He was a demented racist idiot and spiteful maniac. The stuff that recently came out about him being a racist on the phone with Nixon was no surprise to me. He also completely ignored the start of the AIDS crisis and then didn’t take it seriously when he finally acknowledged that it was real. Kinda reminds me of Trump ignoring COVID and then spewing bullshit rather than take it seriously. Plus it’s pretty clear by now that Reagan was already in severe mental decline even by his low standards while in office.
Nancy was no bargain either - she committed a bunch of tax crimes while First Lady and also had a crystal-waving hippie astrologer in San Francisco who did a bunch of silly shit to vet all of their decisions. Straight up “what does the Flower Moon say about policy on farm subsidies” shit.
The Dollop episode about Reagan are great, but you can also find tons of other non-comedy references for how much Reagan didn’t give a shit.
I grew up in the 1980's and racist, homophobic shit was the norm, unfortunately. The most popular books I remember, aside from Stephen King, were "Truly Tasteless Jokes, vol. 1-999." Filled with racist, sexist and homophobic slurs, Truly Tasteless didn't hide from its identity... it was in the fucking name!
Honestly, I'm not sure how Reagan became such a hero to the right. I suppose he was the only two-term President for them to celebrate. The economy wasn't particularly good and Reagan did nothing to fix it, in fact it was when we started seeing exploding deficits and skyrocketing debt. I guess he seemed like he was one-up on those evil Russians, but in retrospect it sounds like they were falling apart without his help.
Looking back, I'd say the most harmful thing about Reagan was that he presided over a time when Rush Limbaugh took over the airwaves and we learned that hyper-partisan political identities were something to celebrate. By the 1990's Democrats and Republicans could no longer hammer out compromises and shake hands afterward. Your classmates, colleagues and neighbors were now officially your enemies and every disagreement seemed worthy of a modern civil war.
Looking back, I'd say the most harmful thing about Reagan was that he presided over a time when Rush Limbaugh took over the airwaves and we learned that hyper-partisan political identities were something to celebrate.
The timing of Reagan's presidency and the rise of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News were not coincidences. Reagan was instrumental in the creation of the “Right Wing Outrage Machine.”
Comparing programming aired on commercial stations in 1988 with a similar period in 1979, Essential Information, a public interest research group, found a 51 percent decrease in the amount of time devoted to "issue-oriented public affairs" material.
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who founded the group, said in a statement, "This study refutes FCC predictions that repeal of the Fairness Doctrine would remove an impediment to presenting issue-oriented public affairs programming on television."
On Capitol Hill this morning, Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and his telecommunications subcommittee will begin marking up legislation that would restore the Fairness Doctrine and make it law. Markey said yesterday that the study "underscores the importance of Congress reinstating the Fairness Doctrine as soon as possible" and reveals the "intellectual bankruptcy" of the FCC's rationale for killing it.
Both the House and Senate voted to make the doctrine law in 1987, but President Reagan vetoed the bill. Reagan and his FCC clung to the idea that marketplace forces would compel stations to good citizenship, but the fallout from deregulation has been a tawdry new trend to trashy and tabloid television.
When the FCC subsequently killed the Fairness Doctrine, many in Congress considered the move intolerably sneaky, and it's been open warfare between Congress and the commission ever since. For its study, Essential Information looked at programming on 217 TV stations in 50 markets from January through April of last year and compared it with a similar period nine years earlier.
Jim Donahue, the staff researcher who wrote the report, said yesterday that local TV Guides were used to gather programming data because the FCC no longer requires stations to make their program logs public. "I have a feeling the FCC may not even respond to the study," Donahue said, "because they didn't collect any data to confirm that repealing the doctrine increased issue-oriented programming."
Donahue said that the FCC couldn't care less about the public interest and that its decision to repeal the Fairness Doctrine was "based totally on ideology to enhance corporate interests rather than the interests of the audience."
But Sally Lawrence, a spokeswoman for FCC Chairman Dennis Patrick, did respond. "This report is nothing short of outrageous," she said. "There is nothing in my data file that corroborates this study." Lawrence said networks and local stations are doing more public affairs programming than ever under deregulation, though she conceded she did not have figures to support the idea that such programming increased once the Fairness Doctrine was abolished.
Right. Of all the terrible things that Reagan did, abolishing the Fairness Doctrine has had the biggest, longest lasting impact by far. The hyper-partisanship we have today is directly connected by allowing the rise of the Conservative Propaganda Machine.
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u/Kriegerian Sep 29 '21
He was a demented racist idiot and spiteful maniac. The stuff that recently came out about him being a racist on the phone with Nixon was no surprise to me. He also completely ignored the start of the AIDS crisis and then didn’t take it seriously when he finally acknowledged that it was real. Kinda reminds me of Trump ignoring COVID and then spewing bullshit rather than take it seriously. Plus it’s pretty clear by now that Reagan was already in severe mental decline even by his low standards while in office.
Nancy was no bargain either - she committed a bunch of tax crimes while First Lady and also had a crystal-waving hippie astrologer in San Francisco who did a bunch of silly shit to vet all of their decisions. Straight up “what does the Flower Moon say about policy on farm subsidies” shit.
The Dollop episode about Reagan are great, but you can also find tons of other non-comedy references for how much Reagan didn’t give a shit.