WELCOME TO THE MEDIA-REAGAN SHOW

Are the media too easy on the President? Should they have hit harder at his televised press conference on Thursday?

“It was an exercise of the media putting the clothes on the emperor,” charged Jeff Cohen, a lawyer who heads Los Angeles-based For Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). “It seems like the media is in sort of a partnership with the President.”

Maybe you saw Reagan’s conference. He seemed disoriented. He misunderstood questions. He gave long, rambling answers. His comments on such issues as SALT II and the space shuttle program had to be clarified by the White House.

Views from two White House correspondents who were there:

“I just felt he was having great difficulty and he seemed confused,” Lesley Stahl of CBS said Friday. “He was very bad this time,” ABC’s Sam Donaldson said. “I don’t think it was a sudden deterioration. That was the same Ronald Reagan who was elected President in 1980.”

Armed with a speech, Reagan usually soars. With no prepared text, though, he can appear almost frighteningly inept, as he was in his first 1984 debate against Democratic challenger Walter F. Mondale in Louisville.

And as he was Thursday.

Typically, though, he was rarely challenged at the press conference (if this were a tennis match, you’d say he made mostly unforced errors). In fact, the President’s infrequent televised press conferences are an emphatic rebuttal of charges that the media are leftist Reagan bashers.

Donaldson asked two strong questions Thursday--on the Challenger shuttle disaster.

“You can make the case that when the President called on me I should have told him that he looked like a fool because he hadn’t answered questions right,” Donaldson said. “But I can’t say that. If I did, I’d get the usual ton of mail telling me how rude and crude I was. It would be all right if I told him in the right tone that he seemed a bit befuddled. But there is a line when you’re questioning public officials, particularly in public, beyond which you don’t go. I can’t define that line and I have never purposely gone over it, although once in a while I come close.”

No one came close at a Reagan press conference during the tumultuous Filipino presidential election. His startling accusation of equal election cheating “on both sides” was ignored at the press conference.

“I was listening when he said that and I just didn’t catch it,” Donaldson recalled. “It was one of those Reagan sentences that sort of twisted and meandered and contained within it the thought that there was vote fraud on both sides.

“I have to tell you that before I get called on a good portion of me is not listening,” he added. “A portion is considering what I want to ask if he calls on me. Once I’m called on, it’s surprising how much my notes improve.”

What undid Reagan Thursday, his aides insisted afterward, was his attempt to answer questions while also trying out his own new system of calling on reporters, which he devised with no one’s knowledge. Reporters in the rear of the room complain of being ignored by Reagan.

According to Donaldson, Reagan’s new system consisted of index cards and a seating chart highlighting the names of reporters in the rear.

“He intended to call on them throughout the news conference,” Donaldson said. “But you could see him fumbling on the podium, shuffling and fumbling. Then he begins to squint. It was like what happened with the O ring in the Challenger disaster, with one thing leading to another. Someone hits him with a question on abortion, then he’s hit again, and while he flips through his three-by-five cards he comes up with the wrong answer.”

On ABC’s “World News Tonight” Thursday, Donaldson reported the almost-humorous saga of clashing statements by Reagan and the White House. In her Friday account of Reagan’s stumbling performance, however, Los Angeles Times reporter Eleanor Clift quoted an unnamed White House official as marveling at how “easy” the press had been on Reagan, who is 75. The official contended that the press treated Reagan “almost reverentially,” fearing a public backlash to anything harsh reported about the enormously popular President.

“I think that’s true,” said Stahl, who hosts “Face the Nation” on CBS. “But if you stop and say he’s senile, then you remember that he put in a performance like that at the first debate (with Mondale), but that the next time you see him, he pulls it out of the hat.” And pull it out he did in a second debate with Mondale in Kansas City.

That explanation doesn’t satisfy Cohen of FAIR, who spent two years in Europe studying the relationship of the media to election politics there. “Reagan would be impossible in Europe,” he said. “The media there wouldn’t interpret what he meant. They’d attack him for not knowing the issues. But over here, the same reporters who seem to be marveling that he is a Teflon President are the very ones who are pampering him and protecting him.”

If that were Richard Nixon, there’d be no protection or pampering. Ditto Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

“If it were Jimmy Carter, we would be talking about it for weeks,” Stahl said. “But we would have many opportunities to get Carter to respond to it. I bet you a million dollars they (Reagan’s aides) won’t let us near him to talk about this. With their fantastic news management, they’ll keep him away so he won’t have to answer questions about it. That way, they’ll make it just go away.”

Not that it would make much difference if the incident did not “go away.”

The President communicates with most Americans on a level that transcends usual intercourse. The camera has not been invented that is Ronald Reagan proof. What he says or doesn’t say and whether he appears sharp or not seems not to matter. He communicates merely by his presence, by visibility, by appearing on TV and being Ronald Reagan.

Hence, the message is not SALT II or space shuttles or tax reform or abortion. The message is the man.