Newsmax and the Rise of Conservative Media

Jeffrey Lord
April 5th, 2025 4:15 PM

It all began with William F. Buckley, Jr. It is worth noting that 2025 marks the centenary of Buckley’s birth. With the founding of National Review in 1955, Buckley was opening the floodgates on what would come to be known as conservative media.

 
Michael Steele Derrick Johnson MSNBC The Weekend 3-23-25
Video

MSNBC: Segregationist Trump Has Ushered In A New Era Of Jim Crow

Mark Finkelstein
March 23rd, 2025 2:48 PM

On Sunday's edition of MSNBC's The Weekend, co-host Michael Steele approvingly cites a statement claiming: "Jim Crow has left the south and now roams the country as his grandson, James E. Crow, Esquire. The segregationists played the long game while we were asleep at the wheel. Derrick Johnson, President of the NAACP, suggests that as a result of the closing of the Department of…

 
Video

PBS Misremembers William F. Buckley Jr.

Daniel McCarthy
April 12th, 2024 8:37 AM

Imagine making a documentary about one of the 20th century’s leading opponents of the Ku Klux Klan — without ever talking about the evil of the KKK itself. If that sounds like malpractice, consider PBS’s new documentary on the life of William F. Buckley Jr. “The Incomparable Mr. Buckley,” the latest installment in the “American Masters” series, has much to say about anti-Communism but never…

 
Joe Scarborough Claire McCaskill MSNBC Morning Joe 4-8-21
Video

Scarborough & Co. Slam GOP as 'Party of No,' 'Darkness and Doom'

Mark Finkelstein
April 8th, 2021 9:54 PM

On Morning Joe, ex-conservative Joe Scarborough laments that the GOP has become "the party of 'No." But as the late, great, William F. Buckley Jr. once said, "a conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop!" Scarborough also criticizes Joe Manchin for wanting to work with Republicans, and not wanting to pass Biden's bills via reconciliation, or by "reforming" the filibuster…

 
Video

Scarborough: Buckley's 'Rolling Over In His Grave' at Attacks on Press

Mark Finkelstein
April 27th, 2020 12:04 PM
Stung by criticism of their on-air TDS meltdowns, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski lash out at the conservative media, calling them "despicable, disgusting" Trump "pawns" who are betraying the legacy of William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan.
 

Blogger: Olbermann Sees That ‘Conservatism…Is a Metastasizing Cancer’

Tom Johnson
September 20th, 2016 11:17 AM
A current MSNBC personality just passed the half-decade mark as a host on the channel. A former MSNBC personality who’s made plenty of comebacks just made another one. The Washington Monthly’s D.R. Tucker praised each man to the skies this past weekend. Tucker called Chris Hayes "the classiest man on cable” and opined that from the get-go, he was brilliant, “an engaging, charismatic host whose…
 

NYT's Sam Tanenhaus Uses Book Review to Slime Racist GOP

Clay Waters
June 28th, 2016 8:54 AM
The New York Times Sunday Book Review featured former book editor Sam Tanenhaus talking about several news political tomes under the rubric “Why Populism Now?” And when we say “talking about,” we mean using the books as a pretext to slime Republicans as demographically doomed, out-of-touch racists. Also: Libertarians give you cancer.
 

New York Magazine Pundit: ‘Crude Tribalism’ Animates Typical GOP Voter

Tom Johnson
May 9th, 2016 7:25 AM
In a Tuesday post, New York magazine’s Chait suggested that conservatism is driven not by an elite but by its riff-raff. Chait asserted, “Whatever [the] abstract arguments for conservative policy…on the ground, Republican politics boils down to ethno-nationalistic passions ungoverned by reason,” and remarked that Donald Trump’s supporters “have revealed things about the nature of the party that…
 

Formerly Conservative Writer Foresees Decline of Conservatism

Tom Johnson
March 13th, 2016 3:17 PM
Michael Lind thinks that movement conservatives are becoming a minor force in American politics, supplanted less by liberal Democrats than by what might be called Trump Republicans. In a Wednesday article for Politico, Lind contended that growing “populist discontent” is bringing about “the gradual replacement of Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan conservatism by something more like European national…
 
Video

Heilemann, Wallace Rip NR's 'Against Trump': Helps Trump, Stupid

Mark Finkelstein
January 22nd, 2016 8:28 AM
National Review was created by the great William F. Buckley, Jr., the brilliant pioneer of the modern conservative movement. Throughout the current presidential campaign season, NR has been a consistent critic of Donald Trump, whose conservatism it views with, to say the least, skepticism. And so it was entirely consistent for NR to publish "Against Trump," a special edition appearing today that…
 
Video

New Film Explores Fiery Bill Buckley-Gore Vidal ABC Debates in 1968

Tim Graham
June 20th, 2015 4:02 PM
In 1968, ABC News tried to improve on its lowly third-rank status by bringing on some rock-em, sock-em commentary around the two party conventions  from two intellectual heavyweights: William F. Buckley Jr. On the right, and author Gore Vidal on the left. A new documentary – from the left, considering it carries a tag from Independent Lens, a leftist documentary series for PBS – explores the…
 

NBC: Gore Vidal 'Unquestionably Brilliant'; William F. Buckley 'Paid D

Kyle Drennen
August 2nd, 2012 4:28 PM
In a glowing tribute to radical left-wing commentator Gore Vidal on Wednesday's NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams could barely contain his adoration for the "prolific writer" who was "unquestionably brilliant." Williams further gushed that Vidal, "got his larger wish in life, to be remembered as both a polemicist and a man of letters. One of the most active and agile minds of his…
 

Some Good GOP Flip-flops

Tony Blankley
October 7th, 2011 1:25 PM
William F. Buckley, Jr., founding father of the modern conservative movement, famously asserted his doctrine of voting for the most conservative candidate who is electable. Let me presume to add an analytic codicil: The GOP and the conservative movement have tended to support the most conservative policies only when they are understood to be conservative and are plausibly supportable by the…
 

Bozell Column: Of Gods And Men

Brent Bozell
April 2nd, 2011 8:21 AM
It’s a discussion for another day as to why those entrusted with the delivery of news so stubbornly refuse to cover the very deadly war being waged at this very moment against Christianity in the Middle East. The aggressors are radical Islamists, the victims Christians, especially those wearing the cloth. Every week another report detailing another attack seeps through the wall of non-…