The Press and Edward Kennedy: A Case Study of Journalistic Behavior

Abstract

It is fair to say that during his lifetime not many people were neutral about Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the youngest of America’s Gracchi brothers. Kennedy polarized. He was either the heir to his brothers’ legacy or the one who sullied it, the voice of the nation’s dispossessed or a populist demagogue, a hard-working legislator or a reckless libertine, a man of unshakable conviction to a set of timeless principles or a liberal anachronism, a practical politician or an intransigent ideologue, a hero or a coward. These images, many of which took on almost mythic dimensions over the last 50 years, may have sprung from actual events, but they only settled in the national consciousness after the media had massaged them. Whatever we came to think of Edward Kennedy, those thoughts were largely a product of how the media interpreted him.