Member-only story
3 Important Figures in U.S. Conservative Media History
Nackey Scripps Loeb, Roger Ailes, and Newt Gingrich
Do you recognize the names of Nackey Scripps Loeb, Roger Ailes, and Newt Gingrich? Their stories expose different elements of the question of objectivity in media.
Nackey Scripps Loeb
Meg Heckman’s 2020 book Political Godmother: Nackey Scripps Loeb and the Newspaper That Shook the Republican Party tells the story of an important 20th-century figure in politically conservative media. Here’s a brief summary of her life based on that book.
Nackey Scripps Loeb was born in 1924 to a publishing family. Her grandfather, E. W. Scripps, had owned an American newspaper chain. (Part of it split off and became Scripps League Newspapers, and her aunt Josephine gained majority ownership of that.) Nackey’s father died young, leaving his children as wealthy trust fund recipients. She originally wanted nothing to do with the family business until her second marriage to William Loeb, who was, as it happened, a newspaperman. Around the 1950s, when “mainstream journalism was becoming more professionalized, more corporate, and more focused on achieving objectivity, a parallel network of conservative outlets was gaining popularity…” These right-wing institutions tended to be more opinion-oriented, and they began portraying the media to their left as biased. (The claim that the “mainstream media” has left-wing bias may therefore be, when it is made from a right-wing perspective, a tautology.)
In 1957, when federal troops arrived to escort Black students to facilitate the racial integration of an Arkansas school, Nackey Scripps Loeb drew a critical cartoon that was admired by segregationists. Her work boosted “many right-wing candidates, including Pat Buchanan,” who got milk and cookies in bed when he stayed at their house. Her husband William was involved with the White Citizens’ Council, and, in a personal letter, he said he thought that the Republican Party should “become the white man’s party.” He published many influential opinions: anti-tax, pro-power plants, anti-gay. At New Hampshire’s Union Leader newspaper, he was famous for “hyperbolic, hyper-conservative front-page editorials” around every presidential election from “the mid-1940s until his…
