Chapter Eight - The 80's: An Actor in the Whitehouse
Chapter Eight
Ronald Reagan ushered in an era in which the evils so many films warned us about not only came true, but were embraced. The 80's were A Face In The Crowd starring Chauncey Gardiner. Perhaps this was made possible by a new generation of reporters and politicians who were no longer looking at each other like strangers, but as classmates agreeing not to tell on each other.
Reagan's "common man" act, consisting of sound bites and a lack of real information, created self-promoting imagery that was too often mistaken for news.
By the time the Iran-Contra scandal broke, the public and Congress were too weak and too numb to pull the trigger the way they had with Vietnam and Watergate. By attributing the most revealing information to alarmist left-wingers, the press watered down Iran-Contra to a war between kooks and crooks, concluding that there wasn't much you could do about either of them.
Ronald Reagan ushered in an era in which the evils so many films warned us about not only came true, but were embraced. The 80's were A Face In The Crowd starring Chauncey Gardiner. Perhaps this was made possible by a new generation of reporters and politicians who were no longer looking at each other like strangers, but as classmates agreeing not to tell on each other.
Reagan's "common man" act, consisting of sound bites and a lack of real information, created self-promoting imagery that was too often mistaken for news.
By the time the Iran-Contra scandal broke, the public and Congress were too weak and too numb to pull the trigger the way they had with Vietnam and Watergate. By attributing the most revealing information to alarmist left-wingers, the press watered down Iran-Contra to a war between kooks and crooks, concluding that there wasn't much you could do about either of them.
posted by Xavier Casto | 00:30
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