Damaged Control

THE IRAN ARMS scandal has become the biggest media event of recent years--far surpassing the smash Libya Bombing Show, the shuttle explosion and even the New York City "crack" epidemic. Not a day goes by without a headline-making revelation of questionable White House conduct.

The scandal, "Irangate" if you will, can be seen as just one more item--if the most serious one--in a long list of Administration wrongdoings. The aggressiveness of media coverage of Irangate, on the other hand, is unprecedented. The media has never done anything but damage control for President Reagan. This time it's doing damage.

President Reagan often has been the darling of the news media. The media blindly and eagerly pursues its role as his propaganda tool. His policy of "limited access" allows him to maintain a distance from the press.

Each time the President gets into a political scrape, he retreats to the White House, Camp David or California, regroups his forces, remakes his political image and then feeds a calculated propaganda attack to the press, which eats it up. The crisis is dismantled in this manner.

This damage control method is the teflon of our "teflon President." Reagan has played the same game in every major political scrape throughout his Administration. He used it after the breakdown of the Reykjavik summit, after the Libyan disinformation scandal and during the coming to power of Corazon Aquino in the Philippines. Reagan has applied this method to the Iran crisis in an effort to regain his stature. But this time the damage control has failed. The media has so far sustained its onslaught.

WHY DID REAGAN'S tried and true damage control method suddenly break down so dramatically? For several reasons. Certainly, the magnitude and visibility of the crisis was a factor. The arms deal involves allegations of criminal conduct, incompetence and rotten policy at the highest levels of the government.

Also, the White House, in its incompetent execution of the arms deals, left a poorly hidden trail of evidence. Another major factor is that in light of Irangate, President Reagan's tough anti-terrorist rhetoric sounds like blatant hypocrisy.

The seriousness of the Irangate crisis, however, was not the only impediment to damage control. Damage control failed because the media failed to comply with Reagan propaganda. This unprecedented lack of media complicity has complex roots. First, the media loves crises in Iran almost as much as it loves the President.

But more important, the mood of respect and camaraderie which Reagan cultivated with the press has eroded recently, especially in the wake of the Libyan disinformation campaign. The recent Congressional election also hurt Reagan in the media's eyes. When Reagan lost the Senate, 55-45 to the Democrats, he lost his aura of political invincibility.

Commentators began to speculate on whether Reagan was a lame duck or a "dead duck." The question echoed through the press: Will Reagan manage to preserve his power as a lame duck President against a Democratic Congress?

President Reagan's media manipulation and its complicity have preserved his popularity. Irangate threatens to crush it. In hindsight, an interesting question is which was more important to Reagan's popularity--his leadership or the media's complicity with it? In other words, who runs America during the mass media age, President or press?