Thank You, Ronald Reagan

Adam's Apple

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Apr 25, 2004
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The New Yorker Looks at a Conservative
By Roger Aronoff
September 15, 2005

Conservatives are often held up by the liberal media as a rare species to be studied and explained to their viewers and readers. It is a nuisance that they used to not have to worry about. Perhaps that is why the New York Times has a writer for whom conservatives are his beat. And perhaps it explains the recent New Yorker profile of Hugh Hewitt, lawyer, teacher, radio host, and author of the book Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation.

Hewitt, a Renaissance Man of the New Media universe, previously worked for then-former President Nixon at his Western White House in California, and in the Reagan Justice Department, where he worked with current Supreme Court nominee John Roberts.

Hewitt is representative of a radical shift in how many people now get their information. It used to be that the only TV news available was the big three broadcast networks airing only 15 minutes a day on their evening news. That evolved to 30 minutes a day in the late sixties. At that time, the only real national newspaper was the Wall Street Journal, though the New York Times was still the "paper of record." Then in the seventies came cable and CNN, about the same time as C-SPAN and Nightline, the late night ABC News show, which grew out of nightly coverage of the 444 days that Americans were held hostage in Iran following the revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power.

In 1987, the Fairness Doctrine was eliminated by the Reagan administration. It had required that equal time must always be given to people holding opposing political views to those expressed on broadcast TV or radio. At the time, many conservatives, including AIM founder Reed Irvine, opposed this change, because the Fairness Doctrine at the time seemed like the only way conservatives could get their opinions heard. Reed later acknowledged that he had been wrong on this one.

http://www.aim.org/media_monitor/4007_0_2_0_C/
 

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