By the time Ronald Reagan's body arrived on Capitol Hill last week, after 100,000 people paid respects in California and just before another 100,000 people honored him in Washington, the news media were already feeling the urgent need to balance the outpouring of love and nostalgia with a screed or two from Americans who hated Reagan. Never mind that funerals aren't usually the time for nasty political debates. Never mind that balance is what the media lacked through the Reagan years. The new "balance" didn't even have to be true - just anti-Reagan. Start with the Reagan AIDS myth. A... continue reading
As we mark the passing of Ronald Reagan, many have remembered his early career as a Hollywood actor. We are told that some of the biggest movie critics at the time thought he was quite good as an actor, despite the way his political opponents reduced his movie career to laugh lines about that chimp movie. Cultural critic Terry Teachout looked up a New Republic review of Reagan's most noticed performance in the film "Kings Row," and found respected critic Otis Ferguson nodding briefly to "Ronald Reagan, who is good and no surprise." Usually during his presidency, Reagan's movie career... continue reading
The greatest president of the 20th century has passed away. Everyone is assessing and re-assessing the giant legacy of this man, as well as the winning personality that helped create it. Even the national media produced coverage you might call loving at times, or at the very least respectful to that broad mass of Americans who loved Ronald Reagan. They've noted the obvious achievements of the man. He had a winning smile and an inspirational optimism and renewed Americans' love and hopes for their country. His determined resistance to global communism led to the end of the Cold War. He... continue reading
In the old days, when man struggled to scratch a living out of the dirt, when the world was wracked by plagues and pogroms, the thought of Heaven must have been much sweeter than it seems today. In our world of creature comforts and great prosperity, when we devote many hours of our lives to being entertained, when it seems the masses worship celebrities more than God, faith appears to some as more anciently foolish than ever. That's especially true if you make movies for a living. The reason Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" stood out so severely... continue reading
Arianna Huffington has written a new book, "Fanatics and Fools: The Game Plan for Winning America Back." It's pointless to debate Ms. Huffington's newfound ideology since there is no guarantee that between the time these words are typed and published she won't have embraced yet a different cause. It is, however, instructive to note that when she left the conservative movement behind, she forgot to pack the truth into her suitcase. Huffington recounts a nightmare event for her - the "Conservative Summit" hosted by the National Review magazine back in early 1993. She tells how the event began "in bombastic... continue reading
On the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision on Brown vs. Board of Education, which began the end of racial segregation being defended as "separate but equal," an anniversary party was thrown at Washington's historic Constitution Hall. The biggest name on the program was TV star Bill Cosby, and he packed the biggest - and most unexpected - wallop. Cosby did not come boasting of progress, basking in satisfaction, or marking a half-century of racial uplift. Instead, he slapped the audience with the rhetorical equivalent of a cold fish. In Cosby's big picture, too many black Americans today aren't... continue reading
Two comfortable institutions of the liberal media establishment, the Pew Research Center and the Project for Excellence in Journalism, have discovered once again that five times as many national reporters (34 percent vs. 7 percent) identify themselves as liberal as conservative. As for that broad middle of 54 percent that declares itself to be "moderate," just consider them liberals with an honesty problem. For liberal tilt, look no further than this number: 55 percent of national reporters think they haven't been "critical enough" of President Bush. After the media's aggressive air war on the White House this year, the only... continue reading
Summer vacation is creeping up, and that means children will have all kinds of free time on their hands. For many boys, that means almost non-stop video game action, leaving them a pasty shade of white as they battle away the summer in the basement. Parents must wonder if their children don't get button-finger callouses, or carpal-tunnel syndrome, or "controller elbow," or something. So what will all that playing accomplish? A parent can only hope the boys will spend a large chunk of the summer role-playing as heroic knights, or dashing spies, or glamorous power-hitters. But video-game manufacturers wouldn't mind... continue reading
The news of Nicholas Berg's gruesome murder came urgently in mid-afternoon on Fox News Channel. Anchor Shepard Smith didn't - couldn't - show the video that had hit the Internet. He handled it gravely, correctly. He explained the deadly facts, how masked Muslim fanatics screamed praises to Allah as they savagely sawed off Berg's head - the head of an American who came to Iraq to help it rebuild. How would this story grab the American news media? How would it change the media's obsession with much less graphic photos of sexual humiliation of prisoners? Many suggested that since the... continue reading
Lost in the hype over the wildly overpublicized finale of "Friends" was its legacy: horny sex chat is now part of the family hour. Because of "Friends," parents now have the unwelcome opportunity to explain (or more likely, dance around explaining) things like premature ejaculation to grade-schoolers. Die-hard fans are calling it the end of an era, but all is not lost. Children getting off the school bus will probably be able to see the same old "Friends" sex follies at mid-afternoon every day in syndication on local stations or cable outlets, including on TBS, where it will probably air... continue reading