The American Spectator is a conservative-leaning American monthly magazine covering news and politics, edited by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. and published by the non-profit American Alternative Foundation . From its founding in the late 1960s until the late 1980s, the small-circulation magazine featured the writings of authors such as Thomas Sowell, Tom Wolfe, P.J. O'Rourke, George F. Will, Patrick J. Buchanan, and Malcolm Muggeridge, although today the magazine is best known for its attacks in the 1990s on Bill Clinton and its "Arkansas Project" to discredit the president, funded by billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife and the Bradley Foundation.

Founding & History

Founded as The Alternative in 1967 by Tyrrell and other students at Indiana University, the magazine is frequently referred to as a conservative tabloid (and was originally published in a tabloid format, although now is published in a traditional magazine format) because its stories tend to be more sensational than those of other conservative magazines such as National Review.

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 as a conservative alternative to the student radicalism at the nation's universities in the 1960s.

During the Reagan Administration, the magazine moved from Bloomington, Indiana to suburban Washington, D.C.

The publication gained prominence in the 1990s by reporting on political scandals. The March 1992 issue contained an expose on Clarence Thomas accuser Anita Hill which stated she might be "a bit nutty, and a bit slutty". A January 1994 article about Bill Clinton contained the first reference in print to Clinton accuser Paula Jones, although the main topic of the article was Clinton's use of Arkansas state troopers to facilitate his extramarital sexual activities and it only referred to Jones by her first name. Both articles were later recanted by author David Brock. The second story caused the magazine's circulation to reach 300,000.

Internal strife followed on the heels of this success, leading to the departure of long-time publisher Ronald Burr after a disagreement with Tyrrell led Burr to call for an independent audit of the magazine's finances. The departure of Burr and several prominent conservative figures from the magazine's board of directors resulted in conservative foundations pulling much of the funding the nonprofit had relied on to pay high salaries to Brock and Tyrrell, as well as to fund direct-mail campaigns needed to keep up the monthly's circulation. Faced with a budget crisis, the magazine, now led by publisher Terry Eastland, laid off staffers and cut spending significantly. The magazine also struggled to pay legal bills incurred from an investigation launched against it by President Clinton's Justice Department for alleged witness tampering in the Whitewater investigation.

As shortfalls continued, conservative gadfly George Gilder, a long time supporter of the magazine who was newly wealthy from an Internet business , purchased the magazine with the goal of turning it into a profit-making glossy with significant media buzz. Numerous staff members, demoralized by the ever-looming budget crises, were laid off or departed after Gilder's hand-picked but inexperienced editors, Joshua Gilder and Richard Vigilante , took the reins and vowed to reach a new technology- and business-savvy audience. Circulation and budget losses continued and even increased in the Gilder era, and at one point the entire Washington-based staff other than Tyrrell and executive editor and web site editor Wladyslaw Pleszczynski were laid off as operations were moved to rural Massachusetts, where the rest of George Gilder's businesses were based. Not long thereafter George Gilder, who had lost most of his fortune with the bursting of the Internet stock bubble, sold the magazine back to Tyrrell and the American Alternative Foundation for $1 in 2003, and it moved operations once-again to the Washington-D.C. area. By the year 2004, circulation had dropped to 50,000.

References & External Links

• The American Spectator official site
• Byron York, "The Life and Death of The American Spectator," Atlantic Monthly (November 2001)
• David Brock, "The Real Anita Hill," The American Spectator [1] (March 1992) (unofficial site)
• David Brock, "His Cheatin’ Heart," The American Spectator [2] (January 1994)
• David Brock, Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative (Crown, 2002) ISBN 0-81-293099-1
• R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. (ed.), Orthodoxy: The American Spectator's 20th Anniversary Anthology (Harper & Row, 1987) ISBN 0-06-015818-2