monly invoked scenario) the pleasures
of domesticity for the dubious rewards
of the fast track, once again woman-
hood is denigrated. The new single
woman of popular imagination is a
white, college-educated professional in
her thirties who squandered her prime
mating years in chimerical pursuit of
a ful?lling career. Her arrogant spurn-
ing of woman?s biological destiny does
not go unpunished. Shocked by her
loneliness into recognizing that careers
are best left to men, she repents and
desperately begins her search for a
husband, a child, and a family, only to
be defeated by the hard reality of the
?man shortage." For her it is clearly, as
Newsweek recently put it, ?too late for
Prince Charming." 
But this cautionary tale, a warning

BOOK REVIEW

against the excesses of feminism, cap-
tures the experiences of only a small
segment of a large and heterogeneous
population of single women. Taken
together, nonprofessional, working-
class, Black, and Other minority single
women outnumber their white profes-
sional counterparts. Further, the media-
driven scenario draws an invidious dis-
tinction between real economic needs
(its ?ne for a woman to work if she
has to} and ?soft? needs for self-
ful?llment. It trivializes many women?s
legitimate desires for both career and
farmilyutvhat, after all, men have by
birthright?by castigating them as a
manifestation of self-seeking, yuppie
greediness.

Women Adrift suggests how much
rests on public representations of wom-

Speaking Nice to Power

anhood and how ambiguous these
representations can be. Consider the
enormous fascination exerted by the
character Alex, a vengeful, clearly dis-
turbed borderline personality, played
by Glenn Close in Fara! Attraction?
the single woman as mad destroyer of
family life. But was Diane Keaton?s
character in Baby Boom, the high-
powered executive chastened by the
demands and delights of domesticity,
any better? The fates of borh unfold
against the backdrop of the family
Alex rejects it; Keaton?s Character
can't resist its allure. Yet both ?lms
underline the normality of family life
and the bizarreness of the woman out-
side it. Both characters are thus pieces
of the same puzzle?the single woman
as a species of exotica. l:l

 

Jefferson Morley

Orr Bender! Knee: The Press and the
Reagan Presidency by Mark Hertsgaa rd.
Farrar Straus (SC Giroux, New York,
1988, 349 pp.

A I write, journalists all over Amer-
ica are plotting to launch new
political magazines. A go?gerter in New
York is said to be circulating a prospec-
tus. A Washington cabal is searching
for a financial backer. A certain Texas
politico has contemplated founding a
journal. A California contingent is
gathering furtively.

Some such conspiracies have come
to fruition. Zeta, based in Boston, is
a of the Chomsky-Cockburn
school of Anglo-American leftism.
(That?s the ?new old New Left," for
those of you with scorecards}. 
for its part, obviously marks a revival
of the progressive Jewish community.
Free-lance writers everywhere, myself
included, hope there will be more.

The journalists responsible for these

 

je?erron Mar-fey is Washington editor of
the Nation ngazr'ue.

94 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 2

schemes all share a dissatisfaction with
the existing organs of political ideas.
They often lament the ideological dis-
tance between the New Republic and
the Nation. Some say it is too large;
Zeta is dedicated to the propositiOn
that it is too small. In any case, all
sense the general ideological confusion
of our times. A new journal of ideas,
it is believed, would clarify the end of
Reaganism and the advent ofpcresz'rorilea
and contribute to the improvement of
the political culture.

But a journal seldom creates a politi-
cal community; more often the commu-
nity creates the journal. The longhairs,
hippies, and antiwar activists of the
19605 made up the counterculture.
and the counterculture launched a
thousand mastheads. The plotters of
the next liberal weekly constantly ask
themselves: isn?t there a political com
munity big enough to support one
more magazine?

The prospects of the liberal weekly
are one small illustration of the problem
of liberal political culture in the United
States. Among many other Americans.

we secular, semiscienti?c, white, middle-
class, and usually Jewish journalists
are wondering when the liberal com-
munity ?out there" beyond the pro-
verbial Beltway is going to express
itself. Many people want to believe
that the American community is in
many ways fundamentally liberal. But
how does one ?nd that community?
How, as Michael Dukakis must wonder,
does one de?ne it?

I got to thinking about the role of the
journalist in American political culture
while reading On Bent/ed Knee, Mark
Hertsgaard's indictment of the liberal
media in the Reagan era. Hertsgaard
claims that the media were ?constitu-
tionally disinclined to offer fundamen-
tal criticisms of a presidency that above
all else articulated and advanced the
interesrs of corporate America."

He argues that, during the Reagan
years. the mainstream media covering
the executive branch and Congress
became steadily more isolated from
American society. He notes that re-
porters for national news organiza-
tions are overwhelmingly white and

 

 

upper-middle class. \Vhatever their
own political views (which tend toward
Dukakis-style liberalism), these jour-
nalists accept the corporate, pro?t-
oriented, deferential culture in which
they work.

David Gergen and Michael Deaver,
the senior White House of?cials who
excelled as genial puppeteers of Rea-
ganism, explained to Hertsgaard how
easy it was to manipulate the main-
stream press. think a lot of the
Te?on came because the press was
holding back," Gergen told Hertsgaard.
don't think they wanted to go after
him that roughly."

Hertsgaard also generously quotes
various media superstars who deny,
rather too volubly, that they have been
manipulated. Here?s Steve Smith, a
senior editor at Time, explaining the
magazine?s coverage of Reagan?s ?rst
term. ?For the press to say the President
of the United States is out to lunch is
quite a statement," Smith said, adding
hastily, ?Please don?t have me saying he?s
out to lunch, becausel don't think he
is.? Smith ?nally sank beneath the waves,
leaving only these bubbles behind: We
try to be objective in the sense that we
try to be fair. But since we interpret and
analyze the news, there is a built-in sub-
jectivity. But we are objective in terms
of mm having a prec0nceived notion
how we Want things to come out.?

The essential needs of the main-
stream media are simple, as the Reagan
White House well understood. Net-
work television correspondents need
compelling visual imagery, preferably
from the president, the one political
representative whom the entire national
TV audience has in common. Reporters
from the prestige dailies and the news-
weeklies need high-level sources who
can provide background brie?ngs that
are ?both precise and deep.? In other
words, network correspondents need
a president as a prop; TV and print
reporters alike need to be told what the
baf?ing pronouncements of the federal
bureaucracy actually mean in practice.

Gergen and Deaver provided the
visuals and the sources. Deaver, in
particular, seemed to have perfect pitch
for American mass culture. (Hertsgaard
notes that Deaver is a gifted pianist
with the ?musical equivalent of photo-
graphic memory.? Various pollsters and
scribes were employed to provide the
intellectual background music, usually
rif?ng on the familiar chords of ?foreign

as

policy resolve," ?inflation is down.
and "America feels better about itself.?

The result, as Hertsgaard shows,
was that the press ignored, misunderv
stood. and assisted the deceit of the
Reagan administration. He charges
that, distracted by Reagan, the media
paid too little attention to the ?realities?
of American society: the redistribution
of wealth from the middle class to the
rich, the dangers of nuclear war, the
deficit, and so on.

I put ?realities? in quotes not be-
cause these political developments are
not real and serious. They are. But mosr
Americans have neither the time nor
the inclination to study nuclear war,
Nicaragua, the de?cit, or the causes of
homelessness. These developments that
Hertsgaard decries were visible to, but
could be avoided by, the nonpolitical
majority of Americans.

be sure, the ?fairness issue,? the
consequences of which Gergen
and Deavcr bOth feared, was an ex-
pression of the pervasive sense that
Reagan was jeopardizing the furore of
most Americans. But for employed,
white Americans living outside the
inner city, the ?realities? of Reaganism
were not immediately apparent. The
mainstream media, Hertsgaard insists,
could have and should have made
them unavoidable.

Hertsgaard anticipates some but
not all of the possible objections to
his argument. He acknowledges, for
example, that the media have long
been captive to the American presi-
dency, and he argues that a
new kind of servility was practiced
during the Reagan era. But was it a
worse kind of servility? It would be
hard to prove, for example, that Reagan
was subjected to less intense scrutiny
than were John F. Kennedy or Dwight
Eisenhower.

Are the consequences of media col-
labomtion more dire today than they
were twenty-five or thirty years ago?
The most obvious journalistic failure
of the Reagan years was the media?s
collective inability to n0tice the Iran-
contra machinations. From Angus: 1985
to November 1986, the administration?s
illicit dealings went on in view of the
Washington press corps before any-
one took notice. Even when journalists
did begin reporting the story, few dis-
cussed the constitutional implications
of what North, Secord, Poindexter, er

had wrought.

But this reticence is hardly new. Ever
since \Y?orld War II, the mainstream
media have been reluctant to challenge
the executive branch on foreign policy
actions. Early in 1961. the New limit
Times learned of an imminent invasion
of Cuba. and, at \Whitc l'louse request,
did not run a story. The mainstream
media also neglected the question of
the constitutionality of the Vietnam War
until it was raised during the Nixon
impeachment hearings in19T-1. In chal-
lenging the executive branch, the media
will go only as far as do mainstream
politicians.

Furthermore, the Democratic party
was as much to blame as the press corps
for the lack of informed debate in the
mainstream press during the Reagan
years. don't think the coverage has
been terrible," Jonathan Kwitney of
the ll??zll Street Journal told Hertsgaard.
?There has been some good reporting.
But there is no opposition within the
political system." Hertsgaard allows that
the disarray of the Democratic party
during the Reagan years was part of
the reason? for Reagan?s political suc-
cess. But the thrust of his book is to
pur the onus on the press.

If the press is responsible for the
failure of the Democrats, Hertsgaard's
implication is that the mainstream cor-
porate media ought to serve as a kind
of second-string political oppOsition,
just in case the out-of?power party ab-
dicates. Jim Johnson, Walter Mondale's
campaign manager, told Hertsgaard
that the press should have forced
the president to do what the Demo-
crats could not. ?If the major networks
had decided to do Day One, Day Two,
Day Three since the President has
answered a question,? Johnson said,
Reagan would have been forced to run
a more substantive campaign in 1984.

To indulge such a fantasy requires
us to neglect Hertsgaard?s strongeSt
point ??about the structure of the mass
media. As he shows, major media cor-
porations are large. pro?t-oriented
bureaucracies not inclined to chal-
lenge abuses of power by the executive
branch. CBS, for example, is insritu-
tionally incapable of sustaining the
independent journalistic legacy of an
Edward R. Murrow. If Hertsgaard is
right about the mainstream media
being ?constitutionally disinclined to
offer fundamental criticisms [emphasis
added]," then it would seem neither

REVIEWS 95

realistic nor prudent to entrust them
with the job of sustaining the American
tradition of democratic opposition to
centralized power.

But what is the alternative? If the po-
litical Opposition fails, is the American
public simply doomed to be manipu?
lated? ?Who else but major media orga-
nizations can infOrm the "TV-watching
public of abuses of power?

he quixotic possibility is the new
liberal weekly. Few pretend that
one more journal of ideas is going to
transform the Washington press corps
or American political culture. But hope
springs eternal that new publications
could spur the competitive instincts
of mainstream journalisrs, prompting
them to do a better job. These publica~
tions would also provide a forum for
thinkers in the political opposition.
This is the dream, but the effects of
such publications trickle down slowly,
if at all, to the bureaucracies of major
news organizations and the disparate
coalition that is the Democratic party.
A second possibility, wished for by
Hertsgaard, is that the mainstream
media will learn from their mistakes
during the Reagan years. The media,
Hettsgaard declares, must ?live up to

BOOK REVIEW

the concept of a free and independent
press first upheld some two hundred
years ago by the American Revolution.?
As history, this is dubious. The press
in the early republic was partisan and
was openly aligned with factions in
the executive branch and in Congress.
In any case, these possibilities assume
that the media system will somehow
transform itself from within.

The third possibility, as intriguing
as it is unlikely, is that the mainstream
media could be transformed?or at
least challenged?from outside. There
are two recent journalistic precedents:
the counterculture press that emerged
in the \Western capitalist democracies
in the period between 1965 and 1972,
and the mmz'zdat press that has spread
throughout the communist societies in
the EaSt since the 19605.

For all their differences, these two
outbursts of democratic journalism
share several common features. Both
?ourished independently of the soci-
ety?s dominant and unresponsive in-
formation bureaucracies. Both were
based on a fundamental rejection of
the premises of the Centralizing state.
Borh were the by-product of a new
and independent political culture.

To be sure, the effects of such jour-

The Conservative Rabbinate:
Looking for Men in All the Wrong Places

nalism trickle up slowly to government,
but their influence ought not to be dis?
missed. In the torpor Of the Brezhnev
years, the samz'zdat culture of the East
sustained the idea of a free and inde?
pendent writer. This culture, especially
expressed in its rock music, has it-
ritated and goaded the authorities.
Communist reformists, such as Mikhail
Gorbachev, came to understand that
they could no longer afford to ignore
the fact that people were refusing to
be manipulated from on high. Glasrzosl,
it should be remembered, was not
simply handed down from above. It
also forced its way up from below.
Maybe the samz'zdat-rock culture of
the East, and not the liberal weekly, is
the model for revitalizing American
journalism. In the 19505 and 1960s, rock
music traveled from the West to the
Easr and is now a power-fol influence
in the cultural transformation of the
socialist world. If the mmizdat-rock
culture of the East comes back to the
West, it would be as an echo Of??-and
heir to?the Western counterculture
and its underground press. The cheap
technologies of electronic desktOp pub-
lishing make journalistic innovation
seem both more possible and more
promising than ever before. Cl

 

Daniel H. Garcia's

The Ordii-zarr'mz of Women as Rabbis:
Studies and Responm edited by Simon
Greenberg. Jewish Theological Semi-
nary of America, 1988, 233 pp.

hen, after years of often acri-
monious debate, the faculty of
Conservative Judaism?s Jewish Theo-
logical Seminary of America voted in
October 1983 to ordain women, many

 

Daniel H. Coulis is the dear: ofstzidemr
and r: lecturer in r'ab/pr'zzr'c at
the University othtdat'rm in L0: Angela.

96 TIKKUN VOL. 4, NO. 2

Segments of the American Jewish popu-
lation sensed that something of great
importance had transpired. The liberal
Jewish community applauded the move,
while the Orthodox decried Conserva-
tive Judaism?s abandonment of its prior
commitment to halakha (Jewish law).
Proponents of the decisioa who were
familiar with the seminary in particular
and with Conservative Judaism in gen-
eral believed that, at long last, the
largest branch of American Judaism
had succeeded in demonstrating that
a serious dialogue could take place

between traditional halakha and the
modern commitments to morality and
to equality for women in Jewish life.
As part of the deliberative process
that the chancellor and his faculty
undertook from 1979 to 1983, faculty
members were invited to prepare po-
sition papers on the ordination of
women, to be disseminated through-
out the seminary community. Ten of
those papers, long the subjects of
conversation and analysis within the
inner sancta of Conservative circles,
have now been published in a single