By the end of the decade, the Iran-Contra Affair with its related scandals of Nicaraguan contra drug trafficking and the October Surprise allegation that Reagan and his team began their secret dealings with Iran before the election in 1980 had become the journalistic opposite of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers.
Rather than pressing for the full truth, the Washington press corps found it far safer, career-wise, to reject suspicions of government wrongdoing.
As the 1980s ended, the Right's propaganda was ascendant and it was clear to me that my time trying to convince unwilling editors to go against the grain had come to an end.
In 1990, as a new decade dawned, I left Newsweek with the thought that there must be a better way to undertake the kind of critical journalism on important topics that was no longer welcome in the mainstream media.
The 1980s also had seen the triumph of Reagan's anti-government populism, rallying millions of Americans to the banner that Reagan raised in his First Inaugural Address that "government is not a solution to our problem; government is the problem."
From that viewpoint came theories about how tax cuts tilted to the rich would eliminate the federal debt and trickle down wealth to the middle class and the poor. Further, according to Reagan's dogma, with Big Government constrained and Big Labor tamed, the "free market" would thrive; millions of new jobs would be created; and the private sector would regulate itself.
Reagan and his team sold much of the nation on these ideological "truths" even if the ideas had no rational foundation. Under Reagan's policies, the federal debt soared; millions of middle-class jobs were shipped abroad to low-wage countries; American wages stagnated; once-thriving cities became wastelands; self-regulation turned out to be a bad joke; the savings-and-loan debacle was a harbinger of worse to come.
Yet, the parallel transformation of the modern American news media meant that fewer and fewer journalists were willing to risk their careers to tell these stories in meaningful ways. Journalists were loath to be tagged with the "liberal" label. It was much easier to single out a few individual politicians (preferably Democrats) for blame.
The 1990s
By the early 1990s, the historic role of the American press as watchdogs for the public had been transformed. Instead of growling at the corrupt and powerful, the press corps had become guard dogs, protecting the new Republican establishment and snarling at citizens, whistleblowers and even fellow journalists who sought to expose wrongdoing.
But many Americans including some who should have known better still thought the Watergate/Pentagon Papers press corps was alive and well. After all, the new reality was obscured by a steady flow of right-wing propaganda promoting the false (or at least obsolete) notion that the national press corps had a "liberal bias."
After leaving Newsweek in June 1990, I began approaching wealthy progressives with the alarming message that the mainstream news media was lost as a reliable force for telling important truths. I also had started work on my first book, Fooling America, which tried to explain how the U.S. news media had stumbled so far off course.
But my warnings were met with widespread disbelief, a wall of unwillingness to recognize or address the emerging media crisis. Some executives at progressive foundations responded with bemusement, wanting to believe that the problem must have rested with me and the other mainstream journalists who had lost out in the internal struggles at major news organizations.
Other wealthy progressives simply didn't see the strategic importance of supporting honest journalism for the political battles ahead. In their view, that was someone else's responsibility, while they focused on addressing the worsening social and economic needs of society hunger, homelessness, endangered wetlands, underfunded medical research, etc., etc.
Noting the many philanthropic demands especially after a decade of Reagan's economic policies, one foundation bureaucrat smiled at me and said, "oh, we don't do media."
So, the early part of the 1990s became a time for me to test out other venues for my journalistic work, hoping against hope that my analysis of the U.S. press corps was wrong and that the wealthy progressives were right about some pendulum swinging and the problem correcting itself.
