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The Spotlight

The Spotlight was a weekly newspaper in the United States, published in Washington, D.C. from September 1975 to July 2001 by the now-defunct antisemitic Liberty Lobby. The Spotlight ran articles and editorials professing a "populist and nationalist" political orientation. Some observers have described the publication as promoting a right-wing, or conservative, politics.

After a lawsuit against Liberty Lobby brought by the Holocaust denial organization the Institute for Historical Review, the newspaper was shuttered in 2001. Some of those involved in the paper went on to found the American Free Press, a similar publication.

The Spotlight has been described in media reports as promoting an America First position and giving positive coverage to the political campaigns of Pat Buchanan and David Duke. The Spotlight gave frequent coverage to complementary and alternative medicine, including advertisements for the purported anti-cancer supplement Laetrile. Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, in their book The Silent Brotherhood, described The Spotlight as regularly featuring "articles on such topics as Bible analysis, taxes and fighting the IRS, bankers and how they bleed the middle class, and how the nation is manipulated by the dreaded Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations", adding "the paper attracted a huge diversity of readers". NameBase described the newspaper as "anti-elitist, opposed the Gulf War, wanted the JFK assassination reinvestigated, and felt that corruption and conspiracies can be found in high places".

Circulation of The Spotlight peaked in 1981 at 315,000 but fell to about 90,000 by 1992.

The Spotlight ran articles and editorials professing a "populist and nationalist" political orientation. Some observers have described the publication as promoting a right-wing, or conservative, politics. The Spotlight was called "the most widely read publication on the fringe right" by the Anti-Defamation League, who also stated the newspaper "reflected Carto's conspiracy theory of history" and called the paper antisemitic.

Howard J. Ruff in his 1979 book How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years praised The Spotlight for its investigative reporting, while criticizing it for a "blatantly biased" right-wing point of view and concluded "there are many things I detest about it, but I wouldn't be without it."

U.S. Congressman and John Birch Society leader Larry McDonald criticized The Spotlight in the Congressional Record in 1981 for purported use of the Lyndon LaRouche movement as a source of news items.

On August 14, 1978, The Spotlight published an article by Victor Marchetti linking former CIA agent and Watergate figure E. Howard Hunt to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Headlined "CIA to Nail Hunt for Kennedy Killing", the article said: "In the public hearings [of a pending Congressional hearing], the CIA will 'admit' that Hunt was involved in the conspiracy to kill Kennedy." It also claimed that the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations had received an internal CIA memo from 1966 that stated the agency "will have to explain Hunt's presence in Dallas on November 22, 1963".

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