MediaWatch: January 1990
Table of Contents:
The 1980's: The Evil Reagan Years
"Greed, for the lack of a better word, is good," pronounced actor Michael Douglas as capitalist caricature "Gordon Gekko" in the Oliver Stone movie Wall Street. Piecing the "Decade of Greed" together in a desperate frenzy of imitation, the networks liked Gekko's image so much that CBS used it four times, and ABC and NBC showed it twice in their end-of-the-decade reviews. "To many people, it's scenes like this from the movie Wall Street that says all there is to say about the 1980's," reporter Erin Moriarty claimed on CBS This Morning.
Tut-tutting over the Decade of Greed was a clever way of talking around a decade of record-setting prosperity. Reviewing the media's indictments of the decade, MediaWatch analysts found references to the recovery on a few occasions, but in the cascade of impressions, America's remarkable turnaround was buried by both indictments of our lack of compassion (despite the doubling of charitable giving) and worries over economic decline.
Madonna, one of the hottest musical sensations of the decade, was remembered often, but mainly for singing the greed anthem "Material Girl," which CBS called "a theme song for the decade." Madonna percolated through all three network histories as a soundtrack for the materialistic decade. U.S. News & World Report Senior Editor Donald Baer compared her to the President: "Ronald Reagan and Madonna. On the surface, he stood for the fundamental American values that she parodied. But underneath, they conveyed the same Horatio Alger myth: Self-image over reality. Say it or sing it enough, and any dream of yourself might come true, at least in the public's perception." Baer defined the '80s as a time when "the majority willingly suspended their disbelief and embraced Reagan, despite his manifold shortcomings."
Newsweek's "Conventional Wisdom Watch" gave the '80s a thumbs down, giving the restrained summation: "Greedy Yuppies screwed homeless. Big party on deck of Titanic." When the Saturday Night with Connie Chung staff asked "a fair number of people from all different kinds of professions" what the decade added up to, "More than 95 percent of them," Chung announced with a straight face, "said simply, it was the Decade of Greed." Sure.
On NBC, Irving R. Levine did note the economy "flourished" and the financial markets had a "spectacular run," but then said "the Reagan presidency's military build-up and popular tax cuts pushed the country into staggering debt." Worrying that we will be left "woefully behind the competition as a result, " Levine concluded "the record of the '80s is not encouraging." During NBC's December 27 prime-time special The Eighties, Tom Brokaw announced that "Reagan, as commander-in-chief, was the military's best friend. He gave the Pentagon almost everything it wanted. That spending, combined with a broad tax cut, contributed to a trillion-dollar deficit." Over a video of homeless people, Brokaw asked "Social programs? They suffered under Reagan. But he refused to see the cause and effect."
"This was not a compassionate decade," chimed in Jack Smith on ABC's This Week with David Brinkley four days later. "The number of homeless mushroomed and more people sank into poverty, including nearly a quarter of the nation's children." On the December 26 ABC special co-produced with Time, Images of the '80s, Peter Jennings did admit the U.S. experienced "the longest and most sustained boom in the nation's history." He immediately followed with the obligatory Gekko clip and finished the sentence: "But it didn't always trickle down as they said it would."
"The full price we paid for following Reagan into the most profligate debt buildup ever conceived will not become clear for a while," predicted U.S. News Assistant Managing Editor Harrison Rainie, not so surprising a complaint coming from a former Chief of Staff to Senator Daniel Moynihan (D-NY). "By 'selling the sizzle' of Reagan, as his aide Michael Deaver put it, the administration spun the nation out of its torpor with such fantasies as supply-side economics, the nuclear weapons 'window of vulnerability,' and the Strategic Defense Initiative...The Soviets countered in 1985 with Gorbachev, who was fully Reagan's equal in the spin-doctoring game. He tried to lead another kind of revolution -- one designed for the oppositionist class against the privileged."
Praising Gorbachev while scorning Reagan was an integral ingredient of the hindsight formula. Boston Globe Washington reporter and columnist Tom Oliphant echoed Rainie: "A hundred years from now -- long after Ronald Reagan has been lumped with other ineffectual Dr. Feelgoods like William McKinley and Calvin Coolidge who swam with the tide of their times -- the last fourth of the 20th century will be remembered for the demise of imperial communism, and the Soviet Union's President will be remembered for both making and letting it happen."
Another interesting network tactic was bringing in the people who made the 1970's such a fabulous time to be alive. NBC handed over the environmental segment of The Eighties to its favorite dubious expert, Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, an enthusiastic believer in disproven scenarios like Famine 1975! Without the slightest bit of embarrassment over 20 years of being overwhelmingly wrong, Ehrlich predicted the coming global warming "could starve somewhere between 40 and 400 million people to death twice a decade over the next couple of decades" and warned "what we're talking here, now, is a possible 50-50 chance of ending civilization." Jane Pauley concluded "the '80s were not good years for an increasingly crowded and fragile world."
CBS followed the same formula in its Saturday Night with Connie Chung story. Malcolm Forbes and Lee Atwater got a little time, but '70s gurus got much more. Anti-technology activist Jeremy Rifkin ("The Reagan years and the Reagan Administration was a massive regression, if you will") and "consumer advocate" Ralph Nader, who said: "We have record poverty in this country in the 1980's. We have millions of hungry, unsheltered children and infants in the 1980's. We have epidemics that we never had before in the 1980's. We have millions of people afraid to go out on their front porch because of the drug dealers. We have Reagan's America."
ABC's Jack Smith expressed a mysterious media consensus when he summarized the decade: "Although Americans felt better, the decade leaves them wondering how much of that was reality, how much illusion?" But who was dealing in reality and who in illusion? Who was finding "record poverty" in the midst of a historic recovery? If the media didn't find a decade of illusion, they did find a decade of disillusion, as the ideas they had long snickered over in their studios took over and made the decade. Their only responses were easy sermons picking on easy targets, media-manufactured Yuppie stereotypes repeated often enough to assume a reality all their own. Perhaps it was all that could be expected of a media establishment whose fondest depiction of the realities of the decade was itself an illusionary image created by a movie actor: "Greed, for the lack of better word..."
