24
PARTISAN REVIEW
tra-constitutional transfer of power from the presidency to a
de facto
al–
liance between the Congress and the media. Congressional action,
whether in the Senate Committee's hearings directed against the Nixon
administration, ironically like Senator McCarthy's committee hearings
against the Truman administration, can provide only a legislative forum
for criticism of executive authority. Yet the media provide the resonance
for that criticism and are able to sustain the confrontation in the public's
mind. Mostly inadvertently during the early phases of Senator
McCarthy's activities, and with much greater zeal and dedication during
Watergate, the media sustained the stories that led to presidential popu–
larity loss, withdrawal, or resignation.
Since Watergate, it seems evident that there has been a widespread
political recognition of the reality of media power. This is taken for
granted in the realization that one of the challenging tasks of presidential
leadership is to gain the ability to set a political agenda. Since I exclude
the hypotheses of media monolith or conspiracy, it is important to sug–
gest why this account of the media's role in agenda-setting can be ex–
plained. First, the various news media, particularly television or non-print
media, need to transpose the complex events of a reality derived from
the world village into a simpler, dramatic, and understandable, inter–
preted version. Second, within the groups that now make up the com–
munciations and information industry there are strong tendencies toward
political liberalism, which emerge in different ways in the media percep–
tion of reality. Although the agenda-setting role of the media is not ex–
plicit and transparent within the political campaign, in many ways it is
tacitly recognized and taken for granted.
Much of the praise for former President Reagan as a communicator
assumed that the task of the presidency was to be able to set the agenda
by getting through to the people without the president's views being fil–
tered through the media. Reagan's success at this task may have ob–
scured the degree to which the power of shaping the agenda had actu–
ally been transferred from the ordinary exercise of presidential authority
to the media, and this may be reflected in the current difficulties of
President Bush. A Democratic presidency may result in both a less adver–
sarial media and the end of congressional committees as confrontational
investigative forums. So the victory of the "media's candidate" would
mark a reversion in the balance of power between the presidency and the
media
Edith Kurzweil:
Thank you. Would you like to answer?
Eric Breindel:
I think Professor Sidorsky makes a very compelling
