Showtime Hails Gorbachev as the 'Real Democrat,' Despairs Reagan Enabled 'Growth of a Right-Wing Media Empire'

Brent Baker | January 7, 2013
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Tonight, viewers of CBS-owned Showtime will be treated to the ninth of ten installments of Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, which has attacked U.S. leaders – from FDR to Ronald Reagan – from the far-left while hailing the virtues of communists.

Last Monday’s installment, on Carter and Reagan, offered a representative sampling of Stone’s worldview, an hour which included displaying the Media Research Center’s “Don’t Believe the Liberal Media” placard as he fretted over how President Reagan “enabled the growth of a right-wing media empire” which has “dramatically lower the standards of American political discourse and, in general, doom prospects for progressive change.”

That “right-wing media empire” is made up of “a number of interlocked, well-funded conservative think-tanks that helped shape a new Washington group think. Playing up fears, resentments and hatred of government,” a paranoid Stone warned as he cited players which hardly match the reach of ABC, CBS, NBC or the New York Times: “Clear Channel, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, Talk Radio Network, Salem Radio, the USA Radio network, and Radio America.”

Reagan’s policies, Stone lazily maintained, “weakened the middle class, busted unions, heightened the racial divides, widened the gap between rich and poor.”

“As far as Reagan’s much-vaunted role in winning the Cold War,” Stone decided “the lion’s share of credit goes to Mikhail Gorbachev -- a true visionary and, it turns out, the real democrat.”

More in the cross-post on the MRC's NewsBusters blog.

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