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…
