Christopher Ruddy

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Christopher Ruddy is a conservative American journalist. He is known for his controversial writings about the death of deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster. Ruddy is currently the CEO of NewsMax Media, an Internet media company he founded.

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[edit] Background

Ruddy grew up on Long Island, New York, where his father was a police officer in Nassau County.[1] After graduating from Chaminade High School in Mineola, he earned his undergraduate degree in history from St. John's University in New York City and a master’s degree from the London School of Economics, and also studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He worked briefly as a high school teacher.

Early in his career, Ruddy was editor of an alternative media publication known as the New York Guardian.[2] While with the Guardian, Ruddy gained notice for debunking a story in the PBS documentary Liberators that an all-black army unit had liberated the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps.[3] He called the documentary an example of "how the media can manipulate facts and narratives to create a revised history both believable and untrue."[4] Ruddy then moved into more mainstream journalism with the New York Post, which he joined as an investigative reporter late in the summer of 1993. After initially writing about abuse of Social Security disability benefits, he focused on the Vincent Foster case, the subject of an ongoing investigation after Foster had died earlier that year.[5]

[edit] Vincent Foster case

There have been three official investigations of the death of deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster, all of which concluded that he committed suicide.[6] The first was by the United States Park Police in whose jurisdiction the original investigation fell. Due to Foster's position in the White House, the FBI assisted in the investigation. In January 1994, Ruddy began writing stories questioning the official conclusion that Foster had committed suicide and pointing to weaknesses in the Park Police investigation.

About six months after Foster's death, Ruddy interviewed some of the emergency personnel who had attended to the body. The paramedics talked about the relative lack of blood at the scene, and it was suggested, according to homicide experts Ruddy consulted, "that Foster may have been killed elsewhere and that his body was dumped in the park." Ruddy also pointed to tests that had not been conducted and other issues not accounted for by the investigation.[7]

Ruddy’s articles began after Janet Reno, due to Foster’s connections to the Clintons' business dealings and a White House travel office controversy, had been pressured into appointing an independent counsel to investigate what came to be known as Whitewater. The first independent counsel, Robert Fiske, and the FBI also investigated the circumstances of Foster's death and the White House response. In a report released June 30, 1994, Fiske concluded that Foster had committed suicide. The Post had already stopped publishing articles by Ruddy about the case in March 1994. Accuracy in Media, another organization that had been pursuing the story, criticized the Post for accepting Fiske’s conclusion, reportedly leaked to the media around this time, and pulling Ruddy off the story.[8]

According to James B. Stewart, Ruddy refused to work on other stories and ultimately resigned. Post editor Eric Breindel recommended him for a job at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review owned by Richard Mellon Scaife.[9] In November 1994, Ruddy was hired to investigate the story full-time by the Tribune-Review.[10] In between Ruddy’s departure from the Post and joining the Tribune-Review, he put out a report through the Western Journalism Center criticizing the Fiske investigation as inadequate. With the help of Scaife, the Center took out full-page ads in major newspapers to promote the report (Scaife gave $330,000 to the Center in 1994-95 before ending his support).[11][12]

Ruddy’s report now claimed that Park Police had staged the scene of Foster’s death as described in their reports.[13] One of the officers named by Ruddy sued him along with the Western Journalism Center, seeking $2 million in damages for libel.[14] The suit was dismissed because Ruddy had not specifically charged the officer with wrongdoing, only the Park Police in general.[15]

Ruddy later built on his work on the Foster case for his book The Strange Death of Vincent Foster. In reviewing the book, Richard Brookhiser of the National Review called it "the St. Mark version of the gospel of the Foster cover-up: a plain narrative of the perceived failings of the official investigation, with minimal speculation."[16] Shortly after the book came out, Fiske’s successor as independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, released his report from the third investigation into Foster’s death. Starr also concluded that Foster had committed suicide.

Once Starr's report was out, many conservatives distanced themselves from the conspiracy theories that had arisen about Foster’s death. They often singled out Ruddy for criticism as a symbol of this phenomenon. One critic wrote a particularly harsh review of Ruddy's book in The American Spectator, a magazine to which Scaife was giving sizable annual grants. In response, Scaife informed its editor that he would not continue his financial support of the magazine. The Wall Street Journal commented about Ruddy, "He and a few allies are obsessive in refusing to accept the answers Mr. Starr now provides. But that does not mean his questions never should have been asked."[17]

[edit] Ron Brown investigation

Ruddy followed up his book with an investigation of the circumstances surrounding Commerce Secretary Ron Brown’s death. Brown had been killed in a plane crash in Croatia in 1996. Citing the opinion of a medical examiner who was involved in the investigation, but did not actually examine Brown's body, Ruddy raised the possibility that Brown had received a head wound from a gunshot.[18] This notion was rejected by the medical examiner who did examine the corpse, who concluded that Brown died of blunt force injuries from the crash. An Air Force statement said there was no exit wound and explained that apparent "bullet fragments" were caused by defective x-ray film.[19]

In defense of his reporting, Ruddy said, "I never offer any conspiracy theories. If I think there's something that doesn't add up or smells fishy and there's evidence to support it, I report it."[18] The coverage prompted White House press secretary Mike McCurry to name Ruddy when asked who in the press was a "hate merchant". Ruddy responded that the White House was "panicking" over the attention the story had gotten.[20]

[edit] NewsMax

In 1998, impressed with the way news of the Lewinsky scandal circulated on the Internet, Ruddy decided to start an Internet news company. With financial support from Scaife and other investors, Ruddy founded NewsMax Media.[21] The NewsMax.com website launched on September 16, 1998, with Ruddy serving as columnist and editor-in-chief. In addition to the website, the company publishes a monthly NewsMax Magazine. After starting NewsMax, Ruddy was mentioned in a January 1999 Newsweek article as one of twenty "Stars of the New News."[22]

Compared with his reporting during Bill Clinton's presidency, Ruddy eventually took a more subdued view to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. He said she had moderated and no longer generated the same animosity among conservatives. Ruddy told The New York Times he and Scaife had changed their views: "Both of us have had a rethinking. Clinton wasn’t such a bad president. In fact, he was a pretty good president in a lot of ways, and Dick feels that way today."[23] This got some attention in conservative circles, with John Podhoretz questioning the rationale for their change of heart and complaining that Ruddy's earlier allegations had undermined "principled critiques" of the Clintons.[24] David Horowitz defended Ruddy in response, suggesting the comment referred to Clinton's domestic policies and arguing that Ruddy had not considered those objectionable even during the Clinton administration itself.[25]

[edit] Publications

[edit] References

  • Moldea, Dan E. A Washington Tragedy: How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited a Political Firestorm. Washington: Regnery Publishing, 1998. ISBN 0-89526-382-3.
  • Poe, Richard. Hillary's Secret War: The Clinton Conspiracy to Muzzle Internet Journalists. Nashville, TN: WND Books, 2004. ISBN 0-7852-6013-7.
  • Stewart, James B. Blood Sport: The President and His Adversaries. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. ISBN 0-684-80230-9.

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Moldea, p. 410.
  2. ^ Navrozov, Lev. "Are U.S. Economic Statistics Accurate?" NewsMax.com, July 8, 2005.
  3. ^ Stewart, p. 391.
  4. ^ Moldea, pp.144-145.
  5. ^ Poe, p. 96.
  6. ^ Office of the Independent Counsel. "Report on the Death of Vincent W. Foster, Jr." October 10, 1997
  7. ^ Moldea, pp. 157-158.
  8. ^ Moldea, p. 267.
  9. ^ Stewart, p. 429.
  10. ^ Evans-Pritchard, Ambrose. "Suicide is hard to sell". The Daily Telegraph, February 2, 1995.
  11. ^ Moldea, pp. 267, 275.
  12. ^ Chinoy, Ira and Robert G. Kaiser. Decades of Contributions to Conservatism. Washington Post, May 2, 1999, p. A25.
  13. ^ Moldea, p. 268.
  14. ^ Moldea, p. 276.
  15. ^ Moldea, p. 350-351.
  16. ^ Brookhiser, Richard. "Body Politics". New York Times Book Review, September 28, 1997, pp. 13-14.
  17. ^ Moldea, pp. 378-379.
  18. ^ a b Kurtz, Howard. "Demise of a buddy system". Washington Post, December 8, 1997, p. B1.
  19. ^ Plante, Chris. "Air Force doctors 'rule out the possibility of a gunshot wound' to Brown's head". CNN, December 5, 1997.
  20. ^ Kurtz, Howard. "CBS producer's hidden agenda". Washington Post, January 12, 1998, p. B1.
  21. ^ Poe, p. 171.
  22. ^ Poe, p. 172.
  23. ^ Kirkpatrick, David D. "Anti-Clinton campaign loses some steam". New York Times, February 19, 2007.
  24. ^ Podhoretz, John. "Now They Tell Us: Clinton-Bashers' Weirdest Twist". New York Post, February 20, 2007.
  25. ^ Horowitz, David. "A Misplaced Attack and An Apology to Frontpage Readers". FrontPage Magazine, February 26, 2007.

[edit] External links

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