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.
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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.