The slogan which, more than any other, sums up the appeal of the Reagan administration is its outcry against "big government." Its constant contention is that government has become too cumbersome, too intrusive, imposing too many regulations; that government recklessly and needlessly interferes in areas best left to individual decision. A reduction of such government, the Reaganites proclaim, will dissolve the pains and discomforts in our society, restore our freedoms, solve our national problems, and bring us back to a condition where America is "great" again, as it was, presumably, in simpler and happier times. This verbal assault on "big government" has become, in fact, the all-pervasive political cliché of the mass media, a ritualistic incantation, iterated so many times, and in so many ways, that it has become, by sheer repetition, an unexamined argument, a knee-jerk response, part of the conventional wisdom that floods television. Hence it is too often accepted as one of life's truisms. Moreover, many in the mass media have not only seen the presidency of Ronald Reagan as the embodiment of the truth of that cliché but have defined his political success as the expression of a resurgent conservatism, a conservative ideology defined, supposedly, as a principled campaign to destroy the evils of "big government."