October 1986, sec. A, p. 32.
80
Bundy, Kennan, McNamara, Smith, “Reyjavik’s Grounds for Hope: A Basis For Progress On Arms,”
sec. A, p. 32.
79
42
that they were themselves at fault for their own predicament (and moreover for the
political predicament of their President). The earnest and optimistic Ronald Reagan, all
of a sudden, was the innocent, the party being duped. The press, by very virtue of its
attempts to ask probing questions, was now disruptively partial, misguided, counterproductive, and ultimately unnecessary. Never mind that the press had specifically been
kept out of the process at Reykjavik—had been physically prevented from obtaining the
information needed to cast sound judgment on the story they were reporting. They had
been held at arms length from the summit’s proceedings so that the only access they had
to information came directly through a small group of administration insiders; they had
been fed information by these insiders—information which, either out of competition for
headlines or a supposed duty to journalistic integrity, they had felt compelled to publish;
they had been told that information coming from anyone else should be deemed suspect;
and then they had been blamed for having published the information they were fed,
blamed indeed for having been the cause of the very public relations campaigns they had
tried to present as soberly and disinterestedly as possible. They had, in other words, been
played for a fool. It is hard to imagine a more maddening scenario for a professional
journalist, particularly any journalist clinging to idealistic notions of serving the public
with relevant and accurate news. Irony of ironies, America’s “free” press now perceived
itself falling casualty to the public relations war it considered itself responsible for
mediating. Reporters, marginalized against their will at Reykjavik, were now being
demonized for having been marginalized. Maddening indeed. Now they just had to
figure out how they were going to respond.
43
*
5
*
One hesitates to read too much novelty into such a moment. The press had seen
presidential deception before, and deception far more serious than this. In those previous
tests, journalists had exhibited stunning power, leading the push to remove two
consecutive presidents from office. (Lyndon Johnson, the first of the two, had felt
himself so savagely persecuted that he went on the record decrying the press’s apparent
super-powers: “You guys. All you guys in the media. All of politics has changed
because of you.” 81) What happened here is at first blush less dramatic. It is certainly
more subtle. Yet it was every bit as significant—maybe more—in molding the historical
trajectory of the press’s relationship with the executive office. In response to the lies of
previous presidents the press had perceived a clear mode of counter-attack and had
followed up. Here, by contrast, reporters found themselves in a straightjacket.
The press’s greatest obstacle—the obstacle which the Reagan administration so
shrewdly picked up on (as the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations would after
it)—lay in the very nature of its own existence. The press, or rather the amorphous
conglomeration of organizations ambiguously lumped together under that word, was (and
is) not, as so often seems to slip one’s notice, composed of non-profit organizations. Nor
was it publicly funded. It has no public mandate. Grand ideals of objectivity
notwithstanding, the vast majority of newspapers, magazines, and radio and television
stations, are corporations (or subsidiaries thereof), and like all corporations have to
answer first and foremost to clientele. A newspaper company has to sell newspapers. A
radio station has to sell advertisement spots, and to do so it needs to attract listeners. For
81
David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (New York: Knopf, 1979), 6.
44
media organizations in 1986, attacking a popular president—at least, attacking him too
overtly—simply made bad business sense. But of course, appearing to lack objectivity
could also spell doom for a newspaper. So you had to appear as if you were striving for
objectivity, but only to a point. For the American press corps following the Reykjavik
story, this proved a troublingly paradoxical calculus. The novelty of the Reykjavik story,
then, wasn’t the fact that press felt itself deceived. This wasn’t a matter of deception. It
was a matter of exploitation. For the first time, a presidential administration both
recognized weaknesses which had always existed in the press’s claims to power, but
which had never been exploited, and found itself in a position to exploit these weaknesses
for its own political gain.
This revelation, this formula, is one of Reagan’s most profound political legacies.
President George W. Bush, at a 2003 barbeque he hosted for the press corps at his ranch
in Crawford, Texas, mentioned, somewhat provocatively, his preference not to watch
television news or read newspapers, save the odd sports section. “How do you then know
what the public thinks?” one reporter asked. “You’re making a huge assumption,” Bush
replied—“that you represent what the public thinks.”82 Bush was right on target, as was
his Chief of Staff Andrew Card, who later elaborated: “[You press] don’t represent the
public any more than other people do. In our democracy, the people who represent the
public stood for election. . . . I don’t believe you have a check-and-balance function.”83
In 2003 just as in 1986, this is exactly what the press didn’t want to hear, but it was
unavoidable. It is frankly more realistic for a presidential administration to recognize the
press as little more than another competing special interest. Baker’s model could be
82
83
Ken Auletta, “Fortress Bush,” The New Yorker, 19 January 2004, pp. 53-65.
Auletta, “Fortress Bush,” p. 54.
45
written off as little more than a moment of historical naïveté, now obsolete.
Pharmaceutical companies are trying to sell drugs. Oil companies, oil. The press, news.
Or worse, headlines. As Mark McKinnon, who coordinated advertising for Bush’s 2000
presidential campaign, put it: “[The press’s] job is to do a job. And that’s not necessarily
to report the news. It’s to get a headline or get a story that will make people pay attention
to their magazine, newspaper, or television more.” And negative headlines sell. “I’ve
never subscribed to the [liberal] bias argument about the press,” McKinnon added. “I
think the press is tough on everybody. The nature of news is that conflict is news.”84
The nature of politics is often quite the opposite. For an incumbent president, no news is
sometimes the best kind. The last thing a president wants is journalists poking around,
listening to every little thing he says, waiting for a slip-up, for a headline. The press, for
the president, is a vehicle by which he can get his message—call it what you will,
“discourse,” or “rhetoric,” or “spin”—to the public. But if the middle-man can be cut
out, why not? If the press’s access can be limited without in the process damaging one’s
approval rating, is that not simply an intelligent strategy to adopt? There is no article in
the constitution providing for free press access.
Ronald Reagan, whether or not he was the first president to grasp this point,
certainly exploited the knowledge to an unprecedented degree. Nor was this fact lost on
the press. As noted previously, there was a explosion of books in the early years of the
Reagan presidency specifically addressing (or “exposing”) the administration’s dealings
with the press, and the uncanny control Reagan seemed to wield over journalists. There
were more such books with Reagan than with any prior president. And there is a story
unto itself of how these works saw a general shift in tone sometime around Reykjavik—
84
Auletta, “Fortress Bush,” p. 56.
46
from the accusatorial tone the press assumed in the early years of the first Reagan
administration, where they seemed eager to demonize the president and his cabinet for
their public relations efforts, to what became, by the time George H.W. Bush took office
in January 1989, a more reflective and even self-critical tenor. This transition evolved
out of the anxious situation in which the press found itself at Reykjavik. A week after the
summit, the public (and in many instances, members of the press corps themselves) had
successfully been “spun.” Reporters were indignant at the brazenness with which the
administration’s public relations campaign had been carried out, but were unsure how to
proceed. They felt handcuffed. Not only administration insiders, but now public figures
in general (like Bundy, Kennan, and McNamara) and even public media figures (like
Reston) were turning hostile. This seemed an extraordinary effort to publicly castrate the
press corps, or at very least, a symptom thereof. Also a challenge. The administration
was throwing the press’s own irrelevance in its face and implicitly challenging them to do
something about it.
But here again, the administration seemed to have the upper hand. The press
didn’t just feel handcuffed. In a very real sense, it was. Reagan, particularly following
his post-Reykjavik P.R. campaign, was a political dynamo, wildly popular with the
public. And he had successfully painted the press as squabbling and contrarian. This
may have been the greatest catch-22 of all. If the press cried foul, complained, they
would only add to this reputation, further demean themselves, and probably cripple their
sales. After Vietnam and Watergate, the public didn’t want scandal. Particularly not
with Reagan, whom they loved. “It was so hard to get mad at Reagan,” said Ben Bradlee,
who at the time was the Managing Editor of the Post. “Day after day, for seventy years,
47
the press is told they’re too goddamn liberal. And I know…I at least…after Watergate I
know I pulled back a little bit. We didn’t want to put [another president] in jail.”85 It
would have been bad business.
Reykjavik was a microcosmic representation of greater tensions—of a larger give
and take between the press and the Oval Office. In the wake of the Reykjavik summit
specifically, and in its dealings with the President in general, the press felt pinned. But it
couldn’t go on the offensive—not an outright offensive in any case. What it did instead
was clever, albeit ineffectual. At the macro level of discourse, it was also the seeds of
ideological change. And it started, in earnest, in the wake of Reykjavik and responding
to Reykjavik. The press’s response was linguistic. In the weeks following Reykjavik,
major newspapers and media outlets popularized and clung to a relatively new and
exceedingly ambiguous term, “spin.” In its linguistic ambiguity, it was a term which
allowed the press to feel appropriately critical of the President while never really
launching a serious attack. It allowed them to preserve ideals of their own objectivity
without poisoning their product commercially. In short, it allowed the press to save face.
But it also irreversibly changed the terms of the power-dynamic between the press and
the executive office. And it did so in a way which would only exacerbate the media woes
out of which it was born.
*
6
*
About a week after Reykjavik, the press did something entirely novel: it covered
itself being “spun,” in precisely those terms. Even at the time, members of the
85
Ben Bradlee, Author’s interview, 6 December 2004, Cambridge, MA. Tape recording.
48
journalistic elite exhibited a canny awareness that something significant was happening.
“Rarely do the ringside seats of history provide as many valid clues to reality as they did
at Reykjavik,” wrote the Post’s Lou Cannon. “And rarely have journalists in a
democracy been so blatantly advised by their government to reject the evidence of their
eyes and ears in favor of an official instant revision portraying failure as a success. Still,
the reality of what we saw will linger long after the fantasies of the White House spin
merchants have faded away.”86 It is easy to read over these words without reflecting on
how fantastically odd they are. “Still, the reality of what we saw will linger long after the
fantasies of the White House spin merchants have faded away.” Cannon, a well-known
reporter at one of the leading newspapers in the United States, was here acknowledging
that the facts of a news story were not correct and at the same time declining to take up
the issue. He left it to history to set the record straight.87 How astonishing for a
prominent reporter to do this. Is it not a reporter’s job, after all, to do precisely the
opposite? Was clearing up the Reykjavik fiasco not a Pulitzer in the making? And yet
Cannon simply distanced himself from the debate, quietly asserting that historians would
be able to fix this “official instant revision portraying failure as success.” Cannon’s tone
is almost remorseful. Reading over his statement once again—“Still, the reality of what
we saw will linger long after the fantasies of the White House spin merchants have faded
away”—it becomes increasingly clear that this was not Cannon’s assumption at all. It
was merely his hope.
Tom Wicker took an equally indirect approach at criticism on the Times’s
editorial page: satire. “[W]e’ve been privileged to meet the one and only Doctor Spin
Lou Cannon, “Naivete: the Verdict at Reykjavik,” Washington Post, 20 October 1986, sec. A, p. 2.
Indeed, later in the same article Cannon says this explicitly: “history is likely to deliver a harsher verdict
of the Reykjavik summit than did the White House spin patrol.”
86
87
49
himself,” Wicker wrote. “[T]he master curve-baller, illusionist and smoke-blower of the
day, maybe the all-time champion of dipsy-do. He turns out to be—not unlike the
Wizard of Oz—President Ronald Reagan, as friendly and lovable as Frank Morgan.”
After discussing instances of Reagan’s spin magic from earlier in his presidency, Wicker
turned to Reykjavik, his evidentiary gold mine:
[A]ll of this masterful bridging of Credibility Gap was eclipsed by the legerdemain of
Doctor Spin and his stage hands in the aftermath of the Iceland summit’s collapse.
P.R. men as yet unborn will someday curse the fate that denied them an eyeball view
of the master’s peak performance.
Secretary of State Shultz, seeming near tears, told a national television audience
Sunday night that he was “deeply disappointed” by the summit failure. But by
Monday a fully orchestrated Administration, with the Doctor on the podium, was
spinning out the melody that “breakthroughs” and “sweeping potential agreements”
(breathtaking please!) had been achieved.
In this “post-summit phase” (more genius), White House spinners logged 71
“media events” (a golden oldie), 53 involving top spinners like Donald Regan and
Mr. Shultz—who, quickly recovering from his disappointment, personally spun out
the good news for the networks and The New York Times. Peter Roussel, a deputy
spinner, was moved to speak pridefully of a “media blitz.”
…One more win for the Gipper may be in sight and that, fellow rubes, is the name
of the game.88
Wicker made 18 references to “spin” in a 761 word article when, two weeks before, the
phrase had been used only a handful of times in the history of American journalism. But
the point isn’t merely that the word was being used, and used a lot. There is also the
question of how it was being used. Wicker, obviously, was critical of President Reagan.
But he couldn’t help portray the President’s behavior as part of a “game.” “[F]riendly
and lovable” Reagan does not come across as evil, or even crooked, so much as clever
and endearingly crafty. Wicker can’t help but respect the administration’s adroitness at
spinning a story-line. While the tone of the article drips sarcasm, Wicker’s parenthetical
quips—“(more genius),” and, earlier, “(one of his terms of art)”—can only be construed
Tom Wicker, “In the Nation; Meet Doctor Spin,” New York Times, 26 October 1986, sec. 4 (NYT
Magazine), p. 23.
88
50
as sincere, even if they are laced with acid intent. “Spin,” then, while clearly something
Wicker judged negatively, also connoted an aspect of mischief. “Spin” was wrong, no
doubt, but nobody could consider it as grave as, say, “propaganda.” Pundits could
satirize the president’s spinning, but they had a hard time criticizing it outright. President
Reagan could be “Doctor Spin” and not necessarily suffer politically. Neither did the
press come across any better in the eyes of the public, if their only option was to frame
themselves as spin-watchdogs. If the president was a mischievous rebel who everybody
seemed to like, despite his habit of telling un-truths, the press was the bland authority
figure, the curmudgeonly god-parent, the school principal. Furthermore, to the extent
that the public believed the President, and not his detractors, the press looked
unreasonable and biased in their efforts to portray him as Doctor Spin. The Christian
Science Monitor published an article on October 29, 1986, criticizing the press for doing
just this: “The fact is that we may be in better shape than anybody [the press] dared
predict two weeks ago. That is not because of the Reagan administration’s media
blitz....It just may happen to be true.”89
In the case against “news management,” or spin, Reykjavik was indeed a gold
mine of evidence. It was also the catalyst spurring an ideological shift in the press’s
understanding of its own relation to the executive office. The bizarre story of the
summit, its telling and retelling, seemed to crystallize a context for judging the rest of
Reagan’s presidency. Spun stories from the past gained new editorial currency. In the
same article, Wicker recalled Reagan “swap[ping] a Soviet spy for an American
journalist while assuring the nation that it wasn’t really a swap”; then denying leaked
information about a “‘disinformation’ campaign aimed not at the Soviet press but at the
89
John Hughes, “After Reykjavik,” Christian Science Monitor, 29 October 1986, p. 12.
51
U.S. press”; then explaining that there was no CIA link when “a U.S. plane formerly used
by the CIA and owned by a company with links to the CIA was shot down in Nicaragua,
[and] a surviving American crewman said he had been told that he worked for the CIA,
then named a supervisor with links to the CIA and to Vice President Bush.”90 Alex
Brummer, of the British newspaper The Guardian, recalled Reagan’s campaign promisespast in the context of spin-present. “[T]he White House ‘spin doctors’ were at work
seeking as it were to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat,” Brummer wrote, comparing
Reagan’s efforts at promoting the 1986 congressional campaigns of key Republicans to
the strategies which had led him to victory himself in 1980 and 1984. “As the world
discovered…when the President’s handlers put him on the public relations offensive, he
can change perceptions as if by magic.”91
The press was refocusing its attention on Reagan’s history of spin, but its tone had
changed. Whereas in the early years of Reagan’s first term, books like Larry Sabato’s
The Rise of Political Consultants and Sidney Blumenthal’s The Permanent Campaign
had specifically attacked presidential politics as underhanded and deceptive, now the
press, equally infuriated at their own demeaned position, turned its poison pen on itself.
Instead of combative, the press became self-critical. Instead of blaming the
administration, now, for the first time, the press blamed itself for not trying hard enough
to get at the administration. Instead of demonizing the spin doctors, the press now took
aim at reporters for having allowed themselves to be spun.
This trend of the press shifting blame away from the spinners and towards
themselves (the spinees, as it were), came to a head during the final years of Reagan’s
Wicker, “In the Nation; Meet Doctor Spin,” sec. 4, p. 23.
Alex Brummer, “Commentary: Trapping Reagan’s magic makers in an iron grip,” The Guardian
(London), 6 November 1986, sec. 1, p. 23.
90
91
52
second term. As what was already being called “the Reagan era” neared its end, a
cascade of books hit the market analyzing the president’s legacy.92 The most notable of
these with respect to Reagan’s press policy, both for its comprehensiveness and the
attention it commanded upon its release, was Mark Hertsgaard’s On Bended Knee (1988).
Hertsgaard, who had written for both the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles
Times, produced a scathing critique of the White House press corps, the most rarified
echelon of professional journalism. These reporters, he claimed, had failed both their
profession and their country by taking a wishy-washy, and even in some instances
complicit, attitude towards the curtailment of their own access. On Bended Knee is
dedicated to “I.F. Stone, America’s greatest modern newspaperman: Had the press in the
Reagan era approached the standard set by I.F. Stone’s Weekly, this book would have
been unnecessary.”93
The resonance of Hertsgaard’s claim was all the greater given his sources.
Having gained unusual access to the inner-workings of the White House, Hertsgaard had
Reagan’s spin doctors tell in their own words, and in explicit detail, how and why they
had kept the nation’s most elite group of journalists in check. David Gergen, Reagan’s
Director of Communications, revealed how he “guided” newspaper and television stories,
and told Hertsgaard of the administration’s seven basic news management principles for
anyone communicating directly with the press:
Among others, Michael Deaver’s Behind the Scenes [Michael Deaver with Mickey Herskowitz, Behind
the Scenes (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1987)] is notable for its political and anecdotal
access. Released a few years later, Lou Cannon’s President Reagan stood for most of the 1990s as the
preeminent Reagan biography, both in terms of sales and critical acclaim—excluding Reagan’s own
autobiography, An American Life (1990), that is.
93
An independent American journalist, Stone published a weekly newsletter, “I.F. Stone’s Weekly,” from
1953 to 1971. Stone gained a reputation as a staunch critic first of McCarthyism, then of American policy
during Vietnam. [Robert C. Cottrell, Izzy: A Biography of I.F. Stone (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 1994) xi-xxii].
92
53







plan ahead
stay on the offensive
control the flow of information
limit reporters’ access to the President
talk about issues you want to talk about
speak in one voice
repeat the same message many times94
Michael Deaver, Reagan’s campaign guru and Deputy Chief of Staff, told in turn of the
sophisticated techniques he had employed to harness the power of television to the
president’s advantage. It was Deaver who coined the adage “television elects
presidents”95—Gary Hart, after the 1988 Democratic primaries, could well testify to the
implicit converse of this statement: that bad television management loses elections. The
Reagan public relations outfit brought television operations to new levels of refinement.
According to Hertsgaard, it was Deaver who first latched onto the fact that the
networks’ appetite for stories (and video clips—the staging of which was Deaver’s
personal specialty) outweighed the President’s need for media coverage. The press
wanted to cover the President, and would seek him out whether or not he provided open
access. The key, then, was to limit access in just such a way as to minimize negative
coverage, while at the same time feeding reporters a heavy dose of choreographed press
events, information-heavy and easily useable press releases (always with a favorable
twist), and cookie-cutter video clips for evening news programs—you had to keep
reporters busy, to provide them with everything they needed to do their job with the least
amount of effort. Otherwise they might start digging. “They’ve got to write their story
every day,” Leslie Janka, a press officer in the Reagan administration, told Hertsgaard.
“You give them their story, they’ll go away. As long as you come in there every day,
94
95
Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee, 34.
Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee, 17.
54
hand them a well-packaged, premasticated story in the format they want, they’ll go away.
The phrase is ‘manipulation by inundation.’”96 This strategy in itself wasn’t new, of
course. It was exactly what Roosevelt and Eisenhower had done, and what several other
presidents since had tried to do, albeit less successfully. What was new was the press’s
response of blaming itself. What was new, in short, was the kind of response
encapsulated in Hertsgaard’s book. Whereas in 1981 and 1982 journalists attacked
Reagan for limiting their access, here Hertsgaard was soberly acknowledging the
administration’s schemes, but lambasting the press for their apparent laziness and
complicity in their own marginalization.
On Bended Knee met with very mixed reviews, which are particularly interesting
in their testimony to the jagged progression of press thought. The Washington Post’s
Molly Ivins took the correctness of the book’s argument wholly for granted, and wrote a
review lamenting the sad state it implied for the press:
This book becomes eerily more apposite as the sorry 1988 presidential campaign
winds up, or down. Mark Hertsgaard’s conclusion is that for eight years now the
Oval Office has been occupied by a public relations firm, and that the media response
has been, for a variety of reasons, gutless, complacent, sycophantic or inept. You
could probably get half the White House press corps to vote aye on that proposition,
but the more interesting part of Hertsgaard’s book is not the troubled witness given by
conscientious journalists—it’s the testimony from Michael Deaver, David Gergen,
Richard Darman and Jim Baker, the guys who did the manipulating. To read how
they did it is chilling—because they’re still doing it.97
There are two interesting facets to Ivins’s review: first, that Hertsgaard’s argument, from
her perspective, didn’t even require defense—that “half the White House press corps”
would “vote aye” seemed obvious. She is more intrigued by the fact that the spin doctors
would so readily admit their spin-doctoring tactics while they were still in office, still
96
Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee, 52.
Molly Ivins, “How Reagan Bamboozled the Press; Greasing the Wheels for The President’s Easy Ride,”
Washington Post, 7 November 1988, sec. B, p. 3.
97
55
spin doctoring. Reporters from elite papers writing reviews of On Bended Knee seemed
to share this sense that the press’s own fault in the matter went without saying. Lionel
Barber quoted Hertsgaard in an article in London’s Financial Times, speaking out in full
agreement with Hertsgaard’s criticisms of the press corps’ complicity (in this specific
case with reference to coverage of the 1988 presidential campaign): “What is hard to
accept is the way television here has allowed itself to become an accomplice to the
crimes of all the candidates.”98
The Times review, by Stephen E. Ambrose (who, interestingly, was not a
professional journalist, but a historian), found Hertsgaard’s argument harder to accept.
[Hertsgaard] believes that it is the responsibility of the news media to criticize and
analyze, not just balance a White House handout with a Democratic response,
especially in a period in which “the Democrats were a pathetic excuse for an
opposition party—timid, divided, utterly lacking in passion, principle and vision.” As
one example, he castigates the media for not raising the issue of impeachment during
Iran-contra. He points out that the reason for this failure was that the Democrats
would not use the “I” word, so the press had nothing on which to write a story. This
criticism ignores the obvious fact that it is Congress, not the news media, that has the
power to impeach. Mr. Hertsgaard thus joins President Nixon’s loyalists (who argued
that their man was done in by the press), with the difference that he wishes the press
had done it to President Reagan, too. In other words, both Mr. Hertsgaard and the
Nixon loyalists grossly exaggerate the power of the press.99
Ambrose seems to fundamentally misunderstand both Hertsgaard’s argument and the
press’s uncomfortable predicament. Of course the press doesn’t literally impeach, nor
did they directly remove Nixon from office. But the press does (or did) have the power
to mobilize public opinion against a president. And the press did have the power to do
just this against Nixon. And the press did not have the power, or the will, or the
commercial incentive, to do the same to Reagan.
Lionel Barber, “Politics Reduced to Soap Opera,” Financial Times, 19 October 1988, sec. I, p. 31.
Stephen E. Ambrose, “Mr. President! Mr. President!” New York Times, 20 November 1988, sec. 7 (NYT
Book Review), p. 34.
98
99
56
This is not to pick unduly on Ambrose. In fact, most reviewers were equally
unwilling to accept Hertsgaard’s argument—pretty much all reviewers, in fact, save those
with specific experience on national news desks at major papers. Everett Carll Ladd,
then the executive director of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research and a
professor of political science at the University of Connecticut, quickly dismissed
Hertsgaard’s book in the Christian Science Monitor.
Hertsgaard gives many accounts of efforts by Reagan aides to put a favorable “spin”
on events—efforts that are made daily.
But he never tells how it is that a national press corps shown by a number of
careful studies to be dominated by views well to the left of Reagan’s, and which in
1984 gave between 85 to 90 percent of its votes to Walter Mondale, could be duped
into adulatory coverage of a conservative Republican.100
While Ladd is clumsily correct that Hertsgaard never really gets to the heart of the matter
of how the press was “duped,” as it were, his confusion as to how a press dominated by
liberal reporters could report so positively on a conservative Republican betrays what was
evidently a complete misunderstanding of Hertsgaard’s thesis. In retrospect, it is
astounding how many reviewers seemed to wildly miss their target in reviews of On
Bended Knee. Yet another reviewer, Malcolm Jones of the St. Petersburg Times
(Florida), gave what became a very common reading, particularly among smaller, more
regional newspapers: that the book simply misunderstood journalism, and that any
journalist could tell you just that.
You end up wanting to argue with him, to straighten him out, to make him see just
what it is reporters do and why they do it. Even when he’s wrongheaded, Hertsgaard
sharpens our notions about why journalists do what they do.
Ultimately a lot of his objections are grounded in assumptions that I suspect very
few journalists would share.101
Everett Carll Ladd, “Assessing the Reagan presidency—and the man,” Christian Science Monitor (Book
Review Pullout Section), 2 December 1988, p. B1.
101
Malcolm Jones, “Critique of Reagan press coverage lacks understanding,” St. Petersburg Times
(Florida), 2 October 1988, sec. D, p. 7.
100
57
Jones might as well have been writing in the 1920s. His notion of “what reporters do and
why they do it” seems fully to reflect Ray Stannard Baker’s idealistic vision that after
Versailles American “national policy would have to be formulated in the presence of
public opinion and with the need for public assent in view,” that the press represented a
“fourth estate.”
What the reviews of On Bended Knee make bluntly obvious is the gaping rift that
existed between the professional consciousness of journalists at elite press institutions
and reporters at less prominent, regional papers (and with this second group, critics who
weren’t journalists at all, but public policy experts or historians).102 On Bended Knee
struck at the ideological borders of journalistic thought, and therefore was simply baffling
to readers still holding on to the idealistic notions of journalistic service Hertsgaard
wished to mark as antiquated—readers who hadn’t had such notions forcibly ripped away
from them through the experience of directly covering news stories like Reykjavik, that
is, of directly encountering the presidential spin cycle.
Hertsgaard’s book was cutting edge journalistic thought—so much so that readers
not themselves living the experiences he confirmed had trouble making sense of his
claims. On Bended Knee represented the very beginnings of a wave of journalistic
ideology still in its nascent phases. That said, there was something fundamentally
missing in Hertsgaard’s analysis, something which deserves close attention here for the
light it sheds on how and why the press felt compelled to popularize the term “spin.”
Hertsgaard’s own materials suggest a conclusion beyond that which he reached. An
102
The breadth of this rift is the precise reason for which this essay has necessarily been limited in scope to
the news coverage of prominent papers—trying to speak in terms of an over-arching ideology for the entire
press corps would be a overwhelming project.
58
interview he held with Vicki Barker, a United Press International radio reporter, is
especially revealing. “That’s the White House beat,” Barker told Hertsgaard. “[The
administration] keeps up a steady drip-drop of barely news, and you have to scramble to
keep up with it, because otherwise your editors ask why the competition has it.”103 What
is most interesting about Barker’s comments is not her description of the White House’s
technique of informational inundation (which was well known by that point), but what
she reveals about the editorial process. If one didn’t “scramble to keep up” with the dripdrop, one’s “editors ask why the competition has it.” Hertsgaard chalks this up to usual
reportorial laziness—and in doing so misses a critical point. As Hertsgaard himself
notes, editors are responsible, first and foremost, for ensuring that their publication (or
program) sells. The ordinary assumption, the one that Mark McKinnon made with
reference to George W. Bush’s wariness to grant too much press access, is that headlines
sell. It is best to “scoop” the competition, to push for new and revealing headlines. But
Barker’s comment seems to betray a certain casualness about this model on the part of
her editor. The editor wanted her to get the cookie-cutter headline, not to dig for
something deeper. If the press was complicit with the Reagan spin machine, it was
complicit for reasons other than laziness.
Hertsgaard was not oblivious to press economics. In a section he calls “A Great
Capitalist Instrument,” he makes the point that while a majority of individual journalists
may be liberal, media executives were fully in support of the political establishment, and
that it was their say that mattered. “[F]reedom of the press is guaranteed only to those
who own one,” Hertsgaard quotes A.J. Liebling as saying. And during the Reagan
administration, Hertsgaard says:
103
Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee, 55.
59
The parent corporations of nine of the most influential national news organizations—
ABC, CBS, NBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street
Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek and Time—were all Forture 500
members. Moreover, through interlocking directorates—sharing members on boards
of directors—and lines of credit and other financial relationships, these parent
corporations were themselves linked with dozens of others of the largest corporations
and banks in the United States. Contrary to right-wing mythology, the press was not
an institution dominated by leftists but a creature of the very richest of the rich and
mightiest of the mighty in American society.104
And, Hertsgaard says, “[t]o the class of super-rich and powerful businessmen who
ultimately controlled the U.S. news media, Ronald Reagan was the most ideologically
congenial President in living memory.”105 Therefore, Hertsgaard concludes, these media
moguls managed their businesses in a way that would favor the President. It very well
may have been the case that the businessmen “who ultimately controlled the U.S. news
media” were pro-Reagan. But they were also pro-Nixon.
In failing to consider a broader historical and commercial context, Hertsgaard
misses a fundamental point, and it is one well worth considering in order to contextualize
the subsequent ubiquity and power of the concept of “spin.” What guided news content
was something in fact more simple than the political agendas of puppeteer tycoons—it
was their economic agendas. First and foremost, big media was in it to make money.
Hertsgaard recognizes, in another section, that “[c]entral to Deaver’s success was his
recognition of something journalists were loath to admit about their business: that news
was, to the corporations that produced it, primarily a commodity to be bought and
sold.”106 He connects this point to the administration’s treatment of the press corps’ (i.e.
that it was treated like any other special interest, just another corporation trying to sell a
product and seeking the government’s help doing so). But he fails to take the next step.
104
Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee, 77.
Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee, 77.
106
Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee, 52.
105
60
He fails to consider that Reagan’s easy treatment might have been, at least in part, a
calculated business decision by publishers and broadcasters, not a political decision, and
equally, not something forced upon them. Limited access notwithstanding, reporters
could have criticized the President had the market been ripe for criticism. Nixon had
severely limited press access, but the press had challenged him openly and savagely.
There was one key difference. Taking down Nixon was good business. The American
public disliked Nixon, and anti-Nixon headlines sold. Reagan, on the other hand,
enjoyed heady approval ratings, particularly in the weeks following Reykjavik.
Hertsgaard, then, didn’t take his point far enough. In the intellectual trajectory of
the press corps responding to limited executive office access and “news management,” he
represents an intermediate step. For much of the twentieth century, the standard response
was to blame the president and the administration for spinning. Hertsgaard, by pushing
the boundaries of journalistic thought, marked the beginnings of a shift in which the press
started blaming itself for not doing a better job uncovering spin. A third more gloomy
step is presently underway (and will be discussed momentarily) in which the press is
moving beyond straightforward blame and unevenly coming to terms with a position in
American society that is much weaker than what, for much of the twentieth century, they
have imagined themselves to occupy.
*
7
*
It would be simplistic to label Reykjavik a distinct ideological turning point.
Rather it was a catalyst, provoking questions and anxieties which reflected ideological
61
change already in progress, while also serving to agitate matters further. “Spin” was thus
born out of anxiety. Following Reykjavik, the press wanted to criticize Reagan. He had
made them look foolish. He had stiff-armed them leading up to and during the summit,
limiting their access and preventing them from reporting the story of the summit in a
matter that even approximated standard journalistic procedure. He had then made a
mockery of their reporting by speaking straight to the public through televised speeches
and a chopped-down, pre-packaged “drip drop” of press releases, the content of which his
media operatives could strictly control. He had affirmed his power over the press. He
said one thing, the newspapers said another, and ultimately the public listened to him and
not to them. Indeed, the public was so solidly behind him that the press was forced to
revise its content or appear biased. Whether the papers changed their story for economic
or political reasons, or whether they had simply been “spun” like everybody else, hardly
mattered—their shift in coverage was equally demoralizing, whatever its impetus.
Reagan’s story had won. Theirs had lost.
The press wanted to criticize the President, but couldn’t. They couldn’t for
reasons both economic and political. They were still uneasy about launching a full-scale
attack on another president so closely on the heels of Johnson and Nixon. And
commercially, an attack simply didn’t make sense. The President was too popular.
“Spin” was born, then, as a way of splitting the linguistic difference between “news
management” and “propaganda”—and the political difference between attacking and not
attacking. It was conceived of the press’s anxiety about its own lack of power, and in the
most immediate sense, the term eased these anxieties. It allowed the press to feel as it if
was criticizing Reagan without doing anything that would offend its readers. This
62
eagerness to split the political difference is apparent in Wicker’s satire and Cannon’s
assumption-cum-hope that history would set the Reykjavik record straight. But if the
term “spin” assuaged press anxieties in the short-term, it ultimately became so popular as
to displace the most powerful linguistic weapon they had at their disposal, “propaganda,”
thereby serving only to broaden the divide between the press’s real power and that which
they felt they deserved.
“Spin” was both the product of preexisting anxieties and a progenitor of new
ones. It was born out of a press trauma, following Reykjavik, but ironically functioned
only to enable similar future traumas. This double function was critical in guiding the
shift in the press corps’s self-understanding which was both advanced and epitomized by
On Bended Knee. Both Hertsgaard’s arguments and his reviewers’ troubled and
inconsistent responses were informed by the recent emergence of the term “spin,” even
though Hertsgaard himself never explicitly analyzes the significance of the word in his
book. In a chapter entitled “An Amiable Dunce,” Hertsgaard made the case that the press
had been tricked into portraying the president as a man of the people, which in turn made
any factual slip-ups he might make, whether intentional or inadvertent, in fact work in his
political favor—if he made errors, they were seen as humanizing, even charming, and if
he got things right he got all the credit for his wisdom. “Americans were not told about a
President who harbored an apparently pathological disregard for truth,” Hertsgaard noted,
“but about a well-meaning Everyman who at times got his figures wrong.”107 In either
case, the press played the role of the attacker, or worse, the inconsequential bickerer. The
“Amiable Dunce” effect thus mirrored that of Wicker’s “Doctor Spin” satire. Even if the
press criticized the President, things seemed to magically work to his political
107
Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee, 149.
63
advantage—and against theirs. This, in summary, was the immediate effect of “spin” and
of the Reykjavik news story. The news story not only incited the popularization of the
term, it also brought the limitations of the press’s financial and political realities to the
forefront of a national debate over who could and should shape and direct public opinion.
Elite journalists, already feeling fenced in by these broader realities, now found
themselves more immediately trapped by the aspect of their profession over which they
felt they had the most control: their own language.
*
*
*
Reykjavik, to reiterate, was not a distinct ideological turning point but a catalyst.
It brought to the forefront questions and ideas which in turn have facilitated the formation
of a new wave of press corps introspection and self-criticism. Specifically, these
questions have guided two separate ideological shifts. The first was that represented by
Hertsgaard, in which journalists questioned whether their denigrated political position
might have been self-imposed. The second, which didn’t gain significant momentum
until the dawn of the 21st century and the George W. Bush administration, has seen the
press pose a question in fact far more disturbing to the collective psyche of its elite
establishment: whether it is even relevant to consider scenarios like Reykjavik, and the
political dynamic of spin, in terms of “fault.”
Today, the press’s elite is acutely aware of its own commercial underpinnings, if
only because this fact has so consistently been held over journalists’ heads by politicians
eager to limit media access. The profusion of literature on the “corporatization” of the
64
American media which has emerged in the last five years108 parallels (in scope, not in
content) the barrage of books which emerged in the early 1980s decrying the rise of
political consultants. But the underlying ethics of these respective sets of literature stand
in sharp opposition. The tone of the first is energized, vigilant. That of the second, in
contrast, is gloomy, riddled with anxiety and concern, and much more passive. Nicholas
Lemann, the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University,
concludes a recent New Yorker article with this utterly self-aware description of the
press’s realization that it is beholden first and foremost to market forces, and that market
forces don’t seem to value “objective” news reporting as they once did:
[T]here is another possibility, which is much more worrisome, at least to journalists
who work in the mainstream media. It is that during the years of heavy shelling—
through impeachment and the Florida recount and then the rough 2004 campaign [not
to mention the Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass scandals]—what they consider their
compact with the public has been seriously damaged. Journalism that is inquisitive
and intellectually honest, that surprises and unsettles, didn’t always exist. There is no
law saying that it must exist forever, and there are political and business interests that
would be better off if it didn’t exist and that have worked hard to undermine it. This
is what journalists in the mainstream media are starting to worry about: what if
people don’t believe in us, don’t want us, anymore?109
Lemann’s outlook is indeterminate. His ethic is an odd combination of the new—the
dark, passive, forces-beyond-our-control outlook—and the old. He gives a cursory nod
to “blame,” observing that some interests “have worked hard to undermine it,” but there
is no edge to this blame. What these interests are doing isn’t “propaganda,” nor is it even
“spin.” They are simply doing what is in their interest, what would make them “better
108
Perhaps the most highly publicized example is Kristina Borjesson (ed.), Into the Buzzsaw: Leading
Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), which
includes essays by 20 renowned journalists and media critics, including Dan Rather, Gore Vidal, Ashleigh
Banfield, and Borjesson herself. A number of the essays take specific aim at the implicit censorship
created by market pressure, a notable few going so far as to suggest a British Broadcasting Channel (BBC),
state-operated media model in the United States.
109
Nicholas Lemann, “The Wayward Press: Fear and Favor; Why is everyone mad at the mainstream
media?” The New Yorker, 14 February 2005, pp. 168-176.
65
off.” And if there is any ethos which is today politically and commercially
untouchable—in precisely the way that Reagan was politically and commercially
untouchable—it is the ethos of commercial self-interest. Lemann shows no inclination to
criticize these politicians or businessmen who are acting in their own interests by
attempting to undermine “mainstream media,” or media geared towards objective news
reporting. He merely ponders, with weighted pessimism, what this reality foretells for
the future of the press.
The Reykjavik story is only a first step in understanding the inconsistent
ideologies guiding modern journalism. The years since have complicated matters
immeasurably. Politically unguarded news alternatives like The Daily Show and The
Rush Limbaugh Show have met with commercial success exceeding that of publications
geared towards objective news reporting. Mainstream newspapers have been gouged. At
the time of Reagan’s election in 1980, 70.2 percent of adults in America claimed to
consistently read newspaper news. In 2004, that number had dropped to 52.8 percent.110
Even network television news has taken a hit. Ratings of the nightly news broadcasts of
the three major networks have dropped 34 percent in the past decade, and 44 percent
since 1980.111 Meanwhile, journalists like Ken Auletta are matter-of-factly asserting that
the press has reached new lows of powerlessness:
What seems new with the [George W.] Bush White House is the unusual skill that it
has shown in keeping much of the press at a distance while controlling the news
agenda. And for perhaps the first time the White House has come to see reporters as
special pleaders—pleaders for more access and better headlines—as if the press were
simply another interest group, and, moreover, an interest group that’s not nearly as
powerful as it once was.112
110
Scarborough Research. Data prepared by the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) Business
Analysis & Research Department, <www.naa.org>.
111
Neilson Media Research unpublished data, <www.nielsenmedia.com>.
112
Auletta, “Fortress Bush” p. 57.
66
The two trends—the declines in readership and ratings, and the decline in political clout,
are clearly not coincidental. It is less apparent whether the damage that has been done is
irreparable. Lemann’s outlook is not altogether encouraging.
Further study of the press’s most recent ideological step, in the direction of
Lemann and Auletta, is certainly merited. To conclude this essay, however, I wish to
propose yet a third step. This study of the Reykjavik summit and “spin” has not been a
purely academic exercise. If there is a lesson to be learned from Reykjavik, it is one of
“real” versus “idealized” power. The press seems to be coming to terms with the idea
that the power Ray Stannard Baker imagined for American media was just that—
imagined. But coming to this understanding does not necessitate gloom. In a sense, the
press simply has to master the tactics which have been used against it—to act more like a
politician, as it were. Lemann poses the question darkly and passively: “what if people
don’t believe in us, don’t want us, anymore?” But for all the question-posing, there is
very little active defense of “objective” news-telling. The press is selling a product, there
is no doubt about that. And yet, despite their apparent coming-to-terms with this fact,
there is virtually no advertising. Fox News labels itself “Fair and Balanced”—but could
anyone imagine the New York Times doing the same? It seems vaguely absurd to
imagine a New Yorker article which, instead of assuming an aloof distance from the
press’s woes, went on the offensive in support of “objective news.” Still more absurd is
the idea of the press “spinning” its own agenda, running a public relations campaign in
the name of objectivity. It’s almost a contradiction in terms. And yet perhaps this is just
what is needed. A campaign in the name of making the public “believe in” objectivity—
67
in the name of making them “want.” An active, Reaganesque redefinition of the powers
that be.
*
*
*
68
Bibliography
* Given my heavy reliance on newspaper and magazine articles as primary sources, I
have chosen to list the articles I used individually. I have sorted them by publication,
then by date. I have listed articles I used as secondary sources separately. I have then
used separate categories to list books used as primary sources, books used as secondary
sources, other secondary sources, and interviews. Books and articles used as both
primary and secondary sources are listed under both categories.
Primary Sources (Newspapers and Magazines)
The Christian Science Monitor
Hughes, John. “After Reykjavik.” Christian Science Monitor. 29 October 1986.
Ladd, Everett Carll. “Assessing the Reagan presidency—and the man.” Christian
Science Monitor (Book Review Pullout Section). 2 December 1988.
The Economist
Un-bylined. “Warming up for Iceland.” The Economist. 11 October 1986.
Un-bylined. “The Road from Reykjavik.” The Economist. 11 October 1986.
The Financial Times (London)
Barber, Lionel. “Politics Reduced to Soap Opera.” Financial Times. 19 October 1988.
The Guardian (London)
Brummer, Alex. “Commentary: Trapping Reagan’s magic makers in an iron grip.” The
Guardian (London). 6 November 1986.
The New York Times
Davis, Elmer. “The New Deal’s Use of Publicity.” New York Times. 19 May 1935.
Safire, William. “On Language; Calling Dr. Spin.” New York Times. 31 August 1986.
Schmemann, Serge. “Summit Diplomacy: Who Won and Who Lost; Keeping Score: A
Limited Success for Gorbachev.” New York Times. 1 October 1986.
Gelb, Leslie H. “A Quest for Compromise.” New York Times. 12 October 1986.
69
Un-bylined. “Iceland Protests: From Jews to Hare Krishna.” New York Times. 12
October 1986.
Un-bylined. “No-News Pact Appears to Be Holding.” New York Times from Associated
Press. 12 October 1986.
Weinraub, Bernard. “Work Units Set Up.” New York Times. 12 October 1986.
Un-bylined. “Derailment at Reykjavik.” New York Times. 13 October 1986.
Un-bylined. “Mr. Reagan.” New York Times. 13 October 1986.
Un-bylined. “Excerpts from Comments by Shultz at the News Conference in Reykjavik.”
New York Times. 13 October 1986.
Apple, R.W. Jr. “Politicians Say G.O.P. Has Lost a Campaign Plum.” New York Times.
14 October 1986.
Lewis, Flora. “Reykjavik Riddles.” New York Times. 14 October 1986.
Un-bylined. “Transcript of President’s Broadcast On Talks With Gorbachev in Iceland.”
New York Times. 14 October 1986.
Gwertzman, Bernard. “The Road Ahead: Each Side Blames Other for Failure, But
Meeting May Still Yield Success.” New York Times. 14 October 1986.
Un-bylined. “Quotation of the Day.” New York Times. 15 October 1986.
Apple, R.W. Jr. “Senate Nominee Pushes ‘Star Wars’ in Colorado.” New York Times.
15 October 1986.
Gwertzman, Bernard. “Shultz to Meet Soviet Counterpart For Talks in Vienna in
November.” New York Times. 15 October 1986.
Weinraub, Bernard. “U.S. Acts to Enhance Image After Talks.” New York Times. 15
October 1986.
Boyd, Gerald. “President Hopeful: Citing Gains on Arms, He Asks Moscow Not to
‘Miss Opportunity.’” New York Times. 15 October 1986.
Un-bylined. “The War Over Star Wars.” New York Times. 15 October 1986.
Clymer, Adam. “First Reaction: Poll Shows Arms-Control Optimism and Support for
Reagan.” New York Times. 16 October 1986.
70
Boyd, Gerald. “President Is Critical of ‘Liberals’ Who May ‘Chop Up’ ‘Star Wars.’”
New York Times. 16 October 1986.
Weinraub, Bernard. “Reagan Triumphs From Failure in Iceland.” New York Times. 17
October 1986.
Reston, James. “How to Miss the Boat.” New York Times. 19 October 1986.
CBS News Poll. “Reagan and the Russians.” New York Times. 19 October 1986.
Bundy, McGeorge, George F. Kennan, Robert S. McNamara, and Gerard C. Smith.
“Reyjavik’s Grounds for Hope: A Basis For Progress On Arms.” New York Times.
19 October 1986.
Wicker, Tom. “In the Nation; Meet Doctor Spin.” New York Times. 26 October 1986.
Ambrose, Stephen E. “Mr. President! Mr. President!” New York Times. 20 November
1988.
The New Yorker
Auletta, Ken. “Fortress Bush.” The New Yorker. 19 January 2004.
Lemann, Nicholas. “The Wayward Press: Fear and Favor; Why is everyone mad at the
mainstream media?” The New Yorker. 14 February 2005.
The St. Petersburg Times (Florida)
Jones, Malcolm. “Critique of Reagan press coverage lacks understanding.” St.
Petersburg Times (Florida). 2 October 1988.
The Washington Post
Cannon, Lou. “Reagan-Gorbachev Summit Talks Collapse as Deadlock on SDI Wipes
Out Other Gains.” Washington Post. 13 October 1986.
Carmody, John. “Final Edition.” Washington Post. 14 October 1986.
Un-bylined. “Beyond Reykjavik.” Washington Post. 15 October 1986.
Raspberry, William. “Diplomatic Sales Scam.” Washington Post. 15 October 1986.
Hoffman, David. “Iceland Talks: One Word Chills Hope; Summit Spawned Startling
Concessions Before Final Deadlock.” Washington Post. 19 October 1986.
Cannon, Lou. “Naivete: the Verdict at Reykjavik.” Washington Post. 20 October 1986.
71
Ivins, Molly. “How Reagan Bamboozled the Press; Greasing the Wheels for The
President’s Easy Ride.” Washington Post. 7 November 1988.
Secondary Sources (Newspapers and Magazines)
Herbers, John. “The President and the Press Corps.” New York Times Sunday Magazine.
9 May 1982.
Auletta, Ken. “Fortress Bush.” The New Yorker. 19 January 2004.
Primary Sources (Books and Periodicals)
Baker, Ray Stannard. Woodrow Wilson and the World Settlement, 2 vols. London:
William Heineman, 1923.
Blumenthal, Sidney. The Permanent Campaign. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.
Borjesson, Kristina (ed.). Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a
Free Press, revised edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Cannon, Lou. President Reagan. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.
Clurman, Richard M. Beyond Malice: The Media’s Years of Reckoning. New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988.
Deaver, Michael with Mickey Herskowitz. Behind the Scenes. New York: William
Morrow and Company, 1987.
Halberstam, David. The Powers That Be. New York: Knopf, 1979.
Hertsgaard, Mark. On Bended Knee. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988.
Reagan, Ronald. An American Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990.
Sabato, Larry. The Rise of Political Consultants. New York: Basic Books: 1981.
Skinner, Kiron K., Annelise Anderson, Martin Anderson (eds.). Reagan: A Life in
Letters. New York: Free Press, 2003.
Speakes, Larry. Speaking Out: The Reagan Presidency from Inside the White House.
New York: Avon Books, 1989.
72
Secondary Sources and Works Consulted (Books and Periodicals)
Alterman, Eric. What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News. New York:
Basic Books, 2003.
Alterman, Eric. When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and its
Consequences. New York: Viking, 2004.
Gerald J. Baldasty. The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century.
Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992.
Bledstein, Burton J. The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the
Development of Higher Education in America. New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1976.
Blumenthal, Sidney. The Permanent Campaign. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.
Borjesson, Kristina (ed.). Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a
Free Press, revised edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Cannon, Lou. President Reagan. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.
Clurman, Richard M. Beyond Malice: The Media’s Years of Reckoning. New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988.
Cottrell, Robert C. Izzy: A Biography of I.F. Stone. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 1994.
Davis, Elmer. History of the New York Times 1851-1921, reprint edition. St. Clair
Shores, Michigan: Scholarly Press, 1971.
Deaver, Michael, with Mickey Herskowitz. Behind the Scenes. New York: William
Morrow and Company, 1987.
Diamond, Edwin. Behind the Times: Inside the New York Times. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995.
Farrar, Ronald T., and John D. Stevens. Mass Media and the National Experience. New
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Halberstam, David. The Powers That Be. New York: Knopf, 1979.
73
Hertsgaard, Mark. On Bended Knee. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988.
Gary, Brett. The Nervous Liberals: Propaganda Anxieties from World War I to the Cold
War. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
Gergen, David. Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership, Nixon to Clinton.
New York: Touchstone, 2000.
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Norton & Company, 2003.
Greenfield, Jeff. How the Media Missed the Story of the 1980 Campaign. New York:
Summit Books, 1982.
Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, and Paul Waldman. The Press Effect: Politicians, Journalists,
and the Stories That Shape the Political World. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003.
Kaplan, Richard. Politics and the American Press: The Rise of Objectivity 1865-1920.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Kurtz, Howard. Spin Cycle: How the White House and the Media Manipulate the News.
New York: Free Press, 1998.
Lewis, Carolyn Diana. Reporting for Television. New York: Columbia University
Press, 1984.
Partington, Alan. The Linguistics of Political Argument: The Spin-Doctor and the Wolfpack at the White House. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Peterson, Christian. Ronald Reagan and Antinuclear Movements in the United States and
Western Europe, 1981-1987. Lewiston, England: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003.
Pratkanis, Anthony, and Elliot Aronson. Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and
Abuse of Persuasion. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1992.
Quirt, John. The Press and the World of Money: How the News Media Cover Business
and Finance, Panic and Prosperity and the Pursuit of the American Dream. Byron,
CA: California-Courier Publishing, 1993.
Ramsey, Doug, and Dale Ellen Shaps (eds.). Journalism Ethics: Why Change. Dallas,
TX: Foundation for American Communications and The Dallas Morning News,
1986.
Remnick, David. Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. New York:
Vintage Books, 1994.
74
Schudson, Michael. Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers.
New York: Basic Books, 1978.
Schudson, Michael. Origins of the Ideal of Objectivity in the Professions: Studies in the
History of American Journalism and American Law, 1830-1940. New York: Garland
Publishing, 1993.
Semonche, John E. Ray Stannard Baker: A Quest for Democracy in Modern America,
1870-1918. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1969.
Simons, Howard, and Joseph A. Califano, Jr. (eds.). The Media and Business. New
York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Tuchman, Gaye. “Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsmen’s
Notions of Objectivity.” The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 77, No. 4 (Jan.,
1972), 660-679.
Winch, Samuel P. Mapping the Cultural Space of Journalism: How Journalists
Distinguish News from Entertainment. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997.
Secondary Sources and Works Consulted (Other)
Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe.
Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd Ed.
Scarborough Research. Data prepared by the Newspaper Association of America. (NAA)
Business Analysis & Research Department, <www.naa.org>.
Neilson Media Research unpublished data, <www.nielsenmedia.com>.
Wordsmith, <wsmith@wordsmith.org>.
Interviews
Alterman, Eric. Historian, author of What Liberal Media and When Presidents Lie: A
History of Official Deception and its Consequences. Author’s interview, 9 November
2004, Cambridge, MA. Tape recording.
Beschloss, Michael. Presidential historian. Author’s interview, 23 November 2004,
Cambridge, MA. Tape recording.
Bradlee, Ben. Executive Editor, Washington Post, 1965-1991. Author’s interview, 6
December 2004, Cambridge, MA. Tape recording.
75
Greenberg, David. Assistant Professor of Journalism and Media Studies, Rutgers
University, author of Nixon’s Shadow: The History of the Image. Author’s interview,
22 November 2004, Camden, NJ. Telephone.
McAllister, J.F.O. Washington Correspondent, Time Magazine, 1982-1988. Author’s
interview, London, England. Telephone.
76