Posted 1:46 AM by Scoobie Davis

The Reagan Literary Legacy
Brendan Nyhan of Spinsanity fame wrote a persuasive article for the American Prospect regarding how the Reagan legacy is being hijacked by Newsmax.com and his son Michael Reagan (for a companion article from ConWebWatch’s Terry Krepel, click here). Newsmax is a right-wing web site and magazine run by Chris Ruddy, a Scaife-funded former peddler of Vince Foster conspiracy theories (Ruddy challenged 60 Minutes to examine his Vince Foster theories; 60 Minutes took Ruddy up on the challenge and promptly tore Ruddy a new one). Nyhan’s article convincingly demonstrates that Newsmax epitomizes what historian Richard Hofstadter called the paranoid style. In addition to its jaundiced reporting, Newsmax is notorious for spreading a particularly nasty urban legend: Newsmax falsely claimed that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton snubbed the Gold Star Mothers, a group of mothers of combat soldiers killed in action, when they visited her office. The Gold Star Mothers were forced to put a disclaimer on their web site correcting Newsmax’s urban legend because their office was inundated with letters and emails.

The only thing I disagreed about Nyhan’s article was his statement that “… it's certainly questionable that [Reagan] would endorse Newsmax magazine as the key to his legacy.” Reagan’s political legacy (that embodied massive corruption, extremism, and arms sales to an “axis of evil” nation) includes a long history of fervent support for profoundly kooky publications. Reagan proudly declared that the Washington Times (the self-proclaimed “America’s Newspaper” owned by South Korean megalomaniac Sun Myung Moon) was the first newspaper he read each morning. Reagan also admitted to being a devoted reader of Human Events a far right Washington tabloid that recently had Ann Coulter on its staff. In fact, Newsmax is tame stuff compared to the reading material that Reagan perused on a regular basis.