The Media Research Center has long been a defender of all things Ronald Reagan, demanding that all media coverage of him be never less than hagiography and shouting down any criticism of him no matter how legitimate. So when a new movie about Reagan came out earlier this year, the MRC made sure to play defense and help it play victim. Catherine Salgado complained in a Aug. 16 post:
The star of a new movie about the late President Ronald Reagan is accusing Facebook of targeting the movie.
Actor Dennis Quaid and the marketers for a soon-to-be-released film Reagan accused Meta-owned Facebook of suppressing advertising and promotion of the movie. Newsweek claimed Facebook told them that it “may have been” censorship by mistake, not on purpose.
Quaid, who plays Reagan in the movie, wrote in an email to Newsweek, “Facebook is once again censoring the free flow of ideas, deciding what’s best for us to see and hear; only this time it’s throttling advertising and promotion for my movie about Ronald Reagan.”
MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider responded to Facebook’s censorship, “Have you noticed that these ‘mistakes’ and ‘glitches’ by the Big Tech platforms always favor the left? But these glitches aren’t always about limiting conservatives’ actions. Just the other day, Google claimed that there was a glitch that allowed Kamala Harris to attach fake headlines to the logos of media outlets, to her great benefit. The one consistent thing is that Big Tech always favors the left.”
MRC Free Speech America Director Michael Morris agreed. Morris said, “Here they go again. Notice how Big Tech’s censorship mistakes invariably seem to always be in one direction: in support of the left and against the right.”
Neither Morris nor Salgado offered any actual evidence that any alleged “censorship” was deliberate — they’re more interested in pushing the victim narrative. And despite the complete lack of any hard evidence, this made the MRC’s list of “Worst Censorship of August.”
Christian Toto joined in the victimhood narrative in an Aug. 31 column:
“There they go again.”
No, that wasn’t President Ronald Reagan but Dennis Quaid, the actor who brings the late leader to life in “Reagan.” The movie, out Aug. 30, recalls the president’s remarkable life from his days as a humble lifeguard to leader of the free world.
Getting the word out about the film has been “complicated,” to use a common Facebook phrase.
Quaid shared how Facebook, now officially known as Meta, initially banned “Reagan” marketers from boosting posts tied to the film on “The Joe Rogan Experience.”
“Censorship is happening to us through Facebook,” Quaid told the Spotify host. “The content in [the posts] was ‘an attempt to sway an election.’”
Newsweek reported that the problem began months ago after Quaid appeared on a podcast hosted by Dr. Jordan Peterson. Facebook prevented the film’s marketers from boosting a clip from that interview for brand awareness.
Toto didn’t mention that Peterson is a right-wing activist with dubious ideas, so it was obvious were was some agenda-pushing going on here.
Tim Graham spent a Sept. 2 post raging that actual movie critics didn’t like the film, dismissing every single one of them as liberal activists despite offering no evidence to back up the claim:
Our old colleague Kristine Parks at FoxNews.com notes the new movie Reagan, starring Dennis Quaid, is strongly liked by audiences with a 97 percent audience score on the site Rotten Tomatoes. But the critics are liberals, and among them, it only had a 26 percent score.
Compare that to the 2016 movie Southside with You, a biopic which gushed over young Barack and Michelle Obama. Both were positive movies, but the Obama film received rave reviews and a 91 percent score by critics (71 percent audience).
Christian Toto told Fox News: “Film critics, by and large, lean relentlessly to the left, and they let that flavor their reviews. So, when a Michael Moore film hits theaters, the response will be glowing, by and large, regardless of the content. The recent projects tied to progressive heroes like President Barack Obama (Southside with You) and Ruth Bader Ginsberg (RBG) are similarly hailed even by those who use the term ‘hagiography.’”
Nick Shrager of The Daily Beast used the H-word for Reagan: “You may have suspected that this MAGA-tinged hagiography would be absolute trash, but it turns out you didn’t think low enough,” he wrote. It’s “the worst movie of the year.”
“Regardless of how you feel about Ronald Reagan the president, most will be united in finding this biopic a preachy, plodding, graceless groaner,” he added. “McNamara’s film is so ungainly and transparent that it plays like embarrassing propaganda.“
Thanks, Tim, for seemingly confirming our hunch that Parks is the writer who penned culture-war attacks at the MRC under the name Kristine Marsh. But if we’re to follow Graham’s partisan conspiracy theory, shouldn’t we also dismiss Toto’s love of the movie because he’s a right-wing activist? Graham doesn’t want to discuss such trivialities when there’s another movie reviewer to bash for not conforming to his preferred ideological biases:
Washington Post critic Ty Burr declared “Quaid offers a congenial impersonation with little depth, in part because depth is not what we wanted (or got) from Reagan.”
Communism? Who finds evil in communism? Burr doesn’t: “Reagan organizes its narrative around its subject’s lifelong fight against the Red Menace, which it assumes we know is bad without being told why. Godlessness, mostly…”
Burr concluded: “The faithful for whom Reagan was made aren’t likely to see that it’s a hagiography as rosy and shallow as anything in a Kremlin May Day parade. As pop-culture propaganda — popaganda, if you will — the movie’s strictly for true believers. As history, it’s worthless.”
It’s especially stupid to (a) suggest there’s nothing provably evil about communism and then (b) compare the anti-communists to a Kremlin May Day parade. He’s just trolling.
Isn’t Graham just trolling by inventing a claim that a movie reviewer is a committed communist so he has a strawman to attack? Meanwhile, the MRC published a review of the film that stuck to the hagiographic script in a form of an Aug. 22 post by Cal Thomas, who gushed that it was “more of a love note to a man who did great things for his country and the world. There could be no better epitaph for any political leader.”
The film wasn’t the only Reagan defense the MRC served up of late. Clay Waters spent a Sept. 17 post Heathering onetime conservative writer Max Boot for committing the offense of engaging in Reagan wrongthink:
Foreign policy columnist and former Republican Max Boot has written a Reagan biography, and it’s insufferable, if the essay by Northwestern University professor Daniel Immerwahr for the September 16 New Yorker, “What if Ronald Reagan’s Presidency Never Really Ended?”, is any indication.
The New Yorker is a “sophisticated” publication with a long, literary history, written for urban lefties by urban lefties, but the political articles aren’t always as knee-jerk liberal as one may expect (perhaps because they’re so lengthy that non-liberal facts have more of a chance to pop up).
But that’s not the case for this 4,000-word piece, about the re-education of Max Boot and how he lost faith in his formerly beloved Ronald Reagan. It sounds like every other hostile, condescending liberal journalistic cliché hurled at Reagan over the last half-century. The closest thing to a fresh angle is tying the 40th president to Donald Trump, in order to demonize two Republican presidents at once.
The rest was just old-fashioned liberal bias: That President Reagan was indifferent to civil rights and poor people, a dummy who lived in a fantasy world who ushered in a decade of greed and untrammeled laissez-faire while letting federal deficits go wild, and almost starting World War III with silly Star Wars projects.
Waters also made a point of bringing up “the mortifying scandal of Boot’s wife, Su Mi Terry, being indicted for being a secret foreign agent for South Korea,” even though it was completely irrelevant to his book.