Uncritical perusal of this past Sunday’s edition might lead a reader to believe your coverage of SDI and Ronald Reagan to be unbiased and fair. Careful analysis, however, reveals a shameful display of bias, an absence of intellectual honesty and a disturbing tendency to allow ad hominem attacks to intrude into your journalism.
Even though your editorial acknowledges SDI as an issue that demands serious national debate, you take a gratuitous swipe at the former president who started the debate with his “Star Wars dream.” Even worse, you print an unprobing, softball-laden Q & A with a typically anti-Reagan journalist, Frances FitzGerald, who demonstrates her balance by dispelling the never-credible but oft-repeated knock that Reagan was a dunce.
Instead, she charitably offers that he was an intelligent con man who, she cruelly insinuates, had no “emotional relationship…with his wife.” Unchallenged, she asserts that in the 1950s, before becoming the fraudulent “character…a construct which he created,” Reagan was “very far right, almost to the strange paranoid right wing.” When both interviewer and interviewee are indifferent to the facts, they overlook well-documented reality: Ronald Reagan began as a Democrat who evolved into a conservative Republican over several decades.
Yes, this “almost inhuman” man, who fooled us all with a “ridiculous [missile defense] system that doesn’t work,” set the stage for the most important foreign policy issue debate of the 2000 presidential election. After seven years of scuttling Reagan’s “dream,” a legacy-desperate Bill “It’s the economy stupid” Clinton is now championing the SDl cause. Even as journalists are overwhelmingly not, history will continue to be kind to President Reagan, his vision and his undeniable love of America.
