Posted on 04/20/2011 8:31:43 AM PDT by RobinMasters
That's not entirely true. Reagan's joke was during the microphone sound check, which by mutual agreement had always been off the record. By reporting the joke as a newsworthy comment, the drive-by media chose to throw out the relationship it had always enjoyed with the presidency, but the joke did not cause any noticeable controversy anc certainly not anything that lasted for weeks. There were some brief complaints from the most radical leftist peaceniks and some obligatory protests from the Soviet diplomatic corps, but it hardly rose to anything even close to howling and shreiking. In the end, the drive-by media looked foolish for reporting an off-the-record mic check.
Are you kidding me? I was with a foreign affairs agency at the time. The pin stripe suits and talking heads inside the D.C. beltway went nuts.
Well maybe inside the beltway it was a big deal, but outside the beltway, the story pretty quickly became how the lamestream media had stepped on its own collective d**k by publicizing the off-the-record mic check and looked like fools. Within less than a week, nobody outside the beltway was talking about it, and if they were they were not directing criticism toward Reagan over it.
Sounds like the folks inside the beltway need to spend more time in the real world outside the beltway to have a clue about what’s really going on.
Two months before the 2000 election, CBS had no problem at all releasing the full recording of an open mike recording of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Yet with Obama, the rules change. Go figure.
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