A conservative magazine publisher has created a stir during recent weeks by his non-partisan attack on shoddy and otherwise incomplete reporting by the mainstream media on vital national issues.

American Conservative Publisher Ron Unz, below left, published on April 29 Our American Pravda: The major media overlooked Communist spies and Madoff’s fraud. What are they missing today? The long article described missed or misplayed national stories over the past three decades. Among them, he wrote, was coverage of the run-up to the Iraq War, which he described as one of the nation's greatest disasters.

Unz is a former Republican gubernatorial candidate in California's 1994 elections, a theoretical physicist by original training, and a software developer by profession. A 1999 magazine cover at right described his career.

More currently, he argues that conventional wisdom and other complacency has been leading major news organizations into missing stories repeatedly in a manner so bad that it approaches the Soviet Union's press performance during at least part of the Stalin era.

The Atlantic Magazine addressed his thesis in a column this week, part of what he describes as a gratifying reaction.

Unz amplified his views as guest on the June 7 edition of MTL Washington Update, which I co-host live at noon (EDT) with co-host Scott Draughon, founder of the My Technology Lawyer radio network. Click here to listen to listen to the insightful Unz 30-minute live segment, now on archive. For questions or comments on any of our shows, call in toll free (866-685-7469 ) or send an email to [email protected]. Author and former wrestler and Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura is scheduled as our guest next week at the same time.

Unz received our invitation because of his hard-hitting, non-partisan approach, as well as by his obvious civic passion focused on several topics I have also researched for the Justice Integrity Project, the radio show, and my forthcoming book, Presidential Puppetry.

Among these topics are the anthrax attacks on Washington in 2001 that, along with 9/11, helped generate Senate support for the Patriot Act and the Iraq War. He cannot understand why the FBI investigation was so haphazardly covered by the national media. He asserts also that New York columnist Sydney Schanberg and many veterans groups were correct in the 1970s to assert that many Vietnam-era POWs were alive and in captivity. Unz quoted as mostly accurate and fair a summary of his column by Metafilter, which he described as “a small leftist website.”

A provocative essay on the flaws of the American media by the editor and publisher of the American Conservative, Ron Unz, containing: allusions to conspiracy theories, condemnation of Soviet spies (and a kind word for Joe McCarthy), criticism of the FBI, approving quotations of Paul Krugman, fresh questions about the moral character of John McCain and his fitness for office, disapproving descriptions of the Obama administration as “Bush’s third term,” and a broadside against the selling of the Iraq war calling it the “greatest strategic disaster in United States history.”