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

Audio

Episode Summary

“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.)

---

Related Content

• Despite the right’s complaints, there really isn’t a liberal media, why not?
• Right-wing figures are applying their bogus complaints about the media to artificial intelligence
• ‘Post left’ podcasters have become an incredible voter depression tool of some of Trump’s top contributors
• Reactionary comedy isn’t funny, but it sure is effective at capturing the imaginations of low-information voters
• How Washington Republicans leverage QAnon and other conspiracy movements
• Right-wing donors have been secretly (and openly) funding fake leftist candidates for decades
• The women of QAnon
• How naive faith in legal formalism handed the Supreme Court to the radical right

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, 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.

So for example, like, the Medic Research Center, which is Labrenda Bozell’s media watchdog. Why does that exist? It was founded in 1987, I think it was, Accuracy in Media was already basically doing the work, but Accuracy in Media wasn’t [00:36:00] as invested in defending Reagan. And the Reagan administration was more focused on defending the CIA, and like the military apparatus, and business.

And so they wanted a group that was gonna be more focused on saying religious issues, for example. Right. And so they created it. And so part of what the book argues is that, again, there’s a way of narrating all of this, the kind of vast right-wing conspiracy, and oftentimes this gets relegated back to like the Powell memo from, I think it was 1971, right?

These kind of conspiratorial documents that say, oh, we need to build this big media apparatus in order to crush the left and do X, Y, Z. There were all kinds of visions like that. All of them were only implemented piecemeal, but it was the fact that multiple people were just like trying it, right? They were just being iterative.

They were being entrepreneurial, they were just trying out their own projects, even if they were already competing or if they were duplicative with other efforts, right? I think that’s the real difference between like liberal advocacy groups and media and the right is that liberal advocacy groups kind of look around and say, okay, what, gap is there that isn’t being fulfilled?

They don’t do duplicative work all that much, right? The right doesn’t care. They’ll just, multiple different billionaires will fund things that are basically the same project with slight variations depending on their ideological preferences or whatever it would be. or political preferences in terms of candidates, for example.

And all of that is coming at us and entering into the political at the same time. and I think this is one reason why we see our. Broader political system pretty heavily skewed towards rightwing initiatives. It’s ‘cause there’s a whole, first of all, there’s a lot more money, but second of all, there’s just a lot more initiatives.

People are just trying it and they’re engaging in these duplicative efforts in a way that the liberals are a little bit more afraid of doing, I think, or more measured or guarded with their money and their time.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s absolutely true, and it is an entrepreneurial mindset rather than a institutional mindset. and the, thing is, like, yes, it can be [00:38:00] duplicating some of the work that people are doing, but you know, the reality is, especially in our, age of millions of social media accounts and YouTube channels and whatnot having only one group means that you have put all of your publicity strategy in the hands of one set of people who are fallible, who have limited perspectives, who don’t hire people that think differently from them who, might be fixated on fighting the last election instead of fighting the current one.

There’s just a variety of problems of this approach and it’s especially more damaging in the social media age to the left. and, and you can see that, just with this proliferation of content, that you see on YouTube on, TikTok Instagram, all of these places, it, doesn’t have to be the best content ever.

Like, because most people, they don’t know very much about politics. They don’t know about history. They don’t, like, so expecting them to want to sit there and hear a, a footnoted lecture on, the, history of U-S-A-I-D, like, no one’s gonna sit through that.

No one’s gonna watch that. Like, almost no one’s gonna watch that. Sadly. But, instead, if you had something that was saying, look, here’s five things that the U-S-A-I-D did that were great, or, and here’s five things that they did that in increased economic opportunities for Americans, or five things they did that helped us not have disease in our country or whatever it was.

Like these are simple, much more easy to digest messages. The right is just so much better at understanding letting a thousand flowers bloom is much more effective from a PR standpoint.

BAUER: It is, it’s that, and it’s also at some point along the way and this is mostly the case of like Rush Limbaugh and later Fox News, and then, obviously all the influencers and other talk radio people as well. Is that [00:40:00] somewhere along the way, the right struck at the idea that it’s gotta be entertaining, right? it can’t just be. Ideas and, interestingly, like even some really successful figures on the right. So people like Paul Weyrich, for example, who was one of the founders of Heritage Foundation he created a conservative cable television network, that was short-lived. And it was, by all accounts pretty boring.

It was kind of like a conservative CS fan basically. And it didn’t really pick up partly ‘cause he didn’t have the kind of economy of scale that Rupert Murdoch was able to get. But also he didn’t have the kind of entertainment values that like, what is it Roger Ailes brought to the table?

And so I think part of what you’re seeing now is that conservative media and right wing media, including influencers and that sort of thing, is. Nothing if not entertaining, unfortunately. Right. and part of what that does is it allows for crossover coverage. So I’ll give you an example of this guy Clavicular, right, who seems to be everywhere these days.

Clavicular was just interviewed by 60 Minutes, and that’s not just because Barry, we is in control of 60 minutes now. It’s ‘cause he’s like a weird, entertaining figure, right? Is He is like, oh, this guy hits himself in the face with hammers and does meth microdosing allegedly, right? All of these things are curious.

People consume it because it’s like. Wild and, funny in a perverse way, right? And so I have people in my life who aren’t, brain rotted by like me, who write, rightwing stuff all the time. Who will be like, oh, what’s with this Clavicular person? So fascinating. And it’s like, nobody should know about that.

It he’s like a fringe figure who’s designed to appeal to like 18 through 21-year-old men, basically. Right?

SHEFFIELD: Even younger. Yeah.

BAUER: Right? Or even younger. And so there’s really no reason for him to be as prominent as he is. But the reason he is, because it’s entertaining in a perverse way to people who disagree with him even, and it’s amplifying and boosting him.

And so, [00:42:00] I think that we’re all somewhat complicit not just, the riot and these influencers, but it’s like, we all are, and by we all, in academics, intellectuals, journalists, et cetera, are boosting this content. And what that means is not that like all of the people that I write for my audiences or whatever are conservatives or something.

But if I’m talking about something and it gets to somebody who’s curious, right? Conservative, curious, maybe they start investing and looking into that, right? And so I think that, there was a time through, most of the time the book is about actually the kind of mid 20th century, mid to late 20th century where if you didn’t want to consume right-wing, reactionary, or conservative content, you simply didn’t, right?

You just watch regular TV or subscribe to the Nation or New Republic or whatever. Now you can’t get away from it. All of the legacy media is covering it like it’s a news story because it’s become its own sector of culture that is reported on in the same way that you report on sports or you report on Hollywood or whatever. And until we can do something to, burst that bubble where right-wing media and right-wing culture is so large and so loud and so interesting, perversely that all of us feel the need to consume it, we’re gonna continue to kind of have this lingering reactionary problem. and I think part of it is that Trump and the Trump administration is boosting it, certainly.

And, but I don’t think that when he goes away that’s gonna necessarily get rid of this broader culture that’s emerged around him.

Trump, entertainment, and right-wing media amplification

SHEFFIELD: Oh yeah. Not at all. I mean, he himself is the apotheosis of, what you’re talking about here. I mean like the. 2015, CNN would show an empty podium of Donald Trump, “he’s about to speak.” And they would there and have that on the screen for, 20 minutes and they would talk about what, gosh, what’s he gonna say? He’s so wacky. It’s so fun.

[00:44:00] and, while they don’t do that anymore currently, that underlying impulse that was so entertaining for them, that is, is the, core appeal for many people who like Donald Trump, even now that, they might not, they probably don’t even know what his policies are.

All they know is that he’s funny. And, he pisses people off and he makes politics entertaining. And that’s enough.

BAUER: I mean, he doesn’t even know what his politics are. He ran against Forever Wars and now here he is starting Forever Wars. Right? Like he’s inconsistent ideologically, right. and the, personality and all of the infrastructure and culture that’s built around him creates a sense of stability where there’s really a lot of chaos, honestly. Right. but getting back to what you just said, because it’s, I think a really important point. You’re right. That CNN and these kind of like legacy cable networks were really important in platforming and boosting Trump when he was running in 1516, because what if he says something crazy, like, we wanna be there to capture it.

And so they would run his speeches all the way. Right. Lots of free airtime. Right. They stopped doing that after that. But what ends up happening is an organization called Right Side Broadcasting gets created, out of Alabama actually, that does livestream all of his speeches from very early on until, it’s over.

And throughout the 2020, and 2024 campaigns would do that. And so there are live streams that last for hours. It’ll be like, they’ll get there and start three or four hours before the speech, they’ll interview Trump supporters as they’re getting there for the event. And then they’ll cover the event.

And then, sometimes the president himself will say hi to them. And then, it’s, an all immersive experience. It’s kind of like the streaming experiences of like the clavicular, right? Where you’re like plugged into somebody’s life 12 hours, 24 hours, right? So it’s creating this kind of immersive.

Parasocial relationship, right? Between the viewers and the figures, right? Whether it be Trump or CCU or any of these other folks. [00:46:00] And I think that is something that there really is no corollary on the left, but I also think it shows the way that the right uses the affordances of the broader media system around them.

So if mainstream media stops covering Trump in a certain way, it creates an opportunity that some billionaires and right-wing media figures. I think in that case it was, the MyPillow guy funded the right side broadcast network, I think. But it’s like, okay, well we will invest and create this new media apparatus that then there will be a constituency for that we’ll develop.

And so it’s like a constantly proliferating, array of audiences, that regardless of what. Style or what political ideology or what religious or non-religious disposition you have, there is an outlet or a platform that can lure you into the right wing fold, right? It’s totally pluralistic.

SHEFFIELD: Because they have so many, yeah.

BAUER: Right. Within, its kind of broader constraints of, promoting white supremacy and other kinds of social hierarchies according to race, gender, sexuality, et cetera. As long as you’re engaged in that project of perpetuating those hierarchies one way or another, you’re, on the in right? It’s this kind of massive big tent.

And I just, I don’t know other than changing strategy really remarkably, I don’t really know how the left combats that at this stage.

SHEFFIELD: Well, another thing that I think is, notable, like, just to go back to kind of the, one of the initial premises of your book is, that, so the idea the media, the mainstream media is unfair and biased against our perspective. That was invented by the left, as you said. And that viewpoint has continued unbroken. Like I see everybody on, Blue sky, constantly complaining, oh, the New York Times is, they’re so terrible. They had this bad headline here. I didn’t like this story, that NBC did or whatever. So they’ve continued [00:48:00] making these criticisms, but they haven’t made the leap to say, well, okay, so you think the mainstream media is unreliable at relaying your viewpoints?

Okay, so then why don’t you create your own media? Like, they don’t do that. And that’s, it’s just astonishing. It’s to me, as somebody who came over from the political, right, I, it’s amazing to me frankly, that I see people just criticizing the main, they say it sucks and they say it’s terrible, and then they do nothing about it other than complain.

BAUER: I mean, and I, do think some people are, I mean, you think like Medi Hassana created Xeo, right? There’s, there are left media initiatives that are being created. I mean, you can look at like Hassan Piker is doing similar kind of lefty work. I think what we’re really seeing. And this is also something I, I talk about in the book is, so you’re right that there was in the 1930s and forties, there was kind of a progressive media reform movement, that was coalitional, it was a popular front initiative between liberals and leftists.

So Marxists and more liberal democrats, right? That did think that the media was biased against them and then made certain kinds of overtures to try to repair that, right? A lot of federal broadcast regulations in the thirties and forties in terms of media ownership, for example, or in terms of content regulations like the Mayflower Doctrine, which banned editorials over the airwaves and then subsequently the fairness doctrine, right?

All of these were the result of that progressive media reform movement. But what happened at the end of the 1940s into the 1950s, the second red scare that we commonly call McCarthyism these days, but isn’t just about McCarthy. It extended from the, 1947 ish all the way into the 1950s. The Second Red scare marginalized many of the leftists within that progressive media reform movement to the margins of public life.

One of the figures I write about in the book is George Sez, who was a important critic, media critic on the left. He was a kind of popular front era star. He had a newsletter [00:50:00] called, in fact, that was, devoted to press criticism. It accused, reader’s Digest of being the center of kind of a proto fascist press conspiracy in the United States designed to oppose the new deal and to support Hitler.

and, this is, he’s writing this in the forties during the Second World War and George SDAs was redbaited to the margins of public life. By 1950. He lived until I think the nineties. he was still around, but he wasn’t influential. He wasn’t being called upon by CNN to talk about the press or whatever.

He was living a small life. And I think one of the things that happened during the Red Scare, and this is something that. I’ve written about extensively, not only in the book, but in some public facing work as well, is that the purpose of the Red Scare was not just to get rid of communists, it was to create a negative incentive structure for liberals to ally with communists and to ally with fur further left issues or left political folks around issues of common concern like organized labor and civil rights especially.

And so what the second Red Scare did was it salted the earth to prevent the formation of another popular front on the left between liberals and leftists. And so part of what you’re seeing play out now, and part of, I, I suspect the reason why you don’t see kind of the left or liberals creating media in the way that you saw with the right is the right was engaged in a popular front activity from the 1940s, fifties, all the way to the present.

Whether you’re a fascist or you’re a traditional conservative, whether you’re a fusion or like a bircher, whatever it would be. All of them are on the same page effectively advocating for a lot of the similar things. Liberals though, especially starting with like kind of Clinton era in the 1990s, start to adopt a lot of conservative values, honestly, in terms of neoliberal political ideology.

And part of what that does is further creates a wedge between the left and liberals. And that wedge has never really gone away. And so I think that part of what you’re seeing, for example, with the New York Times is a lot of the critiques of the times are coming from [00:52:00] the left. There are some critiques of the times by liberals as well, right?

But. Liberals are also content with like Ms. NBC or what is it, Ms Now, right? They have liberal platforms that they’re okay with. It’s the leftists that don’t really have all that much media that’s doing their version of the news. but that’s a relatively small constituency and the liberals are not willing to all align with the left often.

And so because of internal fighting within the kind of broader umbrella that we call the left, but which is really liberals and leftists, right? That’s why you don’t see the kind of proliferation and kind of iterative collaboration that you saw between the fringe right and the mainstream, right?

In the 19th, 20th century rather. because you don’t have that kind of an alliance actually. And so. My argument has often been, you need to rebuild that alliance first, right? We need to rebuild the conditions of possibility for a popular front on the left before we can start engaging in this kind of iterative movement in media building, right?

But it’s really difficult to do that when you still have major leaders in the Democratic Party who are still consistently marginalizing left voices even within their own party, right?

Why the left doesn’t build its own media

SHEFFIELD: yeah, that’s a good point. And as an example of that, the unwillingness to have a popular front, I would say is. You look at, the way that many Democratic figures respond to Hassan Piker. So here’s somebody who has a massive audience, and, is constantly criticizing Trump and Republicans, but because he also is, very anti Netanyahu, and, and all and says, American foreign policy over the decades has caused a lot of deaths and destruction.

Those are things that they don’t want to be aligned with. and so they won’t have anything to do with him, even though far more popular than any of their personalities that they have managed to, come up with. But, at the same time, I have to do, give, some credit to people.

Like with the over at Crooked Media now, [00:54:00] who do actually engage with him, and are not trying to ban him. So I, think to some extent people are starting to realize what you’re saying. But then there’s separate problem, which is I think that, when you do look at further left figures who have popular podcasts, like, there’s one called QAA, there’s, another one called, Chapo Trap House. Like those shows basically only have the same people on their shows at this. Like they never invite new people, they never invite new guests. And so as a result, you have, you do have a few aspects of, left media that are popular. But you don’t have more. And it isn’t only because there are not billionaires, it’s because the people who have an audience, they have a scarcity mentality because they think, well, if I platform someone else, then I will lose my audience.

they’ll come to these guys and, it’s like, that’s not at all how the right wing thinks as you have really know.

BAUER: That’s right. Yeah. So it’s, again, it’s like a competitive mentality, right? Internal to their media sector about building and maintaining audiences. The right was like less invested in that. I mean, I, would, I had one of the bits of research I did for the book is I interviewed Richard Rie who’s a direct male pioneer for the right.

And one of the things he told me is he recounted this meeting he had with some older conservative movement leader back in the eighties when he wanted to create his, magazine Conservative Digest, which was kind of designed to be kind of a mass conservative media outlet. I think initially it had like a hundred thousand circulation.

It declined kind of precipitously. Unclear whether that was really all that well read, or it was just vig kind of circulating it among his lists and that kind of thing. But in any event he told me a story that basically somebody in the right argued with him, Richard, you’re just gonna be cutting into the pie, right?

there’s a pie of conservative audience. We’ve got this much of it. If you do this, you’re just gonna be taking some [00:56:00] slices or audience away from us. Basically, you’re gonna be engaging in competition within the audience. And said, I saw that as the wrong approach. He was like, if this little pie is all we’re gonna do, he said like, I might as well go play golf and like spend time with my family.

Like I wanna build the pie. I want the pie to be bigger. Right? And so he was invested in media strategy that was designed to increase the audience, not about fighting over the audience that already existed, but how do we grow the audience? And I think that’s a different approach that was very successful for the new right in the seventies and could be very successful for lefties now.

But I also think the important. Missing element of what you had just said is like, you’re right that within the kind of podcast circuit and kind of liberal lefty media sphere, that’s one thing. But what you didn’t have in the say eighties and seventies is the conservative movement basically effectively captured the Republican party.

Right? There was still some in fighting there, there was still some, new left. Didn’t like everything that Reagan did. He didn’t give them everything he wanted ‘cause he was working within kind of a bipartisan mode within Congress. Still it was complicated, but you don’t see the kind of boundary policing internal to liberalism in the left that you currently by the Democratic party, within the Republican party.

So for example, like Zora Ani, right? Very popular, won the election in New York. The Chuck Schumer, who’s his senator. Right. As far as I know has never met with him. Right. Donald Trump has met with him. Right? He is gone to the Oval Office and talked to Donald Trump, right? And so it’s like there’s such an unwillingness among the kind of democratic party establishment to welcome in a younger generation of more lefty folks who are indeed critical of those kind of liberal policies of the last 20, 30 years.

Unwilling right to let go of the legacy of what they built and turn it over to the next generation because of the ideological differences associated there. And I think that is [00:58:00] why the Democratic Party is a dying party. And until there is more of an acceptance and a willingness right, to channel the kind of new audiences that these kind of liberal and left podcasts and sorts of things we’re bringing to the table into voters and into the party apparatus, then it doesn’t really matter if, there’s a non-competitive mindset among liberal and left podcasters and media outlets.

If the political corollary, the party apparatus is unwilling to do business with them in the first place too, right? So I think that the, if you look at the right and what made them successful, what is headwinds facing? The left is multifaceted. It isn’t just that the left doesn’t have media like the right does.

It’s that the party doesn’t think that way either. And the donor base doesn’t think that way either. And so. I would argue that looking to the right and seeing what they did well, what made the conservative movement and the Republican party juggernauts by the 1980s into the two thousands is important.

so that we can see how we can replicate it. And how we replicate it, by the way, isn’t just creating the exact same thing, parallels and copies. It’s being opportunistic, it’s being iterative, it’s being duplicative when you need to be right. And it’s being, entrepreneurial. And then it’s gonna look very different than it looked for the right, because we have a different media environment and a different political environment, but we need to start engaging in the same kinds of strategic behaviors as ‘em if we’re ever going to catch up.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s a great point. I think the other core difference, between the left and the right and the contemporary American political space is that the right, not only, have they done all these aspects that you just said, but it’s, that it comes in many ways from an an underlying emotional idea, which is the evangelical impulse.

And I don’t mean religion. I mean that the idea that, looking at the sort of the market growth strategy of Christianity is evangelism. It is [01:00:00] talking about what you believe to as many people as you can. That is literally the command. whereas, the way that left politics is practiced, there is no evangelical idea.

Like the, there is this notion, well, the facts will speak for themselves, and if we just fact check these right-wing lies, then no one will believe them. And if we just say the truth one time on one channel, like Ms. Now, like there, there can only be one left channel. There can’t be more than one. there, there should only be one.

And that’s like they have this mentality that there should only be one of everything. And that, that will be optimized and just the best that it can possibly be. And of course it’s not real, but you know, like they think it’s enough because they have no emotional desire to let everyone know what you believe and, let everyone know that you’re smart and you got the right answers.

BAUER: I mean, I think that we definitely need a secular evangelism on the right or on the left, rather in the way that the right has been very successful at. I also think though that and I am speaking very self-consciously as somebody who lives in the state of Alabama right now and works in higher ed where there are lots of new laws and policies against exactly the kind of evangelism that you’re talking about that there are state-based headwinds against people participating in the kinds of advocacy you’re speaking of, right.

Pride, right? as a celebration of queer life and identity every June, right? And in the south it’s often in like September But in any event that is in some ways an a secular evangelism, right? It is about saying, we’re here, we’re queer.

like we’re out in the community. We’re a part of the community, right? If, you have sympathies or identify this way, like you’re one of us, like, join up, like be loud and be present, right? And yet there are states cracking down on public displays of queerness public displays [01:02:00] of, gender non-conformity, right?

And so I think that there, it isn’t that the left isn’t interested in evangelism or in promoting, just more equitable world. It’s that. The means that we’ve used to do it cause problems, right? By people that don’t want a more equitable vision of the world, and that they use the state to crack down.

And so I think it’s interesting that in the last couple of decades, as we’ve seen Rightwing efforts to criminalize, diversity, equity and inclusion to, criminalize being trans in certain states it, isn’t as though the kind of broad base like cultural and economic left is unwilling to adv advocate for its beliefs.

It’s that doing so has a cost and it’s an increasingly steep cost. And I don’t think that we can, I don’t think that the overall, like mainstream discourse around cancel culture or around like campus, moral panics is up to the. Up to the charge right of, that actually allowing for leftists to speak what the truth is for them, without punishment and re and repression.

And so again, I, think that there’s a way that as somebody on the left, like it’s always easier just to critique the things that we can’t have control over, right? Oh, I wish that we had done this thing better or we had a better messenger, or that the Democratic party was more open-minded about like a OC or something like that.

But then you have to look at like what are the kind of state repressive apparatus headwinds that are preventing people from speaking out and organizing together. And those are real. And, unless we can do something about that, I don’t really see an opportunity for kind of an evangelist, left political culture to emerge.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s a valid point, but I [01:04:00] mean, there’s people, a lot of people who don’t live in those states that could do it for sure. And, project that into the national experience.

BAUER: But the,

media won’t cover it ‘cause they’re too busy fixated on like, how conservatives are being repressed because again, the idea of like liberal media bias and the idea that conservatives are somehow cut out of the mainstream culture has been so hegemonic and has been bought into by the liberal, quote unquote liberal media itself.

Right. That you end up getting this kind of skewed coverage. Right. And so I, I think that it isn’t just all on the left, is what I’m saying. It’s like the, broader, legacy forms of communication and, intellectual life in this country are also skewed against the left in certain ways.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. Which is why you need to have your own, like, I mean, that’s the, that is the, reality.

Republicans use left-wing political theory more than the Democrats do

SHEFFIELD: and one of the other things that you say in the book that I think is really, important and it’s something that people on the further left, could do a lot more reading, or better understanding, is that the far right. They are Leninist and they understand the political theoretic of Lenin in a much better and more mature way. Then than, the left does. And especially the American left. And also, like Andrew Breitbart and other people like him, they’re constantly talking about, using the terms of the post-structuralist left of Gramsci, Antonio Gramsci, and other people like that saying, look, this is how societies work.

This is how change works. This is how media, structures work to influence opinion and the people’s opinions. Are not even things that they choose in many cases. I mean, it’s just like, now of course they make all kinds of absurd ideas about the Frankfurt school and whatnot. But you know, their understanding of politics as a manufactured consensus [01:06:00] is, a lot more superior. It is a lot more superior, I think, to a lot of left-wing thought.

BAUER: I mean, I, think, and I get it this later in the book, that the last 30, 40 years of conservative activism have been informed by like a Wright Gramsci. And if you look at even in 1992 there’s a chapter of Rush Limbaugh’s book. See I told you so, about culture war. And in it, he literally talks about Antonio Gramsci and he is like: Hey, there was this like Marxist Italian communist guy. he had this idea of hegemony and culture war. we should do that instead. So he is like, these, communists are using gramsci and we should do it better. Right. And Andrew Breitbart learns about gramsci and learns about kind of, Birmingham style Marxist theory, cultural theory while an undergraduate in American studies at Tulane, university, and then takes it and runs with it during the Tea Party era.

And so I think that, my most polemical argument, which I don’t, I haven’t made in written form, is that the, modern conservative movement is actually a continuation of the communist movement, more so than an opposition to it. And so far as, and this is more consistent with the arguments in the book, is.

They look to their left and they steal ideas, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re doing Marxist reading groups. I actually a or asked, Richard Vickery, when I talked to him, interviewed him. He said, oh, well we redesigned, or we, what is it? Reverse engineered the left is the way that he put it.

And I said, Richard, what did that look like? Were you like doing chy reading groups and stuff? And he was like, no. He was just, he was like, we were looking at like institutions that worked on the left and then borrowing and taking their tactics. And so for example. American Conservative Union, if you look at their papers at BYU and Provo that was modeled explicitly after the Americans for Democratic Action, which was a progressive [01:08:00] group, in the 1940s, fifties.

I mean, and so, they’re constantly, the right is constantly looking leftward. It’s also interesting. Another thing I talk about in the book is, the radio and television industry Blacklist Red Channels, which was published, by Counter Attack, which was a group of American business consultants. It was a anti-communist research outfit, in the forties and fifties.

In 1950, they published red channels where they accused the communist party of using the radio. To basically brainwash and establish cultural hegemony right on behalf of the left. They saw that and they said, oh, it was this Lenin theorize or Stalin theorize this idea of transmission belts of ideology using media to the people.

and if you actually look like the transmission belt metaphor wasn’t exactly the way that they meant it, but if you look. Later on, the idea of a transmission belt, right, of transmitting ideas from an elite to a population is something that is kind of the basic, media strategy of a lot of conservative movement activists throughout the 20th century.

So the, not only were many. Conservatives, former communists themselves, like literally disaffected anti soloists who shifted over. You also have a lot of folks who were not communists, nevertheless, stealing and borrowing a lot of ideas from them. Not necessarily ‘cause they were reading Lenin, right, but they were internalizing ideas based upon their observations of left strategy, both old left strategy originally, the actual popular front era and new left strategy in the 1960s as well.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And, this was present, at the very beginning, like we, we should say that as well. Like, James Burnham, who was, basically after Chambers, the, most intellectual political writer of that generation, that he was a, for a former communist himself.

And he, his ideas are thoroughly Marxist in terms of his, understanding of organizational [01:10:00] theory. And then he brings in, Carl Schmidt into it as well. And it’s, so, it’s like this, fusion of of these extreme ideologies. but it’s, very effective because they’re willing to, pick and choose and, borrow things that work.

Whereas on the left, everybody’s like, no, we, know everything. We are the ones who know how everything works. And no one else knows anything better than us. So,

BAUER: Well, and one, one of the things with like left theory is that there’s a conflation often of the theory of vision and the theory of praxis, right? That these things are somehow theorized together. But the right has a whole series of theories of vision. Much of them Straussian and schmid and a variety of other kind of right wing thinkers.

But they’re theory of practice is fundamentally a left theory of practice, and they’ve borrowed from primarily communists and Marxists thinkers in terms of how do we go about making political change at a societal level, right? The right is has been using those tactics and leveraging those tactics for generations.

We can’t see it because we’re focused on what they’re saying, which is right-wing political ideology, but their practice is often left wing in inspiration, and part of what my book is designed to do, and this is partly the tracking of that idea of structural media bias from left to right is saying. When we think of the right as kind of an insular political movement that is innovating and iterating on their own and not looking at the kind of various through lines between the right and the left, the way the right borrows, tactically, strategically, rhetorically from the left, we give the right more credit than it’s due.

We make them seem like they’re brilliant strategists and brilliant political actors and theorists, right? They’re borrowing heavily from things around them. They just have the money, resources, and time to, make it work. and to another point that we’ve talked about is they don’t fight one another publicly, right?

In the way that the left is very prone to doing. [01:12:00] and that also creates or creates and is created by. Their constant reliance on enemy construction, right? The idea that the press and the culture more broadly is biased against them and is skewed and targeting them means, well, let’s not, share our dirty laundry publicly.

It’ll be used against us, right? And so I think that until the left is able to engage in a similar kind of practice we’re gonna still be kind of, whatever, asymmetrical, right? Within political culture.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, on that point, I mean, effectively what, you’re saying is that the right is a better user of leftist political theory than the left is.

BAUER: It, has certainly had more success with it, and there are reasons for that, right.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, but it’s, also, I think that there’s a, so having been on the right, I can tell you like there is no separation between the theorists of politics and the practitioners, the campaigners of politics. So like they’re constantly in dialogue with each other and reading what each other has to say.

And they might not, agree with somebody’s issue position, but they think, wow, that has an interesting theory of how ideas propagate. And so they’ll pick it up, whereas on the left, in the Democratic Party, you know that you have a, separate consultant class that only looks at its own material.

The strange and tragic paradox of the American left is that, most political scientists, generally speaking, are on the left. And yet the research that they make has almost zero impact on Democratic campaigns. So like within political science, it is basically a consensus opinion that in presidential campaigns, television advertising has almost no impact, and that significant disparities in it have no impact.

because the, you can show people a thousand more ads in a zip [01:14:00] code, and it has not even a, third of a percent. An impact a thousand more. So that’s a, consensus in poli sci, but the Democratic party doesn’t know that. They don’t know that this is real and they don’t know anything about, I idea propagation or construction of the self. Left wing political theorists have been thinking about and writing about for decades.

They have, there’s this vast literature. And no one in the Democratic consultant class has ever read any of it, it seems like.

BAUER: Yeah, and I think it’s, interesting and remarkable that if you look for example, at successful lefts campaigns recently, like a Zan Ani for example they’re drawing on a form of kind of intellectual practitioner in the sense that some of the people that are working or work for his campaign come out of the graduate student labor movement in this country. And so they are indeed reading. Political theory of change, political praxis theory, while doing it, organizing their fellow workers as graduate students at a series of universities in the northeast primarily, and then going on and working through DSA or going and working for other kinds of unions.

And so there that kind of. Praxis oriented, deeply engaged, intellectual political theory. Is there it’s just not in the Democratic party, right? It’s not at the DNC, right? It is operating at the scale of. Smaller local campaigns that are more connected and tied into the kind of rising edge of, organi young organized labor in this country.

But much of the kind of like growing radicalism within labor movements in this country. You look at the UAW has become much more lefty targeting in the last few years. A lot of that is a result of shifts within the labor movement partly related to the labor movement’s, increasing organization of intellectual spaces.

Like universities. And so I think that there is the possibility of some real, bottom up kind [01:16:00] of theory practice organizing taking place. It just hasn’t bubbled all the way up into the kind of corporate political classes. and it might not, because those classes have a self perpetuation problem, right?

They wanna stay in power. And that does not mean elevating, rank and file labor organizers all the way up through their ranks.

The Democratic Party’s flawed theory of politics

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it’s also that the, operative class of the Democratic party has a very simple conception of how politics works. So like they think that the way that you win in, elections is you identify issues that the public likes, and then you position yourself accordingly to them. And that’s not at all empirical.

It is completely not true. That public opinion is malleable. And again, this is, the, consensus in political science is that public opinion is malleable. People’s views are incoherent. Most people don’t have an ideology in any way shape, like in any real coherent manner. They might have a party view which can shape them, but they would vote for you regardless of what your positions were, because in many cases they don’t even know what your views are.

BAUER: Or they’ll vote based on what they’re primed on that particular month or week or whatever it is that they’re voting. Right? And so, yeah, no, the, political science is there on it. Like all of the studies are there on it. But think you’re right that among like within like the Democratic party, organizing folks, there’s this, un unwillingness to engage with the fact that the public is malleable and that public opinion is fake. It, it is an, it is, something that we can use to explain things in hindsight, but it doesn’t actually tell us much about anything about how individuals vote. And if you look, and I, have another piece coming out later this year actually about this, that if you look to the [01:18:00] 1930s.

When they were in inventing public opinion polling as a method. You have in the very first issue of Public Opinion quarterly, this guy, Floyd Alpert, writes a piece that says, look, public opinion is fictional. It is a trope that journalists use to talk about how the people think. it doesn’t exist, but.

How might we devise a way that we could measure it? And then he goes about doing Like, here’s, like, here’s what we would do that you would study it or whatever, in order to be able to have a measurable object. And like that is the beginning of, I mean, not the beginning. There was, pew or not Pew.

Gallup and Roper had been doing it before then, but there’s it is a fictional concept that we have created an empiric to. Claim to analyze. And now the Democratic Party in particular is ruled by that empiric that is based on a fiction versus the right, which says we’re gonna tell the people what they think, and if we do it effectively, we’ll win.

Right? If liberals in the left start thinking that way, we’ll win.

SHEFFIELD: Yep. Yeah, great point.

All right. So, that’s been a, edited edified discussion. And for people who are interested in keeping up with your work, aj what, is your advice for that?

BAUER: So I’m on most of the platforms at AJ Bauer. I’m on the Twitter, I’m on the blue sky, I am on the LinkedIn, I’m on all of the things. You can also, buy my book making the Liberal Media. It’s for sale on the Columbia University Press homepage or, site. If you use the discount code CUP 20, you save $7.

It’s also for sale on, Amazon and all the other places where people buy books. But yeah, otherwise see you on the Blue Sky and the Twitter, I guess.

SHEFFIELD: All right. Sounds good. Thanks for being here.

BAUER: Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

SHEFFIELD: So that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to Theory of Change show where we have the video, audio, and transcript of [01:20:00] all the episodes. I thank you very much for your support. And if you are able to spread the good word about the show on the internet, on social media, wherever you might happen to be posting or sending things to people, that would be very helpful.

And if you’re watching on YouTube, make sure to push the like and subscribe button so you can get notified whenever there’s a new episode. Thanks a lot. I’ll see you next time.