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 times in a more “favorable” way.
Bauer: Yeah, absolutely. And so a lot of those national news reporters were based at outlets in New York and Washington, D.C., or at outlets that were owned by chains based in the North—either Chicago or New York, or wherever it would be.
And so there was an active discourse in the South during the 1950s and 1960s, especially among white Southern editors who worked for papers that were in favor of maintaining the racial status quo in the South, who saw—basically these similar kind of discourse to the way that these folks talked about Martin Luther King and other civil rights activists as outside agitators—they also saw the press as a kind of outside agitator: people who were not from the South, who were coming down and reporting on the “problems” in the South in a way that wasn’t fully understanding of what the white supremacists at the time thought was the kind of natural harmony between Blacks and whites in race relations in the South.
And part of the kind of expansion of this idea of liberal media bias, especially within the South, happens during the ‘60s and during the civil rights campaign, partly because the Civil Rights Movement is leveraging media, right? It’s engaging in civil disobedience in order to attract cameras, to show off the horrors of white supremacy and Jim Crow. And those Southerners who wanted to maintain the status quo, right, saw the press as participating in that project.
Bacon: We talked about Nixon a little bit earlier. I used to work at The Washington Post. So talk about the role of Watergate in this because then you have the media on some level does push out a president, a certain way. And it’s a Republican president, obviously. So how does that play into this?
Bauer: Totally. So Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, all of the kind of press’s critical coverage of the war in Vietnam—and the fact that people, conservatives who are watching TV, were getting live reports about Vietnam and casualties in their television sets, right, as they’re watching TV.
And so the way to think about this is: throughout the 20th century, as you see all of the kind of conflicts that emerge, all the movements for social change—the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement, the feminist movements, queer liberation movements—as all of these developments are taking place in the 1960s, if you are a traditional white conservative American watching your evening news, watching Walter Cronkite, you are seeing an increasing gap between the world as you understand it—the kind of traditional Christian, nuclear family values— you’re seeing increasingly a disconnect between that and what you’re seeing on television.
And conservative politicians, Republicans like Nixon and Agnew, are able to leverage that disconnect, that gap between the perceptions of these individuals and what they’re increasingly seeing on television, right? And so rather than saying, oh, the world is changing, right, maybe I need to change too, you need to reassess the way I understand the world—these folks retrench, right? They say the media is skewing it, right, they’re biased against us. And that’s what’s actually convincing us that there’s a problem. Really, there’s no problem at all.
Bacon: So 1980 — we actually have, Goldwater is lost, but now the movement conservative has won the election. So I don’t actually remember: is Reagan very anti-press? Because I think part of the story about Reagan is he’s a master of imaging. He’s an actor, he’s a media manipulator. So is he very invested in this liberal media idea? I don’t actually remember.
Bauer: Reagan is like Buckley in the sense that he is the great communicator, right—in the sense that he is trying to—he’s not criticizing the press so much as he’s engaging in kind of jocular navigating of the press. But Reagan takes less of a lead here, actually, than another organization during the time—or a few organizations that helped get him elected.
So in the 1970s, there was a series of new organizations that emerge. Things like the Heritage Foundation, right, things like Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum. I talk a little bit about Eagle Forum in the book, but I’m only mostly focused on a group called Accuracy in Media. And so Accuracy in Media is created in 1969, just a few months before Agnew’s famous speech that tars the press. And basically throughout the 1970s, Accuracy in Media goes about demonstrating, here’s an example of liberal media bias, here’s an example, right—really ratchets up the kind of bias narrative throughout the 1970s.
Now, in the late 1970s, you have a person named Richard Viguerie, right, who’s still alive as far as I know. And he is a direct-mail pioneer for politics on the right. And so he starts cobbling together these different single-issue campaigns, right, in order to raise awareness and build support for what ends up being the kind of Reagan revolution in 1980. And Viguerie leverages this media criticism that’s rising by Accuracy in Media, even though they had a tense relationship at times—to basically say, don’t trust the press, we need to elect Reagan.
And so throughout the Reagan administration, Viguerie and Accuracy in Media and all these other organizations are still maintaining their critique of the press. But less so Reagan, right—Reagan has to do business with the press still. And so again, part of what you’re seeing throughout the history of the modern conservative movement is a kind of delicate balance between trying to win over the press, especially when you’re in a position of power where you need the press in order to convey your message—people like Goldwater failed at this, right, Nixon and Reagan—and then a constant grassroots mobilization against the press, not only to perpetuate that idea of liberal media bias, but because there was an earnest critical disposition toward the press among conservatives. It wasn’t just that conservatives were using this to tar the press—they earnestly believed it. And that’s part of the conceit of the book.
Bacon: I was going to ask that, because like today, if you go to a Donald Trump event, if you ask about the media, they’ll boo the media. When I’ve done this before, they will ask where your press pass is, they’ll say fake news. We’ve talked about elites, we’ve talked about politicians—was there a moment where the average—I don’t know, if it’s polling or what have you—but when did the average Republican voter take on this sort of anti-media identity? Because that’s pervasive now. When did that start?
Bauer: Yeah. And so I think that the book tracks the development of that identity throughout the course of the 1940s and onwards. But again, I argue that it really starts in the 1950s.
And so part of what the book argues is Facts Forum—that early 1950s organization—is really the first grassroots mobilization of the modern conservative movement. It wasn’t calling itself conservative yet, because again, H.L. Hunt was trying to call things “constructive” because he thought “conservative” was a bad brand, right?
But all of those people, or many of those people, who showed up to Facts Forum events, who listened to its programming, people who participated in it—they end up going on and consuming National Review by 1955. Some of them joined the John Birch Society by the late 1950s. And there is an institutional memory within the right, to the point that—and I write about this a little bit at the end of my book—I was raised conservative, I was raised listening to Rush Limbaugh as a kid in the 1990s, and I had a critical disposition toward the press, right?
And so the way that this works is: you’ve got folks in the 1950s who are engaged in conservative politics, you’ve got this critical disposition to the press, young people like William F. Buckley coming in the ‘50s and into the ‘60s, and they are told by the elders, right, oh, the press is going to come at you—this is the story of Joe McCarthy, right. And institutional memory within conservatism and within conservative identity, the press, the targeting and the animosity toward the press, is baked into that.
And this is one reason why I argue that it isn’t so much simply the press doing something that makes conservatives feel better, or appealing to conservative audiences in some kind of way—this is baked into conservative DNA. Not in a biological sense obviously, but in terms of what it means to be a conservative politically, as a political identity partly means having this critical disposition toward the press.
And that means that when they’re consuming legacy or mainstream media, they’re reading it against the grain, right. And then when they’re consuming conservative media, they’re feeling validated, right. And so that’s the dynamic that’s played out, especially in the post–Fairness Doctrine era, with the Limbaugh talk radio moment and then Fox News and et cetera—is, now conservatives have a whole array, right, an entire right-wing media apparatus that’s going to give them content that feels good to them, that is consistent with their worldview.
That doesn’t mean that’s all that they consume, though. They still do go and consume legacy or other media, but they do so in a way that gives them things to criticize, right, that gives them things that make them feel motivated to stick with their conservative media.
Bacon: We’ve gone from the ‘40s to the 1990s, really. In this period—when does the media start realizing, oh, we’re being demonized. When does the awareness on the other side come that we’re being demonized, we need to have a strategy to deal with that? I don’t actually have any idea.
Bauer: Yeah. So that’s a really great question—I talk about this in the book too. And so in the late 1960s, you mentioned Agnew’s famous speech, right? So Agnew gives this speech that says basically—Nixon gives a speech. This is his famous “silent majority” speech, by the way, where he says we’re going to be scaling back U.S. military operations in Vietnam, we’re going to be turning things over to the South Vietnamese.
Nixon’s approval ratings go up after that speech, actually—the public likes that speech because they’re tired of the war. But the pundits on television pan the speech, especially this idea of the silent majority, right—they criticize the rhetoric of Nixon. So Agnew comes out and says, hey, look, there’s this gap—the gap again, right—between popular perceptions, which is this kind of great silent majority of conservatives as they imagine it. Basically similar to how Agnew—or how H.L. Hunt imagined that, by the way, right, so back to the ‘50s.
But anyway, Agnew gives this speech. Now, some context: by the late 1960s, most Americans are getting most of their news from TV—that’s the primary source of news for most Americans. Now there’s an increasing amount of criticism of television, though, not necessarily from conservatives, but from media critics broadly speaking. The idea here was that television dumbs things down, that it’s “if it bleeds, it leads,” right—it’s creating a negative perception of things, right, that it is leading to a dumbing down of American discourse because of soundbites, right.
So all of the kind of conventional criticisms of television as a medium are really picking up in the 1960s. Agnew’s speech dovetails with those. And so what you see, interestingly, is in the immediate press response to Agnew’s speech, the press pans it—they say this is censorship, Agnew’s trying to use the federal government against the press, against television networks, this is untoward, right. But then if you look at Columbia Journalism Review, right, in early 1970—I think January 1970—they do a special issue that has a lot of critiques that say, look, Agnew’s wrong, the press isn’t liberal, right, this is absurd. But then you start to see people saying: what does he get right? There’s something about his critique that lands, right. It isn’t that the media is biased against the left or against Nixon, but there is something, right—there’s a lack of trust.
So what you start to see in the 1970s, among journalists and among scholars who study journalism, is an increasing concern with trust in journalism. So all these trust-in-journalism surveys, like Gallup and Pew, those start in the 1970s, actually. And so the question—or the kind of problematic—of trust in journalism starts in the ‘70s, as a result of not only right-wing press pressure but these other pressures that then cause them to actually consider those right-wing pressures.
The other thing that happens during this time period is you have something called the National News Council, which was a briefly lived press ombudsperson from the early 1970s to the early 1980s, was independent, and it was designed to basically hold the media accountable to the public—to rebuild those lines of trust between the public and the press. And so that was partly resulting from both of those dynamics, right—the critique of television as well as the critique of liberal media bias.
Now, the National News Council wanted to appear impartial—that was their whole purpose. At the same time, Accuracy in Media, this conservative watchdog group, saw them as an opportunity to basically launder the conservative critiques of the press through this kind of impartial National News Council. And the National News Council realized this at the time—I actually went to their archives, which are at the University of Minnesota, and internal memos and letters, they say, look, these Accuracy in Media guys are up to no good, we know that they’re going to try to use us, we’re worried that if we don’t go along with them that they’re going to tar us as liberal or leftist.
So in the early days, they try to carefully review Accuracy in Media critiques more closely than other critiques that get raised to the council. And the first few they actually approve, they say, you know what, Accuracy in Media is right. And so they ingratiate themselves with them.
Now, ultimately that doesn’t last for that long—nothing is enough for right-wing media critics—and that coalition and symbiosis kind of falls away ultimately. But part of what I’m arguing in the book is that it isn’t just that conservatives believe that the media is biased. If that was the case, then it wouldn’t really be a discourse, right—it wouldn’t be this whole thing that we all have to reckon with.
The problem is that journalists in the 1970s onward have started to look over their right shoulder,—that they’ve started to say, I’m liberal, maybe interpersonally—is that skewing my coverage in some way? And so part of what the book argues is that yes, this critique from the right is a crucial part of this, but another crucial part of this is this idea of balance or impartiality, which is an impossible ideal, right.
And so if you’re a journalist and you’re trying to live up to that impartiality or that objectivity norm, which is part of what professional journalists aspire to do—if you’re constantly being told from the right that your coverage is biased—over time, you’re going to start to listen to that, and you’re going to start changing and shaping your coverage in a way that ends up skewing and ratcheting that coverage to the right, so that they’re a little bit less loud in their criticism of you.
So this is one reason why the belief in liberal media bias persists: it becomes an effective tactic on the right for drawing the legacy media rightward.
Bacon: We were in the ‘80s. Let’s come to the ‘90s. Yeah. You made an allusion to Rush Limbaugh. I think Fox News is founded in ‘96, is that right?
And then Newt Gingrich is a political force at the same time. So talk about—are those three sort of one? Rush Limbaugh’s rise is a forerunner of conservative media, so is Fox News. They’re also critiquing liberal media on their programming. And Gingrich is a new movement conservative. How do those three fit together?
Bauer: Yeah. So one of the really important things that happens in the 1980s is the Reagan administration gets rid of the Fairness Doctrine. So the Fairness Doctrine, as I mentioned, is a policy from 1949 to 1987 that mandates balance over the airwaves—TV and radio.
Now, once you get rid of the Fairness Doctrine—so they get rid of it in ‘87—by ‘88 Rush Limbaugh gets hired by ABC Radio to go national, right. And so by the early 1990s Limbaugh has revolutionized AM radio and conservative right-wing media.
Now, what I argue in the book is this is a really important turning point, because for most of the 20th century—from the 1940s to the 1980s and ‘90s—you’ve got primarily a conservative media that is movement media. It emerges out of the movement and it is doing the bidding of the movement. Now, there are different components of the movement — the John Birch Society, William F. Buckley, et cetera—that have different kinds of subtle agendas, so the movement media isn’t always in lockstep, but it’s always serving a movement purpose.
Once you get Rush Limbaugh, Limbaugh has two logics, right? One is advancing conservatism and advancing the right—not necessarily movement conservatism. He actually didn’t identify as a movement conservative and didn’t emerge out of the movement, right—it’s his own version of conservatism that’s informed by the movement but is separate from it. But also Limbaugh is about making money—he’s entertaining an audience.
And so Limbaugh is making different calculations than a Buckley or somebody else. Now, interestingly, as he becomes the kind of leader of the opposition, right, in the 1990s—as Reagan retires and as Bush doesn’t get elected in 1992.
Bacon: Clinton does, yeah.
Bauer: Right. And so Gingrich is really—and I don’t really write about Gingrich in the book, we’re not really getting to that in the book—and kind of in the early ‘90s there’s a little bit of a recap at the end into the contemporary, but we skip over that ‘90s period. The ‘90s period is much more complicated, which is one reason why I don’t get into it in the book— because you see both these commercial logics and these movement logics fighting in and out and in play.
And in fact, I’ve got this telling moment in the book where Cliff Kincaid—who’s an activist for Accuracy in Media—Rush Limbaugh on his radio program talks shit about Cliff Kincaid, right. And Cliff Kincaid is irate about this. And he is going around to all his conservative movement buddies and he is saying, hey, help me get in touch with Rush, I need him to correct the record, he was wrong about me, blah blah blah. Rush Limbaugh’s like no, this guy’s a joke, right—he’s refusing to do it, right.
And part of what I argue in the book is like, this is the moment where the conservative movement really realizes that it’s created something that’s beyond its scope—that they’re no longer in control of the monster they’ve created at this point.
And I think that this dynamic, where you’ve got the conservative movement and these kind of media logics that are beyond their control, partly explains the emergence of Trump, right—who was not necessarily the conservative movement guy in 2016, right, they were into Rubio, they were into Cruz, there was a bunch of different people that they were rallying around.
Trump ends up winning partly because of Rush Limbaugh and Breitbart—ultimately Fox joins the team as well, right. And so this media logic versus the conservative movement logic is partly what allows Trump to capitalize on the kind of tensions between those different movement and media logics.
Bacon: Okay, we went through most of the history that you wanted to go through, so I want to ask questions that are not maybe as grounded in history. I guess first I want to go to—the book doesn’t hit the post-2000 period as much, but I want to ask: so I got into journalism in 2002, so by that point—I worked at Time magazine, I worked at The Washington Post—we, most of us, we discussed privately—I remember being at dinner once and somebody asked, who has voted for a Republican, and none of us had. And it’s an awkward thing.
And so my experience of the media has been an obsession with—we are all Democrats, we are very guilty about this, we must be biased, so we must—the Iraq War benefits from the Bush perspective, the media is obsessed with not proving they’re liberal, therefore they cover it credulously, and so on.
So that’s a period that I’ve experienced personally, when does that sort of sink in, that the journalism community is obsessed with this? Is there a historical part of this that you’ve analyzed or researched where my experience—with the journalism community being very obsessed with this by 2000 and up to now—is that in research as well?
Bauer: For sure. So again, that starts in the ‘70s, right? Yes. So you’re getting Accuracy in Media constantly accusing the press of bias. You’ve got Columbia Journalism Review and all of these journalism academic organizations that are starting to study the problem of trust in media, right? Upcoming young journalists who are going through those programs are learning, right, that, oh, the public doesn’t exactly trust us and we need to build trust. And again, that isn’t always coded as right-wing critique—it’s just, hey, now we need to be more aware of our audiences and trying to serve their needs and interests.
Now, there’s an important study that comes out in the 1980s, actually, by some conservative-leaning economists that look at—they do surveys, professional surveys of journalists, and lo and behold, they find that most journalists identify as liberal or had voted for Democrats, right. And so that becomes yet another moment in the 1980s that kind of raises this idea that the problem of liberal media bias isn’t necessarily just structural, right—which had been the premise of most of the early to mid-20th century. By the ‘80s, with that study, they say the structural bias happens because of individual, rank-and-file journalists and their biases. Now the critique here becomes: the people that own the media are primarily conservatives—or at least not like woke lefties or whatever.
But nevertheless, that becomes—as you experienced, I think—a really important aspect of journalistic subjectivity, the ability of a journalist to navigate their job. So you’re supposed to be objective and impartial, but in the back of your head, right, that you’re a liberal, or you voted for a Democrat once, or whatever it would be.
And so when you hear critiques from the right that you’re biased, you’re like, I’m not right-wing, so maybe they’re right. Maybe they’re onto something. Maybe I should listen to them. When you hear critiques from the left—if you’re already liberal or left personally—you’re like, no, I know I’m not that far.
And so again, there is a milieu thing here among journalists. And I do think it’s true that a lot of legacy reporters—they may not be like Democrats or leftists or something, but a belief in democratic pluralism, broadly speaking—that kind of curiosity drives people into the industry, I think.
I don’t think that necessarily skews the coverage, although I do think that the right is onto something—that if we have a sense of empathy in our reporting, especially nowadays—or they’re critiquing empathy—yeah, maybe that’s bias, if that’s the criteria they’re using, right.
And so again, the book is formally agnostic on this question of bias and whether it exists, because I think it’s the wrong question, right. The question is: what are the outcomes? What does the world look like as a result of our reporting? And is that view of the world accurate, right—is it true? Does it ring true to people or does it not? And if it doesn’t, then persuasion needs to be involved, right.
Bacon: Talk about that a little bit. So you think the question of whether—so you don’t—the question of is the media biased, you think, is the wrong question. What is the right question?
Bauer: I think the question is: what as a people do we want? Who are we as a people, right, and what are our goals, right—what do we desire, what do we think is the common good that we’re all endeavoring to build together?
I think that we lose that question oftentimes these days, right—we’re very much caught up in whatever’s trending, whatever Trump said on Truth Social yesterday is a constant call and response to whatever the latest thing that’s happened is, and there’s less kind of pausing and taking a moment to say: what are we doing here, right?
Why does it matter, for example, if whatever Kristi Noem’s husband, likes wearing large breasts or whatever—how are we getting distracted by things like this in the midst of a war that we are fighting? Our money is going to bomb people in Iran and we’re getting sidetracked on these kind of social media things, right?
Bacon: So the Noem thing is a hard one, but I guess the broad, the real question is: what you choose to cover is a decision.
And I guess the critique from the right might be: in 2020, the number of Black men in America killed by the police did not dramatically increase, but the media decided to cover that more. And the media could have chosen to cover aborted babies. So I think that’s the critique. And maybe on abortion rights and gay rights, the media probably covers them closer to the Democratic Party. We could talk about free trade, they might cover it a different way.
So I think that’s the reality — people are getting — the debate is: is the reality being skewed in a certain way? How do you view that?
Bauer: Yeah, so let me rephrase it a bit, right. The conservative worldview is one that believes that social hierarchies, cultural hierarchies are natural and inevitable—that racial hierarchies, gender hierarchies, sexual hierarchies, class hierarchies—that the world is as they imagine it, right, that’s the world.
Now the real world is far messier than that, right—there are way more genders than they choose to think or believe, there are way more forms of relating with one another in terms of race and sexuality and gender and all these sorts of things. So when a journalist reports on that, reports on the complexity of the world—which flies in the face of the very simple worldview that conservatism sustains—it’s inevitable that that complexity isn’t going to fit within that framework.
And so I think this is a really crucial difference between conservatives and journalists—also a difference between conservatives and liberals, I would say, is that journalists and liberals, for the most part, look out at the world and see the world as objective. And what I mean by that is not that they have the right view of the world—we all have complex and confusing views of the world—but the idea is that the world exists somewhere and you can go and measure it eventually and you can figure out its existence.
And then what you do is you measure the world that exists out there, and then you say, we’re going to tweak the things that we think are wrong with it, right—oh, income inequality, right, or homophobia, or whatever it would be—we’re going to make tweaks to the system in order to fix this thing that’s out there that’s causing a problem.
Conservatives have a view of the world in their heads that they then go and try to conform the world to that belief system, that idea. And those are two fundamentally different relationships to the world—one thinks the world exists independently of us and we’re engaging within it, and the other tries to transform the world into the vision inside its head. And so there isn’t so much a vision among journalists or the left for what the world ought to look like—it’s, this is what the world is, and then maybe we want it to be a little bit better, but it isn’t a full changing of what the world is, unlike the conservative worldview.
Bacon: We’ve mentioned the terms objectivity, impartiality, neutrality—these terms are all —I think The New York Times, the word they use now is “independent,” but we have all these code words in journalism. And your sense is these words are not particularly helpful.
Bauer: Totally. So I’ll give you a good example of an “independent” newspaper, which was the John Birch Society’s Birmingham Independent. They were literally advocating for white supremacy in Birmingham.
It was independent because the two local papers, the Birmingham News and the Birmingham Post-Herald, were owned by Northern chains, and they were still—not covering the Civil Rights Movement fairly or accurately, but they were doing so in a way that was not right-wing enough for the John Birchers, right. And so the Birchers were independent of that press.
So all of these things are relative, right, and to some degree in the eye of the beholder. And so we can get mired and bogged down in debates about: is it bias, isn’t it bias, is it independent, isn’t it independent, all this sort of thing.
I would rather have a conversation about what do we want from the world, right—what do we owe to one another as citizens of the same country, or as people of the same world, right. Those kinds of questions, I think, lend themselves to building bridges with people, right—figuring out what are the problems that we face as a people and as a world, and how do we resolve them together. Those are the kinds of conversations I want to be having, right.
We’re facing climate change and all kinds of horrific things—this is a moment where we need, not just in terms of the U.S. but across the globe, to come together and figure out how we can continue living together. That’s not where we’re at, unfortunately, and we get further from that every day.
Bacon: Your book is about conservatives critiquing the media. Was it helpful, in that 50-year period, that there was no sustained liberal critique of the media—that there was an imbalance here? Was that helpful to the Republicans, that the Democrats didn’t say much about the media?
Bauer: Absolutely. So I think that there were left media criticisms during this time period, right? If you look at the new left against the war in Vietnam. You look at the Black Panther Party—there are all kinds of left critiques of the media as well during this period. But those are relatively small in scale versus the kind of scale of the growing and burgeoning right-wing media and its increasing connection to the Republican Party throughout the course of the 20th century.
And part of what the book argues is—if you look during the Popular Front era, so this is the 1940s primarily—as the communists are aligned with liberals and progressives around issues of common concern: fighting the war against fascism in Europe, supporting the rights of Black Americans, and supporting organized labor. Those are the three kind of primary planks of the Popular Front.
There were a variety of different Popular Front media outlets, right, including one that I write about in the book that was called In Fact, which was a progressive, media-critical newsletter run by a guy named George Seldes that had a bigger circulation than The New Republic at the time, and bigger circulation than The Nation, right. So there were relatively large and influential left media in the 1940’s. Now the McCarthy era—that second Red Scare, the late ‘40s into the 1950s — most of those folks are pushed out of public life.
Now, people—George Seldes lived a long life. I think he died in like the 1990s or early aughts or something—I think ‘90s. So it’s not like these people disappeared. But their influence waned—they were no longer able to write for major outlets, they were no longer going on television news and being a pundit or a commentator, right.
And so the marginalization of the left in the late ‘40s and early 1950s—as well as the way that the Red Scare worked—wasn’t just targeting communists, it was targeting liberals who, during the Popular Front era, had allied with communists. And so part of what this did is it salted the earth for future left-liberal collaboration by sowing distrust between them.
Liberals were throwing their leftist comrades under the bus so that they could be saved and they could continue to persist within the public sphere. And so that tension still exists with us to this day. The conflicts between liberals and democratic socialists, or leftists, or whatever—to this day are still distorted. And the ability to bind together and find common interests to target together is still tainted by the sins of the second Red Scare—we’re still living with the consequences of that.
Bacon: As you were talking, I couldn’t help but think about—we’re not in the Red Scare, we’re not talking about communism. But I do think there was a period in the 2010s where someone like Ibram Kendi could be published in The New York Times and The Atlantic and people like that. And now those people have been pushed out, to some extent, of those kinds of publications. And some of that pushing out of the sort of “woke”—has been done by people who call themselves liberal. And that’s that tension that is still playing out in a similar kind of way, I feel like.
Bauer: Absolutely. And so I think that the anti-woke backlash is a Red Scare, basically.Now, don’t get me wrong— Ibram Kendi is not a communist.
Bacon: That’s what I was nervous about.
Bauer: But it’s the logic, right? It’s the same logic. It’s that there are people that are more radical, they are engaging in common cause with people who are more moderate or liberal, right, around issues that matter to them—in this case, against police brutality, or the whole Black Lives Matter movement, or MeToo. There were a variety of different movements that this was a reaction against. But the goal there was to, again, pull leftists and liberals apart, to engage in wedging.
Bacon: And to force the leftists out of the mainstream, in a certain sense.
Bauer: Totally. And a really important part of this was—part of the anti-woke crusade by Chris Rufo was an opposition to DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Now, there are lefty critiques of corporate DEI that are well-meaning and spot-on.
But Chris Rufo—and the right—knew that if you target DEI, this is going to create a wedge within the left, among some folks who are supportive of corporate DEI efforts as not ideal but at least something, right, and people who are critical of them. And so this is where you end up seeing on Twitter, right—lefty people, they’re like, I don’t know about this Chris Rufo guy, but he is right about DEI. No, he’s not. We don’t need to let them wedge us. But it did, unfortunately.
But I also think the important thing is—in the last several years, Gaza, I think, and the encampments around Gaza—Democrats were cracking down against that, right. And so again, if we’re thinking about the Red Scare as outside of the context of communism explicitly—more radical or leftist politics as seen as a specter, and the anxiety that that specter is getting closer and closer to the precious kind of mainstream liberal democratic order. Not only the right, but also the powers that be within the Democratic Party, who want to maintain their New Democrat kind of Clinton-era neoliberal thing—they see common cause with the right, actually, there. And keeping more lefty, more radical voices out of common cause with them.
Bacon: I guess last thing, what is the critique of the mainstream media from the right—it’s a little different than Nixon or Gingrich, I think. How does it sound today?
Bauer: I think the really big difference now is: throughout most of the time period I’m talking about, you’ve got legacy media where most people are getting their news and information. There wasn’t a whole—it’s what we scholars call a low-choice media environment, right? You’re going to watch your local television network, you’ll watch either ABC, CBS, or NBC, whichever anchor you think is more attractive, and then you’re going to read your local newspaper, right? Maybe you’ll subscribe to Time magazine or Newsweek, and the difference in discourse between those outlets was not that wide.
One might get a scoop here or there, but it was pretty consistent. You then had a small, nascent right-wing media. Now, if you were a conservative in the 1980s, you could listen to Rush Limbaugh, right—there was an option for you—but generally the broader, bigger media was going to all be skewed against you, in your perception.
Nowadays we’ve got a massive right-wing media industry that is just getting larger and is, through media capture, buying into those legacy outlets—CBS, CNN, presumably soon enough too. And so you’re seeing this massive right-wing media sector. You still have the legacy media sector, whose influence has waned significantly, is getting smaller and smaller—or not smaller in terms of audiences, perhaps, but smaller in terms of influence. And then you’ve got basically no, or very little, left media.
And so within the broader structure there is an asymmetry and that asymmetry is sorting throughout the entire system. And I’ll give you an example of this. The other day I was listening to NPR, right—National Public Radio—they were doing a segment, I think it was Morning Edition, on Candace Owens’s documentary about Erica Kirk which has a bunch of conspiracy theories and stuff like that.
Now I study this stuff for a living—like, my brain is ruined—so I have to know who Candace Owens is, I have to know who Erica Kirk is. Regular people don’t. But they do, right? Because the right-wing media is so large, it’s creating characters and soap operas and dramas, right, that are so captivating, that legacy media feels compelled to cover it as news too.
And so what we have now is—it used to be that if you wanted to avoid right-wing media, you simply didn’t consume it. Now you can’t avoid it. I don’t think that there’s any real way out of that, outside of building a broad and big left media to balance out that overall. And so, ironically, in a book that is critical of the idea of fairness and balance in journalism, and argues that those ideas and values in part give rise to the right—or are leveraged by the right to build that right-wing media apparatus—I do think that we need balance within the overall system now. And that doesn’t mean balance at the level of legacy media, although I will take that. But what I would like is: we need, infrastructurally, right, to build out a left media.
Bacon: You mean not The New York Times—you mean a real, left-leaning media, not MSNBC even, probably?
Bauer: Totally. But the way to think about this, though, is both, right? And that’s the way that the right thought about it. So the right was advocating for: we want a token columnist at The New York Times and we also want our own television network. You got to do both.
And so I think the left right now does have some kind of tokens here and there in mainstream legacy media outlets—occasionally, not at all—but doesn’t have that big apparatus yet. And so we got to build that apparatus—that’s really the lesson here.
Bacon: Okay. You have the book. Can you show it to people?
Bauer: Oh yeah, I got one here.
Bacon: Making the Liberal Media. AJ Bauer. And then—is there anything else you want to—we went on a while. Anything else you wanted to say, anything I missed? Anything you want to say?
Bauer: No, I really appreciate the opportunity. And yeah, I’m at AJ Bauer on all the apps, or all the different things, if you want to engage with me there. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Bacon: Good to see you. Thank you.
Bauer: Yeah, likewise. Take care.
Bacon: Bye-bye.
