More On Christopher Ruddy And The Fake News (Part II)

Christopher Ruddy, CEO of Newsmax, will be speaking tonight as part of Point Park College's "Talk Back" series.

In case you weren't there back then. Ruddy was the guy at Richard Mellon Scaife's Tribune-Review who at the center of all the "Vince Foster was murrrdered!" fake news.

Yep, that was him. And that's who Point Park has invited to talk tonight.  As I pointed out here, Point Park's Center for Media Innovation was made possible, in part, by a very serious donation from Richard Mellon Scaife - enough that they had a celebration dedication of a plaque honoring Scaife.

In looking around in Ruddy's history, I found this very interesting set of words published by CNN in 1998:

At Scaife's newspaper his reporter Christopher Ruddy doggedly pursues the Foster case. And when Ruddy's book, "The Strange Death of Vincent Foster," got a bad write-up in the American Spectator, saying Ruddy sounded like a "right-wing nut," Scaife cut off the magazine's money.

American Spectator Editor-In-Chief R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. said, "Dick was angered by the review. And called me and said he didn't care to support the American Spectator any further."

The story shows up at The Atlantic, as well:

Richard Mellon Scaife was widely known to entertain conspiracy theories about the 1993 death of Vincent Foster. A Scaife-owned newspaper hired Christopher Ruddy, a reporter who questioned the authorities' conclusion that Foster had killed himself in a park just outside Washington. In 1997 Ruddy published a book, The Strange Death of Vincent Foster, which suggested that Foster had been murdered. The book appeared almost simultaneously with the final report of the independent counsel Kenneth Starr, who concluded after an exhaustive investigation that Foster had killed himself. Most conservative publications took Starr's report as an opportunity to knock down Ruddy's work once and for all, but since Ruddy was a favorite of Scaife's, the Spectator faced a dilemma over whether to review the book. Had it been Pleszczynski's decision, the book would most likely not have been reviewed, but Tyrrell intervened, knowing the issue was a sensitive one for his biggest donor. Tyrrell gave the book to John Corry, who had rewritten the Mena Airport story.

Corry hated the book. Calling Ruddy a "very heavy breather," he compared Foster conspiracy speculation to way-out theories such as that the CIA had introduced crack cocaine into the ghetto, that a Navy missile had brought down TWA Flight 800, and that British Intelligence had assassinated Princess Diana. "Beware when an investigative reporter begins sentences with words like 'oddly,' 'strangely' or 'interestingly,'" Corry wrote. "There may be nothing odd, strange or interesting at all, but the game is to make you think there is." When the review appeared, in the December, 1997, issue, Scaife was livid. He called Tyrrell and told him that the foundation would no longer contribute to the Spectator, ending another relationship of some three decades.

And remember that this take down was at a conservative magazine.

And Ruddy will be talking tonight at Point Park. I wonder if anyone will be asking him about his place in the history of American Fake News.