Media
Crawford, Alan
MEDIA Alan Crawford More Right than Reagan New Right fundraiser Richard Vi-gucric seems bent on making George Steinbrenncr of the Yankees look like a model boss. For the fourth time in five...
...Lofton will continue to work for the magazine, but editorial responsibility for most policy matters has been shifted to Tapscott, who will have his hands full...
...So far, Viguerie has invested enormous amounts to keep the magazine afloat, and he seems to be prepared to keep doing so at least a while longer...
...Mark Tapscott, the new skipper, is a seasoned Republican Party flack who will probably do as well as can be expected under the circumstances...
...Later he served as press secretary to Representative Robert Bauman, Maryland Republican, and administrative assistant to Representative Jim Collins, Texas Republican...
...Cover stories have featured such Viguerie cronies as the ubiquitous Phillips, the National Conservative Political Action Committee's Terry Dolan, and the Free Congress Foundation's Paul Weyrich, who is also a Conservative Digest columnist...
...Editorial chores in the early days at Conservative Digest were a collaborative New Right exercise...
...When the Justice Department brought suit against the American-Chilean Council in 1978, it was revealed that the organization had planted material favorable to the Pinochet regime with Edwards...
...The article had, in fact, been written by Morton Blackwell, then a Viguerie company vice president and editor of The New Right Report, who is now the White House's liaison with the New Right...
...For the fourth time in five years, Viguerie has hired a new editor for Conservative Digest, the shoddy monthly he publishes "for the New Majority...
...The Committee, headed by National Review's, William Rusher, Phillips, and Viguerie, was formed to publicize their claim that the Republicans were ideologically bankrupt and should be replaced by a new conservative party...
...Tapscott shares Edwards's conviction that the Digest should appeal to right-of-center audiences on a wide range of concerns, only some of them political...
...In July 1980, John D. Lofton Jr...
...The first editor was Lee Edwards, a Washington publicist and former activist in Young Americans for Freedom, for whom journalism has always been something of a sideline...
...He would much prefer to be known as the publisher of an influential political journal than as the New Right's junk-mail king...
...in apparent retaliation for a decision by the owners of the hard-hitting conservative weekly Human Events to reject Viguene's repeated offers to buy them out...
...He says he intends to fit the magazine "somewhere between Time and Newsweek and the pictorial People magazine, with feature material like Harper's.'" That's a tall order...
...basing his estimates on surveys he has commissioned, says there is "no limit" to the magazine *s potential and believes he can boost the number of subscriptions to 200,000 or 230,000 "within a couple of years...
...In hard-hitting but easy-to-read reporting, it would cover local textbook protests and tax revolts, while promoting the rising movement of right-wing television evangelists...
...Unlike other right-wing journals...
...He has also worked closely with the Taiwanese government...
...As a University of Oklahoma undergraduate, he published his own "off-the-wall" conservative weekly, and as a University of Dallas graduate student, he founded the Texas Guardian, funded by disaffected alumni and conservative Dallas businessmen...
...One of Edwards's articles had to be dispatched to Alaska for approval by Howard Phillips, the deposed Office of Economic Opportunity director then serving with Conservative Caucus, and returned to the Washington area to be okayed by Viguerie himself...
...Between such stories as "America at the Mercy of Terrorist Thugs" (by Representative Larry MacDonald of Georgia, a John Birch Society national council member) and "Soviet People Awash in a Tidal Wave of Booze," the Digest has, in recent years, shown a strong preference for self-congratulatory in-group journalism...
...A recent issue even covered a "Morton Blackwell roast...
...and all the rest...
...he also had a notion, consistent with his disdain for the conservative leadership in America, that such magazines as Human Events and William F. Buckley's National Review were not reaching the vast numbers of Americans sympathetic to their point of view—disaffected Southern Democrats, blue-collar workers in the industrial North, foes of forced busing and gun control, right-to-lifers, fundamentalist ChrisAlan Crawford is the author of "Thunder on the Right: The 'New Right' and the Politics of Resentment," tians...
...We want to provide a magazine that anyone could find interesting, provocative, and controversial, whether they are conservative or liberal...
...The Reader's Digest already fills the bill about as well as anyone could wish...
...Two entire issues—those of February 1981 and February 1982—were dedicated to this presumed injustice, complete with lists of those who didn't get deserved political plums...
...A review of George H. Nash's The Conservative intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 cautioned potential readers not to be "put off by the word 'intellectual' in the title...
...a magazine they will want to read, even if they don't agree with us," he says...
...Black-well feared that if the article appeared under his own name, it might upset his chance to be a delegate to the 1976 Republican National Convention...
...The Texas Guardian was distributed free on several campuses, reaching, by Tapscott's estimate, more than 30,000 students...
...An assistant editor of the Digest was directed to affix his own byline to an article promoting something called the Ad Hoc Committee for a New Majority...
...The magazine complained there were too few "real Reaganites" in White House jobs...
...Through relentless self-promotion in the magazine, these and other New Right figures have advanced from the status of "rising stars" in the conservative movement to "most admired...
...A "Christian Burkean traditionalist with strong libertarian tendencies," Tapscott became an assistant editor at Conservative Digest in 1976...
...Though it claims to be the largest-circulation political journal in America, it reaches only some 70,000...
...Conservative Digest first rolled off the presses in 197S...
...and coverage of "all the major Washington news outlets," popular culture, and the arts...
...This, presumably, will mean the end of coverage of "Morton Blackwell roasts...
...One of Tapscott's primary responsibilities, he acknowledges, will be to make the Digest "financially viable...
...Viguerie, Edwards, Phillips, and other brash young rightists were eager to wrest control of Washington's growing conservative movement from the old fogeys at the American Conservative Union and Human Events...
...Their plan was to use the Digest to build the movement in the hinterlands, and this could best be accomplished, Edwards believed, by providing a general-interest, family-oriented magazine that would soft-pedal its right-wing politics...
...That goal may prove elusive despite Tapscotl's best efforts The New Right, contemptuous of subversives who read books and watch such treasonous television shows as "Sixty Minutes," has little room in its world for deft journalism...
...That's how Edwards ran the Digest and so did Brien Benson, who replaced Edwards in 1977...
...Vigueric not only wanted a publication of his own...
...took over, and brought to Conservative Digest the pugnacious polemical style he had displayed at the Republican National Committee's First Monday, at the American Conservative Union's Battleline, and in his own syndicated column...
...He first became active in politics when he was stirred by Ronald Reagan's 1964 endorsement speech for Barry Goldwater...
...features on Conservative Digest's own subscribers...
...Conservative Digest appealed, as one reader observed, "not only to the elitist conservatives but to the lower-income . .. who make up the bulk of America...
...Tapscott...
...For the last year, he has been the Republican National Committee's director of communications...
...To reach these supposed masses of conservatives, the Digest would feature cover stories about George Wallace as well as Bill Buckley...
...This can cramp the style of any editor—a weakness that has been apparent through the magazine's brief history...
...Alternately defending Reagan from his critics on the Left and attacking him for being insufficiently true to the Right, Conservative Digest threatened to withhold reelection support from the President in 1984...
...Tapscott has big plans for Conservative Digest...
...It was Lofton, a self-styled "right-wing yippie" who now writes for the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times newspaper, who headlined his interview with Jerry Rubin at the 1972 Democratic National Convention: McGovern Backer No Longer Thinks Sons, Daughters Should Kill Parents The new editor wants to run cover stories on racecar drivers and football heroes—his preferred role models for Middle America Under Lofton's editorship, the attempt to fashion a general-interest, Family Wee/c/y-style publication was ditched, and internecine squabbles between the New Right and the Reagan White House got big play...
...stories about people who have solved problems "without the help of government...
...Only in the Digest could you find picture stories on the fortieth birthday parties of both Phillips and Morton Blackwell...
...from all evidence, an able administrator with a firm grasp on managerial skills...
...features on ordinary folks who have lived through "great crises...
...Tapscott is sure he has a formula that will make his Digest a winner: cover stories on racecar driver Richard Petty and football hero Roger Staubach, whom he sees as role models for Middle America...
...He is smart, young (thirty-two), as experienced in right-wing journalism as a Capitol Hill operative can hope to be...
...a workmanlike writer—his doctoral dissertation was on "John Brown and Apocalyptic Millcnnialism"—and...
...Tapscott, like Viguerie, is a Texan...
Vol. 46 • October 1982 • No. 10
