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News on the Right
News on the Right
Studying Conservative News Cultures
E D I T E D B Y A N T H O N Y N A D L E R A N D A . J. B A U E R
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
v
vi Contents
Contributors 251
Index 255
F I G U R E S A N D TA B L E S
Figures
11.1 Media Consumption by Ideology 197
11.2 Echo Chambers? Predictors of Cable News Consumption 197
11.3 Predictors of Attitudes Toward Various News Outlets 198
11.4 Perceptions of Media Bias in Presidential Elections (December
2007) 199
11.5 The Right-Wing Echo Chamber: Media Consumption and Political
Attitudes 200
11.6 Predictors of Conservative Political Opinions 202
11.7 Predictors of Obama Job Approval 203
11.8 Echo Chambers? The 2016 Presidential Election 205
11.9 Media Consumption and 2016 Voter Preferences 205
12.1 Human Events’ Use of the Term “Liberal Media/Press,”
1950–1989 220
12.2 New York Times’ Use of the Term “Liberal Media,” 1930s–1990s 226
Tables
2.1 Promotional Statements for Christian Radio News Services 25
2.2 Opening Bumpers of American Family Radio Talk Shows 26
2.3 Stories Reported on Selected Newscasts for January 8, 2018 30
2.4 Excerpts from American Family News Stories for January 8, 2018 33
2.5 Talk Shows Aired January 8, 2018, on Evangelical Radio 35
2.6 Talk Shows Aired January 8, 2018, on Salem Conservative News/Talk
Radio 39
vii
viii Figur e s and Table s
ix
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1
2 A. J. Bauer and Anthony Nadler
with right-spun news. The same era saw a broad array of reformers and critics
charging that monopolistic conditions in the newspaper industry were yielding
conservative press bias, oft personified in the figures of syndicated columnist
Westbrook Pegler and Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick. In addi-
tion to mainstream newspapers, pro-business and anti-communist interpreta-
tions of the news flowed freely from small journals of opinion like Human Events
(1944–present) and Plain Talk (1946–1950) to more widely circulated periodi-
cals like American Mercury (1924–1980) to the largest mass-market weekly of
them all, Reader’s Digest (1922–present). Early progressive media critics, from
George Seldes to Dorothy Parker’s Voice of Freedom Committee, exhaustively
documented and contested this burgeoning right-wing mediasphere in the
1940s, sparking some of the most robust media reform efforts in US history to
date (see Pickard 2014).
In spite of efforts to counter it, right-wing media blossomed in the early
1950s—fueled initially by McCarthyism and by the vast wealth of oil tycoon
H. L. Hunt, whose Facts Forum (1952–1956) radio, television, and print prod-
ucts launched or boosted the careers of some of the most prominent conser-
vative journalists and media personalities of the 1960s and 1970s (Bauer
2017). With his launch of National Review in 1955, aided over the airwaves by
Clarence Manion and in book publishing by Henry Regnery (Hemmer 2016),
Buckley laid the cornerstone of what would become, ironically, a sort of early
“establishment” conservative media (see Lane, this volume, for a discussion of
anti-establishment themes in the early years of the National Review). While the
National Review often framed itself as the center of the conservative universe,
considerable right-wing media production exceeded its orbit. Despite being for-
mally exiled by Buckley in 1962, the John Birch Society remained a continuous
source of conservative pamphlets, magazines, and newsletters. The 1960s and
1970s saw considerable rightwing anti-communist and white supremacist com-
mentary from popular evangelical broadcasters like Billy James Hargis and Carl
McIntire, not to mention H. L. Hunt’s Life Line, all of whom similarly iterated
what Heather Hendershot (2011) describes as an “ultra” conservative discourse
outside Buckley’s sanction.
By the mid-1970s, a sort of rival conservative media establishment emerged
at the hands of New Right activists, including most prominently Paul Weyrich
and Richard Viguerie (see DiBranco, this volume). Applying direct mail prin-
ciples to political movement building, the New Right formed an array of conser-
vative single-issue groups. These groups—like Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum,
which successfully campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment, and the
National Rifle Association, which has reshaped popular and judicial under-
standings of the Second Amendment—played important roles as newsmakers,
setting and framing the terms of mass-mediated national debates concerning
4 A. J. Bauer and Anthony Nadler
race, gender, sexuality, and class, leading up to and throughout the Reagan
administration. Meanwhile, New Right–affiliated groups like the Eagle Forum,
Accuracy in Media, and later the Media Research Center played a considerable
role in promoting and gathering evidence claiming that the movement was beset
by a “liberal media” establishment (Bauer 2017).
No longer constrained by the National Review’s aspirations for an intellectual
tenor, the New Right stoked the embers of a populist conservatism that flour-
ished in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine
made space for political talk radio innovators like Rush Limbaugh. As conserva-
tive mass media began achieving commercial viability in the 1990s, talk radio
hosts like Limbaugh and national media outlets like the Wall Street Journal and
Fox News soon eclipsed movement-based conservatism as the primary impe-
tus of news on the right ( Jamieson and Cappella 2008). This trend continued
as conservative news blossomed in many varieties online. In the early years of
the web, established conservative institutions took the lead in founding online
forums and news sites, such as Townhall, an online news community launched
by the Heritage Foundation in 1995. Yet, many more web denizens would visit
the online aggregator the Drudge Report, founded by the idiosyncratic conserva-
tive Matt Drudge. As more users turned to the Internet for news and commen-
tary in the early 2000s, news entrepreneurs from Andrew Breitbart to Michelle
Malkin to Ben Shapiro have proven conservatives to be nimble in adopting
emerging media forms from blogs and podcasts to online video streams. These
sometimes unruly conservative media stars and online communities have put
increasing pressures on the Republican Party “from below,” influencing the con-
tours of conservative politics.
cases, they will increasingly build interconnections and render insights that span
broader circuits of conservative news production and consumption.
As the interdisciplinary variety of this volume attests, to study conservative
news cultures is not to adhere to a particular theoretical or methodological
approach or tradition. Like Stuart Allan (2010), we use the term news culture to
avoid the sometimes rigid dichotomy between media and society, emphasizing
the way in which both objects mutually constitute one another. We pluralize
the term to foreground the variegated byproducts of this co-constitution—
news varies according to the words and actions of newsmakers, according to the
judgments of particular reporters and outlets, according to cultural and politi-
cal economic structures of circulation, and according to the myriad interpretive
frameworks employed by audiences. A particular news culture results from con-
sistent practices or patterns of meaning making that emerge between and among
these sites of production, circulation, and consumption.
For our purposes, a news culture is conservative insofar as it involves forms
of media production, circulation, consumption, or identification by institu-
tions and actors who are associated with the extended infrastructure of or
discourse produced by the modern conservative movement in the United
States. That movement—initially composed of neoliberal, traditionalist, and
anti-communist intellectual strands—cohered in the mid-1940s and has
been a recognizable, if historically contingent, force in US political culture
and beyond ever since (Nash 1998; Burns 2004). There is a long-standing
tendency, epitomized most recently by intellectual historian Corey Robin,
to reduce modern conservatism to a single drive: “the felt experience of hav-
ing power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back” (Robin 2017, 4).
While we do not discount the impact of this reactionary impulse in foster-
ing conservative thought and activism in the United States and beyond, it is
too narrow a framework for understanding the capaciousness of news on the
right. Indeed, from its outset modern conservatism has been composed of
an array of oft-feuding personalities and ideological tendencies. The move-
ment’s internal contradictions, both personal and political, have historically
resulted in a panoply of media outlets with varied and oft-competing ideo-
logical projects (neoliberal, neoconservative, paleoconservative, etc.), policy
emphases (anti-abortion, pro-gun rights, etc.), and styles and tones (from
the high-brow National Review, to the middle-brow Conservative Digest, to
low-brow talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh). Far from “noise,” such con-
servative media plurality results in many discrete, though often overlapping
and intersecting, news cultures—ways of making sense of daily occurrences,
patterned to support, justify, or otherwise resonate with the various beliefs
historically associated with modern conservatism.
Tak ing Cons er vative News S e r i ously 7
point for analyzing the social rituals, institutions, and sense-making processes
constituting the journalistic field more generally. Research into conservative
news will feed into analysis of key problematics and themes in journalism stud-
ies, such as the analysis of how journalists establish cultural authority and legiti-
macy (Carlson 2017; Zelizer 1990), shifting conceptions of professionalization
(Waisbord 2013; Schudson and Anderson 2009), relations between news out-
lets and their publics (Nord 2001; Usher 2016), news institutions and agenda
setting in changing media environments (Guo and McCombs 2015), and
emerging work into the affective and emotional dimensions of news production
and sharing (Papacharissi 2015; Wahl-Jorgensen 2019). Research into conserva-
tive news will also introduce new questions regarding the political economy of
media, as much of this research has focused on commercial and state-funded
media, while conservatives have relied heavily on patronage networks to build
much of their news infrastructure. In areas of overlap among journalism studies
and political communication, historically rich and nuanced accounts of conser-
vative news cultures will have much to add to analyses of mediated partisanship.
At the same time, greater engagement with existing research in journalism
and media studies will offer richer accounts of meso-and macro-level contexts
in which conservative news cultures take shape. Spurts of growth and change
in conservative news institutions cannot be isolated from the cultural processes
and contexts in which they are enmeshed. The enormous popularity and influ-
ence of the Drudge Report, for example, cannot be separated from the decline of
professional journalism’s hegemony, the burgeoning of online citizen journal-
ism, and the powerful dynamics of online attention that favor sites establishing
prominence early in the development of a digital genre.
We intend this volume to serve as a step toward more reflexivity and greater
interconnection in this nascent interdisciplinary subfield. As this field grows, we
hope to see it become an area of scholarly debate and dialogue where scholars
scrutinize and build upon each other’s theories. Centering conservative news
cultures will also give life to new problematics rising directly from this line of
inquiry. Yet, researchers studying conservative news will still have to navigate key
tensions surrounding structure and agency. Popular and scholarly critiques of
right-wing media can too easily slip into “magic bullet” discourses—presuming
conservatives are merely hapless dupes of the machinations of right-wing media
owners and producers. While this concern deserves critical scrutiny, so too do
opposing assumptions of market populism that frame conservative news out-
lets as merely reflecting their consumers’ pre-existing tastes and dispositions.
Figuring out why particular media circulate widely among certain groups and
the significance of such circulation requires thinking of media outlets as “nei-
ther mere servants of demand nor overlords capable of dictating exactly what
news content consumers must accept” (Nadler 2016, 10). Scholars must grapple
Tak ing Cons er vative News S e r i ously 9
with the negotiations that occur among conservative news outlets, their audi-
ences, and the larger array of political and social actors that shape narratives of
public life.
An Opening Salvo
The chapters in this book each explore particular conservative news cultures
while emphasizing how their analysis fits within the conservative news subfield.
This collection focuses mostly on conservative news cultures centered in the
United States, though several chapters speak to questions of theory and method
that transcend national context. Our contributors draw on cultural history,
political sociology, cultural studies, and rhetorical analysis to study conservative
news cultures across several decades and tied to outlets representing multiple
media formats, from print to television to online communities. These authors
speak to intersecting questions and topics ranging from the origins of the notion
of “liberal media” to connections between conservative media structures and
movements to the impacts of conservative news cultures on political life in the
United States and beyond. We have organized the chapters around three loose
thematic sections: mobilizing political identities, building conservative media
infrastructure, and legitimizing conservative discourses. No bright lines separate
these themes, and there are considerable overlaps among them. The chapters
in this book take up each theme as situated in different historical moments or
media formats, so each section provides an opportunity for comparative per-
spectives and historical depth along one axis of inquiry.
The first four chapters focus on the construction of imagined communities
and political identities. Much of the research on conservative media to date has
focused on the beliefs and ideologies such outlets promote. These chapters turn,
instead, to explore how conservative media have attempted, with varying suc-
cess, to foster a sense of community or collective political identification among
their audiences. As the chapters in this section demonstrate, conservative media
outlets have often promoted a sense of conservatism not only as a set of prin-
ciples, policy preferences, or beliefs but also as an integral aspect of personal
identity. Conservative media negotiate the boundaries of conservative identity
as it relates to others identities—most notably race, gender, class, religion, and
regional loyalties. Each of these chapters illustrates why much of the emotional
attachment to and passion for conservatism may be understood through the
prism of identity. Political psychologists have increasingly conceptualized the
formation of political identities as a crucial factor animating political activity
(e.g., Mason 2018; Huddy and Bankert 2017). Yet, we should be cautious not to
assume that the processes that drive people to take on political identities must be
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