Noting the year it was published, I'm certain I hadn't read it before; in 1992 I had not yet become comfortable using a computer & I wasn't a reader of The New Republic.
It's interesting to note that at the time Bernstein wrote it the sensationalist tv talk shows were dominating daytime programming, so that was his main focus in describing the "idiot culture". But he also noted what still remains today: the media's focus on infotainment, which the media presumably thinks is what viewers want most.
Fox News wasn't yet on tv in 1992 & now we have disinformation & lies to go along with the meatless non-news stories that have no affect on our lives other than the media's assumption that we have big appetites for sensationalism. With the addition of Fox News' way of doing business, Bernstein's head must be spinning.
I thought these two excerpts were significant:
And now in George (H.W.) Bush we have still another president obsessed with leaks and secrecy, a president who could not understand why the press considered it news when his men set up a faked drug bust in Lafayette Square across from the White House, “Whose side are you on?” he asked. It was a truly Nixonian question. This contempt for the press, passed on to hundreds of officials who hold public office today—including Bush, may be the most important and lasting legacy of the Nixon administration.
(...)
For the eight years of the Reagan presidency, the press failed to comprehend that Reagan was a real leader—however asleep at the switch he might have seemed, however shallow his intellect. No leader since FDR so changed the American landscape or saw his vision of the country ajid the world so thoroughly implanted. But in the Reagan years we in the press rarely went outside Washington to look at the relationship between policy and legislation and judicial appointments to see how the administration’s policies were affecting the people—the children and the adults and the institutions of America: in education, in the workplace, in the courts, in the black community, in the family paycheck. In our ridicule of Reagan’s rhetoric about the “evil empire,” we failed to make the connection between Reagan’s policies and the willingness of Gorbachev to loosen the vise of communism. Now the record is slowly becoming known. We have, in fact, missed most of the great stories of our generation, from Iran-contra to the savings and loan debacle.
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