Media Beat: The Televised Greatness of George W. Bush: ‘Today’s television environment is, more than ever, warmly hospitable to simple — and simplistic — declarative statements. That’s just as well for Bush, who has

shown a distinct tendency to get entangled in a morass of fragmentary linguistic riffs. Last year, on many occasions, he seemed painfully anxious to make his

way to the end of sentences without further embarrassment. But now, for the most part, it’s a very different story.

For insights about recent shifts of George W. Bush’s persona on television, I contacted media critic Mark Crispin Miller, whose 1988 book Boxed In: The

Culture of TV was a groundbreaking analysis of the tube. In the book, he disputed the customary image of the U.S. president as a “mighty individual” —

and identified that image as “a corporate fiction, the careful work of committees and think tanks, repeatedly reprocessed by the television industry for daily

distribution to a mass audience.” ‘ FAIR