It’s time to end the unfair, imbalanced Reagan coverage

Here’s where it reached its low: last week, CNN’s Bob Franken interviewed an 8-year-old. The… Here’s where it reached its low: last week, CNN’s Bob Franken interviewed an 8-year-old. The little tike had written a paper on, you guessed it, Ronald Reagan.

For the past week and a half, coverage of Ronald Reagan’s opulent funeral — isn’t a $2.3 million, tax-funded memorial for someone so opposed to government waste a little ironic? — and endless, glowing tributes to Reagan have filled every magazine, newspaper and newscast.

I’m a cable news addict. When I sit down for a meal, I turn on the television and flip from MSNBC to CNN to CNN Headline News to, if I need a laugh, Fox News. When the recaps of “the Reagan legacy” began, I was hoping for a fair and comprehensive look at history. The stories I’ve seen had a little too much “proponent of fiscal responsibility,” “great communicator” and “winning the Cold War,” and not enough “$3 trillion deficit,” “more lip service than action” and “backing Saddam Hussein, supporting South African apartheid and illegally selling weapons to terrorists.”

Most guests on newscasts and political talk shows have been Reagan biographers, friends and political allies. For example, as the group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting noted, the June 6 edition of MSNBC’s “Hardball” featured Reagan strategist Richard Wirthlin, Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) and Reps. David Dreier and Chris Cox (both R-CA).

But the worst was Fox News, whose recap of the Reagan years was so hazy, skewed and simplistic, that, if I didn’t know the network was a shameless, right-wing, kitsch-machine, I would have thought they were making an ironic statement about Alzheimer’s effects on one’s ability to recollect the past.

I can forgive tributes to a man at the time of his death being a little shmaltzy, but given the sheer number of Reagan recaps, I would have hoped for more well-rounded analyses of Reagan’s policies and their impacts.

Not coincidently, the Wall Street Journal cited a number of unnamed Republican aides who say they had been planning the funeral and related events as a “legacy-building event” for years.

Anyway, given the fact that the news media has been more clogged with Republican crap than Rush Limbaugh’s intestines, you may not have noted two other news items involving other ex-presidents — live ones!

On Monday, the first official presidential portrait painted by a black artist was unveiled at the White House. Simmie Knox, a self-trained painter and son of an Alabama sharecropper, depicted former President Bill Clinton sitting reflectively in the Oval Office. Knox’s painting is very nice, but not exactly fitting of the smooth scoundrel who gave us a pretty good idea of what it would be like to have Hugh Hefner serve as president. Maybe Knox should have painted Clinton coolly leaning back in his chair as a black beret peaks out from under his desk. In one hand, Clinton grips a Big Mac, as the other gives a big thumps up.

On Sunday, former president George H.W. Bush celebrated his 80th birthday by parachuting 13,000 feet to a field next to his presidential library at Texas A’M University. Meanwhile, in Washington, officials at the Capitol Rotunda and National Cathedral started taking down the buildings’ funeral decorations only after word came from Texas that Bush had landed safely.

For a more in-depth look at recent Reagan coverage, Nick Keppler recommends www.fair.org/press-releases/reagan-myth-reality.html. While you are online, e-mail Nick at pnk6@pitt.edu.