The linked blog's ideas are a bit difficult to verify or disprove in part because there is no real "media/govt/etc. institutional class" in a monolithic sense. The American media incorporated a large number of political views and it is very easy to cherry-pick negative campaign coverage and present that as a universal response to Reagan. The National Organization for Women called Reagan sent out a statement in October 1980 that Reagan had a "medieval stance on women's issues,'' but also castigated Carter for lukewarm support for the ERA and explicitly refused to endorse Reagan's Democratic opponent. NOW's position demonstrates that politics in the 19980 election were far from a Manichean division of pro- and anti-Reaganites and there was a pretty diverse reaction to Reagan. For example, the political science professor Bertram Gross published a book Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America in 1980 that argued that American capitalism was pushing America into a fascist direction, but the book received generally lukewarm or negative reviews in the American press. The Christian Science Monitor's review states Gross was a "shrill old-Left assault on the rising new Right," while the Journal of Business Ethics praised Gross's clarity of argument, while noting his argument "was not entirely convincing," and the NYT's brief snippet review contended these such a blanket statement that America is evolving to fascism "requires better reporting and a clearer eye than this author demonstrates." It is very easy to look at the publication of Gross's book as a sign that "the media establishment" blithely accepted the charge that Reagan was a protofascist, but looking at the actual response of that self-same establishment shows the response to these charges was much more nuanced. Reports on Reagan's primary campaign would note that there were occasional anti-Reagan signs invoking the spectre of fascism (the sign "fascist gun of the West" seemed to be quite popular), but also that such stops also had significant pro-Reagan campaign signs. So while the "fascist" label was out there in Reagan's campaign, it was not universally accepted by the media or a large segment of the public.

At the risk of painting with a very broad brush, the major concerns of the mainstream media about a Reagan presidency in evidence during the primaries and general election was twofold. Firstly, his advanced age was an issue. This was one concern that did show up in a number of political polls at the time. A Spring 1979 Harris survey of Republicans and independents showed that there was a sizable percentage of voters who feared Reagan would be too old to stand the rigors of office. This concern filtered out into the some of the negative coverage of Reagan which noted that the Reagan that first ran against Ford was now four years older. Written after Regan's electoral victory in 1980, James Reston's NYT op-ed "Reagan's Startling Victory," contended that "we will have a one term president, without fear that Reagan, at his age, will not run for a second term." Both Carter and Connally had also made much of Reagan's age on the campaign trail, which also clouds analysis of the issue- were reporters creating the age issue to defeat Reagan or just reporting and commentating on it? Again, the relationship between reporters and the news is seldom as clear-cut as the linked blog-post indicates.

The other big issue of the Reagan campaign reporters tended to be critical of is the candidate's often folsky oversimplifications of complex problems. In his in-depth July 1979 analysis of Reagan, "Reagan: The 1980 Model," NYT political correspondent Adam Clymer concluded that:

What Ronald Reagan's campaign team has to sell if a politician who believes there are simpler answers to most problems than the country has been given to assume, and that most problems require less, not more, from a government that, in Mr. Reagan's words, "invents miracle cures for which there are no known diseases."

Clymer's piece noted that one interpretation of the Reagan phenomena was that such sentiments were "simplistic solutions with little depth," but they also could help catapult Reagan to victory. But even here, discussion of Reagan's tendency to simplify complex problems could be quite nuanced. In a guardedly favorable November 1979 assessment of Reagan in the Wall Street Journal, "Ritual Reagan," the author noted that Reagan's simplifications were an issue of "packaging" for mass political consumption, but they could fatally compromise his presidency should Reagan triumph. In a September 1980 Boston Globe defense of Reagan, the conservative columnist noted that reagan's approach to government is

simplistic, all right. But it is also simple and consistent and coherent. People can understand it. People are, if you will, mostly simple if not simplistic.

The spectre lurking behind the linked blog post is of course drawing a historical parallel between Trump and Reagan. However, such a historical comparison is pretty facile. Reagan, unlike Trump, had broad governmental experience as Governor of California and his 1976 presidential primary run against Gerald Ford which very nearly ended in a Reagan victory, which is something not present in Trump's CV. There certainly were elements of political theater that surrounded both candidates; television stations in the US and abroad sent in massive requests for Reagan films to air and the most popular was Reagan's Bedtime for Bonzo in which he partnered with a chimp. Yet while the namesake chimp featured prominently in early coverage of Reagan's campaign and would remain a staple of anti-Reagan discourse (perhaps most famously in Genesis's "Land of Confusion" music video ), a lot of mainstream political commentators took Reagan seriously as a candidate and measured his policies accordingly. Some of this commentary was negative, others positive, and others staking out positions in between.