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February 5 - March 10, 2023
right-wing anti-intellectualism gussied up as scholarship.
Conservatism, critics concluded, was an ideology of the heart rather than the head.39
“When the nation’s best-sellers are produced in Alton, Ill., Florissant, Mo. and Canyon, Tex., rather than in the giant publishing houses of New York, the evidence is good that the communications gap has reached revolutionary dimensions.”
Those expecting despondency from right-wing media, however, would find themselves disappointed. After all, conservatives had been racking up losses for years; Goldwater’s nomination had been a step forward.
The challenge now was
to figure out what went wrong and how to make a better s...
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Manion, for instance, started up a short broadcast called the Manion Forum Footnotes, three- to five-minute pieces perfect for radio audiences increasingly likely
to listen in the car rather than in the living room. The briefer time period forced Manion to be more colloquial and provocative, a welcome change from the occasionally stultifying weekly radio addresses.
His long-running debate show Firing Line went live in 1966, giving the quick-witted editor a chance to spar with liberal guests while promoting a conservative point of view on a public broadcasting network.10
In the post-Goldwater years, the right’s frustration over this television lockout led to the first attempt to establish a conservative television network.
The Conservative Book Club (CBC) was the first and most successful of these efforts.
Buoyed by secret access to National Review’s closely guarded list of active subscribers,
Selling the book to hard-line conservatives meant trumpeting the dangers of socialism and the revolutionary potential of the book. Selling the book to college students required something else entirely.
Such efforts showed conservative media activists beginning to reorient their work in the post-Goldwater years, seeking to expand their base and reach new audiences while still appealing to the movement conservatives who had helped Goldwater capture the nomination.
the prevailing image
of conservatism was still that of a secretive, dangerous, fanatical horde.
Before conservatives could win over the apathetic middle, they first had to work...
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“We know from eleven years’ experience that, once Mr. Average American gets a chance to find out what is happening to his country, he becomes a dedicated Conservative.”
National Review editors wryly added, “Now if the American voter can only be brought to
the point of agreeing to annihilate little girls who play with daisies, this country can have a conservative Administration.”
During the election, opponents had successfully painted Goldwater as a dangerous madman leading a band of fanatics.
Thanks to dishonest Democratic campaigners and their co-conspirators in the media, the right had been unable to control the image of the movement and its spokespeople.
Even if conservative media could reach a larger audience, such efforts would be worth little if “Mr. Average American” believed conservatives were nothing more than...
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As with Manion’s Conservative Clubs, “individualism
was the overriding value upon which the NFCO was built. This was, after all, conservatives’ basic nature; “to force them into a collectivist type of organization,” a press release explained, “is to violate a basic tenet of conservatism.”
No sooner had this success been achieved, however, than conservatives were hit with a “violent and vitriolic” response, a series of “deceits and distortions”
“we had to fudge, we had to compromise, we had to change our spots in order to be practical and to mesh with the necessities of political survival.
Concepts long central to the right’s worldview—“silent majority” and “liberal media bias”—became subjects of national debate under Nixon, thanks to the legitimacy they gained from White House sanction.
Agnew lambasted the “effete corps of impudent snobs” encouraging the unrest.
pounced on Agnew for “raw demagoguery” and “truly monumental insensitivity.” But conservatives were thrilled.
choosing the stories and writing the commentary, these anchors, producers, and pundits served up not objective analysis but the liberal pap of the New York–Washington echo chamber. And every night, forty million Americans tuned in, imbibing bias and mistaking it for neutrality.42
“We’re in for dangerous times.”
Wicker called instead for journalists to take up the task of “journalistic muckraking,” to “dedicate ourselves to the search for the meaning of things, and turn ourselves
loose to be the true storytellers our time, novelists of the age, rather than professional recorders of accumulated facts and authorized views.”
Conservative media, he argued, were “the only force standing between the liberal news media and the total monopolization of all news information available to the American people.”
Though far across the political spectrum from Efron, he, too, believed journalists wore liberal shades that blinded them to improvements in the South, military successes in Vietnam, and the appeal of conservatives and Middle America.
These joined Buckley’s Firing Line, which first went on air in 1966 and Rusher’s debate show The Advocates, conservative-centered programs that highlighted and legitimated the conservative perspective.52
Three centers of authority—Efron, AIM, and Manion—worked together to disseminate and legitimize a conservative interpretation of biased news.
Whereas a generation of mainstream journalists celebrated the role of the press in exposing the crimes of the Nixon White House, breathing new life into the profession and reinvigorating the field of investigative journalism,
“The result,” he concluded, “is that a gullible public is caught in the talons of a power that ironically describes itself as freedom.”61
Nixon’s resignation a year later added a new argument to conservative media’s response to Watergate. His abuse of power proved the federal government needed to be constrained. Prior to the resignation the argument found little purchase among people like Manion and Buckley and Regnery, all of whom held that neither the original break-in and bugging nor the attempts at cover-up amounted to anything outside ordinary political dealings. Once the White House tapes revealed the depth of Nixon’s involvement and his resignation made shoring him up unnecessary, they dropped all pretenses. This, they
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By 1975, Regnery and his wife, Eleanor, overcame their aversion to conflict and demanded Susan be released.
Salem Kirban, a direct-mail fund-raiser who moonlighted as a popular end-times prophet. (Author of books like 666 and I Predict, in 1981 Kirban would launch the nation’s “first toll-free prophecy hotline.”)
but it did mean delving into the right’s rapidly expanding talent pool.
If conservatives wanted a better America, they would have to invest in better media. And not just any media. “However great the influence of mass newspapers, of TV and radio may be,” he wrote, “it is still ideas that run the world, and it is finally books, and not necessarily the most popular, that put ideas into circulation.
Hiring Fingerhut proved to be a miscalculation. As good as he looked on paper, he was, in Regnery’s words, “utterly irresponsible.”
“Regardless of its civil code of laws, a society that is not held together consciously by its teaching and observance of the laws of Almighty God is unfit for human habitation and doomed to destroy itself.” In a year when the Moral Majority and the Christian Voice were emerging as major political players, it was an argument both modern in sentiment and quaint in expression.
An economic recession had settled in—never a good backdrop for an election—
Perot’s cranky populism wasn’t going to win the presidency, but it could easily skim off votes from conservatives who were disappointed that the patrician president not only failed to connect with them but had also gone back on his no-new-taxes pledge.
Fox News, founded in 1996,
