The Sunday Interview: The Myth of Liberal Media Bias: A History of the Conservative Media Machine
Historian AJ Bauer details how conservatives constructed a media machine starting in the 1930s, evolving from H.L. Hunt's 1951 Facts Forum to William F. Buckley's respectable outlets and the John Birch Society's alternative channels. He traces the strategy through Barry Goldwater's 1964 defeat, Nixon's "silent majority" speech, and Spiro Agnew's attacks, which forced the National News Council's creation. While Accuracy in Media leveraged the Fairness Doctrine to demand balance against feminists, Paul Weyrich envisioned independent conservative television. Ultimately, the lifting of the doctrine in 1987 unleashed Rush Limbaugh's profit-driven model, creating an asymmetrical right-wing apparatus that made conservative ideas unavoidable and forced journalists toward self-reflexivity rather than mere neutrality. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Origins of Liberal Media Bias00:14:48
Axis Mundi.
Springtime for me is the season where I go outside, take a hike, jump in the ocean, plant my garden.
It's also the moment when I look forward to spending time outside around a campfire or with my kids at the park, the people I love the most.
And that reminds me of the responsibility of protecting them and taking care of our financial future.
Policy Genius makes dealing with financial planning simple.
I trust Policy Genius because their team works around the clock to fulfill my needs.
They compare quotes from the top insurance companies around the country.
To make sure I get the right rate, prioritize your peace of mind.
Go to Policy Genius, an online insurance marketplace that allows you to compare quotes from some of America's top insurers.
Their team will help you get what you need fast.
Protect a life you've built.
With Policy Genius, you can see if you can find 20 year life insurance policies starting at just $276 a year for $1 million in coverage.
Head to policygenius.com to compare life insurance quotes from top companies and see how much you could save.
That's policygenius.com.
Welcome to the Straight White American Jesus Sunday interview.
I'm Annika Brockschmidt, author of German language books, Americas Gotteskrieger, America's Godly Warriors, and Die Brandstifter, The Arsonist.
And today I am speaking with my good friend AJ Bauer about his new book, Making the Liberal Media How Conservatives Built a Movement Against the Press, which is out now at Columbia University Press.
AJ is a historian and he researches right wing movements in the United States and internationally.
And with a focus on the role of media activism, press criticism, and journalism, and how that pulls into the formation of political movements.
AJ, thank you so much for coming on the pod.
Of course.
Thanks so much for having me.
So, in your new book, you map out the role that essentially animosity towards established mainstream media outlets, news outlets, has played historically on the right.
And you go deeper in that than.
You go deeper rather than just to show how media usage and media strategy has changed on the right over the last couple of decades.
Because I feel there's been a lot of writing on that already.
But what you're doing is you're digging further into the role that this antagonism and bitterness almost towards mainstream media outlets has played in the ideological consolidation of the American right, which I found it fascinating.
And you've been researching right wing media for a long time now.
And I wanted to start out with an anecdote that you tell towards the end of your book, where you describe how you first got started on this path with an anecdote from the morning after the election of Bill Clinton.
Can you tell our listeners what happened?
Can you take us back in time?
Yeah, sure.
So I was raised in North Texas in the US.
A very conservative county.
My congressman growing up was Dick Army, if anybody remembers back then.
He's the former House Speaker or Majority Leader, rather.
And so I grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh.
My mom and dad both were Reagan Republicans.
I was primarily raised by my mom.
And we would drive around, you know, she would drive us around North Texas listening to Rush Limbaugh.
And I kind of grew up listening to him and was, you know, a very dramatic little Republican.
The drama is still with me.
I've lost the Republicanism.
But I went to bed as a child does, right?
This was 1992, right?
So I was not yet, I think it was eight years old, right?
And so I was really curious as to whether my guy, George H.W. Bush, would win re election.
And I went to bed before the returns came in.
And so that morning I woke up, and as I did many mornings as a child, I ran out and got the newspaper, which we had the Dallas Morning News on our front lawn.
And I got it, and I opened up the plastic wrapping, and it showed that.
That Clinton had won, and I just burst into tears and I ran into the house.
My mom was sleeping, and so I woke her up.
Mom, did you see her?
Whatever, she of course already knew.
I mean, from the night before, but she was prepared, yeah.
She's like, Oh, yeah, yeah.
But you know, this was a really formative memory for me, is like remembering this kind of conservative milieu that I grew up in and a conservative identification, really.
That it took me quite a bit to break from ultimately the Iraq war, the kind of post 911 era is what helped push me leftward.
But for most of the 90s, you know, I was.
Just like a lot of my, not informants, but people that I research, right?
Rooting against Clinton with all of my might.
And what brought you onto the career path that you're on now?
Was there a specific moment that really changed what you wanted to do?
Because if I understand it correctly, you used to work as a journalist as well.
Yeah.
So I was initially going to become a journalist.
Growing up reading the Dallas Morning News and listening to Rush Limbaugh, I was very much interested in politics from a young age, but also interested in participating through media.
I saw media as the kind of primary.
Means of participation in politics.
I wasn't interested in becoming a politician or joining a political party necessarily.
I think I kind of saw the power of, you know, a Limbaugh or, you know, the columnist that I read in the newspaper and wanted to join their ranks.
You know, I graduated college in 2007, and the next year in 2008 was the financial crisis, the Great Recession.
Right.
And so there weren't that many jobs.
There weren't that many journalism jobs, especially as the book documents, there's been a kind of journalism or a newspaper crisis in the United States since the 1940s.
It's ongoing and still ongoing.
And so I found some small, you know, kind of freelance work.
I was an intern for a year, but those weren't landing into longer term jobs.
And so I ended up going back to graduate school in American Studies at New York University.
And as I got there, I started reading kind of theory and, you know, thinking deeply, but I was missing interviewing and talking to real people as a journalist.
That was something I liked to do.
And so my first study was looking at the Tea Party movement, actually, in 2010.
I did a multi sided ethnography of the Tea Party movement in Boston and Dallas, Texas.
And when I was doing that research, I started to hear a lot of my informants say, you know, talk about the media and their media consumption.
That was one of the questions that I asked them.
And one thing that I noticed that was interesting is there was this discourse at the time that, you know, people were brainwashed by Fox News or by talk radio, right?
It was this very passive audience kind of way of thinking about how conservatives consume media and how media influences them.
But when I was talking with my informants, I had one or two that primarily consume Fox News, but many of them consumed kind of widely, you know, consumed multiple different outlets, kind of compared and contrasted them.
I noticed that they were kind of involved in what they experienced as kind of a critical relationship or engagement with the media.
And so, that being said, a lot of my informants wouldn't be interviewed unless they could interview me back.
And so, this would be a one hour semi structured interview that would turn into a four hour debate, right?
As a method, that became really exhausting for me.
And so, I was like, I don't want to interview people anymore.
How can I, though, better understand this kind of critical disposition toward the press that I'm noticing in my informants, right?
And so I was like, archives are dead people primarily, right?
I can go and read what they've written and things.
I don't have to debate them.
It's not going to be quite as intensive.
I'd already had a little bit of historical methodological training for my undergraduate.
And so I shifted gears and started doing kind of this deeper dive history into where that belief in liberal media bias came from.
And the way I was initially thinking of the project was what was the prehistory of Fox News, right?
Fox News, when it comes in 1996, it launches under the slogan Fair and Balanced, right?
Why did it say fair and balanced?
To whom did that appeal?
And when people tuned in, what did that mean to them?
Especially when conservatives tuned in.
And so part of what the book does is it's explaining where this notion of balance, especially on the right, comes from and how that's informed not just conservative media from a top down perspective, the kinds of programming choices, but also how does that shape the way conservative audiences engage with media, not only right wing media, but mainstream as well?
And what I find really interesting reading the book is that you start your analysis further back than I think we're used to in most of the pieces that examine the building of the media landscape of the current right,
because you start your analysis in the 1930s and 1940s with basically the diagnosis that back then, when we look at the newspaper industry specifically, We have, or we can notice if we look at the source material, more of a right leaning bias in newspapers.
Can you explain to us why that was the case and why you think that moment is so important as a starting point from where you take us on this journey to explain how the liberal media, quote unquote, got made?
Yeah.
So there's a couple of reasons for this choice.
The first reason is when I first started out doing this research, I said, well, if I'm going to historicize the idea of liberal media bias, I kind of need to know where it started, right?
And I read a really useful book for this by Victor Picard called America's Battle for Media Democracy, which is about the progressive media reform movement of the 1940s.
And it turns out in the 1940s and 1930s during the New Deal era, there was a widespread perception among the kind of popular front.
So the leftists all the way to the liberals in the United States.
That the media was biased, but it was biased toward the right, right?
Against the New Deal, against equality for Black Americans, right?
Against all of the things that kind of the left liberal popular front stood for, right?
And so once I realized that there was this prehistory, I said, well, this actually makes it quite easier because then the question isn't where does the liberal media start?
It's how do we get from a widespread perception that the media is biased toward the right to the opposite of that, right?
Part of what this intervention is then is often when we narrate the history of the modern conservative movement in the US, we tend to focus on the kind of internal dynamics within that movement that made it successful in a way that kind of retroactively makes it seem more coherent and more strategic than it was at the time, right?
And so, one thing that I've realized going and looking at a lot of archives, so including archives of the American Business Consultants, which was a right-hands communist group during the kind of McCarthy era, as well as accuracy in media and Brigham Young University in Utah, as well as the American Conservative Union papers in Utah, is I noticed that within the internal correspondence, the right is always looking to the left and not just like communism or something, but looking to liberals and saying, well, what are they doing that's successful?
Because for much of the New Deal period in the 1930s and 40s, partly due to the Popular Front, partly due to the popularity of the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt, there was widespread popular appeal for liberal ideas, Keynesian liberalism, socialism.
These were ideas that were popular in the United States.
Conservatism as an ideology.
So, you know, neoliberal capitalism, you know, kind of like traditionalism were increasingly unpopular.
And this was something that conservatives knew and kind of had a kind of sense of humor about in a certain way.
There's a book that I mentioned in it that I found actually in an ad in Reader's Digest in the 1940s called How to Be Popular Though Conservative.
This was a book that was published in, I think, 1946.
They had a bunch of cartoons.
One of the cartoons had a little girl riding in a, like a Cadillac kind of, I was going to say SUV, that's pretty SUVs, a Cadillac kind of limousine with her dad.
And said, Daddy, do all fascists drive Cadillacs?
And so it's like playfully making fun of the fact that conservatives are kind of stereotyped as like evil billionaire fascists or whatever.
But the book was all about rhetorical strategies for how conservatives might make their case in a way that was more salient.
And so recapturing the idea that it wasn't just that conservatives were out of power, but they were concerned that their view of the world was increasingly not salient, right?
Not popular.
And one thing that we often see in kind of critical accounts of the right is what I argue is kind of a paranoid.
Reading strategy, right?
This kind of conspiratorial approach, right?
Oh, well, these billionaires got together and they knew how to change the media, you know, the Powell memo, right?
These kinds of stories that we have about secret machinations and then their implementation.
What I found was actually a lot of, I don't want to say transparency, but a lot of public.
Discussion about the fact that conservative ideas were not popular and what can we do to make them popular, right?
They were publishing these in public facing journals.
This wasn't all conspiratorial behind the scenes stuff.
There was some of that too, obviously, but not all of it.
And so part of what the book is doing is saying the right doesn't just come up with its ideas from whole cloth or because of some, you know, mentality or, you know, conservative mind, right?
They are constantly surveying the terrain around them and they're taking ideas and borrowing.
Tactics and borrowing discourses from their opponents.
And so, thinking kind of dialogically between the left and the right allows us to better understand how the right has come to form.
And it changes our perspective a bit, right?
Rather than thinking that the right is kind of all knowing, super strategic, and that they've got so much money that they're just a juggernaut, right?
When you look back, the reason the right has been successful is that they're very opportunistic, they're iterative, they throw a bunch at the wall and see what sticks.
And they're entrepreneurial, right?
A billionaire will fund multiple different projects that might be competing with one another.
Tactics and Borrowed Discourses00:07:17
Doesn't really matter.
The end result is going to be a rising tide lifts all ships kind of thing, right?
And so these are tactics that liberals and leftists should also learn from, right?
Not to say that they should do the same thing that the right did because we're living in a different moment, all that sort of thing.
But it's worth saying what is the right doing that is successful and palatable?
What are ways that we as liberals or leftists can adopt those ideas or borrow parts of them and then iterate on them in ways that might be useful?
Right.
So, what are some examples that you could give us?
What are some ideas that people on the right, people who had enough money to found these like new entrepreneurial media projects, where they looked at some tactics from liberals or from leftists and said, this is something we should try out?
And I think what's also quite important to keep in mind, as you point out over and over again in the book, is Not all of these efforts were initially successful.
There's a lot of stories of like failed media projects here that then over time maybe morph into something else.
But what are some tactics that people on the right copied?
You just mentioned the progressive media reform movement.
Maybe we can start out there.
Yeah, for sure.
So, part of what the progressive media reform movement did was it engaged in a series of kind of letter writing campaigns to basically convince the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, that right wing commentators, people like Fulton Lewis Jr., who was a famous right wing commentator in the US from the 30s to the 60s, that they were violating something in the 40s, at least, called the Mayflower Doctrine.
So, the Mayflower Doctrine was a ban on broadcast editorials that existed from 1941 to 1949.
It was replaced in 1949 by something called the Fairness Doctrine.
So, The Fairness Doctrine was the kind of dominant broadcast regulation policy in the US from 49 to 1987.
So, the mid 20th century, during exactly the same time period where the modern conservative movement grows to success, right?
We're talking about the period in the decade before the National Review and Goldwater, or before two decades almost before Goldwater, all the way up to Reagan, right?
And the second Reagan term.
And so, the Fairness Doctrine mandated that all broadcasters need to broadcast issues of controversy, public concern, right?
So, cover news and Political issues, and that they needed to do so in a way that was balanced, right?
That gave both sides of whatever the issue would be.
So that happens in 1949.
By 1951, you have H.L. Hunt, who's a rich oil man in Texas.
His family owns the Kansas City Chiefs.
So, like, very deeply plugged into American cultural life.
But H.L. Hunt was kind of disconnected from the modern conservative movement that others like Nikki Hemmer writes about in her great book, Messengers of the Right, right?
So that's Bill Buckley, Henry Regenery, Clarence Mannion, right?
These are kind of Midwestern and Northeastern businessmen and their associates who banded together and had.
A pretty significant responsibility for helping shift the Republican Party to the right, right?
Over the course of the mid 20th century.
Hunt was not a part of that set, right?
And so often gets left out of these kinds of narratives.
He was kind of a loner, kind of idiosyncratic.
He saw his project as constructivism, not conservatism, because he thought constructivism was a better brand.
So he's thinking about branding because, again, conservatism is unpopular.
And he's like, well, if conservatives can call themselves constructive, then more people will be excited to use this brand and they'll talk about it, right?
Now, Constructive ended up not going anywhere, but in 1951, he created something called Facts Forum.
So, Facts Forum starts out as a series of local discussion groups that are kind of loosely coordinated out of his offices in Dallas that were designed to debate the common issues of the day.
And this is during the McCarthy era and in the run up to the McCarthy era and in it.
This is during the Korean War, early to mid 1950s.
And so, they gather people together to talk, to read the news of the day, their local newspapers or whatever sources that they wanted, and then to debate them.
And there wasn't initially any expectation that people be conservative.
It was, you know, anybody can come.
But the milieus in which Fax Forum was launched were typically kind of like white middle to upper middle class neighborhoods in Dallas and kind of throughout the country, spread by social connections of Hunt and his oil company associates.
And so these were de facto conservative ideological spaces that framed themselves as open ended and everybody could participate.
Right.
And so, What I think is really useful here, and in the book, I call Facts Forum the first grassroots mobilization of the modern conservative movement, because it was indeed, I found evidence of it in local newspapers at the time.
It wasn't just the Facts Forum newspaper or Facts Forum news magazine, right?
You could find evidence of these things happening, but they were small groups.
They would get together, they would engage in these kinds of debates.
Now, Hunt ran into an issue, which was it was difficult to scale this local discussion group idea because it required a lot of local community buy in.
So Hunt would send associates out to kind of have an initial meeting in hopes that it would.
Stir some interest.
In some communities, it did stir interest.
In other communities, it didn't.
And so I think he got a little frustrated with this and saw broadcast as a medium as a way of circumventing this problem, right?
Of scaling up this discussion group idea.
So he hires Dan Smoot, who is a former FBI agent, to do fax form radio programming initially, ultimately TV programming as well.
They ultimately branch out and have a whole kind of array of radio and TV programs, all of which were designed to meet the new requirements of the Fairness Doctrine.
So, again, the fairness doctrine requires kind of educational political programming that balances both sides.
Hunt is out of his own pocket paying for the production of radio and TV programs that are nominally balanced.
So, Dan Smoot would say, Here's a question that's important to American political life.
And then he would say, On the one end, and he would talk the liberal perspective, and it'd be kind of boring and convoluted and not that strong.
And then he'd say, But on the other hand, and he'd give the conservative perspective, and it would be very rhetorically.
Yeah, exactly.
Great sell.
And so, part of what he was doing, right, is they were engaging in balance, but in a way that kind of tilted the scale to the right.
And so, this project gained in popularity.
It spread across the country.
It was using the affordances of the fairness doctrine, because what you had was broadcasters, local broadcasters who now needed to meet this federal requirement, didn't want to have to pay out of pocket for it.
And Hunt was saying, hey, here's some free programming, right?
You can just air it.
And so he did that.
They broadcasted it.
It was going all across the country, even in US territories and including like the Philippines, right?
Had some facts form airing as well, typically around US military bases.
But in any event, this programming was highly successful.
Now, what I note in the book is in the winter of 1953 54, Ben Dagdikian, who later goes on to write The Media Monopoly, works for the Washington Post, later in his life as the dean of the journalism school at Berkeley, he was an early reporter in the 50s and did this investigative report.
Respectability Politics in the South00:14:58
Reporting about Facts Forum.
It was a kind of multi part expose that basically accused Facts Forum of being a right wing front, right?
There was, you know, the public was new about the concept of front groups at this time because this is at the ending days of the McCarthy era.
They were used to kind of communist front accusations.
And so it was kind of a corollary there.
This is right wing front.
And part of what I argue in the book is this is a really pivotal moment because when you're reading Facts Forum's magazine, before that, it's, you know, debates about issues of the day.
There's a little bit of press commentary and press criticism in there and debates about whether the press is biased, but not that much.
Once the press starts targeting Facts Forum, the publication really takes a shift towards really overt press criticism to the point that they even have programming about in Facts Forum in 1955, for example, is the media biased, right?
And towards what?
And in that media debate, you have on the one end, Fulton Lewis Jr., who again was this right wing commentator, and William F. Buckley, a young William F. Buckley, debating liberal college professors about whether or not the media is biased.
And so that's in 1955, in the months leading up to the National Review's founding.
And so, if we think about our traditional notion of where the kind of new modern conservative movement emerges, it's 1955, right?
It's the founding of the National Review.
And then John Birch Society is founded a few years later.
But part of what my research says is if you look just five or six years earlier in the 1950s, many of the people that were involved in both the National Review and Young Americans for Freedom, ultimately, and all the kind of Buckley projects, as well as the John Birch Society, all got their start with Facts Forum.
And so, you see that as a node through which both the respectable corners of the conservative movement, like Buckley, And the disreputable corners like Birch, the Birchers, both emerge out of this moment that just so happens to be framed against the press.
And so part of what the book argues is that there are many excellent books.
We've got a wonderful historiography of modern conservatism now with all kinds of extremely good work.
But all of this is filtered through the lens of, even if you look at abortion or something, or the Equal Rights Amendment, as I write about in the book.
Yeah, the issue might be about maintaining patriarchy, right?
Or maintaining white supremacy, but it's framed through the lens of, well, the mainstream media isn't covering the world in a way that allows for white supremacy or patriarchy to seem inevitable or natural, right?
And so we need to critique the press alongside this ideological project.
There's also, I feel like, which is really interesting just psychologically, this underlying notion of, yes, they're aware that their ideas aren't popular, but they don't see that as a flaw in.
The ideas themselves.
Rather, it's all about marketing.
It's a marketing problem on our side, but it's a problem that we're being framed in a certain way or we're not being given the correct type of attention or equal time or whatever it is on the media side.
And that's really, I feel like, something that we see and that you show in the book that starts very, very early and that is one of the through lines that we see till today.
Yeah, I think that's a really important observation, right?
This idea that conservatives had a view of the world, right?
They thought they had the truth, right?
Understanding of the world.
And they saw media reporting and the fact that most people didn't agree with their view of the world, not as a problem with their worldview, right?
But with a problem with the world.
And so I think this is one reason why the right sees its project as conforming the world to the vision of the world that they have in their heads, which is very different than the way a lot of liberals proceed, which is, The world is objective.
It exists out in the world.
We identify problems and tinker with those problems to try to fix them and make lives better for people.
But it's a reconciliation with the world that the right is not really interested in, right?
It's about bending the world to their vision versus the opposite.
And what I found also really interesting, and you talk about this in your book, about because it's all about where does this idea of liberal media come from and how is it being used?
How does it change over time?
What would you say?
I know this is, I'm asking you to distill the question of your book in a couple of minutes, which is an awful thing for an interview to do.
I'm aware of that.
But where does it stem from?
And what can that tell us about the connections between these allegedly more marginal voices on the right and the ones of the quote unquote respectable?
The corner of the American right, the Bill Buckleys, you know, the more well known, the Clarence Mannions, who often get billed as this, I think you're right, as this first generation of really influential conservative media figures after World War II.
What is the, not just maybe the personal connections that we can draw out and that we've read about, but what is topically around the idea of the liberal media?
What is the through line here and how does that change?
Under the pen of, let's say, a Bill Buckley as he makes his way into respectable media discourse.
Yeah.
So adding this lens of respectability politics into the narrative, I think, is really useful.
Partly because, on the one hand, it explains why you have the modern conservative movement as we understand it today, right?
When you think about liberal media criticism or criticism of the liberal media, right?
You would think that it's kind of a rejection of, right?
Donald Trump, for example, right?
Loves to say fake news, loves to talk trash about the media.
He also deeply relies upon the media, right?
In order to, Get his message across and to be covered in ways that, frankly, steel man him into a more coherent version of himself, oftentimes.
Right.
And so there's this like tension there between the critique of the media and the desire for the media.
And what you can see when you add this respectability politics into the mix is part of the reason why, if you look at the National Review, for example, there's some critique of the media and mainstream institutions in there, but it's only some.
Right.
Partly because Bill Buckley wants to criticize the media, wants to cultivate that critical disposition toward the press among his audiences so that they're, you know, reading the mainstream media critically.
But he also wants that media to cover him favorably, right?
And to cover his movement as, you know, the respectable opposition and serious thinkers, right?
Yeah.
And so he's got some buy in into the mainstream media apparatus, actually.
He wants to be covered by them in a favorable way.
An interesting thing about the John Birch Society, right?
And a lot of the kind of more Outspokenly white supremacists and racist activists of the John Birch Society, especially in the US South during the 1950s and 60s, is they didn't actually want that media to cover them well.
They wanted that media to stop covering them, like to leave it up to local reporters basically that knew the Southern situation better, right, in their view and would narrate it more favorably to the kind of white elite ruling classes in the South, right?
And so these folks didn't want to convince, you know, the mainstream media to let them write for them necessarily.
Some of them did, but A lot of the John Burr Society people were about building alternatives, right?
Not alternatives that were designed to make the movement seem respectable to the mainstream, which is what the National Review was, right?
Buckley's project was partly, hey, we've got ideas too, right?
Take us seriously, just like you take, you know, the New Republic or the nation or whatever seriously.
One of the outlets that I write about in the book is a hyper local right wing outlet in Birmingham, Alabama in the 60s called the Birmingham Independent.
And they were about building an alternative media locally within Birmingham.
To basically try to counteract the local daily newspapers, the Birmingham News and the Post Herald, because they saw those as owned by Northern influences, basically, these chains that were based in New York and elsewhere.
And so, part of what you see, if you look at the disreputable side, is you see a part of the movement that has been more successful, arguably, than the Buckleyites, in the sense that it isn't just about building respectability within the political system that exists.
It's about building alternative media outlets and scaling them up so that the right has, you know, is punching above its weight within that system, right?
So it's not just, you know, one way of thinking about it, right?
Is one approach would be for the right to appeal against the New York Times to get a New York Times columnist, right?
To get a conservative token or whatever at the Times, right?
Another approach is we're not going to try to get the mainstream media to do what we want to do.
We're going to build these massive alternatives so that the mainstream media itself is less significant and less powerful.
And that's the project that's actually been more successful on the right than even the kind of nitpicking coverage of mainstream outlets.
What I found really interesting, because you just mentioned the American South, the US South, is that because you detail after Goldwater as the first candidate that the emerging, starting to be organized, American right rallies behind.
And he blames his losses on biased media.
Can you tell us about the role that both the Goldwater campaign, but also A specific type of Southern white media environment of the 1960s play in shaping this emerging conservative movement's sense of media embattlement?
Yeah.
And so Goldwater, when he runs up against Lyndon Johnson, the Johnson campaign is highly effective at leveraging media against him and charring him as kind of, you know, a lunatic who's going to like.
It also makes it pay for them, right?
The way Goldwater runs his campaign is kind of.
An Oppo researcher's dream, in a way.
For sure, right?
But again, you also have, I mean, there's the famous Goldwater rule, right?
Which is a rule that was put in by the American Psychological Association because of that campaign, because you had the mainstream magazine outlet, Fact Magazine, publishing interviews with thousands of psychiatrists, basically saying that he was like mentally unfit to serve, right?
And so I think that there was a sort of, in the early 1960s, and part of this is because the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were actively opposing and trying to tar, you know, the Further right, Birchers and folks is kind of like fringe and weird and, you know, a problem, right?
But Goldwater gets kind of caught in that narrative in a way that allows for conservatives who, again, already believe at this point that the media is biased against them and against their movement.
It's kind of rendered clearly and on a national scale, right?
With the Goldwater campaign.
A lot of those folks also, by the way, felt that Joe McCarthy a decade earlier had been treated unfavorably by the press as well, right?
And so Goldwater isn't.
And or it may seem like an origination point and is in many narratives, right?
Of the right, but it's actually important because it actually establishes a trend, right?
Not that it's the first instance of the media going after a candidate, but that actually the media had already gone against Faxform and had gone against Goldwater or against McCarthy, right?
Now it's going against Goldwater too, right?
Of course, it's biased.
It kind of affirms this idea, right?
What was I forget the rest of the American how does the American Southern, the white Southern media environment, what role does it play in this sort of constellation?
Yeah.
And so starting in the 1950s with the Brown versus Board decision, right, as you start to see the civil rights movement really leaning into, you know, boycotts and other kinds of civil disobedience designed to attract media attention to the plight of black folks in the South and try to oppose Jim Crow segregation,
what you end up getting is a lot of national news crews coming down and capturing these kind of horrific, spectacular, right, images of protesters being, you know, mauled by dogs and, you know, shot by fire hoses and that sort of thing, right?
And so Before that, or as that's going on, you have a lot of Southern white newspaper owners and other people who are concerned, journalists in the South, who basically see this as a major public relations problem.
Getting back to the idea of public relations as a crucial element of the right, it's not, oh, the things that we're doing to people of color are horrific.
And when you shoot that on video, it looks really bad.
It's, no, these cameramen just don't understand what's going on.
And they're not framing the picture correctly, right?
Yeah.
Right.
Or they're being duped by these, like, you know, outside agitators, civil rights protesters, right?
And so there was a lot of discourse among white newspaper owners in the South during this period about how to kind of circle the wagons, as it were, right?
And make sure that they can report on the quote unquote truth of the racial relations in the South, right?
Which, in their viewpoint, is much more sympathetic to the maintenance of white supremacy.
Now, interestingly, though, getting back to the kind of progressive media reform movement, right?
One of the critiques of that movement was that a lot of newspapers, local newspapers, were increasingly getting bought up by chains, and that that lack of local ownership and the concentration of power in people that had larger and larger business interests was actually skewing coverage to the right.
Now, interestingly, these white Southerners saw that same problem, right, of newspaper consolidation into chains, especially because a lot of those chains were owned by operations in the North, right, outside of the South.
They saw that actually the same kind of critique, the structural critique against consolidation.
But they saw that as basically outside influence within the South, right?
And so part of what the Birmingham Independent, this kind of smaller operation, is about was how do we counteract this at a grassroots level, right?
So that we can tell the quote unquote true story of the American South to white Southerners that also exposes the quote unquote communism and lies of the civil rights movement.
To the point that if you read, I didn't mention this in the book, but if you read the Birmingham Independent, they have editorials.
So basically, after Bull Connor's Six Dogs on protesters, there's a lot of backlash.
Founding Accuracy in Media00:14:57
Because it's televised.
And briefly, the Birmingham Police Department says, We're going to not use dogs anymore, right?
This isn't strategic for us, basically.
The Birmingham Independent writes an editorial saying, Sick the dogs again, right?
What is this, like, you know, bullshit of not using dogs to attack protesters?
We think this is good and we should do it.
Don't be influenced by the national mainstream media, right?
And so, you know, you see really rendered very cleanly and plainly, right?
The kind of horrors of the white supremacist project in these papers in a way that, you know, If that was part of the national major media, I don't know that that would have served them all that well, actually.
Right.
And so there's, in some of these outlets, you see it's like a lack of strategy in a way.
And it really speaks to the fact that it isn't just about managing the mainstream press, although that's part of it.
It's also an increasing realization on the right that we need to create outlets that are big enough in scale that can reinforce our ideology or force that belief system onto people.
Right.
I found it really interesting how you map out the way that the image of the quote unquote liberal media and of liberal media bias slowly gets mainstreamed.
It becomes not just a core part of conservative right leaning identity, political identity, but it also kind of moves up the ladder of both political power and respectability, right?
So when we get to the Nixon and Agnew.
Years they're famously vitriolic against the press, especially Agnew Nixon.
Sure, in his rhetoric, a bit more veiled on his tapes, very clear the press is the enemy in his famous quote.
And then, of course, Agnew's speech in is it 69 and 69?
Yeah, where he essentially frames the liberal media as an enemy to the previously established Nixonian silent majority.
As sort of the diametral opposite as to what quote unquote real Americans want and yearn for.
What would you say were factors that made it possible for this rhetoric to be so successful?
Because it really seems like it struck a nerve and really led to some major changes, not just within sort of the right wing media landscape, but also.
In its relationship to the quote unquote liberal media, and even influenced how these maligned, allegedly liberal media outlets behaved themselves.
Yeah, for sure.
So, a few things to note, right?
So, Agnew gives one very famous speech, which is in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1969.
He actually follows that speech up a couple of weeks later in Montgomery, Alabama.
It's kind of corollary to that speech that often gets overlooked.
But in both of those speeches, in the like late Late in the year of 1969, he excoriates the mainstream press for their coverage of Nixon's Vietnamization speech.
Now, the public supported that speech and that policy in terms of public opinion polls, but the pundits really panned it, right?
And so Agnew gets up there and says, hey, clearly there's a gap, right, between what regular Americans, the kind of silent majority that Nixon talks about in his speech, and these kind of elites in mostly in New York and DC who are, you know, talking to one another and, you know, coordinating their ideology, presumably a liberal ideology, right?
A couple of things are happening around that moment that make that take off, right?
To make it go viral, right?
In the kind of contemporary parlance, right?
One is a few months before that speech, an organization called Accuracy and Media was founded.
So, Accuracy and Media still exists to this day.
It's a conservative press watchdog group, but they're founded in 1969.
When Agnew gives his speech, it immediately increases the salience of their political project because they were founded to do, you know, to basically monitor the quote unquote liberal media.
Once Agnew gives his speech, now the whole country knows that this is an idea or a problem.
And so it creates space that accuracy in media by the early 1970s is able to take advantage of, right?
And they do so in terms of, you know, writing letters to the editor, to newspapers and television companies, complaining, writing, filing complaints with the Federal Communications Commission about broadcast networks, engaging ultimately in shareholder activism where they bought up shares of major media companies and then tried to get them to change their policies in ways that would be advantageous for conservatives, as well as running ads.
In newspapers, right, criticizing those papers.
And so, accuracy media is really responsible for taking the idea of liberal media bias that Agnew really speaks and then making it kind of a steady drip, right, throughout the 1970s.
So, it'd be one thing if it was just Agnew says this thing and then that's the end of it.
Accuracy media steps in to basically say, like, hey, and here's an example, and here's an example, and here's an example, right?
And so, it helps create this growing perception, right, that the media is biased.
Now, the other thing that happens that is important is by 1969, if you look at like the Columbia Journalism Review, right, or the editor and publisher, you're starting to see the beginnings of backlash against television.
So, television in the US by the 1960s and 70s is the primary source of news for most Americans.
It's where most people get their news.
But increasingly, people are kind of disaffected by television.
There's one narrative that's kind of like, oh, it makes you dumber.
You're not thinking as critically as when you're reading, right?
There's all kinds of stuff that isn't necessarily like, Liberal media bias critiques, just general critiques of television as a medium, its commercialism, the way it kind of dumbs down ideas, that kind of thing.
Those debates are happening and are the context in which Agnew gives his speech.
And so, what happens is now within the pages of Columbia Journalism Review and editor and publisher, after Agnew's speech, you do see backlash.
You see the press saying, This is overreach by the federal government.
This is censorship.
You know, clearly, Agnew and Nixon are trying to, you know, pressure the press or rally the public against the press in a way that's designed to get us to cover them more favorably, right?
You do see that kind of commentary.
But what you start to see, especially by January of 1970, right, is a kind of reappraisal or reconsideration of those speeches and saying, okay, look, Agnew isn't right, right?
We know that he's wrong.
The media isn't liberal, like these kinds of things.
But maybe he's onto something, right?
Our audiences are increasingly not trusting us, perhaps, or people are upset with television.
And so they start internalizing that liberal media critique, not immediately.
They don't say immediately, we agree that we're liberal and, you know, woe is us.
We need to change our policies.
But they say, Are they onto something?
Maybe they're onto something.
And then this begins a long and ongoing period of introspection and reflexivity by journalists that say, well, I might be personally liberal.
Does that mean that my coverage is liberal?
Maybe I need to go a little bit more and cover the right a little bit more so as to show that I'm not being biased against them, right?
So it plants the seed in a lot of journalists' heads that they need to be looking over their rightward shoulder because that's where the critique is coming from the most, right?
And so, part of what the book argues is that the desire to be impartial or objective, right, in the face of the fact that individuals have personal opinions, right, even if that's not something that's being incorporated into their news, right, that that tension is a really important one for why the liberal media criticism is not just something that's a belief on the right, but is something that is increasingly a factor in how regular professional journalists go about their day to day lives.
And a good example of this from the book as well is.
In the 1970s, 73, I think, through the 80s, there's an organization in the US called the National News Council, which is an independent ombudsperson that's designed to basically take public complaints against the media and then to try to work with the media outlets to create corrections or remedies for it.
The idea here was to rebuild trust in the news media.
Part of the reason that that trust was seen as needing to be rebuilt is because of Agnew in 69 and because of accuracy in media in the years in the early 1970s.
And so the entire concept of trust in news as a problematic.
Is partly a response and a reaction to this right wing media criticism in the mid 20th century.
And so, interestingly, the National News Council wants to appear impartial.
They put Bill Rusher, the publisher of the National Review, on its board.
So they've got a token conservative on there.
But interestingly, Accuracy and Media sees the National News Council and says, hey, We can use this to our advantage, right?
And so they start filtering a lot of their complaints against the media to the National News Council.
And if you look at the internal memos and correspondence within the National News Council, they are aware very early on that Accuracy Media is going to try to use them to basically launder their critiques as impartial, even though Accuracy Media has a conservative axe to grind.
And they say, but we need to handle this delicately because if we don't, then they're going to tar us as liberals, right?
And leftists, right?
And we can't have that because then it gets in the way of our ability to be an independent, neutral arbiter.
Right.
And so, initially, the first few complaints that accuracy and media makes, the National News Council sides with accuracy and media and basically publicizes that the media is, you know, engaging in bias in those claims.
Ultimately, they end up scaling back a bit.
Accuracy and media also stops submitting things to them.
So, that kind of what is it?
Symbiosis is short lived, but it really speaks to the power of objectivity as an imperative, but one that makes journalists vulnerable, right, to these critiques, especially from the right.
Because I think something we also see early on, as you show in your book, is it's never enough, right?
There is not like, there's not a, let's say, a quota of conservative commentators that these organizations want to reach or would be happy with.
Because what would you say is the underlying goal?
Because if we take their claims at face value, we want, I don't know, more conservative voices in news.
How do they operate?
Do they say we have these and these demands, or is it just pointing at news stories and saying this is biased against us because and then a list of reasons?
So, organizations like Accuracy and Media or the Eagle Forum also used a lot of media activism.
This was Phyllis Schlafly's crusade against the Equal Rights Amendment.
Good old Phyllis.
Both of them used the fairness doctrine as a mechanism for getting conservative viewpoints over the air.
So, for both Accuracy Media and Eagle Forum and other organizations, Grassroots and otherwise organizations on the right, they oftentimes were making the redress they were requesting was balance, basically, right?
Put a conservative on the air, put Phyllis on TV to counteract a feminist, right?
That was their project.
A fame.
There were, yeah, exactly.
Sorry.
But there were also, like, there was also another wing, right?
Or another strategy, which is, and honestly, one of the main figures in this early on is Paul Weyrick, who founds the Heritage Foundation.
Weyrick had an idea that he wanted to build a conservative television channel, right?
That was his vision.
And so, Part of what I got at earlier when I said that conservatives are opportunistic and iterative, it isn't just they had one thing.
It isn't just that the conservative movement wanted balance in the mainstream media.
They did have people agitating for that.
But they also had these other folks saying, well, let's do that.
And it's always yes.
And we need to build our own institutions as well, right?
In order to shape the overall media conversation even more.
And Wayrick was an early advocate for that.
And so, interestingly, if you look at the fairness doctrine, internal memos within the Reagan administration deciding.
What to do with the Fairness Doctrine in the 80s, because Mark Fowler, who was the FCC chairman, wanted to get rid of it.
Reagan at this point is kind of like in his letting Nancy run things stage, it feels like a little bit.
In his Nancy era, yes.
In his Nancy era, right?
And I guess when wasn't his Nancy era?
But, anyways, true.
The debates internal to the Reagan administration, though, is they went and asked a lot of conservative activists, should we get rid of this policy or not?
And you really see in those debates a mapping of the diversity of tactics within right wing media activism.
So, you see Phyllis and you see Reed Irvine saying, No, we can't get rid of the Fairness Doctrine.
We need it as leverage to basically be a part of that mainstream media conversation, right?
And then you see people like Weyrick who say, No, we need to get rid of it because then we can have our own network.
And that's what we want to do.
And Weyrick ends up creating his own cable network, which the Fairness Doctrine never applied to cable anyway.
So, it wouldn't have really mattered.
But he ends up trying to create a cable network in the 90s, ends up failing because, as Reese Peck, who wrote Fox Populism, argues, like it just wasn't.
Entertaining.
It was like C SPAN, like is boring, right?
Just conservative talking ants or whatever.
And so it isn't until Fox News that you actually get that entertainment value or really, you know, Rush Limbaugh by the late 80s.
And so what you see with the lifting of the Fairness Doctrine in 87 is both of these things are unleashed.
So up until the 80s, you see primarily the successes of the conservative movement is in getting mainstream outlets to cover them more favorably and to add conservatives into mainstream outlets, right?
From the 80s onwards, after the Fairness Doctrine, you see that.
Coupled with a massive growth, growth, and growth of commercially viable, right, conservative media.
So things like Rush Limbaugh, conservative talk radio, kind of revolutionizes AM radio, ultimately Fox News and all the kind of proliferating digital outlets since then.
So we have basically two things happening at once.
We have one, the idea of a liberal media bias isn't a fringe belief anymore.
It's being discussed and taken seriously and even applied as a self critique by mainstream journalists.
But at the same time, we also have in the right wing media landscape that's starting to slowly emerge, we have basically the introduction of entertainment as an element that can popularize ideas that previously people wouldn't listen to because they would fall asleep while somebody on Poor Wirex outlet would drone on and on.
What would you say?
How does that change?
Consequences of Conservative Content00:08:51
Because I'm sure readers have heard this.
On this pod, even before you know that the fallout from the end of the fairness doctrine is the rise of people like Rush Limbaugh, basically pretty immediately after.
So, if we see the fallout from the end of the fairness doctrine, but also this idea of commercialization and the sort of entertainment makeover of right wing media types, how does the rights media landscape change after that and sort of into the into the 90s and 2000s.
Yeah, I think often we think of it as the beginning of right wing media as we understand it today, the end of the Fairness Doctrine.
But I think it's really important to note that the Fairness Doctrine created the conditions of possibility for the right wing media that emerged after it, right?
So without Facts Forum, without the balance imperative of accuracy in media and Phyllis Schlafly or whatever, and them using it to get conservatives on the air, you wouldn't have had the audiences and you wouldn't have had the mass movement that allows for Rush Limbaugh to have a captive audience, basically, right?
And so it's true that Limbaugh is.
In his entertainment value, does strike on something truly new within the modern conservative movement at that time.
A lot of the stuff I was reading during the Fairness Doctrine era was not particularly entertaining in the way that Limbaugh could be.
And you actually see this play out in the book.
There's this funny kind of debate or kind of tension or conflict toward the end of the book where Accuracy and Media, one of the leaders of Accuracy Media, Cliff Kincaid, Rush Limbaugh kind of talks shit about him basically, like on his radio program.
And Kincaid is mad about it and is trying to get.
Limbaugh and a responder to correct the record or whatever, and he won't.
And it shows this kind of moment that that traditional conservative media strategy that had worked for so long for groups like Accuracy and Media, there's like a new sheriff in town, right?
And he doesn't need necessarily to do the bidding of the movement anymore.
And so part of what you see after the Fairness Doctrine, I argue in the book, is a shift.
So it's a continuity with the movement, but it's a break between movement oriented media activism, right?
Activism that is rooted in a broader movement context into people who are dealing with kind of dual logics or dual kind of what's the word motivations, right?
So Lin Baugh's goal is to promote conservatism, but he's not going to just listen to whatever Heritage Foundation is saying they want to prioritize.
He's going to prioritize what he thinks is important.
And what he thinks is important is what Audiences are going to be excited by and tune in, right?
So that they can make money, basically, right?
And so now what you see, and this is partly explains the rise of Trump, right?
Is as you start to see conservative media, commercially viable conservative media, have a power being a source of power in its own right, you basically have two different power sources on the right.
You've got the movement infrastructure and you've got the media infrastructure.
And there is a kind of revolving door oftentimes between those two things.
But technically, they don't work in entirely lockstep, which is how you get something like Trump, where you've got a lot of the conservative movement in 2016.
They were like looking at Rubio or looking at Ted Cruz or whatever it would be, right?
Trump was not the early darling of that, right?
It was right wing media outlets that were able to champion him.
People like Limbaugh, not Fox initially, early like Breitbart, but ultimately Fox joins that thing as well.
And nowadays, since both those movement media like National Review or the Daily Signal or whatever it would be, Are in competition within the broader attention economy with these like influencers and things like that.
It's a fundamentally different dynamic and it's much less controllable by the conservatives themselves, but it's also much more unwieldy for all of us, right?
It's almost impossible.
I mean, like during much of the 20th century, if you didn't want to consume conservative content, you could simply not consume conservative content, right?
Nowadays, you can't escape it.
I was listening to National Public Radio the other morning and they were talking about Candace Owens' documentary about Erica Kirk.
And I was like, why do regular people study the right?
You and I study the right.
We are consumed.
Our brains are ruined by this stuff, right?
Just wrong.
Regular people don't need to know who any of these people are.
You know what I mean?
And so I think that part of what the book explains is how do we get from a period where conservatives were insurgents, right?
Trying to get their viewpoints into larger and larger outlets so that they could influence the broader public into The opposite, which is that now, if you're a member of the public, you can't escape conservative ideas.
It's either the right wing media is so loud that you hear it in your day to day life, or traditional outlets like national public radio or the New York Times are increasingly running profiles on these increasingly fringe characters that have no business actually being in the mainstream public eye.
And so, I don't know.
You and I, I guess, are somewhat complicit in this.
I mean, we're doing a podcast now because people are interested in the right, right?
Leftist liberal people are interested in the right.
Honestly, sometimes I wonder whether we're helping or hurting in that regard, right?
Like, would it be better if we all kind of tuned it out?
I say that kind of provocatively, but sure.
No, I think that's a fair question.
I think what I get stuck on is I think there is a value to covering these people in an analytical framework.
I think there are certain text genres that should not be used in covering these people.
So the big Portrait with the glossy photo spread, for example, about Curtis Yavin.
Nobody needs that.
That is actively hurting all of us.
And as well as, I would say, the interview, there are very few journalists who I would say are equipped to interview some of these people.
And B, even if you are equipped to do it correctly, what is the value of this, right?
There is a limited amount of things that can productively come out of a conversation like that.
And usually it goes against zero, I would say.
For sure.
And I love that as a reframing.
And I think that part of what it gets at is part of where the book concludes too, is at the end, I say that part of what we need to recognize as journalists, right?
Even if you're not intending to be political with your reporting, let's say that you see yourself as impartial and objective and you're not, you know, you're calling balls and strikes, as they say, right?
Yes.
Your output, though, has political consequences.
Journalism is innately political and there's no way to write it in a way that is not.
And so, part of what I call for kind of at the end of the book is that journalists actually need to be a lot more self reflexive, not necessarily looking over their rightward shoulder, but saying, what I intend to write here, whether that's about the right or about whatever it would be. Is going to have certain political consequences.
What do I suspect those political consequences will be?
And are those justifiable, right?
Should I run this story?
So it's not always about how to run it, although I think you're right.
Like certain forms of interview or certain types of narrative shouldn't be used in certain contexts.
I think it's also a matter of should we or shouldn't we report on this, right?
What will be the consequences of reporting on this?
And to the extent that that can be predicted or controlled.
But it's a matter of, You know, there's no putting the toothpaste back in the tube, right?
We currently live in an environment where there's a mainstream media that's already looking over its right shoulder and is kind of skewing its coverage in some ways accordingly.
We have a massive right wing media apparatus that is putting all of its effort into shaping our public knowledge about the world with a right wing vantage.
And there is a very small and nascent, if you want to even call it that, left or liberal progressive media with.
Very small audiences.
And so, until billionaires, if any billionaires listen and want to fund like left wing media projects, unless there is like a left media corollary to that right wing media, also applying pressure to that mainstream legacy media, we're going to be in this asymmetrical battle until we can balance that out.
Best Day to Subscribe00:01:44
That is not necessarily optimistic, but I think optimism is overrated because I'm not sure if it's that useful as an analytical tool, although I understand the emotional need for it sometimes.
AJ, before we finish up, can you tell us where listeners can connect with you and your work?
Where can they find you and where can they find the things you write about?
Yeah, absolutely.
So, my handle on pretty much all the apps is AJBauer.
So, AJBauer.
I'm on the blue sky.
I'm on the Twitter, on the LinkedIn.
A lot of journalism studies people have decamped to LinkedIn.
I've noticed that.
But I have to engage there now.
So there we are.
Yeah, those are the main sites.
I have like a personal Instagram and Facebook, but I don't use them for promotional purposes typically.
That's fair.
There have to be some.
But the book is available directly from the Press Columbia University Press.
If you use the promo code CUP20, you save $7.
So there's that for you.
Otherwise, I'm around.
I'll see you in Tuscaloosa or Brooklyn or wherever I happen to be at a given moment.
Or in Berlin.
All right.
Or hopefully, yeah.
Yeah.
Invite stands.
I'm going to ask AJ one more question about the current state of the right wing media landscape and if and how it got away from its creators.
Subscribers, stick around.
And if you are not a subscriber today, is the best day to sign up.