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CONTENTS
List of Figures and Tables vii Acknowledgments ix
1. Taking Conservative News Seriously 1
A. J. Bauer and Anthony Nadler
2. “From a Christian Perspective”: News/Talk in Evangelical Mass Media 17
Mark Ward Sr.
3. Containing “Country Music Marxism”: How Fox News Conservatized John Rich’s “Shuttin’ Detroit Down” 47
Reece Peck
4. Weaponizing Victimhood: Discourses of Oppression and the Maintenance of Supremacy on the Right 64
Lee Bebout
5. NRA Media and Second Amendment Identity Politics 84
Dawn R. Gilpin
6. Making Media Safe for Corporate Power: Market Libertarian Discourse in the 1940s and Beyond 106
Victor Pickard
7. Conservative News and Movement Infrastructure 123
Alex DiBranco
8. The British Right-Wing Mainstream and the European Referendum 141
Angela Phillips
9. Cultivating Distrust of the Mainstream Media: Propagandists for a Liberal Machine and the American Establishment 157
Julie B. Lane
10. National Review and the Changing Narrative of Civil Rights Memory: 1968–2016 174
Robert Greene II
11. Slanting the News: Media Bias and Its Effects 190
Anthony DiMaggio
12. Bridging the Marginal and the Mainstream: Methodological Considerations for Conservative News as a Subfield 213
Mark Major
13. Conservative News Studies: Mapping an Unrealized Field 232
Anthony Nadler and A. J. Bauer
Contributors 251 Index 255
FIGURES AND TABLES
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
5.1 Sources of NRA Front-Page Headlines, mid-June 2017 to February 28, 2018 91
5.2 Dimensions of Second Amendment Discourse 101
11.1 Power of Partisan Media Consumption in Predicting Public Opinion 201
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project began with a chance conversation at the Joint Journalism Communication History Conference, held at New York University in March 2016. Tony was beginning a new project on right-wing populism; A.J. was finishing a dissertation on the history of conservative media criticism. Both lamented the relative lack of concerted scholarly focus on the study of right-wing media, and began collaborating to build community. Our efforts gained a new sense of urgency following the surprising election of Donald J. Trump to the U.S. presidency, and this book is one result.
Special thanks are due to the Department of Media and Communication Studies at Ursinus College, which employed both of us during the 2017–2018 school year when we drafted and edited much of this volume. We were both supported and sustained by the collegiality of Lynne Edwards, Jennifer Fleeger, Sheryl Goodman, Alice Leppert, Louise Woodstock, Colleen Grzywacz, and by countless students, staff, and other faculty colleagues. We are also thankful for several interlocutors who encouraged us and shaped our thinking while producing this volume: Sierra Bell, Shelley Cobb, Brian Creech, Robert Dawley, Brian Dolber, Joan Donovan, Christina Ceisel, Matt Crain, Letrell Crittenden, Julin Everett, Neil Ewen, Des Freedman, Hannah Hamad, Leslie Lars Hunter, Annie Karreth, Johannes Karreth, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Magda Koniecza, William Lawson, Jonathan Marks, David Mindich, Susan McGregor, Lee McGuigan, Brice Nixon, Andy Opel, Devon Powers, Jen Schneider, Doron Taussig, Susanna Throop, Joe Tompkins, Andrea Wenzel, Julie Wilson, and Asta Zelenkauskaite.
Tony dedicates his work on this volume to his late father, Richard Nadler. Tony’s thinking about the many topics swirling around this project have been profoundly influenced by myriad conversations beyond what surfaces in citations. Mary Vavrus and Kathy Roberts Forde have been outstanding mentors who have offered intellectual guidance and inspiration for well over a decade now. Tony would like thank family and friends outside academia who have
shared such wide-ranging perspectives on and enthusiasm for talking about partisan news who include Andy Anderson, Rebecca Blakely, Scott Blakely, Marty Foix, Brandon Irvine, Marc Levine, Bill Lindeke, Sarah H. Luizzi, Eliah Lux, Jesse McClelland, Matt Meyer, Tami Morse, Kathy Nadler, Margie Nadler, Nick Perlman, Pat Shink, Scott Schway, Andy Wilson, and Dina Zhang. While this book doesn’t address specific findings from his interviews, Tony would also like to thank the many conservative news consumers and conservative media workers who have generously volunteered to share their thoughts and stories with him through interviews. These perspectives have offered deep insight even beyond specific research findings. Tony would like to give a special recognition of gratitude to Alice Leppert who read so many drafts, indulged in so many dinner conversations, and provided rich feedback and spirited encouragement throughout this project. Tabitha Lepler offered a burst of joy at the end of the project; she even allowed Tony to get decent sleep on most days!
A.J. dedicates his work on this volume to his late mother, Mary Ann Baker. She first introduced him to conservative news, as an avid Dittohead in the early 1990s, and this book’s production coincided with her declining health. She was adamant, in her final weeks, that he spent less time with her and more time on meeting book production deadlines. He refused, but knows she would find solace that this book was nevertheless completed. He would like to thank his family—especially Bruce Baker, Emily and Mackenzie Sanders, Terry and Caroline Bauer, Karen and Mike McCoy—for their patience and understanding as he balanced his personal and professional obligations during such trying years. He is equally thankful for the support of many dear friends and comrades, especially Steven Thrasher, Tej Nagaraja, and Sam Markwell. He is grateful to the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU—especially Rodney Benson, Brett Gary, Erica Robles-Anderson, Marita Sturken, Aurora Wallace, and Angela Wu—for the opportunity to return to New York, and for the warm welcome back. His contributions to this book benefitted from the guidance of and intellectual engagement with Cristina Beltrán, Andrew Ross, Brian Ray, and Louie Dean Valencia-García, among many others. Finally, A.J. is forever grateful to Maria Arettines, whose loving encouragement is a resilient source of strength that bolsters this and all of his work.
Lastly, we wish to extend our sincere thanks to Hallie Stebbins, David McBride, Holly Mitchell, and Alphonsa James, and to our anonymous reviewers for shepherding this book through the production process. And of course, this book could not exist without our contributors. We are very grateful for all their diligent and careful research, their sharp analysis, and their persistence and patience throughout many rounds of reviews and revisions. All the contributors in this volume graciously served as reviewers for each other and offered comments that thickened the linkages and conversation throughout these chapters.
1
Taking Conservative News Seriously
A. J. Bauer and Anthony Nadler
In February 1962, CBS News broadcast a special report on right-wing extremism in the United States—among the earliest televisual exposés of certain key figures of the modern conservative movement. Thunder on the Right began with footage of members of a Minutemen militia unit who, correspondent Eric Sevareid derisively noted, were “prowling for communists on the banks of a Midwest river.” The hour-long documentary featured footage from meetings of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade and John Birch Society, as well as interviews with controversial but influential right-wing luminaries like Fred Schwartz, Billy James Hargis, H. L. Hunt, and Birch Society founder Robert Welch. Distinguishing these “extremists” from “more responsible” conservatives like Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, Sevareid warned that the “vibrant vibrations” produced by the “flapping of the right-wing” risked destabilizing US political culture at best and inciting violence at worst. Thunder, he warned, might “create lightning.”
Thunder on the Right epitomizes the tone and tenor of a good deal of journalistic and scholarly criticism of the modern conservative movement in general, and right-wing media in particular (e.g., Crawford 1980). Airing the same month that William F. Buckley’s National Review published its denunciation of Welch, the broadcast helped popularize the notion that the conservative movement could be divided between a “radical” fringe and a “responsible” mainstream. Associating the radical Right with “thunder,” it initiated an ongoing tendency among critics to rely on metaphors of commotion and clamor while describing the impacts of right-wing media and media activism. In their highly influential study Manufacturing Consent, for example, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988) accused conservative watchdog group Accuracy in Media of generating “flak,” disciplining the news media when it grew too critical of capitalism or US imperialism. David Brock (2004), an ex-conservative and founder of the progressive watchdog Media Matters for America, has been raising awareness of what he calls the Republican “noise machine” for the better part of two
decades. Meanwhile, political communication scholars Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph Cappella (2008) have identified a conservative “echo chamber,” in which conservative media outlets like Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the Wall Street Journal combine to set the news agenda for their conservative consumers while inoculating them against ideology-contradicting facts and arguments. Such metaphors—thunder, flak, noise machines, echo chambers—invite us to associate political communication on the right with cacophony. News on the Right begins from a different premise. We contend that a fuller understanding of right-wing media, and its political cultural byproducts, can be achieved by treating these phenomena as less disorienting than meaning making and deeply interwoven into many conservatives’ daily lives and political sensibilities. Indeed, since just about the dawn of mass communication, right-wing media producers have seamlessly blended reporting with commentary, narrating the news of the day from a perspective informed by their ideological commitments, as well as more circumstantial partisan reactions.
Conservative News Is Not New
While partisan news cultures, including those associated with right-wing political parties and ideologies, can be traced back at least to the late eighteenth century (Pasley 2003), and indeed across the globe, this book aims to shed light on the interrelated news cultures associated with the modern conservative movement. These modern conservative news cultures are differentiated from other news cultures in part due to their particular antagonistic relation to news produced according to professional journalistic standards and values. While several components of modern journalistic objectivity were developed during the partisan press era (Mindich 1998), they were consolidated as journalistic professionalism in the early twentieth century (Schudson 2001; Schudson and Anderson 2009), not long before free market ideologues began organizing a nascent conservative movement against the New Deal (Phillips-Fein 2009). That professionalism evolved into a “high modern” journalistic ideology that achieved true hegemony in the postwar decades (Hallin 1994; Pickard 2014)—a period coinciding with the growth of the modern conservative movement and the construction of its early mediasphere.
While Father Charles Coughlin perhaps looms largest in the collective memory of early right-wing media, he was but one of dozens of radio commentators who opposed the New Deal and contested the popular front in the 1930s and 1940s. Network-syndicated broadcasters like Gabriel Heatter, H. V. Kaltenborn, Henry J. Taylor, Fulton Lewis Jr., and George Sokolsky—each with backgrounds as newspaper reporters or columnists—filled the national airwaves
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 addition to mainstream newspapers, pro-business and anti-communist interpretations of the news flowed freely from small journals of opinion like Human Events (1944–present) and Plain Talk (1946–1950) to more widely circulated periodicals 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 products launched or boosted the careers of some of the most prominent conservative 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 formally 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 commentary 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 principles to political movement building, the New Right formed an array of conservative 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 understandings of the Second Amendment—played important roles as newsmakers, setting and framing the terms of mass-mediated national debates concerning
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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 flourished 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 conservative 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 impetus 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 conservative Matt Drudge. As more users turned to the Internet for news and commentary 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 contours of conservative politics.
Defining “Conservative News Cultures”
For much of the twentieth century, when professional journalism was defined according to “high modern” values like impartiality and objectivity, many viewed right-wing news with trepidation. From Robert McCormick to Richard Viguerie, from Fulton Lewis Jr. to Rush Limbaugh, right-wing publishers and broadcasters were often accused of irresponsibility or unprofessional behavior at best, demagoguery at worst. All the while, sympathetic readers and listeners have relied on various mixtures of both journalistic professional and right-wing media outlets to make sense of the news of the day. In some cases, the gap between how a particular issue or event was reported by mainstream news media and by a right-wing commentator may have proved instrumental in helping consumers realize their previously unacknowledged ideological dispositions. In other cases, consuming right-wing news may have allowed self-identified ideologues
to imagine themselves as part of a broader right-wing public or movement. In yet other cases, conservative commentators may have helped draw in new publics by speaking to grievances and frustrations in novel ways—especially to those frustrations not addressed by competing pundits or activists. From the late 1940s onward, as “conservative” became an increasingly salient identification among those on the right, consumption of right-wing periodicals and radio broadcasts helped mobilize and synchronize self-identified conservatives not only around abstract ideological beliefs but also through the daily travails of mediated political conflict; it also helped to cultivate an attachment to conservatism as a social identity (Mason 2018). This quotidian production and consumption of conservative news and the circulation of that news within and beyond the modern conservative movement combine to produce what we term conservative news cultures.
This book’s aim is to bring focus to conservative news cultures as a crucial area for academic inquiry. We write at a moment when the vast power of conservative news cultures to affect the circulation and norms of political discourse could not be rendered more starkly. Most days, Donald J. Trump tunes in to Fox & Friends, a cable talk show whose sometimes conspiratorial news judgment is often reflected in the president’s trademark early morning tweets. Those tweets are themselves treated as news—the controversial ones covered breathlessly by mainstream political reporters across mediums. The president’s supporters like and retweet his posts, spreading their content among likeminded friends and followers across platforms, while his detractors retweet with snarky rejoinders. Often rejoinder tweets themselves go viral, giving quaternary life to bits and pieces of news originating in the judgment of Fox News reporters, editors, and commentators.
While conservative news cultures are by no means unique to our hypermediated present, Trump’s tweet storms offer an example that keenly illustrates the multifaceted nature of this object of analysis. Understanding the phenomenon requires inquiry into no fewer than four sites of meaning-making activity: news production, news consumption and sharing practices, the dialectical relationship between news producers and audiences, and the agency of newsmakers. Studies foregrounding a single site will not necessarily shed light on others. For example, an ethnography of the Fox & Friends production process would yield little insight into how average viewers experience watching the program, let alone how Trump chooses what to tweet from it. Likewise, a rhetorical analysis of Trump tweets might have little to say about the news values of the sources he incorporates into those tweets, not to mention the expectations of those who consume news vicariously through them. It is only practical that various researchers will concentrate their attention on particular sites of conservative news culture. Yet, our hope is that as scholars continue to elucidate particular
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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 political economic structures of circulation, and according to the myriad interpretive frameworks employed by audiences. A particular news culture results from consistent 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 institutions 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 having 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 fostering 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 movement’s internal contradictions, both personal and political, have historically resulted in a panoply of media outlets with varied and oft- competing ideological 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 conservative 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.
An Imperative for Journalism Studies and Beyond
While multiple disciplines have unique contributions to make to the study of conservative news cultures, the interdisciplinary field of journalism studies has a central role to play. Michael Schudson (2000, 56) once observed that, despite the wide variety of societies in which it can be found, journalism consistently functions as the “social coordination of individuals and groups through shared symbols and meanings.” He added that, among other traits, the practice of journalism nearly always presents itself as conveying information and commentary on contemporary affairs, through a discourse that takes itself to be publicly important and truthful, while addressing a dispersed public audience (57). Journalism studies scholars, who have embraced this capacious view of journalism, have ventured far beyond the positivist approaches that dominated much of journalism and mass communication research of the mid-twentieth century. These researchers have cultivated a wide variety of intellectual methods and theoretical frameworks that will prove helpful in analyzing the institutional dynamics, meaning-making and identity-constructing processes, and socialcoordinating aspects of conservative news cultures.
To take conservative news seriously, however, journalism studies scholarship must continue expanding its horizons and scope. As John Nerone (2013, 17) has put it, much of journalism studies has centered its analysis on “a historically specific form of journalism in historically specific news organizations,” namely, journalism as “it is exercised by professional journalists working in industrially organized newsrooms under the supervision of editors, usually in newspapers.” As the professional newspaper—and high modern journalism, more generally—loses its once hegemonic social role, journalism studies scholars have rightly expanded their focus to include other journalistic forms, both the emergent and the long neglected. To make sense of the wide range of institutions and practices through which publics assemble narratives of political life and coordinate social action, journalism scholars are taking more seriously literary journalism (Forde 2008; Bak and Reynolds 2011), left social movement journalism (Atton and Hamilton 2008; Downing 2000), community and ethnic journalism (Matsaganis, Katz, and Ball-Rokeach 2011; Lauterer 2006), tabloid journalism (Gripsrud 2000; Zelizer 2009), and other genres. Yet, journalism scholars have been slow to recognize conservative news and commentary as a rich site of inquiry (Bauer 2018).
As right-wing populist movements have shaken the political landscape in countries across the globe, ignoring conservative and right-leaning news cultures is no longer an option for journalism studies. Not only does conservative news play a powerful role informing its audiences, but also it provides a key vantage
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 studies, such as the analysis of how journalists establish cultural authority and legitimacy (Carlson 2017; Zelizer 1990), shifting conceptions of professionalization (Waisbord 2013; Schudson and Anderson 2009), relations between news outlets 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 conservative 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 conservative 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 influence of the Drudge Report, for example, cannot be separated from the decline of professional journalism’s hegemony, the burgeoning of online citizen journalism, 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 outlets 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 “neither mere servants of demand nor overlords capable of dictating exactly what news content consumers must accept” (Nadler 2016, 10). Scholars must grapple
with the negotiations that occur among conservative news outlets, their audiences, 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 perspectives 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 success, 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 principles, 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
similar across social contexts. Analyzing how conservative news helps formulate and mobilize political identities may provide critical insights on social processes that intensify (or de-intensify) emotional attachments to political identities in particular, historical moments.
In “ ‘From a Christian Perspective’: News/Talk in Evangelical Mass Media,” Mark Ward Sr. examines the power of news programs produced by contemporary networks of conservative evangelical broadcasters. Ward argues that the programming of these networks positions a “Christian worldview” as a conservative political identity inseparable from religious practice and Christian modes of apprehending the world. Ward analyzes how conservative Christian news producers lay claim to a legitimacy that is undergirded by biblical authority as they set news agendas and frame stories. Ward situates contemporary Christian radio within a long history of evangelical struggles over access to broadcasting resources and locates the current genre formation of evangelical news within the United States’ deregulated and highly consolidated broadcast markets.
In his chapter on “Containing ‘Country Music Marxism,’ ” Reece Peck tracks the populist stylistic resonances between country western music and Fox News Channel programming. Using country musician John Rich’s 2009 song “Detroit” as a case study, Peck demonstrates how Fox News employed its unique mix of tabloid aesthetics and populist epistemic appeals to conscribe potentially progressive interpretations of Rich’s song. In doing so, Peck illuminates how Fox endows its conservative political news brand with affective power and social meaning. Tracking the migration of country style from the music sector to the news sector, Peck elucidates how political-taste alignments factor into conservative news cultures. His chapter serves as a call for greater scholarly attention to the way conservative news actively partisanizes national taste divisions while relying on those very divisions in framing its news coverage.
In “Weaponizing Victimhood: Discourses of Oppression and the Maintenance of Supremacy on the Right,” Lee Bebout analyzes a rhetoric of “weaponized victimhood” that he argues plays a crucial role in uniting disparate factions of the contemporary American Right. Weaponized victimhood speaks to a felt sense of loss of power and esteem among social groups facing challenges to their traditionally privileged status positions. In Bebout’s account, this expression of grievance takes on a hyperbolic form through assertions that groups such as whites, men, and Christians face great social oppression. They are portrayed as victims of such projected threats as a “War on Christmas” and “feminazi” activists. Bebout argues that such victimization narratives circulate across various types of conservative and right-wing media—from Fox News to alt right and men’s rights websites. A common rhetoric of victimization cultivates a shared affective sensibility among groups ranging from avowed white supremacists to anti-feminists to others reacting against perceived challenge to their social power and standing.
In her chapter on “NRA Media and Second Amendment Identity Politics,” Dawn Gilpin considers the National Rifle Association (NRA) as not merely a lobbying outfit, trade association, or hobbyist group, but as a full-fledged mediasphere. Since the early 2000s, the NRA has aggressively expanded its footprint within the broader right-wing media environment—it publishes four print magazines and a highly integrated array of micro-targeted online print and video content, social media platforms, and original online television programming. Via a content analysis of NRA.org, a site that aggregates and prioritizes content from across the group’s multimedia platforms, Gilpin employs critical discourse analysis to illuminate the site’s populist themes and rhetorical styles. She finds that the NRA combines the trappings of news genres and right-wing discourses with populist modes of expression to amplify and reinforce the deep affective ties between gun ownership and conservative political identity.
The middle three chapters focus on the construction of conservative news infrastructure. Despite the well-worn association between conservatism and traditionalism, conservative media has been a dynamic force, often tapping into affordances of new technologies and leveraging shifts in regulations with as much, or arguably more, fervor and skill as counterparts on the left. Scholarship on conservative news needs to extend its analysis beyond conservative news texts, their producers, and the audiences who make meaning out of those texts. Scholars must also grapple with how conservative media structures interact with broader media landscapes and other facets of political life. In a commercial media system, the dominate understanding of why particular news outlets spread and thrive is frequently assumed to be a matter of meritocracy: the kinds of news that most match a community’s tastes will succeed in the marketplace. Yet, supply does not merely chase demand. Building an influential news outlet entails devoting resources and investing in efforts to mobilize audiences and cultivate their tastes and expectations (Nadler 2016). The chapters in this section offer insights on how conservatives have built their own news infrastructures, how their infrastructures have influenced broader circuits of news flow, and the conditions that have enabled both.
In “Making Media Safe for Corporate Power: Market Libertarian Discourse in the 1940s and Beyond,” Victor Pickard argues that a corporate libertarian vision of media policy established the discursive terrain in which conservative media ultimately thrived. The corporate libertarian approach conceives of news media as a commodity—rather than a public resource—best left under private control and ownership. Pickard argues that this vision became a hegemonic common sense that came to dominate US media policy discourses—thanks, in part, to a propagandistic influence campaign executed by corporate interests. This led to insufficient resources invested in a democratic news system. Such a policy orientation created conditions for a commercial media system driven by
a competition to meet consumer demand. Yet, as Pickard suggests, it also created a space for right-wing media activists to mobilize and cultivate conservative publics through outlets propped up by patronage networks and ideologically motivated venture capital.
In her chapter on “Conservative News and Movement Infrastructure,” Alex DiBranco expands our thinking of conservative media beyond traditional forms. DiBranco notes that, while a first generation of conservative media activists invested in more or less traditional media enterprises (e.g., magazines, newsletters, radio programming), by the 1970s movement activists associated with the New Right were investing in think tanks and foundations—not only diversifying the conservative movement infrastructure but also complicating the variegated means of sourcing and circulating conservative news and commentary. DiBranco demonstrates how the movement’s turn toward nonprofit organizational structures in the 1970s enabled its institutional proliferation. She maps the result—a dizzying array of funders, organizations, publications, and activists whose efforts continue to wield outsized influence over both the conservative movement and the news cultures that surround it.
In her chapter on “The British Right-Wing Mainstream and the European Referendum,” Angela Phillips uses the 2016 Brexit campaign as a window into how the right-wing establishment press in the United Kingdom influences the country’s broad political agenda. While scholars have tended to emphasize the outsized role of the BBC as a “trust anchor” (Wessells, Ekelin, Kemp, and Forsberg 2018), whose journalistic professionalism mitigates some of the polarizing effects of the United Kingdom’s partisan tabloid print culture, Phillips demonstrates how the latter played a crucial agenda-setting role in the European referendum debate—exploiting the Remain/Leave dichotomy, and the BBC’s “strategic balance,” to frame the debate within discursive limits set by the conservative elite. The result further undermined trust in British broadcasting while largely excluding organized labor from the referendum debate. Phillips’s chapter provides interesting comparative fodder for scholars of right-wing news in the US context, as the EU referendum in many ways replicated the structural conditions that underpin the two-party horse race coverage common in US mainstream political reporting.
This book’s final four chapters turn toward the broad discursive templates that conservative journalists, commentators, and media activists have developed for understanding their work and worldviews against the backdrop of professional journalistic norms and historical shifts in common sense concerning social issues. As discussed at this chapter’s outset, the early conservative movement faced a national media narrative that depicted its leadership and grassroots both as composed of histrionic figures toiling at the political fringe. Attempting to combat this narrative, conservative news cultures positioned themselves within
a broader mediated terrain of respectability politics. Whether by policing the boundaries of “responsible” conservatism—especially as they pertain to conspiratorial analysis and the shifting social acceptance of overt appeals to white supremacy—or by identifying and narrating the workings of a “liberal media” elite, conservative movement leaders developed discursive frameworks for understanding politics that have long since taken on lives of their own beyond their initial movement context.
Among the central issues driving the conservative movement’s discursive productivity was the question of race and racism in the United States. In his chapter, “National Review and the Changing Narrative of Civil Rights Memory: 1968–2016,” Robert Greene II analyzes the National Review’s shifting narratives of the contentious relationship between the modern conservative movement, Martin Luther King Jr., and the broader civil rights movement. National Review writers largely opposed the civil rights movement up until the mid-1960s, casting Black freedom activists and their goals as threats to civilized order and the spirit of the US Constitution. Yet, the National Review would ultimately take on a leading role in reconsidering the conservative movement’s animosity toward King and civil rights—drawing parallels between conservative principles and civil rights claims, and even making fraught color-blind conservative claims to King’s legacy.
The National Review played a crucial role in constructing the “liberal media” trope in the mid-1950s, as Julie Lane’s chapter in this volume, “Cultivating Distrust of the Mainstream Media,” compellingly demonstrates. Lane traces the English origins of “the Establishment” as a rhetorical figure and shows how National Review writers successfully appropriated it, constructing a unifying, besieged mentality that opened space for the nascent conservative media countersphere. These writers placed a critique of media bias within a broader narrative of a smug and elite “Liberal Establishment” that operated across many institutions to, in Buckley’s words, “set the bounds of permissible opinions.”
Through closely analyzing two early National Review columns dedicated to media criticism along with internal discussions among key writers, Lane adds nuance to previous historical accounts of the origins of this pillar of conservative news discourse. She notes that the National Review made a case of liberal bias in media that was not solely tied to a critique of the professional objectivity. Critics writing in the magazine saw purportedly objective professional coverage as tainted with the same bias as liberal journals of opinion. She argues that the National Review “claimed that individual media outlets did not simply tilt left on some issues but worked together to demand conformity with the entire liberal agenda.”
Tackling the continued existence of the “liberal media” trope head on, Anthony DiMaggio’s chapter—“Slanting the News: Media Bias and Its Effects”— investigates whether consumption of Fox, MSNBC, and CNN is associated with
formation of conservative or liberal political attitudes. Analyzing public opinion data collected by the Pew Research Center between 2004 and 2016, DiMaggio’s statistical regression analysis finds little evidence of a liberal polarizing effect for CNN and MSNBC consumption on political attitudes. On the other hand, he finds both selective exposure and polarization to be at work on the right, particularly in relation to Fox News consumption. DiMaggio’s findings corroborate those of network analysts (Benkler, Faris, and Roberts 2018) who have identified a structural asymmetry in political polarization within online media—with right-wing news audiences more insular and their preferred media more ideologically self-reinforcing than their counterparts on the liberal left. DiMaggio clarifies that asymmetrical polarization in general, and conservative news in particular, has measurable effects on political attitude formation among cable television consumers, not only consumers of online content.
In his chapter, “Bridging the Marginal and the Mainstream,” Mark Major further expands our understanding of “liberal media” discourse by analyzing its historical formation in terms of public sphere theory. Advancing a discursive institutionalist methodological approach, rooted in sustained analysis of the actors, ideas, and institutions that give conservative news its cultural form and force, Major asks: how did the notion of the “liberal media” come to have such influence within and beyond conservative news cultures? Major’s approach explicitly connects conservative news infrastructures with the production of “liberal media” discourse. He contends that conservative journalists, commentators, and media activists began conceptualizing the “liberal media” within the institutions of the conservative countersphere by the 1950s and early 1960s. Once this discourse had been crystalized and legitimized among conservative commentators and their eager audiences, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and other prominent Republican voices promoted its circulation within the national public sphere, where it became a template for understanding and judging professional journalism far beyond the conservative countersphere.
The book concludes with a mapping of several lines of academic inquiry that, we contend, speak to the yet-unrealized field of conservative news studies. Scholars have been researching various components of conservative news cultures for decades, but too often disciplinary silos, differing methodological assumptions, and a lack of standardized terminology have precluded the sort of focused scholarly dialogue that typically constitutes a field. Our final chapter highlights the extant disciplinary and interdisciplinary debates that a robust field of conservative news studies would ideally both weave together and build upon. These chapters are by no means exhaustive of the wide array of outlets, audiences, and interactions that comprise conservative news cultures. No one volume could conclusively document and analyze all conservative news and its myriad impacts. Instead, we intend this volume to serve as an opening salvo in
a growing interdisciplinary conversation about conservative news, both in the United States and hopefully around the world. Wherever readers spy a gap in this volume’s coverage, we encourage them to take strides to fill it. While the modern conservative movement knows no shortage of egoists, and indeed prides itself on individualism, conservative news cultures are the work of multiple generations of conservative publishers, editors, reporters, commentators, readers, listeners, and viewers—all working collectively to make conservative meaning out of the news of their day. Understanding the scale and nuance of conservative news cultures will require a similarly collective endeavor on the part of researchers.
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