Media Research Center senior news analyst Scott Whitlock devotes a Nov. 22 NewsBusters post to criticizing a History Channel program on Republican President William McKinley for painting him as “a corporate stooge who took bribes and had his speeches rewritten by business titan John D. Rockefeller.” Whitlock’s defense of McKinley is less than persuasive: “There’s no doubt that Rockefeller, Morgan and Carnegie donated heavily to the McKinley campaign and feared the impact electing the left-wing Bryan would have on business. But the documentary’s fanciful dramatic sequences imply it’s bribery.”
Well, Rockefeller did donate $250,000 to McKinley’s 1896 campaign — which, according to this currency calculator, is equivalent to $6.65 million in today’s dollars. That’s a lot of money in a time when there was no mass media to buy commercials on.
Whitlock goes on to attack McKinley’s opponent, William Jennings Bryan, as having a “left-wing mindset.” He cites a Washington Post article noting that Bryan advocated “women’s suffrage, creation of the Federal Reserve and implementation of a progressive income tax.”
Huh? We weren’t aware that allowing women to vote was a “left-wing” concept. Does Whitlock oppose these things?
If he does, that puts him in the same camp as far-right libertarians like Ron Paul, Vox Day, and Ilana Mercer.