The American Spectator is a conservative American magazine covering news and politics, edited by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. and published by the non-profit American Spectator Foundation. It was founded in 1967 by Tyrrell, who remains its editor-in-chief, with Wladyslaw Pleszczynski its editorial director since 1980.
From 1967 until the late 1980s, the magazine featured the writings of authors such as Thomas Sowell, Tom Wolfe, P. J. O'Rourke, George F. Will, Malcolm Gladwell, Patrick J. Buchanan, Tom Bethell, Terry Eastland, Andrew Ferguson, Christopher Caldwell, Fred Barnes, Roger Scruton, Walter Williams, Raymond Aron, Luigi Barzini, Paul Johnson, Irving Kristol, Jean-Francois Revel, and Malcolm Muggeridge. Major conservative writers and editors, such as Bill Kristol and Bill McGurn, began their careers at The American Spectator, as did Greg Gutfeld and John Podhoretz, who started at the magazine as interns. Some of the earliest published articles by prominent conservatives such as Dinesh D'Souza, Laura Ingraham, and David Frum appeared at The American Spectator. Among the magazine's longest-serving columnists are Sowell, economist and celebrity Ben Stein, Roger Kaplan, and John Coyne. Current frequently contributing writers include conservative health care consultant David Catron, Dov Fischer, Daniel Flynn, Ross Kaminsky, Paul Kengor, Robert Stacy McCain, Scott McKay, George Neumayr, and George Parry. Ali Alexander has also contributed.
During the 1990s, the magazine experienced explosive growth, primarily for its widely read and provocative reports on Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and its "Arkansas Project", funded by businessman Richard Mellon Scaife and the Bradley Foundation. Others to have written for the magazine include Jeffrey Lord, a one-time aide to President Ronald Reagan.
Founding and history
The name The American Spectator derives from a short-lived magazine by that name founded in 1924 by George Jean Nathan and Truman Newberry. The origins of the current magazine date to its founding by Tyrrell in 1967 in Bloomington, Indiana. That year, Tyrrell and his "Saturday Evening Club" took up the name, calling the magazine The Alternative: An American Spectator.
After operating under the name The Alternative: An American Spectator for several years, in 1977 the magazine changed its name to The American Spectator because, in editor Tyrrell's words, "the word 'alternative' had come to be associated almost exclusively with radicals and with their way of life." In fact, Tyrrell had started the magazine on the campus of Indiana University Bloomington as a conservative alternative to the student radicalism at the nation's universities in the 1960s. The American Spectator is not affiliated with The Spectator, a British magazine of somewhat similar format and conservatism founded in 1828.
During the Reagan Administration, the magazine moved from Bloomington to suburban Washington, D.C.
1990s
The publication gained prominence in the 1990s by reporting on political scandals. The March 1992 issue contained David Brock's criticisms of Clarence Thomas accuser Anita Hill. Brock and his colleague Daniel Wattenberg soon aimed at a bigger target: Hillary and Bill Clinton. A January 1994 article about then-President Bill Clinton's sex life contained the first reference in print to Clinton accuser Paula Jones, although the article focused on allegations that Clinton used Arkansas state troopers to facilitate his extramarital sexual activities (see Troopergate). It only referred to Jones by her first name, and corroborated few if any elements of her story. This article was the basis for the claim of damages in a sexual harassment lawsuit, which started the chain of events resulting in President Clinton's impeachment.
David Brock recanted his accusations upon his departure from the conservative movement. He also denounced his Anita Hill article in his 2003 book Blinded by the Right: the Conscience of an Ex-Conservative. He implies that Rush Limbaugh's coverage of his Anita Hill article instigated advertising on Limbaugh's network, which resulted in a large increase in the magazine's circulation. He also implies that this caused the magazine's content to move "away from thoughtful essays and scholarly reviews and humor pieces" to "hit jobs".