Rewriting Ronald Reagan
Table of Contents:
Executive Summary
As the nation prepares to pay tribute to former President Ronald Reagan
on the 100th anniversary of his birth, it is amazing to consider that
his success at turning the U.S. away from 1960s-style liberalism was
accomplished in the face of a daily wave of news media hostility. The
media’s first draft of history was more myth than reality: that Reagan
only brought the nation poverty, ignorance, bankruptcy, and a
dangerously imbalanced foreign and defense policy.
The Media
Research Center has assembled a report documenting the “objective”
national media’s most biased takes on President Reagan, his record and
his times, including 22 video clips and matching MP3 audio:
I. Reagan the Man:
Reporters often agonized over why the American public liked Reagan,
that they couldn’t see through the White House spell and see Reagan in
the contemptuous light that the media did.
II. The Reaganomics Recovery:
Reagan’s policies caused a dramatic economic turn-around from high
inflation and unemployment to steady growth, but the good news was
obscured by bad news of trade deficits, greedy excesses of the rich, and
supposedly booming homelessness.
III. Reagan and National Defense:
Ronald Reagan may have won the Cold War, but to the media, the Reagan
defense buildup seemed like a plot designed to deny government aid to
the poor and hungry, and was somehow the only spending responsible for
“bankrupting” the country.
IV. Reagan and Race:
Using their definition of “civil rights” — anything which adds
government-mandated advantages for racial minorities is “civil rights”
progress — liberal journalists suggested that somehow Ronald Reagan was
against liberty for minorities.
V. The Reagan Legacy: The media painted the Reagan era as a horrific time of low ethics, class warfare on the poor, and crushing government debt.
EXTRA: Reagan, Slammed by Celebrities.
Ronald Reagan’s long Hollywood career earned him no credit among
celebrities, who ridiculed him and even inserted anti-Reagan jokes into
everyday entertainment programming.
