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The Media Today

A President, the Press, and the Lessons of Hindsight

On the changing media fortunes of Jimmy Carter.
January 6, 2025 By Jon Allsop
President Jimmy Carter waves as he leaves a news conference in Washington Friday, April 22, 1977. (AP Photo)

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In February 2023, representatives of Jimmy Carter, the former president, announced that he would cease receiving treatment for cancer and transition to home hospice care. As the New York Times noted, the “news that he seemed to be in his final days prompted a wave of appreciations and remembrances of his extended and eventful life.” (One representative example from the Times’ own opinion pages: “Jimmy Carter’s Presidency Was Not What You Think.”) And yet Carter held on for nearly two years—until last week, when he finally died, aged one hundred. Cue more appreciations and remembrances in the media. Over the weekend, his funeral—which will be a six-day affair in all, culminating with a national day of mourning on Thursday—got underway in Georgia, the state where he was born and would go on to serve as governor before ascending to the White House. According to the Associated Press, Carter helped choreograph the funeral events himself, “to emphasize that his remarkable rise to the world stage was because of—not despite—his deep rural roots.”

Ever since that rise began in earnest, after Carter declared himself a candidate for the 1976 presidential election, he has been an object of media fascination. He was one of the first presidential candidates to run what we might today recognize as a modern media campaign, which is to say, a long one, fueled by messaging savvy and the power of the image: his early victories in Iowa and New Hampshire played into journalists’ love of a good underdog story; as the historian Rick Perlstein has noted, on the day of the Wisconsin primary, Barry Jagoda, Carter’s “media wizard,” flew him to New York so he could react to the results live on a network news set. “This kind of media politics is seamless,” Jagoda said in an interview. “It doesn’t mimic the news or play off the news. It is the news.” (Jagoda’s interview itself, Perlstein writes, “was another novel feature of the 1976 campaign: image-makers publicly explaining how they made their artifice look real.”) With this media fascination came at least some appreciation of a candidate who promised to cleanse Washington of the shame of Watergate and Vietnam. “The basic story that the media was telling about Jimmy Carter in 1976 was that he was this refreshing, populist voice from the hinterlands,” Perlstein told me in an interview in 2023. According to the academic Mark J. Rozell, one study found that many journalists saw in Carter “the possibility for a new era in American politics.” After he won, this translated, at first, into “largely favorable press reviews” of his administration.

Even before Carter won the White House, however, there were signs of tension with the press, and as his administration started to struggle, these would only grow; as Amber Roessner, who wrote a book about Carter and the media, put it in a recent reflection for Time, Americans may ultimately “have to contend with the fact that his presidency signaled a shift toward a more adversarial relationship between politicians and the press.” If this seems hard to square with the intensely reverential coverage of Carter’s death—and the repeat rounds of media eulogizing even before it—the discrepancy perhaps shouldn’t be surprising: as I’ve written before, obituaries in mainstream US news outlets often tend toward the halcyon or hagiographic. In Carter’s case, though, a deeper revisionism also appears to be at work: one inflected by his exceptional post-presidential legacy, but also, perhaps, by a reassessment of his administration, one softened by the passage of time. If media coverage of past presidencies can sand their rough edges, it can also bring a clarity that is hard to see in the moment, in ways that don’t always reflect well on the political media’s proclivities.

If the legacy of Watergate made promises of cleaner government enticing to members of the press, it also supercharged their critical faculties and investigative vim, creating, as Roessner has put it, a “whole breed of political journalists who appeared in great numbers in 1976 to explain the character of presidential candidates,” some of whom were “really put off” by what they saw as Carter’s “piety” and determined to catch him out after he pledged never to lie. As the 1976 campaign entered its final stretch, Playboy circulated an interview with Carter in which a reporter asked him whether his piety made him out of touch with regular Americans, and Carter responded that he would not, for example, judge adulterers since he had himself “looked on many women with lust” and therefore “committed adultery many times in my heart,” at least in the eyes of Jesus. Carter’s comments were nuanced, as the Playboy interviewer later stressed, and yet the story exploded across the media, often with little nuance at all. Reporters asked Carter’s wife whether she was concerned about her husband’s fidelity and even whether she had strayed herself. (She wrote later that “the only lust I worried about was that of the press.”) Carter (who suggested, unconvincingly, that he’d been speaking off the record) said later that the furor nearly cost him victory.

Nor was this exactly a moment of rupture between Carter and the media: he was already sufficiently disillusioned to have said, in the same Playboy interview, that “the traveling press have zero interest in any issue unless it’s a matter of making a mistake.… There’s nobody in the back of this plane who would ask an issue question unless he thought he could trick me into some crazy statement.” On the eve of his inauguration, an article in the Washington Post spoke to a mutual distrust between Carter and reporters who seemed to see him as resentful and aloof. The article began with an anecdote about “jolly” journalists calling Gerald Ford, the incumbent president, from a New Year’s Eve party and getting him on the phone for a “spirited” and “cheerful” conversation, then trying and failing to reach Carter. The anecdote might be “insignificant,” the Post wrote, but its regular telling among the press corps seemed “to symbolize the feeling…that the press and the President are in for four fractious years.” (“Anybody who has covered him knows he doesn’t like reporters,” one journalist said.)

And, if Carter’s administration did enjoy some positive early coverage, it didn’t last. As Perlstein told me in 2023, Carter’s “colorful family” and aides from Georgia were portrayed as part of his outsider charm when he ran for election, but once his administration started to stumble—dogged, in part, by high inflation and crises abroad—that outsider status became a liability. “The media began to represent the louche and redneck associations of Jimmy Carter with the failures of his presidency—that he brought, as they called it, the ‘Georgia mafia’ to Washington,” Perlstein said. (It’s no wonder that Carter wanted to emphasize his deep rural roots during his funeral.) In the wake of this type of discourse came an inflated and persistent news cycle about an embarrassing presidential relative: Carter’s brother, Billy, who struggled with alcohol abuse and became ensnared in a tawdry foreign lobbying scandal. The coverage attached to Carter himself, even though he had nothing to do with it. One month, by Perlstein’s count, the Times ran more than fifty articles on “Billygate.”

In 1979, Carter was fishing in Georgia when an apparently enraged rabbit swam up to his canoe and tried to board. The story was leaked to the press (by Carter’s own press secretary, apparently) and blew up. The subject matter, of course, was deeply silly, but it “seemed to harness many of the more formless feelings that Americans harbored toward their president as he entered the final year of his administration…in an acceptable allegorical way,” one Carter biographer wrote. As another biographer put it, Carter came to be “stereotyped as a weakling, incapable of handling a crisis, let alone a small animal.”

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Carter, for his part, increasingly blamed the press for his political troubles, and began to sidestep the DC press corps to speak instead to reporters and editors from farther afield. He lost to Ronald Reagan after just one term; for many observers, his presidency quickly became a punchline. Asked in 2010 to look back on his contentious relationship with the media, he replied, “I don’t think that was my fault.” Given the timing of Carter’s arrival in DC, right after Watergate, many reporters assumed that “there must be something illicit in my administration as there had been in Richard Nixon’s,” Carter said. He added that he had shown little interest in working the Washington cocktail party circuit. “I think in many ways I could have done a better job of…seducing the press,” he said.

By the time he made those remarks, however, Carter had started to undergo a “remarkable” rehabilitation “on the pages of this country’s elite news and opinion publications,” as Rozell, the academic, put it in 1993. Part of this was due to the fresh course he charted after his presidency ended: his name became synonymous, in much news coverage, with his initiatives on human rights, conflict resolution, and the eradication of debilitating diseases in Africa and elsewhere. As more time passed, Americans came to know him “as the gray-haired retiree who came into the news when building houses or fighting diseases or monitoring elections,” James Fallows, a onetime Carter speechwriter, wrote in The Atlantic last year, around the time that Carter entered hospice care. “It is hard for Americans to imagine Jimmy Carter as young—almost as hard as it is to imagine John F. Kennedy as old.” As Fallows noted, most living Americans hadn’t been born by the time Reagan beat Carter, in 1980. Carter even outlived several of the journalists assigned to write his obituary.

And yet, in Rozell’s telling, Carter’s post-presidency was only one of three reasons for his rehabilitation. “With the benefit of hindsight, a number of opinion elites assess that Carter’s administration accomplished a great deal more than acknowledged by presidency observers during the Carter years,” Rozell wrote, and “when compared to Ronald Reagan’s leadership failings, Carter’s leadership—particularly in the public ethics arena—looks increasingly impressive.” Since his death, several observers have called for a reassessment not only of Carter’s presidency, but, as the Times columnist Nicholas Kristof put it, of “how we in the news media and the political world got him so wrong and treated him so unfairly.” “Carter’s favorite president was Harry Truman, likewise a strong-spined man whom many in Washington dismissed as an incompetent rube,” Kristof added. “But assessments of Truman have risen over the decades, and I’m betting the same will happen with Carter.”

As part of the present wave of Carter content, numerous journalists have been reflecting on their personal interactions with the man. Writing in the Times, Steven R. Weisman, who covered Carter’s presidency, recalled his accessibility and his “appealing and unassuming” nature, revealed through chats about favorite movies and softball games with Carter and his staff. “It seems in retrospect that everything Mr. Carter did or decided caused him political harm,” Weisman wrote. “But Mr. Carter soldiered on. His steadfastness, basic decency and faltering attempts to do the right thing are what I prefer to remember as his legacy.”

His death leaves Donald Trump as the oldest living former president. In two weeks’ time, when Trump returns to the White House, that mantle will pass to Joe Biden.


Other notable stories:

  • Last month, the government of Iran arrested Cecilia Sala, a podcaster and journalist with the Italian newspaper Il Foglio who had been reporting in the country with the regime’s permission; Iranian officials did not publicly say why Sala had been detained, but her arrest came shortly after Italy detained Mohammad Abedini, who has been accused by the US government of steering drone technology to militant groups. As the Journal notes, Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s hard-right prime minister, is under “mounting public pressure” to secure Sala’s release—but any swap deal involving Abedini risks angering the incoming Trump administration.
  • On New Year’s Day, the family of Mukesh Chandrakar, a YouTuber and freelance journalist in India who has covered alleged corruption in the construction industry, reported him missing. On Friday, his body was found in a newly sealed septic tank on property belonging to a construction contractor. According to The Guardian, police have linked Chandrakar’s death to his recent reporting on an alleged road-building scam. Officials have arrested three people in connection with his killing, while another suspect, the owner of the construction site, remains at large. 
  • And, in an op-ed for the Times, the MSNBC host Chris Hayes reflects on the nature of attention: both his own and that of others, which he aims to harness every night. “From my perspective as both an attention merchant and a compulsive customer, it’s clear that the difficulty of sitting in one’s ‘own chamber’—as the philosopher Blaise Pascal described the freedom to sit undisturbed with one’s thoughts—is greatly exacerbated by the form of attention capitalism we are enmeshed in,” Hayes writes.

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.