Reagaphilia

Here's a little challenge to any die-hard believers in NPR's liberal (or even balanced) credentials: Find just one progressive, critical piece on the presidency of Ronald Reagan aired on NPR News in the last 5 years.

Tonight on ATC I had to fight the gag-reflex as NPR aired an adoring commentary on Reagan by Rich Lowry, editor of The National Review. The commentary focuses on Reagan's staged "tear down this wall" speech in Berlin. Michele Norris introduces it by noting that "Lowry says if those words don’t give you goosebumps..."

Then Lowry tells us that "beneath Reagan’s sunny exterior was a stern determination and a hatred of Marxism…conflicts with communist-infiltrated unions in his days in Hollywood." He might have also mentioned that beneath that "sunny exterior" was one of the the most dishonest, corrupt, death-squad loving presidents we've had until - well until now! Lowry is also out to conflate revolutionaries like Che Guevara with mass murderers like Stalin by lumping them all under the label of "communism." He tells us about the "tens of millions of dead bodies in the twentieth century" that Communism left in its wake, but nothing about the millions of corpses left by just the US alone.

Well, it's one thing to give airtime to a Reagaphile like Lowry so that he can pretend that Reagan was worthy of anything but disgust or prison, but one has to wonder where any countervailing opinion is? It clearly is not on NPR.

One interesting little exercise is to search "Richard Lowry" on NPR's site (16 hits) or "Rich Lowry" (25 hits) and then search Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation (what do you know, 1 hit!). Twenty-five to one - sounds like a liberal bias to me! Even add in the editor of The Progressive, Matthew Rothschild (3 hits) and you still get a 25 to 4 hit return. I think NPR is trying to make a Bonzo out of all of us...