Bozell Column: The Media Never Loved Reagan
Is it not amazing that it's taken the news media exactly 100 years
to discover that Ronald Reagan was a role model? While he lived and
even after he died, they shot every arrow and dropped every bomb they
could on this man and his reputation. Now that it's his 100th birthday
and America is celebrating, they find him useful. They're trying to rub
Reagan's magic all over a floundering Obama.
After Obama's latest State of the Union speech - a dreary, boring
spectacle for a normally riveting speaker - all three networks praised
Obama as "Reaganesque," as if he were one of the sunniest American
exceptionalists. Time's latest cover reads "Why Obama [Hearts] Reagan,"
and the cover story inside is titled "The Role Model," oozing that
Obama "realized long ago that Ronald Reagan was a transformational
president."
This is all a grand deception.
The multitude of Americans who were very young or yet unborn in the
Reagan years might be misled from one enormous reality: in his prime,
Reagan was deeply dispised by the the same media that now honor him. He
was stupid, he was uncaring, he was evil, he was senile, and he was
going to ruin America, if not destroy the world in a nuclear war.
The Media Research Center has assembled a Special Report to recount
some of the most pernicious and false attacks on Reagan. Let's consider
just a few examples, among hundreds.
Take
the class war. The "news" people were always waging it. ABC's Richard
Threlkeld went to a Miami riot scene in 1989 and announced: "There is
an Overtown in every big city in America. Pockets of misery made even
meaner and more desperate the past eight years." NBC's Bryant Gumbel
proclaimed in 1989: "Largely as a result of the policies and priorities
of the Reagan Administration, more people are becoming poor and staying
poor in this country than at any time since World War II."
NBC reporter Keith Morrison took the cake in 1992: "Did we wear
blinders? Did we think the '80s just left behind the homeless? The fact
is that almost nine in ten Americans actually saw their lifestyle
decline." Morrison completely ignored reality: (Census Bureau data
shows median family income increased in all income classes from 1981 to
1989.)
The meanest attack was that Reagan's lack of caring led to a pile
of AIDS deaths. NBC's Maria Shriver asked activist Elizabeth Glaser at
the 1992 Democratic convention: "You place the responsibility for the
death of your daughter squarely on the feet of the Reagan
administration. Do you believe they're responsible for that?"
A 1998 PBS program on Reagan claimed: "AIDS became an epidemic in
the 1980s, nearly 50,000 died. Reagan largely ignored it." CBS "Sunday
Morning" TV critic John Leonard sneered that Reagan "took this plague
less seriously than Gerald Ford had taken swine flu. After all, he
didn't need the ghettos and he didn't want the gays." He added, as
Reagan's legacy: "by 1992, 194,364 American men, women, and children
were dead."
(In reality, AIDS funding skyrocketed in the 1980s, almost doubling
each year from 1983 - when the media started blaring headlines - from
$44 million to $103 million, $205 million, $508 million, $922 million,
and then $1.6 billion in 1988. This is what CBS calls "largely ignoring
it.")
But defense spending was, by contrast, an enormous waste. Take it
from ABC's Jim Wooten in 1990: "The dreaded federal deficit, created,
for the most part, by the most massive peacetime military buildup in
America's history." (But in 1990, defense spending was a fourth of the
budget and had decreased 16 percent in the previous five years, while
entitlements were half the budget and grew sharply.)
The reality of the Reagan years was a historic economic recovery, a
strong defense posture that led to the demise of the Soviet empire,
and an America that once more burst with pride. But media liberals
were so obstinate in denying reality that CBS's Morley Safer huffed
just days after Reagan passed away: "When it gets down to the real
substance, I don't think history has any reason to be kind to him."
All Reagan received was mudballs like this one from NBC's Tom
Brokaw at the end of 1989: "Reagan, as commander-in-chief, was the
military's best friend. He gave the Pentagon almost everything it
wanted. That spending, combined with a broad tax cut, contributed to a
trillion-dollar deficit....Social programs? They suffered under Reagan.
But he refused to see the cause and effect."
The "objective" press that never saw any reason to be kind to
President Reagan can only manage to do it now to try and save the
sinking ship that is Barack Obama's presidency. No one should let them
put these two men in the same sentence, unless it's to discuss how far
we've fallen as a nation.
