Rewriting Ronald Reagan
Table of Contents:
Introduction
As America marks the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth,
stories abound of the man and the President — his leadership and vision,
his humanity and optimism, his deep love of country and belief in the
power of freedom. But any measure of his accomplishments has to begin by
noting his unique placement in history as a firmly conservative
president arriving at the end of an era dominated by liberalism — in
both parties. Everything he accomplished he did by the force of his
personality and words, aiming to pick up easily embarrassed moderate
Republicans as well as conservative Democrats. Everything he changed he
managed to do against a daily wave of news media hostility to his
agenda.
Think of everything Reagan did, and then add: He did
it all before Fox News. He did it all before the Rush Limbaugh
phenomenon. He did it all before the instant battle cry of his defenders
could hit the Internet. He did it all before C-SPAN caught on and
people could enjoy the game of watching entire speeches and debates and
then observing how the network tricksters discombobulated them into
liberal hatchet jobs. He did it all when the only conservative regular
on the big networks was ABC’s George Will, who appeared once weekly as a
panelist on This Week with David Brinkley.
In the
prologue to his book on Reagan, Dinesh D’Souza captured the flavor of
how Reagan was greeted by the Washington establishment. Everything
Reagan sought to accomplish seemed ludicrous and uneducated to the
long-standing liberal consensus. Tax cuts would be wildly inflationary. A
foreign policy based on the radical notion that Communism should be put
on the ash heap of history was dismissed as a bellicose fantasy too
dangerous for the nuclear age. At the end of it all, Reagan was the wise
man, and all his detractors — Democrats and ersatz Republicans,
political scientists and economists, “Sovietologists” and journalists —
were the dummies.
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 Ronald
Reagan, his record and his times.
