The Presidency and the Media

Today’s White House press corps cover the nation’s Presidents far more adversarially than they did before the Vietnam War, when journalists limited disclosures about health problems or sexual indiscretions, took pains not to endanger national security and even overlooked policy contradictions, asserted B.U. presidential historian Robert Dallek.

The news media’s behavior all changed in the 1960’s.

“What the press found out was that President Lyndon Johnson was lying through his teeth about Vietnam,” Dallek said. This produced a credibility gap that worsened with Chappaquiddick in 1969 and Watergate.

“One revelation after another left the press feeling, we’ve had the wool pulled over our eyes,” he said. That, combined with the rise of fiercely competitive media and the end of the Cold War with its accompanying national security concerns altered a journalistic culture that had offered earlier U.S. presidents a substantial degree of deference on most private and many policy matters.

As a consequence, today’s presidents “no longer enjoy the kind of privacy, the kind of insularity, the kind of protection, they used to have from scrutiny by the media.”

“To rule, to lead, to govern, you’ve got to have a degree, I think, of illusion. In a mass democracy, you cannot see and hear everything about a president. You can’t know and see all their warts.

“So the question I would pose is: Can we get the genie back in the bottle? How can presidents really be effective any more if every other day you’re going to report their sex lives and about their health?

“We’ve got to find a way in this country to reclaim a kind of deference for the president, and I see one path to this end.

“I think we will do very, very well if in the very near future we elect a woman as president of the United States, because there is a certain illusion in the mass public that women will be more restrained. They’re not going to have affairs the way men do, and whether this is true or not is sort of irrelevant. But the public, I think, will see a kind of recreation of moral authority. And a president has got to have moral authority if they’re going to govern effectively.

“So I think if you can get a woman in the White House, and she’s effective, and she’s successful, it will reestablish a degree of deference which I think is valuable to have in our society if you’re going to have effective leadership and governance.”