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.