Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics - Political Science Book on US Media Influence & Cultural Shifts | Perfect for Political Science Students, Historians, and Policy Researchers

This tells the story of the first generation of the conservative movement in the United States. We see “how conservative media became the institutional and organizational nexus of the movement, transforming audiences into activists and activists into a reliable voting base.” It follows the story of three main characters: the broadcaster Clarence Manion, the book publisher Henry Regnery, and the magazine publisher William Rusher. They spearheaded one of the most successful political movements of the twentieth century. It all begins back in the 1930’s. For twenty years after 1932, the Democrats ran the show, but these men had plans to change that.The first organization Manion and Regnery were involved with was the America First Committee (AFC), which promoted an anti-interventionist policy during WWII. But after the Pearl Harbor attack, the committee disbanded. After being booted from the Eisenhower administration, Manion wanted to wash his hands of the two parties. He said that they failed to keep the country out of war, roll back the New Deal, and take an aggressive stance against communism. Rusher was the last holdout in mainstream politics. It was communism that caused his move to the outskirts of mainstream politics. The three together decided to become “outsiders.” They argued that liberalism was ascendant because “the left controlled institutions: the media, the universities, the foreign policy establishment.” We see the beginnings of a postwar network which gave conservative media its modern form. New ventures included Human Events, Regnery Publishing, the Manion Forum, and the National Review. It was interesting to me that Regnery back in the late 40’s produced three revisionist works on Germany that were actually critical of the Allied treatment of Germany and the postwar order. Another publication of Regnery denounced modern education philosophy because of its emphasis on “collective virtues and collective ideals.” Then there were the revisionist histories, such as Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War.Conservative outlets continued to grow in the 1940s and early 1950s, but still were not meeting the right’s perceived needs, however, by the mid-1950s, we start to see an informal network of conservative media emerge; they saw the established media as being under control of the liberals. Early on, in addition to anti-intervention in foreign policy and anticommunism in domestic policy, we see anti-unionism emerge as a central concern. The conservatives had to create new institutions, new conduits and networks to get their message out. As they saw it, liberals stood inside institutions of power slanting news and opinion in their favor and silencing conservative critics. As the author notes, “Existing separately from established media enterprises meant conservatives in media turned to one another to expand audiences, spread publicity, and bolster content.”By the 1960s, we see the rise of organizations on college campuses, such as the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Their assessment mirrored the critique of established media – “higher education had fallen under the control of a coterie of leftists.” The broader conservative argument was that liberalism opened the door for socialism and ultimately for communist behavior. It was in this decade that clashes over the Birch Society opened a schism in conservative media that persisted through the decade. It was also in this decade that journalists discovered the “radical right” and “ultraconservatives.” By this time, the right had become a media obsession. By 1964, nine programs involving 6600 broadcasts a week on 1300 stations made up about 20 percent of the nation’s radio and television outlets. Around this time we see a concern over the Fairness Doctrine, which caused right-wing media to declare that its purpose was to silence their voices. The author spends some time discussing the Barry Goldwater run for president, and how this coalesced some of the right around Goldwater and caused conflict for others. After Goldwater’s defeat, we see more effort to put conservative senators and representatives in office. For example, the Americans for Constitutional Action (ACA) organization was designed for this purpose. In 1961, we see the first Human Events Political Action Conference, which was a forerunner to the Conservative Political Action Conference. There was an argument against bipartisanship after the Goldwater defeat as well. As the author states, “They saw bipartisanship as one of the fundamental flaws in postwar politics, particularly because it had congealed around nonconservative policies. While this opposition initially led them to advocate third-party candidacies, the Goldwater campaign transformed their goal into remaking the GOP.” In the publishing industry, we see the use of bulk distribution in order to bypass the publishers, bookstores, and reviewers that shaped the book market. Instead we see the rise of a network of conservative organizations to promote and distribute books. There was a funding shortfall in the years after Goldwater, in fact, by the late 1960s, the Forum stopped all regular television production. Nevertheless, sights were now set on taking over a major network such as CBS. This job fell to the Medias Unlimited Corporation. More organizations sprung up over time to promote the conservative cause: the National Federation of Conservative Organizations (NFCO) and the American Conservative Union (ACU). Nixon was elected in 1968, and some felt this marked the end of conservative politics in America.The author notes that by the 1970s, conservatives began shifting the meaning of objectivity from factuality to balanced reporting. They wanted to convince the media outlets that they were unfairly excluding conservative viewpoints. The Accuracy in Media (AIM) entity was founded for this purpose. It was noted that “the first generation of conservative media activists lost their primacy in the 1970s. They would not regain it until the arrival of the second generation twenty years later. We see many conservative outlets struggling in this decade with the collapse of Regnery Publishing and Human Events pushed to the edge of insolvency. By the end of this decade the first generation of media activists was “failing, unmoored from their clear ideological vision and unable to stay afloat financially.”The 1980s saw Ronald Regan become president for eight years. The next generation of media activists would not appear until Regan’s final days in office. During this time, we see other groups vie for control of the movement, such as the New Right, the Conservative Caucus, and Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority. In 1987, the Media Research Center (MRC) was formed to document, expose, and neutralize the liberal media. Limbaugh’s radio show went national in 1988. We see now second generation of conservative media activism taking hold now. The success of this new generation rested on a number of parallel developments: “deregulation, technological change, broadcast innovation, and shifting patterns of conservative leadership.”By 1996, Fox News enters the picture forever changing the landscape. Conservative publishing begins to take off with major publishing companies establishing conservative imprints. This new generation had done something the first repeatedly failed to do, and that is find a way to make their work profitable and popular ensuring the message reached all of the country. Thanks to the likes of Limbaugh, Fox News, and a phalanx of right-wing broadcasters throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the conservative movement had become a mainstay in America. By 2009, “conservative media activists were commandeering both the national political conservation and the Republican Party.”