Even Left-Wing Journalists Can Be Trusted More Than Regime Media

Earlier this week, Gallup reported just 31 percent of us had a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in “mass media,” with 36 percent declaring no trust at all. It has been a long, steady decline from the Fourth Estate’s high point in 1976, when 72 percent told Gallup they trusted “mass media” and only 4 percent had no faith in it.

While many Americans refer to mass media as “liberal” media, there is a difference. Independent journalists, regardless of ideology, have historically uncovered what has been suppressed by government and its obedient media stenographers. We should ditch the phrase “mass media” and instead draw the comparison between “regime media” and reporters truly independent of the regime.

The Trotskyist World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) is a current example. Among other acts of healthy defiance, WSWS editors committed real journalism in 2020 by platforming prominent historians who were sharply critical of the 1619 Project, a nakedly partisan pile of woke misinformation dished out by the New York Times.

An older example from the far left was Ramparts, a communist-sympathizing, muckraking glossy magazine produced from 1962 until August 1975. It frequently featured news that regime media wouldn’t print. In January 1967 the insulted editors of Time magazine accused Ramparts of putting “a bomb in every issue.” The “bombs” were worth reading, but less explosive reports have also held up better than the conventional wisdom of the time—or since.

Ramparts and Ronald Reagan

Consider how Ramparts covered the launch of Ronald Reagan’s political career.

Long since he left the White House, the regime media has continued to maintain a myth that Reagan was stupid. But beginning well before he became California’s governor, Ramparts had a different take. Although they didn’t like Reagan even one little bit, the commies produced important, grudgingly complimentary accounts of his potential and even his intellect.

A profile of Reagan written by famed left-wing journalist Jessica Mitford appeared in the November 1965 issue of Ramparts. This was a full year before “The Gipper” would defeat incumbent Democrat Pat Brown in the 1966 California gubernatorial race. At the time, Reagan was but a rumored candidate and had never held public office.

A Democratic Party leader from Los Angeles told Mitford that Reagan had the potential to be “a most effective and attractive candidate” and that “anyone taking him too lightly would be a fool.” A Republican Party officer from Los Angeles told her the “intellectual content of his speeches is better than I would expect” and that he had a “messianic thing about him—a great white light.” A former U.S. Army acquaintance recounted that in political debates with Reagan “the statistics-quoting was unnerving, it went on endlessly, a fountain.”

The Ramparts editors took another look at Reagan for an October 1966 cover story about the gubernatorial race he would win the following month. They wrote that “Reagan’s campaign has vitality and dedication, and so far it has stuck meticulously to principles which are carefully conservative, but certainly not ‘radical right.’” The news story concluded that “Ronnie is turning the voters on” while “Pat Brown, on the other hand, is saying nothing, except what a terrible right winger and inexperienced neo-fascist Ronald Reagan is.”

Ramparts warned against this hyperbole.

“True, he is guilty of having said in 1963 that ‘there can be no moral justification for the progressive income tax,’” they wrote, “but that makes him a conservative crowd pleaser, not a fascist.” Quoting from a Democratic campaign document that accused Reagan of using his “talents as a magnet to build up neo-fascist organizations,” the Ramparts editors scoffed that this was a “gross exaggeration.”

Ramparts reported that the Brown team’s ignorance led them to commit a historically consequential error.

“Pat Brown and his chief political strategists decided, on the basis of a private poll, that Ronald Reagan would be easier to beat in November than moderate Republican George Christopher,” wrote the Ramparts editors.

Acting on this information, the Democrats dredged up and fed the media a silly old scandal regarding Christopher violating California state milk regulations. Ramparts reported that this “unquestionably helped Reagan defeat Christopher.”

On Election Day 1966, Pat Brown’s supposedly easier-to-defeat opponent demolished him by 15 percentage points.

History Repeats

Fourteen years later, Democratic President Jimmy Carter proclaimed Reagan “both dumb and incompetent” and was “pleased” when he won the 1980 GOP presidential nomination. Carter later admitted his 1980 team had thought Reagan “was the weakest candidate the Republicans could have chosen.”

Reagan won 44 states in 1980 and trounced Carter 489-49 in the Electoral College, one of the most lopsided drubbings in American history. It got worse four years later, when Reagan tore apart former Vice President Walter Mondale, taking 49 states and winning the Electoral College vote by 525-13. The 62 combined electoral votes won by Carter and Mondale in 1980 and 1984 were an embarrassing 208 short of what either of them needed to win the White House just one time.

The Democratic Party is lucky to have survived Ronald Reagan.

As the saying goes, those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it. The 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign concluded former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush would be their most difficult rival. An agenda item for a Clinton planning meeting was labeled “How do we prevent Bush from bettering himself/how do we maximize Trump and others?” (Oops!)

When the left-wing Mitford reported on Reagan in 1965, she concluded that what she had learned about his appeal and potential was “rather scary.” Rather than rely on regime media, President Carter should have read and trusted Ramparts.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/even-left-wing-journalists-can-be-trusted-more-than-regime-media/