Politically right-wing media figures and organizations don’t always see everything the same way, as we’re witnessing now in their public bickering about the wisdom of the Iran war. But a constant, unifying theme among them — one that over time helped lead to their current proliferation and their mass audience — is the belief that mainstream news media slant their news and views to the liberal left.

This is one of the major takeaways from a new and excellent book by my journalism department colleague Dr. A.J. Bauer, who did more than a decade of research to produce “Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against the Press.”*

The book isn’t an examination of the degree to which the claim of liberal bias is true, although it does cite past research showing liberal leanings among journalists surveyed. The book focuses more on how, across decades, conservative political activists promoted the accusation of liberal bias to the point that it helped to galvanize a national, conservative political movement that included leaders, followers and, today, a distinct right-wing media complex.

“The liberal media claim is foundational to modern conservatism,” Bauer writes.

As the book reveals, conservatives’ claims of liberal bias have been around much longer than you might think. Bauer begins with conservative antipathy toward the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine adopted in 1949, then traces the influences of “red-baiting” anticommunist publications and the Facts Forum TV and radio broadcasts funded by Texas oilman H.L. Hunt in the 1950s. The 1960s brought the emergence of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review magazine but also extremist publications affiliated with white supremacists like the John Birch Society.

The pretend impartial media watchdog group Accuracy in Media continued the anti-press cause in the 1970s, bolstered by the public rantings of Richard Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew. What Bauer calls “the New Right” emerged in the ‘70s and ‘80s, exemplified, for instance, by Conservative Digest magazine and Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum.

The FCC’s repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 helped to launch Rush Limbaugh and countless other right-wing radio talk shows, and Fox News Channel began in 1996. Eventually, an “alternative conservative media establishment” existed that was “capable of neatly narrating current events to fit within a worldview palatable to the conservative taste.”

Digital platforms in the 2000s brought even more, such as Breitbart News and Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller. Bauer says that for many of the outlets initiated in the 1990s and 2000s, the conservative political cause took a back seat to entertainment and profits. Further, he writes, easy access to digital platforms has brought so many voices, including extreme ones, that the conservative movement is dealing with ever-increasing division.

In a section of particular interest, Bauer’s research shows that many Southern, white-owned newspapers, including The Birmingham News and The Birmingham Post-Herald, resisted integration and disparaged national press coverage of the civil rights movement.**  Yet even they were “tarred as liberal by activists even further to their right.”

The highlighted example is The Birmingham Independent, a Birch-aligned weekly newspaper that covered the city’s southern suburbs and changed its name from the Cahaba Valley News in 1964. It defended segregation and “routinely denounced The Birmingham News for its coverage of race relations and civil rights,” Bauer writes. The Independent, which lasted 10 years and changed its name yet again to the Alabama Independent, was “replete with press criticism” toward the national news media as well, claiming unfavorable coverage of the weekly’s preferred presidential candidates, Barry Goldwater in 1964 and George Wallace in 1968.

Looking ahead, Bauer anticipates more infighting within today’s right-wing media system once Donald Trump is out of power. What he believes will survive, though, is the disdain for the mainstream press and the production of contrary narratives “consistent with an ever-evolving right-wing worldview.”

* I chose to do this post because I found the book educational, not to sell it. But … if you want to buy it, click here.

** As Bauer points out in the book, in 1988, The Birmingham News (where I worked at the time) published an apology for its coverage of the civil rights movement.

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Tom Arenberg is an instructor of news media at the University of Alabama. He worked for The Birmingham News and the Alabama Media Group for 30 years. This commentary was originally published as a post on his blog, The Arenblog.

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