How the myth of ‘liberal media bias’ warped American politics

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How the myth of ‘liberal media bias’ warped American politics

A.J. Bauer on the origins and purpose of the myth that the establishment press is progressive

Matthew Sheffield

Apr 30, 2026

∙ Paid

“Our real opponent is not the Democrats,” Donald Trump told his Twitter followers in 2019. “Our primary opponent is the fake news media.”

You couldn’t ask for a more perfect distillation of how Republican campaigning works. The idea that the mainstream media and society as a whole are biased against right-wing viewpoints permeates every corner of American politics, even within the Democratic party and within mainstream media outlets.

Within today’s Republican party, fighting against “liberal media bias” was the basic organizing objective of most of the grassroots people I encountered during my years as a Republican media consultant. Opposing media liberals has animated numerous fundraising drives, launched television networks, and built talk radio empires. But most importantly, the myth of liberal media bias makes people who believe in it discount information that might contradict their own political agenda.

Trump endlessly attacks what he calls the “fake news media” because he wants his supporters to disbelieve any kind of negative coverage he may receive. Most people think the idea of Trump-as-truthful is patently absurd, but it’s a remarkably effective lie, as public opinion polls have shown for years.

Every myth has its origin story, and this one is no different. My guest in this episode, A.J. Bauer, has a new book called Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against the Press that traces the 80-year history of this lie, and how (ironically) it’s helped reactionary Republicans have a better understanding of Marxist media theory than almost anyone in the left-of-center operative class.

The full discussion of this episode is for paid subscribers. An excerpt on YouTube is also available. To watch, read, or listen to the full discussion, you will need to be a paid subscribing member on Patreon or Substack. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere. (Note: Purchasing a book through the links in show notes helps support Theory of Change.)

Audio Chapters

(Full version)

00:00 — Introduction

12:19 — The right’s spoken-word culture and debate aesthetics

22:03 — From Facts Forum to the Birchers: the origins of ‘liberal media bias’

34:19 — The right’s decentralized media ecosystem

43:37 — Trump, entertainment, and right-wing media amplification

53:08 — Why the left doesn’t build its own media

01:04:50 — Republicans use left-wing political theory more than the Democrats do

01:16:21 — The Democratic Party’s flawed theory of politics

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Before we get into the book, let’s talk about just the concept of media bias itself. What even is this idea, and is it coherent?

A.J. BAUER: Yeah, so part of what I argue in the book is that the idea of liberal media bias is a form of structural media criticism. So structural media criticism is different than just saying I disagree with that, right? It’s, making a claim that there is a broader kind of systemic overlooking or bias against a specific worldview or series of issues.

And part of what thinking about it that way helps me see in the book is that the idea of structural media bias is something that actually was developed on the left in the 1930s and forties and then kind of migrates rightward. But the other important takeaway there, I think, and this is kind of a broader argument in the book, is that, there are bias claims, right? The right has been making bias claims as the book shows for something like 80 years now. The left was very prominently making bias claims in the thirties and forties and kind of lesser so, but continuing throughout this period as well. [00:04:00] but whether or not the media is or isn’t biased is a kind of perspectival argument, right?

There isn’t any objective or impartial measure by which we can assess one way or another, whether the media is biased. If the media looks biased to you, it has to do with your own perspective politically and what you would like the media to be doing or not be doing. And so part of what I argue is that rather than engaging in bias claims, it’s more productive to think about what are the disagreements we have right, with the world as it’s depicted in media, and then to, criticize the media as need be for those, inaccurate or incorrect, narratives of the reality.

But bias itself isn’t all that. Scientifically provable. It has, however, been a very important and lucrative foil for the modern conservative movement, which is what the book’s about.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and we’ll get into that. But just to push this point a little bit further, aren’t you effectively saying that somebody can’t say that, Fox News is biased? Are you saying that?

BAUER: I’m saying that Fox News is a right-wing media outlet with a right-wing ideological disposition. And so for, lemme give you a better example of this. The New York Times has been covering trans people in a horribly unethical way that is harming the trans community. One way to say that is that the New York Times is biased against trans people.

Another way to say that is, I disagree with how the New York Times is covering the trans community because it’s causing harm. And I think the latter claim is more defensible than the former. because the former gets into questions of, well, what would unbiased reporting look like? And it, still holds fast to this idea that there is an objective or impartial reality.

The second is saying, no, there isn’t an impartial objective reality that we’re trying to measure ourselves against. I think that this is harmful and we should be not doing it that way, right? And so instead of saying like, journalists, you need to do your job better, it’s saying, no, you need to rethink how you’re doing your job Actually.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And the point that no one could ever agree on [00:06:00] what a universally unbiased perspective means. Because even, even the idea of, well, we’re gonna quote everybody who has a stake on an issue, is that itself unbiased? Like you, that’s itself a, conjecture as well that, you would have to prove first.

BAUER: Right. And this idea of balance which is kind of one of the basis points for what objective or impartial reporting often looks like something I call it in the book the balance Imperative. That actually became a really important mechanism through which the right was able to get its viewpoints onto the air and into the newspapers in the 20th century, when they were a much more marginal infringe movement.

So even the balance imperative, which seems as though it’s, designed to create this perception of impartiality or objectivity itself, is basically an affordance that can be used by various political actors. And it’s been used pretty effectively by the right.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and we’re seeing that just not a little bit a field in, in, in academia with that for instance, this week as we’re recording the Harvard Crimson student newspaper reported that the university there was the leadership is trying to raise $10 million to fund right wing professors in the name of reported balance.

BAUER: I just don’t, I just don’t think $10 million is enough. I mean, a, professor needs way more than $10 million. I think it’s hilarious when numbers like that are thrown around. It’s like, oh, in order to recruit a conservative into a college or university that already has many conservatives you need like CEO money, like small time CEO money.

I don’t even know. I.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And your point in the book, which you do hit repeatedly, and very well, is that the notion that the media are systematically against their worldview is, something that American reaction, it is kind of the center organizing principle of the modern reactionary American political movement.

So talk about that a bit [00:08:00] more if you could please.

BAUER: Yeah. So, the idea of media bias has been kind of a driving force for media activism on the right, for, the last 80 years. So the book looks all the way back into the 1940s and fifties. and one of its interventions is it talks about an organization, that emerged in 1951, ran through 57, called Facts Forum.

so Facts Forum was a, nominally balanced program, that was funded by HL Hunt, who was a influential oil man. his family, created the Kansas City Chiefs. he’s still like within the zeitgeist today in that way. he, was the, I believe the inspiration for the, Dallas character jr.

So this kind of eccentric billionaire funds this program in the early 1950s, right in the heart of the kind of McCarthy period. That basically is, one person, initially Dan Smoot, who’s a former FBI agent, and then a series of television radio programs that involved more people that were designed to create kind of a balanced debate style programming, right?

On the one hand, on the kind of liberal perspective, they would give kind of a boring answer, Odine answer on the right. They would give like a really excited answer. So even though it was skewed rhetorically in favor of right wing anti-communist politics, it was nevertheless Nominally balanced.

And part of the reason for this is that a few years before that, in 1949, the fe federal Communications Commission passed a new policy called the Fairness Doctrine and the Fairness Doctrine mandated that all broadcast license holders radio and, later television as well. Would be required to air programs about issues of public controversy in a way that balanced both sides of whatever that issue would be.

and so this balance imperative, which was a state regulatory imperative that shaped, mainstream news in the mid 20th century, and our expectations of objectivity, was almost immediately leveraged by the right by HL Hunt and his [00:10:00] contemporaries to try to get conservative viewpoints over the airwaves.

Now, importantly, in the, kind of, winter of 19 53, 54, facts Forum was criticized in the mainstream media. Ben Bagian actually, who’s, later goes on to write for the Washington Post and be the, he was the dean of the Berkeley, journalism school. he wrote a really important book called, media Monopoly about structural, media bias and consolidation in the 1980s.

He wrote a critique effects forum for the Providence Journal, where he was reporting at the time, basically calling it a right wing front. And so part of what the book argues is that’s a really important moment in the history of this idea of liberal media bias. Not only because conservatives already thought the media didn’t have enough conservative viewpoints on there, and we’re trying to get it using facts forum, right?

But because the media at that point starts targeting modern, early modern conservatives directly. So the, there’s a shift within facts forum from its early years into, its later years away from simply just covering whatever public Contras controversies are in terms of more of an inward focus on saying, we as an institution are being attacked for our beliefs by the legacy press.

Right? So the legacy media engages in an antagonistic relationship with this early modern conservative movement formation. Now, this is before you get things like the National Review, which is founded in 1955. It’s before the John Birch Society, which is formed later in the 1950s. So all of these later conservative movement efforts that foregrounded this idea that the media was biased against them and it was kind of an animating vision for why they needed to engage in media activism was in some ways shaped by this early antagonism between the media and the press.

and it’s interesting, if you look in 19 54, 55. After, the press kind of catches wise to Facts Forum’s bias and starts attacking them for bias. William F. Buckley, a young William F. Buckley, is actually on Facts Forum debating whether the media is biased or not biased. Right? I think it was like April of 1955 in the months [00:12:00] leading up to the founding of the National Review. And so part of what the book does is it says even before we typically, traditionally think the modern conservative movement begins in 1955, 1960s, right? Even before then, they already have this idea that the media is biased against ‘em, and it’s already kind of an animating vision for their politics.

The right’s spoken-word culture and debate aesthetics

SHEFFIELD: it is. And the other I thing about that attitude is that it is an idea that, well, everything is settled in a personal debate in a debate stage, kind of stage setting rather than a book setting or an academic paper setting. And this is, I think, a very notable and important aspect of the difference between the political culture of the left and right.

That the right is a spoken word. Culture, and it is not a literary culture. With some exceptions, of course, there were people from books obviously, but these books tended to be of much lower quality. They don’t have footnotes or they have very few, they don’t respond or even acknowledge other viewpoints.

And so, like this, is what shaped, I think the demand for the constant debate shows. What do you think

BAUER: So I think that’s an interesting position. I would frame it a little differently because I think that the National Review, for example, and later on things like say commentary or the, what is it? Other kind of neoconservative publications later in the 20th century.

SHEFFIELD: weekly standard?

BAUER: Right? Well, and like precursors to it. There lot of, interest Right. By people like Noman Potz and people like William F. Buckley in promoting like a literary aesthetic, right? Like the National Review had Joan Didion writing for it, right? And so I think that there was an aspiration among a lot of conservative movement leaders toward a more literary approach, right?

Toward a more intellectual, written text approach. [00:14:00] That was designed though, I would argue to basically create a sense of respectability for conservative ideas within elite circles. And so in that sense, there was an expectation, at least in the 20th century, that if you are a serious political movement with serious ideology and serious philosophy, that you did engage in kind of literary production.

It wasn’t just about talking right in the TV or radio or whatever it would be. That being said, and this is another kind of subtle argument within the book, is that the Wright never said, well, we’re just gonna focus on radio, or we’re just gonna focus on literary journals, or we’re just gonna focus on tv, or whatever it would be.

They’ve always done all of it, right? And so it’s kind of, opportunistic, it’s iterative, it’s entrepreneurial. It’s throwing everything at the wall and see what sticks, right? and so I do think that the Buckley kind of respectability politics did at least outwardly value a kind of literary.

Sensibility. but at the same time they were very pugilistic and involved in debate style, right? So Buckley himself, who again with the National Review is invested in that literary style, had firing Line, right? Which was a TV show that was a debate show between him and a variety of liberal thinkers that would come on and, engage in conversation with him.

So I do think that you’re onto something, that there’s something about debate that is particularly I don’t know, aligned with conservative aesthetics and views of ideology. But I think they did both.

SHEFFIELD: Well, they did. But I mean, if you look at the output of National Review compared to, let’s say, the Nation or the New Republic during those years, and the authors who came out of them, came out of them writing their own books. Like, I mean, Buckley himself, I think is a perfect example. Like, here’s a guy that he wrote about politics for, more than 60 years, and yet he never produced a substantive book of political theory, not one in his entire life.

And in fact, he admitted that he was, he had tried to make one, which he [00:16:00] called the, I think it was the the Revolt Against the Masses was the tentative title. The book and he couldn’t finish it because he was not able to develop a coherent, extended political philosophy.

BAUER: Totally. And I think Buckley was an organizer. I mean, he aspired to be a literary grade and a philosopher and all these things, but he wasn’t one at the end of the day. Right. and so he was a, an extremely effective organizer, and we see the kind of repercussions of that. but I think that’s also an interesting point, right?

Is that the right it isn’t as though it’s like a movement of philosophers or a movement of literary minds. It’s a lot of really well organized and organizing people actually, and then like a few folks along the way that are better or worse at these other things, right? So there are, political thinkers and philosophers within the movement.

I disagree with them. all of them, right? For various different reasons, depending on the thinker. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re not engaged in a process that they identify as. Intellectual, right? I mean, the Australians, the West Coast Australians, especially writers, is definitely see themselves as engaged in kind of political philosophy, regardless of if we think that’s, doing it good or not, right?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. I mean, yeah, they certainly think of themselves as doing that, but it is notable and I don’t want to stay on this point too long here, the people that are creating these-- like who do have a more philosophical bent, pretty much all of them leave the reactionary politics eventually.

So whether it’s the Whitaker Chambers, whether it’s George Will in the present moment, whether it’s Gary Wills or, so like all of these people who actually are first class minds, generally speaking, they leave because to have fully coherent systematic thoughts is not welcome because it, means that you are independent and, and I have personal experience at that. I, have to say.

BAUER: Yeah, for [00:18:00] sure.

SHEFFIELD: All right. So, but going back to Buckley though in particular, as you note, he’s a key node in this making the liberal media notion. So he, he had kind of a bifurcated approach because on the one hand, he began his career. As a defender of Joe McCarthy, who was literally trying to censor people he didn’t like politically.

And then, and Buckley himself wrote a book saying, McCarthy was great. You should have left him alone. And then, and then of course his first book, God and Man at Yale, was a protracted, hurray against non-Christians at Yale and saying they should be fired. And that alumni should get rid of them.

But then at the same time he also to the general public was demanding these, demanding the fairness doctrine, demanding that he be allowed to debate as many people as possible, demanding a free show on PBS, which he got like that that hypocrisy was just suffused through his entire career. And it’s, maintained ever since by his successors.

BAUER: Yeah. I mean, I think that, so I actually don’t know what Buckley thought about the fairness doctrine. I didn’t see any of, none of his writings really engaged with it. But, nevertheless, he was kind of engaged in leveraging the affordances of it for sure. Right. Especially with firing Line Right.

Was a clear example of him leveraging that. I think that one of the things I argue in my book and the book is a little bit less focused on the, Buckley Circle, right. And the respectability politics associated with the National Review, and is a little more focused on some of the corners of the conservative movement that were less reputable and in particular the John Birch Society which published a series of magazines and did a whole lot of media and other forms of activism concurrent with Buckley, but often is overlooked or kind of seen as fringe, right? Because of Buckley’s efforts to try to marginalize them. And part of what the book argues is that [00:20:00] if you think about this in relation to this idea of the liberal media bias claim, it actually clarifies some things, right?

So Buckley. Even though he would participate in saying that the media was liberal and all these sorts of things, he desperately needed the media, right, the mainstream legacy media to take modern conservative ideology seriously. This is part of the reason why he engaged in this kind of like intellectual style debates on firing line.

This is why he created National Review. It’s about creating a perception that conservatives are serious and worthy of being considered, kind of the responsible opposition to new deal liberalism, right? The John Birch society did not see themselves that way, right? they were much less invested in the policy or the politics of respectability, and which we’re much more invested in, engaging in rallying cries, for example, against the civil rights movement, for example, or in favor of more armed military conflict against the Soviet Union direct military conflict with the Soviet Union.

Interestingly. Unlike Buckley, who was treated as kind of a responsible part of the right, and interviewed by mainstream media outlets, the Birchers were targeted, right? In a similar way to the way facts forum was right As fringe K’s, far right outside of the bounds of respectable American politics.

Buckley himself played a role in pushing them there, right? But the mainstream media covered the birchers that way, as well as kind of an oddity or a curiosity. And so part of what the book argues is that this idea of liberal media bias is less, the creation of Buckley and the respectability politics set, and more kind of a bottom up bubbling of this kind of grassroots mobilizations like the Birchers, who not only saw the media as covering the world in a way that was dissonant with conservative ideology, but they also felt directly attacked by the press.

And this really helps cultivate that belief in liberal media bias, not just within the Buckley set, but [00:22:00] kind of among the conservative grassroots in the 1960s.

From Facts Forum to the Birchers: the origins of ‘liberal media bias’

SHEFFIELD: yeah, well, that’s true. And they definitely didn’t receive a lot of negative coverage. Although that’s, point I, this is where I have to plug my own personal a, personal term terminological note that I often say in episodes, which is that to me, I think it’s important to note that these people are not conservative.

They’re reactionary that Dwight Eisenhower was a conservative. He was somebody ‘cause a conservative, somebody who, looks at the current government and the current society and says, that’s looks good to me. We’re gonna keep it, we’re gonna conserv it how it’s and maybe we’ll tinker with it a little bit.

Overall, we’re not gonna do much either way. Whereas Buckley and his, and the, Birchers and all these other people, they were trying to roll back the clock. Like they were, they wanted to repeal the New Deal. They wanted to get rid of the Great Society when that came along. And I think that it matters in terms of when we’re, thinking about the, their, how they conduct themselves and the, method of thinking that they used.

And to me and, this is maybe a little more philosophical than you wanna get here, but perhaps not. But it, like, to me, there were two key figures that American Reactionaries kind of chose between. So there were two philosophers. One was Michael Oakeshott, who was an English political philosopher.

And then there was another guy named Eric Voegelin, who was a German who immigrated to the United States. And Buckley chose Voegelin. And Voegelin was a guy who, he was a, he was completely pretentious poor scholar. He literally made up an idea, basically a conspiracy theory, that there was a, there was Gnosticism that was a religion that with animating everyone, he didn’t like that they were secretly a Gnostic.

And then as his basis, he, made, he literally used made up quotations from books about ancient Christian gnostics that were not even correct in [00:24:00] many ways. And late in his life, he finally did actually admit publicly, oh yeah, I probably wouldn’t have called this Gnosticism. It was too late by then because, Buckley and all these other people had imported this idea into their politics. Whereas, and, of course Voegelin was this kind religious zealot as well in his own way. Whereas Michael Oakeshott was non-religious. And so the, there, so there was this big gulf, I think between American right-wing politics because it was reactionary and not conservative for a long time when you compare it to the Right, right politics of other countries.

BAUER: For sure. And I, think that yeah, for sure. So I think that you may be right in a kind of philosophical conceptual way that the Birchers were reactionaries and not conservatives, but to a, to an individual, if you had put a gun to their head and asked the Bircher, are you a conservative? They would’ve said yes and they would’ve put a gun to your head if you said they weren’t.

Right. And so I think that there’s, a way that we can intellectually debate philosophically what is or isn’t true conservative, what that means. I haven’t been a conservative myself since the 20th century, as my students would say, right? My kind of like shift left word coincided with the kind of nine 11 moment and the Iraq war.

And so I have almost no dog in the fight of whether something is true or not true conservatism, what I see is a large umbrella of a variety of different claims to conservatism all of which have basically been flattened by being opposed to throughout most of the 20th century communism, and then all of the other various associated things that were labeled to be communists, including the media, including higher ed, including the Democratic Party, right?

And so the. You’re right that there are distinctions [00:26:00] to be made within conservatism. There are, defensible claims to say that there’s conservatism versus reactionary versus whatever you wanna call it, fascism. But that, in some ways overlooks the fact that all of those people were able to ban to together.

Throughout most of the 20th century in opposition to their enemies and their enemies being the left, broadly speaking, liberals also. And, the press. and so it’s interesting ‘cause if you look back historically, even within the book, you can see this HL hunt in 51. He tries to rebrand conservatism as constructivism because if you look at public opinion polls in the late forties, they showed that conservatism as a form of political identification, not as a philosophy or that sort of thing, just as a way of identifying your politics was extremely unpopular.

This is a time period where the New Deal was very popular. People like to identify as liberal. It was much more popular, right? And so Hunt initially thought it was a branding issue. We just need to call it constructivism. Nobody really wanted to do that. There wasn’t, that wasn’t all that exciting of an ideology, or not an ideology, but identity for people either.

And ultimately it’s conservatism that takes up that kind of empty signifier that people all plug their identities into. And so, so I hear you and I think that there is a certain corner of conservatives. I would imagine a lot of folks that write for the bulwark, for example, today, right. or George will. I hear you when you say he’s left the right, he is nevertheless invested in the war in Iran.

And so I think, I don’t know, right?

SHEFFIELD: Well, he left the Republican party. I think he still identifies as conservative.

BAUER: Yeah. And so this is what I mean is like what does it really mean to leave is an important question. And where does one’s investments lie, I think is part of the animating. Question of the debate of what counts or doesn’t count as conservative, right? For me, I’m more interested [00:28:00] in what are the links and bridges that allow for people that identify as kind of more highbrow, philosophical, conservative, to basically be on the same political page, right, to all ally and collate with what you would term reactionaries, right?

How do they see themselves as actually engaged in the same project, and even when they don’t see themselves in the same project as Buckley and the Birchers didn’t at a certain moment, nevertheless, they’re supporting the same policies and they’re supporting the same politicians often as well, although not always.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s a good point. I guess, yeah, I’m just saying that, like the success of, these reactionaries. Is dependent on this entryism with people who are, actual conservatives and, and, then, but they also do that, the flattening on the left. So as you said, everybody on the left is a communist according to there is no such thing as a liberal. There’s no such thing as a progressives. There’s no such thing as a socialist. They’re all communists. Everyone is a communist. And, that, that rhetorical trope is still ex extremely common. In today’s Republican politics, Donald Trump himself frequently talks about communism, that he is opposing communism in the Democratic Party, even though, they, it is a party that won’t even have run on universal healthcare.

BAUER: The, so the Soviet Union has been dead for 35 years, and was there international communism in the early and mid 20th century? Yeah, there was. Did it have the kind of power that the right was concerned with? No, it didn’t. But. I think it’s interesting that people like Trump or various other conservatives are still throwing communism as like this boogeyman when it’s been effectively dead for 35 years, and I, wonder how that’s gonna play out going forward as communism is Historical relic effectively.

SHEFFIELD: Oh yeah, it really is. Well, and the, let’s, go back though to, to the history in the book here for so [00:30:00] the idea that the, media is against, our viewpoints like this is, it became the organizing principle with both the, in a way that you know, the, media magazines and, newspapers, it was, they were linked to the candidates explicitly in, in, in some cases, even like directly with funding, like the, candidates would raise money for the media and then the media would promote the candidates. I mean, it was a really effective system. You talk about some of the early people who were doing that and what they were if you would.

BAUER: Yeah, sure. So, you’re right that there was a lot of collaboration with the movement conservatives and the media outlets. And, for most of the 20th century, I argue a lot of the outlets, not all of them, but a lot of them were aligned with the movement itself. So you got the Human Events, you got National Review, right?

You have, by the 1970s, you have organizations like what is it? Richard Vry and, Paul Weer create the kind of new right affiliations and organizations in the seventies. But it wasn’t all folks who were deliberately aligned with specific individual candidates, right? oftentimes it was individuals with specific projects that then aligned with political candidates.

So a good example of this would be like Accuracy in Media, which is one of the organizations that I write about in the book which was a, watchdog group still exists, that’s designed to basically argue that the, and point out evidence that the media is biased against. conservative ideas against capitalism against us imperialism, although they don’t call it that.

And the Accuracy in Media, though, interestingly, if you look at its origins, a lot of times if you look, at coverage of it in the seventies and eighties, because they were often defending Nixon in the Nixon administration, there was a lot of accusations that Nixon was behind it, that it was basically a front for Nixon and Nixon’s campaigns.

But if you look at the archives and like how it emerged, it actually emerged out of a kind of a, an, [00:32:00] anti-communist luncheon group, that was founded actually by a liberal anti-communist named Al. Al what is it? Forget his name at the moment. McDowell is his last name. And he cr he was a union member.

He was a organizer with a union, who also was an anti-communist and he would host these luncheons in Washington, DC for other anti-communist. And one of the people that was a part of that luncheon and ended up taking it over when he died was a guy named Reed Irvine, who was a former federal Reserve banker.

And he. Got in his head in the 1960s that the media was biased. he wanted to kind of pivot that luncheon group, which was vaguely associated with an anti-communist group called the, council Against Communist Aggression, which is a very funny acronym caca, right. And so he, creates accuracy in media in early 1969, or basically September of 1969.

And then two months later, Spiro Agnew gives his famous speech again, denouncing the, networks for their coverage of Nixon’s Vietnamization speech, which is a speech where Nixon uses the term silent majority and says basically that the silent majority is, tired of fighting the war in Vietnam.

And we need to turn things over to the Vietnamese to fight on their own, right. and so the public. Responded positively to Nixon’s speech. the press pan it though. And so Agnew gets up in November of 1969. He gives two speeches, one in Des Moines, Iowa, and another in Montgomery, Alabama, denouncing the, media for their coverage of Nixon and accusing them of bias accuracy and media had already existed by a few months, and then leverages Agnew’s speech in order to basically build up its donations and build up its profile throughout the 1970s.

And so, even though these things look like they’re working in lockstep, and it’s, it is true. And this is, relegated to a footnote in the book. Agnew and Nixon both donate money to aim later on in life, but like $500, like, not like millions of dollars or thousands of dollars, [00:34:00] which, other folks, were doing Joseph Kors for example, were doing.

And so oftentimes it looks as though these organizations are working in lockstep, and oftentimes they are. But sometimes it’s more just a matter of groups doing their own projects that they think are important, and then those ideas dovetailing together.

The right’s decentralized media ecosystem

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. But, and that’s a, a really good point because it, it, it does illustrate a strong difference between now the, American left and right approach media. So on the left side of the fence, like Hillary Clinton is, was the, made the almost perfect encapsulation of how they viewed the attitude that you just said, like the vast right wing conspiracy as if they were all, taking orders from one committee and one person.

And that was never the case. Obviously they had plenty of meetings and, plenty of groups and whatnot. And a lot of, and they all knew each other in many ways, but they hated each other.

BAUER: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: In many ways.

BAUER: Lots of infighting and lots of overlooking. I mean, one of the things I write about later in the book is, I think it was Terry Dolan who is a new right activist in the 1970s and eighties. he writes this memo that basically is like, here’s what we need to do to fight against the liberal media.

And he outlines a proposal for groups that already exist, frankly. Right. A accuracy and media had already existed for almost a decade and a half by the time he writes this and that. One of the things he was calling for was like a watchdog, like there was multiple di and like others were like various media operations that already existed.

And so even within the movement there would be these like memos and things that would go around. They’d be like, okay. These things already exist. You just don’t like the people that run them, or like you, you want a different version of it. And the interesting thing is that, they would create those new groups.