Transcript: What Democrats Can Learn from the Right’s Media Strategy

Author A.J. Bauer says that over the last eight decades conservatives have both created a massive alternative media ecosystem and successfully undermined traditional news outlets.

This is a lightly edited transcript of the April 6 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: Good morning, everybody. I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now. I’m joined today by AJ Bauer. He’s a professor at the University of Alabama in the journalism department, and we’re going to talk about his new book. The book is called Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against the Press. AJ, welcome.

AJ Bauer: Thanks. Thanks so much for having me, Perry.

Bacon: So just in the broadest sense, give the thesis of your book.

Bauer: Yeah. So the book gives a broad overview based on the premise: where did conservatives start to believe that the media was biased against them and against their worldview? And whereas a lot of earlier projects will look to the start of right-wing media, let’s say with Fox News in 1996, or Rush Limbaugh in the late 1980s, early 1990s—some go back even further to the founding of National Review in 1955.

I go back into the 1940s and really point to the origins of the conservative critical disposition toward the press during the McCarthy era and in the late 1940s. And so the book is a broad overview of the formations of the modern conservative movement with a kind of focus on their relationship and conflict with the press.

Bacon: And so when does your story start? And I guess the first idea is, well, talk about when does your story start. Let’s go with that first.

Bauer: Yeah, so it starts in the 1930s and ‘40s, actually, with a movement called the Progressive Media Reform Movement that’s chronicled by a great historian named Victor Picard. And that book is basically — or his book is basically — about this movement among the popular front liberals, progressives, leftists in the 1940s advocating for a fairer media environment, broadcast regulations, better journalism practices.

And during that time period there was a belief that basically the media was biased in favor of the right. Franklin Roosevelt during the New Deal was fond of saying that 85 percent of the newspapers were against him. This is one reason why Roosevelt went and did his fireside chats, using the radio to circumvent the press.

What I ask is: there’s this perception in the ‘30s and ‘40s, widespread, that the media was biased in favor of the right. How do we get from there to the media being considered as biased against the right? And what I find is in the 1940s a series of different changes take place. One of these is a lot of left anti-Stalinists start drifting rightward, and they bring some of these structural media critiques with them as they go rightward. These are people like Eugene Lyons and Ralph de Toledano who literally are writing for left anti-Stalinist publications in the ‘40s and then by 1955 are working for National Review.

But I also argue that there was a kind of broader discursive shift that takes place, partly by the Second Red Scare, which is commonly known as McCarthyism. And so McCarthyism is a time period where a lot of progressive media reformers are redbaited and pushed to the margins of public life, which then creates an opening for the right to lay claim to that discourse in media criticism.

Bacon: And is the idea that the media is liberal invented by conservatives at this point? Or is it more—is that starting at this point, or do they actually believe that, or are they inventing it for political reasons? A little bit of both?

Bauer: There was concern during the kind of late ‘40s and early ‘50s by a lot of anti-communists that communists were using liberal—what was called fellow travelers—to spread communist messaging secretly, or, sub textually, right, over the airwaves. And that was basically a fraudulent belief, right? That was like not necessarily happening, at least not at the level that they suspected.

But nevertheless, there was some anxiety around it. But the bigger thing that’s happening in the 1930s and ‘40s that is probably more impactful here, right, is that a lot of conservatives—or I should say conservative ideas and beliefs were really unpopular. So in the course of my research, I was reading Reader’s Digest and I found an ad for a book called How to Be Popular, Though Conservative. And I argue that’s reflective of the broader tenor of the time period, that conservatives felt that their ideas were unpopular, conservative beliefs were not being spoken publicly.

Politicians weren’t rallying around them as much. And so there was a series of wealthy people—billionaires, in today’s parlance—who were basically [asking], how do we fix this? One of these important billionaires was H.L. Hunt, who was a famous oil man from Texas. And H.L. Hunt had this idea that the problem isn’t that people aren’t conservative. He believed that the public—around 60 or 70 percent of people—were conservative innately, but that they were afraid to say anything because it was so unpopular. They felt stigmatized by it.

So in 1951, he launched something called Facts Forum. And Facts Forum was a series of local discussion groups coordinated out of his offices in Dallas, Texas, that were designed to get local people discussing the issues of the day—debating what kinds of news they read and whether they trusted it or not, and that sort of thing. And this project was really difficult to scale. It ended up being fragmentary around the country, mostly aligned with Hunt and his associates and their friends as they spread throughout the nation.

And so he scaled this up by taking advantage of a new federal policy in 1949 called the Fairness Doctrine. Now the Fairness Doctrine is something that you and your listeners may be familiar with. A lot of liberals and progressives look back fondly at the Fairness Doctrine period, which is the late 1940s through the 1980s, as a period when the federal government required—over the radio and TV—coverage of controversial issues in a way that balanced both sides, right, that gave, in this case, liberals and conservatives equal weight.

So what H.L. Hunt does is he hires this guy Dan Smoot, who’s a former FBI agent and kind of vehement anti-communist. And Dan Smoot starts doing radio programs where he’ll give the kind of liberal side of an issue and it’ll be not very well articulated and boring. And then he’ll give the conservative side and it’ll be this kind of great oratory, really selling it, right.

Facts Forum becomes this kind of massive radio and television operation, partly because local broadcasters at the time had this new federal mandate and H.L. Hunt basically funded this programming that fulfilled that mandate but tilted it, or skewed it, to the right. And my argument in the book is that the origins of the kind of conflict between the press and the right start around Facts Forum.

So in late 1953 and early 1954, Ben Bagdikian—who later is a famous reporter for The Washington Post and later writes a book called Media Monopoly, a lot of progressive media reform people in the later 20th century familiar with him—he wrote an exposé in 1953–54 on Facts Forum for the Providence Journal. And in that he accused it of being a right-wing front, basically. This was a time period toward the latter stages of the McCarthy era, so people were familiar with what a front was, right—it was a kind of secret, clandestine operation, often by communists, to have something that isn’t nominally communist but tricks people into being so. And he accused Facts Forum of being a right-wing front, basically.

Now, at that point in 1954, Facts Forum shifts its emphasis toward critiquing the press. And so part of what I argue is, from these very early days—before National Review was founded in 1955—you’ve got this conservative grassroots media operation, Facts Forum, that gets into some trouble with the press and then creates this kind of conflictual relationship with it. And from there you start to see the beginning of the belief in liberal media bias.

Bacon: It’s probably obvious, but by the time Nixon is president, I think the critique of The New York Times and so on is out there. When does the mainstream media is too liberal—when does that start being said by Republican officials and politicians?

Bauer: Yeah, so you’re right that that it’s common to look to the Agnew speech, right, in 1969, where he goes against the television networks for their critical coverage of Richard Nixon’s speech about Vietnamization, turning the war over to South Vietnam. But that actually was the kind of third part. That was the thing that establishes the trend.

So among the right, the kind of first instance of the press targeting—or engaging in conflictual relations with the right—is the McCarthy era, culminating in not only McCarthy’s censure but also in Facts Forum getting tarred as a right-wing front. The second instance of that is 1964, which is the Goldwater campaign, which is a famous origination point of the modern conservative movement. William F. Buckley and a lot of his cadre of conservative activists—respectable conservative activists—put all their eggs in the Goldwater basket. Goldwater says a bunch of really outlandish things, gets very easily tarred by the Johnson administration as extreme.

And so Goldwater also blames the press for his loss in 1964—basically, the press for carrying LBJ, helping LBJ have his landslide, right? And so by Goldwater you’ve got—not just Goldwater isn’t, Nixon aren’t the first Republicans, right? Goldwater is really the first Republican, as well as McCarthy beforehand. And so if we take this kind of longer view of right-wing media and of right-wing media criticism, we actually see most of the 20th century—or at least from the ‘40s onwards—as being a period of the cultivation of disbelief.

Bacon: You mentioned National Review. So is there a parallel thing at the same time where they’re creating conservative media and also critiquing the liberal media? Are those happening at once, or are there periods where one starts and the other catches up? Or how does that… because now with today we have Fox News and we still have critiques of the press being liberal, but when does that sort of start?

Bauer: Yeah. And so in the book I look at this outlet that was a hyperlocal John Birch Society outlet in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1960s. And so part of what I argue is—so there’s a great book by Nicole Hemmer called Messengers of the Right that looks at William F. Buckley and Henry Regnery and Clarence Manion, the kind of respectable conservative movement folks.

And part of what Buckley does in the 1950s and 1960s—especially, primarily in the 1960s—is he tries to relegate the kind of Looney Tunes folks, right? So the John Birch Society, especially some of the more overt white supremacists, the Klan in the South, to the kind of margins of the right. He holds them at arm’s length or throws them under the bus, whatever parlance you want to use, right? And he doesn’t necessarily succeed in this.

And Buckley wasn’t totally against the Birchers—he basically goes against the leadership. But my understanding is Buckley’s mom was a Bircher, right? He was not necessarily going to get rid of all of these people. And so Buckley’s media strategy was twofold, right? He was critical of the media, right—he used the liberal media trope. But he also wanted to ingratiate himself and his movement with the media, right?

He wanted mainstream media—The New York Times, The New Republic, The Nation—to consider conservatism and to consider National Review as a kind of respectable opposition. Somebody that they could engage with, right, not somebody that they could easily dismiss.

On the other hand, you have the John Birch Society, which created its own media operations—magazines like Review of the News and American Opinion, which are less commonly talked about today, but are still around. The John Birch Society still exists, right—it never was completely disbanded or anything.

But in the 1960s, while Buckley is doing this kind of two-step, right—yeah, critiquing the press but then trying to ingratiating himself—the Birchers were being actively targeted by the press. And so I argue in the book that the idea of liberal media bias, the critical disposition toward the press, really fosters at the grassroots outside of Buckley’s reach, partly because they’re the ones who are being adamantly targeted by the press at a time when the press is warming up to more respectable conservatives like Buckley.

And so the book shows how this plays out. But when you look at that Birmingham Independent, the kind of hyperlocal paper, they hated the press and they hated Buckley, right? They were like, all of these people are against us, basically. And they were obviously championing politicians like George Wallace, for example, who expressed a much more overt advocacy of white supremacy and segregation in the South.

Bacon: So you mentioned George Wallace. I was going to come to the ‘60s anyway. You mentioned the ‘60s. How does the Civil Rights Movement play into this whole—is that another, is that a big moment for the media’s too liberal? Cause the media does cover civil rights at........

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