Does the Press Love Obama More Than Reagan?

Alex Brandon / AP Photo; AP Photo The media might be kinder to Obama than it was to Reagan, but the treatment has less to do with bias than it does with style.

Barack Obama has “enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either of his two predecessors,” according to the analysis of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. That is not really surprising. Bill Clinton’s early months were chaotic, mainly because his White House staff was weak and his personality, while engaging, was, well, untidy. George W. Bush scrambled into office after a contested election that left more than a residue of bitterness and fatigue all around. A better measure of comparative coverage for Obama so far is with Ronald Reagan. Both administrations were/are led by charismatic and popular men with a clear vision that sharply differs from the presidents they replaced, who were from opposing parties and left economies in a mess and crises in Iran and Afghanistan.

The Obamas are dignified but cool and contemporary, in sync with the cultural touchpoints of the people who cover them.

To get a sense of how the coverage stacks up, I reached Sam Donaldson, ABC’s superb and irrepressible Reagan-era White House correspondent—who has, I gather, just signed a new contract—and The Washington Post’s great White House team of Lou Cannon and David Hoffman.

Their comments and the recollections of other White House watchers whose memories span the decades conclusively support the sense that Obama is getting more favorable press than Reagan did in the same period, with one big caveat. Only 70 days after his inauguration, Reagan survived an assassination attempt that lodged a bullet one-quarter of an inch from his heart. Reagan’s gallantry (“Honey, I forgot to duck,” he quipped to Nancy Reagan) sent his popularity soaring, wiping out grumbles about the Reagans’ imperial style and limning the policy debates for a time.

But overall, Reagan’s “honeymoon” was mainly with the voters who gave him a landslide victory. Reporters for the major print and broadcast outlets—their dominance of the news agenda was far greater than it can be in today’s blog and bloviation culture—approached the new administration with ingrained skepticism, although there definitely were murmurings of untoward deference, as there are now. Donaldson emailed me from his New Mexico ranch that, for all the assets of personality that Reagan shared with Obama, many reporters tended to accept the late Democratic Party savant Clark Clifford’s dismissal of Reagan as an “amiable dunce” whose “age put him out of touch with new social trends and ideas whereas the youthful Obama is seen as smart and ‘with it,’ characteristics that appeal to reporters.”

Reagan’s policies in most areas, Donaldson wrote, appealed less to the natural instincts of reporters than Obama’s do: “Reagan was seen as a hide-bound, cold-warrior conservative while Obama is seen as a moderate liberal, open to policy innovation whose flexible approach to problems is more realistic in today’s world.”

As for style, Reagan’s White House veered toward grandeur, with a distinct preference for buttoned-up staff and elite entertaining. By contrast, the Obamas are dignified but cool and contemporary, in sync with the cultural touchpoints of the people who cover them. Finally, in Donaldson’s view, Reagan was an establishment figure whom reporters were expected to treat with respect (one of his first press initiatives was to impose decorum on press conferences; no waving of hands for attention), whereas Obama manages to seem casual and aloof, which gives the impression of informality that is, in fact, highly disciplined.