FLASHBACK: The Liberal Media’s Long Record of Reviling Ronald Reagan
3rd June 2024
This Wednesday (June 5) marks 20 years since the passing of Ronald Reagan, the conservative Republican President whose policies led to record economic prosperity and laid the foundation for the peaceful end to the Cold War. In the years since his death, some in the media have used Reagan’s memory as a weapon to bash today’s Republican Party.
In 2015, for example, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell juxtaposed the Gipper with his would-be successors: “Reagan’s message was infused with sunny optimism, the flip side of today’s angry rhetoric…. Reagan saw America as a shining sit on the hill. A country welcoming people in, not shutting them out.”
But that’s not how Mitchell (NBC’s White House reporter in the 1980s) and her colleagues characterized Reagan when he was implementing his successful conservative program. As NewsBusters Executive Editor Tim Graham documented 20 years ago, the liberal media harshly, and wrongly, portrayed Reagan during his life “as an unintelligent airhead who lived in a fantasy world, a mesmerizing Music Man fooling the public with a phony bill of goods, a man who was cruel or uncaring to poor people, and a puppet for the greedy rich.”