The Sunday Interview: The Myth of Liberal Media Bias: A History of the Conservative Media Machine

Annika Brockschmidt: Welcome to the Straight White American Jesus Sunday interview. I am Annika Brockschmidt, author of German language books, America's Godly Warriors and Die Brands, 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, with a focus on the role of media activism, press criticism and journalism and how that pulled into the formation of political movements. AJ, thank you so much for coming on the pod.

AJ Bauer: Of course, thanks so much for having me.

Annika: 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 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?

AJ: Yeah, sure. So I was raised in North Texas, in the US and a very conservative county. My Congressman growing up was Dick Armey, if anybody remembers back then, the former House majority leader. And so I grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh. My mom and dad both were Reagan Republicans, and 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 think I was eight years old, right? And so I was really curious as to whether my guy, George HW 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. We got the Dallas Morning News on our front lawn, and I got it. I opened up the plastic wrapping, and it showed that Clinton had won, and I just burst into tears, and I run into the house, and my mom was sleeping, and so I woke her up, and mom, did you see? She of course already knew from the night before, but she was prepared. But, you know, this was a really formative memory for me, remembering this kind of conservative milieu that I grew up in and conservative identification, really, that it took me quite a bit to break from. Ultimately, the Iraq War, the kind of post-9/11 era is what helped push me leftward, but for most of the 90s, you know, I was just like a lot of my informants, but people that I research, right, rooting against Clinton with all of my might.

Annika: 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.

AJ: Yeah. So I was initially going to become a journalist, you know, 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 the 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-sited 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 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 consumed Fox News, but many of them consumed kind of widely, you know, consumed multiple different outlets, 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, you know, one hour, you know, 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 from 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 pre-history 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, right? What did that mean to them? Right? Especially when conservatives tuned in? And so part of what the book does is it's explaining right, 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, right, the kinds of programming choices, but also, how does that shape the way our conservative audiences engage with media, not only right wing media, but mainstream as well.

Annika: And what I found 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?

AJ: 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 Pickard 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, you know, 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 pre-history, 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? And so 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, including archives of the American Business Consultants, which was a right wing anti-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 like 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, 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, I think in 1946 that had a bunch of cartoons. One of the cartoons had a little girl riding in a Cadillac limousine with her dad and said, Daddy, do all fascists drive Cadillacs, right? 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, you know, 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. Doesn't really matter. The end result is going to be a, you know, rising tides lift all ships kind of thing, right? And so these are tactics that, like 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 like, 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?

Annika: 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.

AJ: Yeah, 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 a 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, you know, National Review and Goldwater, 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? They gave both sides of whatever the issue would be. So that happens in 1949. By 1951 you have HL 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 HL Hunt was kind of disconnected from the modern conservative movement that others like Nicole Hemmer writes about in her great book, Messengers of the Right, right. So that's the Bill Buckley, you know, Henry Regnery, 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, you know, during the McCarthy era, and in the run up to the McCarthy era, and in it, this is during the Korean War, early, early to mid-1950s. And so they gathered people together to talk, to read the news of the day, right, 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 Facts 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 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, that 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, you know, 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 Facts Forum 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, you know, convoluted and not that strong, and they'd say, but on the other hand, and he'd give the conservative perspective, and it would be, you know, very rhetorically, yeah, exactly right, great sell. And so part of what he was doing, right, is they were engaging in balance in a way that kind of tilted the scales 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 was going all across the country, even in US territories including like the Philippines. It had some Facts Forum 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 Bagdikian, who later goes on to write The Media Monopoly, that 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 reporting about Facts Forum. It was a kind of multi-part exposé that basically accused Facts Forum of being a right wing front. 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 a 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, you know, 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-ite 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 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, you know, there are many excellent books, you know, we've got a wonderful historiography of modern conservatism now with all kinds of extremely good work. But all of this, right, is filtered through the lens of, you know, even if you look at like abortion, right, or something, or the Equal Rights Amendment, as I write about in the book, right? 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.

Annika: 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.

AJ: 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, like 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.

Annika: 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, where does it come from, and how is it being used? How does it change over time? What would you, 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 interviewer 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 respectable 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 write 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?

AJ: 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, you know, talk trash about the media. He also deeply relies upon the media, right, in order to get his message across and to, you know, be covered in ways that, you know, frankly, steelman him into a more coherent version of himself, oftentimes, right? And so there's this 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? 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 supremacist 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 Birch 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 seriously. One of the outlets that I write about in the book is a hyperlocal 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 of 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, you know, nitpicking coverage of mainstream outlets.

Annika: What I found really interesting because you just mentioned the American South, the US South. 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?

AJ: Yeah. And so Goldwater, when he runs up against Lyndon Johnson, the Johnson campaign is highly effective at leveraging media against him and tarring him as kind of, you know, a lunatic who's gonna, also makes it made for them, right?

Annika: Yeah, the way Goldwater runs his campaign is kind of an oppo researcher's dream, in a way.

AJ: 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 as 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, you know, 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 an, 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 Facts Forum, and had gone against McCarthy, right? Now it's going against Goldwater too, right? Of course, it's bias. It kind of affirms this idea, right?

Annika: How does the American Southern, the white southern media environment, what role does it play in this sort of constellation?

AJ: 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, if 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 to 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 framing the picture correctly, 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 was about was, how do we counteract this at a grassroots level, right? So that we can tell the quote unquote true story of, you know, the American South to white Southerners, that also exposes the quote unquote, you know, 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. Basically, after Bull Connor sicced dogs on protesters, there's a lot of backlash because it's televised, and briefly, the Birmingham Police Department says we're gonna 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 like, not using dogs to attack protesters. We think this is good and we should do it. Don't be influenced by the like, 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 they can reinforce our ideology or force that belief system onto people, right?

Annika: 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 69, where he essentially frames the liberal media as an enemy to the previously established Nixonian silent majority, as sort of the diametrical 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, it's triggered another, really led to some major changes, not just within 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?

AJ: 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 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 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 the 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 in Media was founded. So Accuracy in 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, 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 in 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 in 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 that 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 on to something, right? Our audiences are, you know, 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 views, right, 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, like, work with the media outlets to create corrections or remedies for it, right? 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 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 in Media sees the National News Council and says, hey, we can use this to our advantage, right? And so they started filtering a lot of their complaints against the media to the National News Council. And if you look at the internal memos and correspondents within the National News Council, they are aware very early on that Accuracy in Media is going to try to use them to basically launder their critiques as impartial, even though Accuracy in Media has a conservative ax to grind, and they say, but we need to help 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 in Media makes, the National News Council sides with Accuracy in 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 in Media also stops submitting things to them, so that 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.

Annika: Because I think something we also see early on, as you show in your book, is it's never enough, right? There's 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?

AJ: So organizations like Accuracy in 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 use the Fairness Doctrine as a mechanism for getting conservative viewpoints over the air. So for both Accuracy in 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. There were, yeah, exactly. But there were also, there was also another wing, right, or another strategy, which is, and honestly, one of the main figures in this early on is Paul Weyrich, who founds the Heritage Foundation. Weyrich had an idea that he wanted to build a conservative television channel, right? That was his vision. And so part of, when I got, 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 Weyrich 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 is 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, 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 Weyrich 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 Weyrich 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 heads 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 gross growth, growth of commercially viable 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.

Annika: So we have basically two things happening at once. We have one, the idea of 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 Weyrich's outlet would drone on and on. What would you say, how does that change? Because I'm sure readers have heard this part 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 right's media landscape change after that, and sort of into the into the 90s and the 2000s?

AJ: And 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, you know, 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 in his entertainment value does strike on something truly new within the modern conservative movement. At that time, a lot of this 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 at the toward the end of the book, where Accuracy in Media, one of the leaders of Accuracy in Media, Cliff Kincaid, Rush Limbaugh, kind of talk shit about him, basically, like on his radio program. And Kincaid is mad about it, and is trying to get Limbaugh to respond or to, you know, 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 in 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 logic. So dual kind of, what's the word, motivations, right? So Limbaugh'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 he can make money, basically, right? And so now what you see, and this 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 looking at Rubio or looking at Ted Cruz or whatever, 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, you know, 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, I study the right, you and I study the right. We are consumed. Our brains are ruined by this. Regular people, yeah, regular people don't need to know who any of these people are. No, you know what I mean. And so I think that part of what the book explains is, how did 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 like fringe characters that have no business actually being in the mainstream public eye, right? 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. Leftists, liberals 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.

Annika: 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's 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 Yarvin, 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 be 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.

AJ: 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. At the end I say that part of what we need to recognize as journalists, right, is 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 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 narratives 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, 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 or 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, they want to fund like left wing media project, 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.

Annika: 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?

AJ: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So my handle on pretty much all the apps is AJ Bauer, so A, J, B, A, U, E, R. I'm on Bluesky. I'm on Twitter, on LinkedIn. A lot of journalism studies people have decamped to LinkedIn, and it's, but I have to engage there now. So there we are. Yeah, those are the main sites. I have a personal Instagram and Facebook, but I don't use them for promotional purposes. Typically, that's there 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.

Annika: Or in Berlin.

AJ: All right, yeah. Invite stands.

Annika: I am 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. You can see the show notes on how to get access. So this is the last question. It's always this question for subscribers only. We've talked about them. Smash that subscribe button. Check.