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Book Description
Dennis Boyle has written a very thoughtful review of the first book on his web blog http://www.boilingmad.blogspot.com/. As an addendum to the David Brock books, Bob Flick suggested that we look the essay by Lewis H. Lapham in the September issue of Harper's Magazine titled "Tentacles of Rage: the Republican propaganda mill, a brief history". Book for October 30 (recommendation): "Perfectly Legal: the covert campaign to rig our tax system to benefit the super rich -- and cheat everybody else", by Pulitzer Prize winning, NY Times reporter David Cay Johnston (other books may be considered at the upcoming meeting)
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly- The author, once notorious as a conservative attack-journalist trashing the likes of Anita Hill and the Clintons, repudiated his past in the confessional Blinded by the Right. In this blistering j'accuse, Brock mounts a less gossipy and more systematic assault on the right-wing media juggernaut of think tanks, publishers, talk radio shows, Web sites and cable networks. He treats it as a disciplined political movement, inspired by Communist subversion techniques, bankrolled by a handful of right-wing zillionaires through corporate and foundation spigots, tightly yoked to the Republican policy agenda and masterminded by arch-conservative Grover Norquist at weekly strategy meetings. By Brock's account, it constitutes a seamless propaganda machine conveying dubious scholarship, Republican talking points and antiliberal smear campaigns from think tanks and Internet rumor mills to the FOX News and talk radio echo chambers and thence through a network of conservative pundits into the quality press. Meanwhile, Brock charges, the mainstream media, cowed by spurious charges of "liberal bias," have abandoned their role as objective arbiters of truth in favor of an uncritical airing of partisan ideology in the name of "balance." The result, he says, is a public discourse in which the line between fact and opinion is blurred, poorly funded liberal voices get shouted down, "no issue can be honestly debated and no election can be fairly decided." Brock's critique echoes that of other liberal media critics like Eric Alterman and Al Franken, and cannot be accused of nonpartisanship. He is dismissive of the conservative nostrums whose purveyors he pillories, and his biting takedowns of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and their ilk show he hasn't lost his taste for blood. But Brock's incisive, well-supported analysis and his street cred as an apostate from the conservative press make this a spirited challenge to the contemporary mediascape. -----
Critically Negative Review
In Brocks world, if you are a liberal you can be fair, honest, unjudgmental, you can have high journalistic standards, you can present the news as a true journalist (one with ethics) and yes, your stool doesn't smell bad. Hallelujah! However, if you are a conservative (or a Libertarian, Brock calls black libertarian radio personality and author Larry Elder "right wing" pg 108) then you can't possibly be fair, honest and you are judgmental and couldn't possibly have any respect for journalistic values. On a final note, Brock shows complete comtempt for the market place of ideas, in his world, the news would be restricted to fair minded places like the New York Times and NPR. When the NYT puts the story of Sandy Bergers theft of classified documents on page A17, that's because they are using fair and unbiased journalism as their guide. If Rush mentions the incident, he isn't giving real news and then commentary on that news, he's a right wing attack dog spinning facts and telling lies and duping an audience of mind numbed robots that can't think for themselves. Which reminds me, the other night, on a "fair minded and unbiased" NPR show, Bill Press (highly partisan liberal) noted how the audience of Rush "never reads a newspaper". This is the kind of "news" that Brock wants America to have: NPR, NYT, and Dan Rather. Brock wants the highly popular shows (television and radio) and the best selling books and conservative papers and magazines to be shut down because they are destroying democracy. How "democratic" of him. ----- Note from Steve: The above review was submitted prior to the recent CBS 60 Minutes document debacle on the Bush National Guard service. It may be a bit more stinging to us now -- lots to discuss about media bias!
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5* good insights into ideology and propaganda, June 29, 2004, Reviewer: "lajollaf" (la jolla ca.) - Anyone familiar with the history of propaganda and public relations is aware of how much the strategies of mass persuasion have served ideologies representing radically different worldviews. Ideologues can benefit deeply from one another because content is less important than form: it didn't matter to Goebbels that Edward L. Bernays was Jewish, what mattered was the utility of the latter's technique of massive indirection called Big Think. Soviet propagandists learned from Nazi propagandists (and often vice versa). Brock has done the American public a big service in this book by showing all the craft and design that has gone into the Republican talking-points apparatus. Not only does he document the huge decades-long financing that has stealthily and steadily (with the complicity of centrist media) created a radical right-wing juggernaut, but he also demonstrates how right wing ideologues have circumvented the standard academic peer-review processes that are in place to weed out junk research and impression mongering disguised as consequential results. The researchers in this tradition often cry that academic institutions are against their research, but what they don't tell you is that they'd rather publish in venues where their work is looked at less critically, because it is often unsupportable, and where they simply earn more than they ever would at universities. Perhaps the biggest boondoggle to deliberative discussion in American public discourse is how the media misrepresents these researchers as "scholars" affiliated with think tanks, giving a patina of depth and authority to ideology driven drivel. What the media audience generally doesn't know is that these think tanks are bastions of uniformity with coordinated messages spread by well-dreesed commentators whose ideological conformity are the envy of former Soviet apparatchiks. For those who want to understand why American discourse has coarsened in style and become monochromatic in content, this book provides a good starting place. For those with a broader historical perspective, it helps one to see that America's ideologues may be more dangerous than ideologues of other perspectives because they've been demonstrably more successful: their success is not predicated on physical threat, (as the less succesful political/economic ideologies of past), but on proven marketing techniques lushly financed by corporatist hereditary and new wealth. (It is intriguing to note that for all of O'Reilly's fuss, Soros's political support for left-wing causes is miniscule in comparison to the largesse given by individuals and foundations to the radical right wing. The fact that O'Reilly doesn't lambast Soros's right wing analogues provides elegant evidence for how tilted and spun his program is.) As nicely shown in Brock's book this success is also sadly attributable to a complacent press. You don't have to dislike Bush to want to understand the mechanisms by which populations can be manipulated. And, if you're an American, there is no better way to understand this than by understanding how the Republican Noise Machine operates. This is a substantive book and it is partly so because of the richness and complexity of the history of the radical right and its present influence on American political culture. If the books by Coulter, Stossel, Hannity, Goldberg and company seem considerably less substantive and considerably more shrill this is likely because the influence on modern day America of the moderate (let alone, the radical) left is a useful ideologically driven phantom with, accordingly, less to document and describe. Brock teaches us what to look out for by using the strategems of the Republican right as a case study in the perils of ideology.
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4* The Vast Right Wing exposed, June 3, 2004
Reviewer: Anthony E Reichenberger (St. Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews
I completely agree with what this book is about. The political right in America has elevated message control and "echo chambering" to a higher level unseen in previous political discourse. The way they manipulate facts to their ends, and are able to put them out into the mainstream media largely in tact and unqualified is an incredible achievement. The fact there are so many out there that agree lockstep with everything the right says or does without thinking about it demonstrates their successes in this. However, there are problems with the book. As good as the book chronicles the mechanisms the right has to accomplish this, I believe it would have been far more effective had it been more objective--taken from a viewpoint that this is a sad example of how political discourse is in America; democrats have them too, they just aren't nearly as effective. I also have never been a big fan of Brock's writing (both pre-and post his 'enlightenment'); it is often inconcise and injects way too much of his personal feelings into it.
All in all, if you want to read about the GOP message machine, this gives a very good description of it. If you are a dem and want to reinforce your beliefs, you'll love it. If you are a GOPer, you have less than a month before Fahrenheit 9/11 comes out and you should probably start thinking now about how you are going to trash it.
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5* Countering the Arrogance of Yellow Journalism, September 20, 2004
Reviewer: Douglas Carpenter (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews
A number of American cable news networks are now available throughout most of the world. As an American who has lived abroad much of my life, I know that the mere suggestion that the American news media has a liberal/left bias would immediately invoke chuckles and would sound absolutely preposterous to the overwhelming majority of even the staunchest and most pro-American conservatives in other western democracies all around the world.
And yet still, after all the unfairness and hate-filled name-calling against the Clinton administration, the smear campaign against Al Gore in 2000-the misinformation regarding the 2000 election itself and the deception spoon-fed to the American public by the American news media in the days leading up to and during the war against Iraq and continuing to this very day and the unwillingness of the news media to responsibly follow-up behavior of the Bush administration far more serious than Hillary changing travel agents; we still hear the words "liberal media". For more than eight long years the New York Times and the Washington Post ran front page story after front page story carrying virtually every bit of misinformation the hired-hands of the far-right could dream up. And that is what they call the "liberal media".
In spite of all of this, we still hear well-financed rightwing pundits complain with a straight face that the media has a liberal/left bias.
Do they actually believe this!? Is this just a tactic? Could it be both? Or are they just reading from their talking points?
Unfortunately, this book is not able to answer all of those questions. But it does explain a lot about other factors that contribute to this manufactured corruption of the very core of democracy itself by the leaders of an elitist-driven movement that considers dissent to be treason.
Last year, Eric Alterman's book, 'What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News' was probably one of the first major research works on this vital area to get national attention.
'The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy' by David Brock in many ways reads like a follow-up to Dr. Alterman's research.
Both books presents a bulletproof and watertight case backed up by insurmountable amounts of irrefutable data in disclaiming the right-wing's most arrogant yet most affective talking-point.
"The Republican Noise Machine" takes it a step further by putting forward the concept of "the rightwing echo chamber". In other words, it's not just that Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge or Fox News spread rumors to their bodies of true believers, it is how their disinformation ends up being reported, at least in a speculative manner on respectable outlets.
Please allow me to remind readers that a new book by David Brock and the good people at www.mediamatters.org (a great website to check regularly) is scheduled for release on the October 1. Its title is "'Misstating The State Of The Union: Right-wing Media Distortions During The Presidencies Of Bill Clinton And George W. Bush'".
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2* The pot calls kettle black with a straight face, September 18, 2004
Reviewer: Michael Bird (Anaheim, CA United States) - See all my reviews
It isn't too often I write a review for a book I just couldn't finish, but in this case, I felt I had read enough of it to give a valid opinion. I've noticed that no matter how well written or lucid my reviews are for a political book the "other" side calls it "unhelpful" simply because they disagree with my viewpoint. Such is the nature of the beast, but I bring it up because that same phenomenon happens to a degree here in this book by its author who seems to believe that anyone on the right (in media) is automatically a liar and his or her audience is made up of fools.
While I didn't read much beyond a third of it, I did flip through the rest of the book and here is an interesting quote from page 317: "And should it ever come, the end of news- the end of true facts and good information absent spin- would mean the end of democracy."
Brock has become a mouth piece for the left in this book and there on his changed perch he condemns the right for doing the exact thing he is doing as he condemns them. The pot calling the kettle black to the nth degree.
Perhaps Brock has made a valuable contribution to society with this book, however, because of that quote, remember the words "true facts and good information" which are important in Brocks world (and I agree) to having a good democracy. Consider the current state of affairs in the news business these days: Dan Rather can use forged documents and the left will say "well the information is true anyway, so it doesn't matter that the "facts" were presented in the form of a lie, they are still true." That's news over on the liberal news media yet Brock condemns Fox News throughout this book and uses analogies like comparing Rather to O'Reily.
The comparison between a supposed "neutral and unbiased" reporter/journalist and a pundit that makes no effort at trying to hide a "neutral and unbiased" veil is complete hypocrisy on the part of Brock (and I've heard similar arguments from many on the left). Brock basically states in this book that if you're against abortion, against gun control, want vouchers, want a smaller government, want less taxes, then, because of these beliefs it's impossible for you to be unbiased and neutral and everything you say and report is tilted towards your world view and is basically, in his opinion, destroying democracy.
If Brocks opinion is valid, and I have to question the logic behind it, I wonder what it means if a reporter is for abortion, for gun control, hates vouchers, wants more government regulation and higher taxes (at least on the "rich"). I wonder. Doesn't that mean that reporter can't possibly be unbiased and neutral? You might think so, but alas, Brock has covered this point too.
In Brocks world, if you are a liberal you can be fair, honest, unjudgmental, you can have high journalistic standards, you can present the news as a true journalist (one with ethics) and yes, your stool doesn't smell bad. Hallelujah!
However, if you are a conservative (or a Libertarian, Brock calls black libertarian radio personality and author Larry Elder "right wing" pg 108) then you can't possibly be fair, honest and you are judgmental and couldn't possibly have any respect for journalistic values.
On a final note, Brock shows complete comtempt for the market place of ideas, in his world, the news would be restricted to fair minded places like the New York Times and NPR. When the NYT puts the story of Sandy Bergers theft of classified documents on page A17, that's because they are using fair and unbiased journalism as their guide. If Rush mentions the incident, he isn't giving real news and then commentary on that news, he's a right wing attack dog spinning facts and telling lies and duping an audience of mind numbed robots that can't think for themselves. Which reminds me, the other night, on a "fair minded and unbiased" NPR show, Bill Press (highly partisan liberal) noted how the audience of Rush "never reads a newspaper".
This is the kind of "news" that Brock wants America to have: NPR, NYT, and Dan Rather. Brock wants the highly popular shows (television and radio) and the best selling books and conservative papers and magazines to be shut down because they are destroying democracy. How "democratic" of him.
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July 04, 2004
Book Review - The Republican Noise Machine - David Brock
The Republican Noise Machine : Right Wing Media and How it Corrupts Democracy was a depressing book. I first noticed it from a post by Jerry Colonna. I had it shipped up to my house in Alaska where I settled in for a long read yesterday after my run.
In some ways, it seemed appropriate to read this over the fourth of July weekend. I read a bunch of mental floss on Friday and decided I needed to chew on something serious. I'm back to mental floss...
Until recently I was very apolitical. For whatever reason, I just didn't engage - I felt that things worked themselves out over time and - rather than get wrapped up in the endless political debate - I figured I'd focus on issues that I cared about and support them, independent of their political affiliation. As a result, I told whoever asked that my political affiliation was "my own little party of one."
A couple of years ago, I stuck my toe publicly into the political scene in Colorado. A close friend of mine - Jared Polis - decided to run for the Colorado State Board of Education (he won and is now the chairman). Jared is an unabashed democrat and has become a strong force in the otherwise very conservative state of Colorado. Several friends were running for office in the 2002 election cycle as democrats and I decided to get more actively involved. Everyone (except Jared) lost and - in addition to being bummed out by the candidates that were elected - I was disgusted by the way both parties acted near the end of the election cycle. I remember telling my wife "that's it - I give up - I'm done with organized politics" (of course, that lasted about a week).
The Republican Noise Machine had me sitting in my chair with my mouth hanging open. Brock - a former right-wing insider - has written an incredibly substantive book that tells the story of how the GOP has systematically co-opted the media over the last few decades - starting wtih Nixon and rolling forward to today. This is not a "balanced book" ("balanced view" being one of the fallacies that Brock does a superb job of demolishing) - Brock is unapologetic as he tells his story.
It's quite amazing how organized, effective, and ultimately successful the Republican Right has been. I've experienced this directly in Colorado. A year ago, JB Holston called me and told me about the Independence Institute, a conservative Colorado "think tank" that I was vaguely familiar with. While the Independence Institute isn't mentioned in Brock's book, it's equivalent to many of the conservative "think tanks" that Brock discusses. JB suggested that Colorado needed a "progressive alternative". I agreed and helped rally a crew of folks, including Jared and Rollie Heath (who lost his run for governer against the incumbent Bill Ownes in 2002), to help start the Rocky Mountain Progressive Network. It's a year later and RMPN has done a great job of counterbalancing the Republican Right in Colorado. My experience watching from the background (and learning about the antics - expecially those in the media - by organizations like the Independence Institute) made the story Brock tells even more poignant.
This is a powerful book for anyone that is open minded about the political dynamics in our country. If you are conservative, read it to get an ex-conservative insider's view on what is going on. If you are progressive or liberal, read it to get a much deeper historical understand of how things played out so that you can be more effective contending with them in the future. If you aren't open minded, don't bother - it won't matter to you anyway.
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The Republican Noise Machine
by David Brock
Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy
http://www.thinkingpeace.com/Lib/lib099.html
To Amazon Since defecting from the Republican Party in the latter half of the 1990s and publishing a confessional memoir in 2002, I've discussed my right-wing past with politicians, political activists and strategists, academic scholars, student groups, fellow writers, and hundreds of readers of my book "Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative." I'm rarely asked anymore why I changed, or about the baroque intricacies of the anti-Clinton movement, which I once participated in and then renounced and exposed. After a presidential election decided by the Supreme Court, the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and the war with Iraq, politics has moved to a different place.
Nowadays, when I talk about "Blinded by the Right," people want to know not how I was blinded by the Right, but how so much of the country seems to be in that position. For the first time since 1929, the Republican Party controls all three branches of government. Fewer people identify with the Democratic Party today than at any time since the New Deal. Conservatism seems the prevailing political and intellectual current, while liberalism seems a fringe dispensation of a few aging professors and Hollywood celebrities. People ask me, a former insider, how the Republican Right has won political and ideological power with such seeming ease and why Democrats, despite winning the most votes in the last three presidential elections, seem to be caught in a downward spiral, still able to win at the ballot box but steadily losing the battle for hearts and minds.
While it is not the only answer, my answer is: It's the media, stupid.
When I say this, in a more respectful way, to folks outside the right wing, I usually get either of two responses. Those who receive their news from the New York Times and National Public Radio give me blank stares. They are living in a rarefied media culture -- one that prizes accuracy, fairness, and civility -- that is no longer representative of the media as a whole. Those who have heard snippets of Rush Limbaugh's radio show, have caught a glimpse of Bill O'Reilly's temper tantrums on the FOX News Channel, or occasionally peruse the editorials in the Wall Street Journal think I'm a Cassandra. They view this media as self-discrediting and therefore irrelevant. They are living in a vacuum of denial.
Those who understand what I mean are either members of the media itself, have read media-criticism books or Internet sites devoted to the subject, or are in the political trenches every day dealing with the media. The gap between those who recognize right-wing media power for what it is and those who don't is wide and deep, as if they inhabit parallel universes. The gap is dangerous to democracy and needs to be closed.
When I came to Washington fresh out of college in 1986, I got a job at the Washington Times, the right-wing newspaper bankrolled by Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the Korean-born leader of a religious cult called the Unification Church. Though Moon's paper was said to be read in the Reagan White House, nobody paid much attention to it. We were the proverbial voice in the wilderness. Considering that the paper was governed by a calculatedly unfair political bias and that its journalistic ethics were close to nil, this was a good thing. That was eighteen years ago. Today, the most important sectors of the political media -- most of cable TV news, the majority of popular op-ed columns, almost all of talk radio, a substantial chunk of the book market, and many of the most highly trafficked Web sites -- reflect more closely the political and journalistic values of the Washington Times than those of the New York Times. That is, they are powerful propaganda organs of the Republican Party. For our politics, this development in the media represents a structural change: a structural advantage for the GOP and conservatism, and, I believe, the greatest structural obstacle facing opponents of the right wing. I therefore think it is one of the most important political stories of the era. I have sought to tell this story in "The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy."
I know there is a Republican Noise Machine because I was once part of it. From the Washington Times, to a stint as a "research fellow" at the Heritage Foundation (the Right's premier think tank), to a position as an "investigative writer" at the muckraking magazine The American Spectator, and as the author of a best-selling right-wing book, I forwarded the right-wing agenda not as an open political operative or advocate but under the guise of journalism and punditry, fueled by huge sums of money from right-wing billionaires, foundations, and self-interested corporations.
By the time I said good-bye to the right wing in 1997, what was once a voice in the wilderness was drowning out competing voices across all media channels. The most influential political commentator in America, Rush Limbaugh, and his hundreds of imitators saturated every media market in the country, providing 22 percent of Americans -- not only conservatives but independent swing voters -- with their primary source of news. Conservatives had changed the face of the cable news business with the establishment of the top-rated FOX News Channel, a slicker broadcast version of the Moonie Washington Times. Pundit Ann Coulter and her fanatical ilk topped the best-seller lists, becoming superstars in the world of political punditry. The Spectator juggernaut -- which had a circulation of three hundred thousand per month at its height in the early 1990s -- had been replaced by Internet gossip Matt Drudge, who gets more than 6.5 million visitors to his site every day. Although enormous subsidies were still being pumped into right-wing media that did not turn a profit, right-wing media also had become a multibillion-dollar business, a development that powerfully affected all other commercial media.
The lies, smears, and vicious caricatures leveled against Bill and Hillary Clinton by this right-wing media, and then repeated in virtually every media venue in the country, have now been well documented, not least in "Blinded by the Right." In that book, I compared the anti-Clinton propaganda to a virus as it seeped off the pages of the Spectator into the minds of every sentient American. My memoir ended in 2000; what I did not fully comprehend then, but what is apparent to me now as I have watched the politics of the last few years unfold, is that the virus was not Clinton-specific. In fact, it had nothing to do with the Clintons per se; rather, in different strains, it would afflict any and every political opponent of the right wing, including Al Gore, Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, and the mourners of Senator Paul Wellstone, every major Democrat seeking the presidency in 2004, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, and the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org. What we have here, as a criminal investigator might say, is a pattern.
In the 2000 presidential campaign, the Republican Noise Machine, which worked for years to convince Americans that the Clintons were criminally minded, used the same techniques of character assassination to turn the Democratic standard-bearer, Al Gore, for many years seen as an overly earnest Boy Scout, into a liar. When Republican National Committee polling showed that the Republicans would lose the election to the Democrats on the issues, a "skillful and sustained 18-month campaign by Republicans to portray the vice president as flawed and untrustworthy" was adopted, the New York Times reported. Republicans accused Gore of saying things he never said -- most infamously, that he "invented" the Internet, a claim he never made that was first attributed to him in a GOP press release before it coursed through the media. Actually, Gore had said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet," a claim that even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich verified as true.
The right-wing media broadcast this attack and similar attacks relentlessly, in effect giving the GOP countless hours of free political advertising every day for months leading up to the election. "Albert Arnold Gore Jr. is a habitual liar," William Bennett, a Cabinet secretary in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, announced in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. "... Gore lies because he can't help himself," neoconservative pamphleteer David Horowitz wrote. "LIAR, LIAR," screamed Rupert Murdoch's New York Post. The conservative columnist George F. Will pointed to Gore's "serial mendacity" and warned that he is a "dangerous man." "Gore may be quietly going nuts," National Review's Byron York concluded. The Washington Times agreed: "The real question is how to react to Mr. Gore's increasingly bizarre utterings. Webster's New World Dictionary defines 'delusion' thusly: 'The apparent perception, in a nervous or mental disorder, of some thing external that is not actually present ... a belief in something that is contrary to fact or reality, resulting from deception, misconception, or a mental disorder.'"
This impugning of Gore's character and the questioning of his mental fitness soon surfaced in the regular media. The New York Times ran an article headlined "Tendency to embellish fact snags Gore," while the Boston Globe weighed in with "Gore seen as 'misleading.'" On ABC's "This Week," former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos referred to Gore's "Pinocchio problem." For National Journal's Stuart Taylor, the issue was "the Clintonization of Al Gore, who increasingly apes his boss in fictionalizing his life story and mangling the truth for political gain." Washington Post editor Bob Woodward raised the question of whether Gore "could comprehend reality," while MSNBC's Chris Matthews compared Gore to "Zelig" and insisted, "Isn't it getting to be delusionary?"
The well-orchestrated media cacophony had its intended effect: The election was far more competitive than it should have been -- and, indeed, was decided before the Supreme Court stepped in -- because of negative voter perceptions of Gore's honesty and trustworthiness. In the final polls before the election and in exit polls on Election Day, voters said they favored Gore's program over George W. Bush's. Gore won substantial majorities not only for his position on most specific issues but also for his overall thrust. The conservative Bush theme of tax cuts and small government was rejected by voters in favor of the more liberal Gore theme of extending prosperity more broadly and standing up to corporate interests. Yet while Bush shaded the truth and misstated facts throughout the campaign on everything from the size of Gore's federal spending proposals to his own record as governor of Texas, by substantial margins voters thought Bush was more truthful than Gore. According to an ABC exit poll, of personal qualities that mattered most to voters, 24 percent ranked "honest/trustworthy" first -- and they went for Bush over Gore by a margin of 80 percent to 15 percent. Seventy-four percent of voters said "Gore would say anything," while 58 percent thought Bush would. Among white, college-educated, male voters, Gore's "untruthfulness" was cited overwhelmingly as a reason not to vote for him, far more than any other reason.
Two years after the election, Gore gave an extraordinary interview to the New York Observer that could be read as an explanation of what happened to his presidential campaign. Gore charged that conservatives in the media, operating under journalistic cover, are loyal not to the standards and conventions of journalism but, rather, to politics and party. Gore said:
"The media is kind of weird these days on politics, and there are some major institutional voices that are, truthfully speaking, part and parcel of the Republican Party. Fox News Network, the Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh -- there's a bunch of them, and some of them are financed by wealthy ultra-conservative billionaires who make political deals with Republican administrations and the rest of the media.... Most of the media [has] been slow to recognize the pervasive impact of this Fifth Column in their ranks -- that is, day after day, injecting the daily Republican talking points into the definition of what's objective as stated by the news media as a whole....
Something will start at the Republican National Committee, inside the building, and it will explode the next day on the right-wing talk-show network and on Fox News and in the newspapers that play this game, the Washington Times and the others. And then they'll create a little echo chamber, and pretty soon they all start baiting the mainstream media for allegedly ignoring the story they've pushed into the zeitgeist. And then pretty soon the mainstream media goes out and disingenuously takes a so-called objective sampling, and lo and behold, these RNC talking points are woven into the fabric of the zeitgeist...."
True to form, the right-wing media greeted this factual description with yet another frenzy of repetitive messaging portraying Gore as crazy. Speaking of Gore on FOX News, The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes said, "This is nutty. This is along the lines with, you know, President Bush killed Paul Wellstone, and the White House knew before 9/11 that the attacks were going to happen. This is -- I mean, this is conspiratorial stuff." Also on FOX, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer said of Gore, "I'm a psychiatrist. I don't usually practice on camera. But this is the edge of looniness, this idea that there's a vast conspiracy, it sits in a building, it emanates, it has these tentacles, is really at the edge. He could use a little help." "It could be he's just nuts," Rush Limbaugh said of Gore. "Tipper Gore's issue is what? Mental health. Right? It could be closer to home than we know." "He [Gore] said it's a conspiracy," Tucker Carlson said on CNN's "Crossfire." "I actually think he's coming a little unhinged," The Weekly Standard's David Brooks, now at the New York Times, said of Gore on PBS.
As Gore's experience demonstrated, Democrats ignore these attacks at their peril: Not only do such attacks confirm the preconceptions of Republicans but they shape the thinking of undecided voters and even of Democrats. One of the most frightening experiences I have had in recent years in talking with rank-and-file Democrats is the extent to which they unconsciously internalize right-wing propaganda. To add insult to injury, too many Democrats have a tendency to blame the victims of these smears -- their own leaders -- rather than addressing the root of the problem. For instance, when Senator Daschle made the factual statement that "failed" diplomacy had led to war with Iraq, right-wing media accused him of siding with Saddam Hussein. The ensuing controversy caused many Democrats to think Daschle had put his foot in his mouth.
With the right-wing media now a seemingly permanent and defining feature of the media landscape, if Democrats cut through the propaganda and win back the White House in 2004, they still face the prospect of being brutally slammed and systematically slandered in such a way that will make governing exceedingly difficult. There should be no doubt that the right-wing media's wildings of 1993 -- which led to Clinton's impeachment four years later -- will be replayed over and over again until its capacities to spread filth are somehow eradicated.
Ironically, though not coincidentally, this radical transformation of the media has been obscured by conservative charges of "liberal media bias" that are believed by the vast majority of the public, including about half of Democrats. I'm all too familiar with the claim. From my very first days at the Washington Times, I was schooled to invoke "liberal bias" to deflect attention from my own biases and journalistic lapses and as a rationale to justify my presence in the mainstream media conversation in the name of providing "balance" or "the other side." We sold a lot of books and magazines and commanded lavish attention for our propaganda outside the right wing by using this cover story. As I showed in "Blinded by the Right," the truth was that my work as a right-wing journalist and commentator -- in particular, my American Spectator exposés on Anita Hill and the Clintons -- did not deserve the attention they received. I was delivering a truckload of nonfacts, half-truths, and innuendos, not "balance" or "the other side." What I show in "The Republican Noise Machine" is that my experience was not the exception but the rule.
The "liberal media" mantra aside, if one looks and listens closely to what the right wing says when it thinks others may not be paying attention, there should be no doubt that it has made potent political gains not despite the media but through it. Rush Limbaugh says his program has "redefined the media" and refers to the "Limbaugh echo chamber syndrome," by which messaging originating on his show drives the twenty-four-hour news cycle. "The radical Left," he says, "is furious that liberals no longer set the agenda in the national media." "'New media' outlets pound establishment," the Washington Times announced in an op-ed by right-wing publicist Craig Shirley. In a column explaining why the "outing" in the press of the identity of a covert CIA operative by senior Bush administration officials -- a possibly criminal act committed to harm a Bush critic -- did not spark a major political scandal, Tod Lindberg of the Hoover Institution explained in the Washington Times, "The media culture has changed. Conservatives and GOP partisans now have more than adequate means to offer an exculpatory counter-narrative." When CBS announced the cancellation of a biopic that was deemed unflattering toward the Reagans, Matt Drudge appeared on MSNBC, on a show hosted by a former Republican member of Congress, to announce the "beginning of a second media century .... It was the Internet, it was talk radio, it was cable that put pressure on CBS, and heretofore, there's never been this kind of pressure applied to one of the big titans, one of the big three." Brian C. Anderson, writing on OpinionJournal.com, a right-wing Web site published by the Wall Street Journal, in late 2003, informed conservatives, "[w]e're not losing anymore" and attributed this fact to a media "revolution." "Everything has changed," he wrote.
In a syndicated column titled "Culture War Signals," John Leo of U.S. News & World Report argued that "a corner has been turned" in the "culture wars" with the "rise of a large crop of commentators the left has not been able to match" and "conservative gains in new media" like the FOX News Channel. Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks has written that the conservative media have "cohered to form a dazzlingly efficient ideology delivery system that swamps liberal efforts to get their ideas out." MSNBC's Matthews, interviewing Bernard Goldberg, the author of an attack book on the "liberal media" titled "Bias," got the author to agree with his view that the cable news industry -- whose total news audience is growing while that of the traditional broadcast news networks is declining -- is biased all right, though in favor of the right wing. According to Bill O'Reilly, "For decades, [liberals] controlled the agenda on TV news. That's over." In an interview with PBS, Tony Blankley, the former Newt Gingrich flack turned editorial page editor of the Washington Times and "McLaughlin Group" panelist, said:
"Starting in 1994, with the Republican election of Congress, I think Limbaugh made the difference in electing the Republican majority. In the following three elections, he made the difference holding the majority. And in 2000, in the presidential race in Florida, he was the difference between Gore and Bush winning Florida, and thus the presidency."
Commenting on the media while interviewing Ann Coulter about her book "Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism," right-wing radio host Sean Hannity crowed, "We've basically taken over!" Coulter, who has made millions off the charge of "liberal media bias" while maintaining a career as perhaps the most biased right-wing voice in the media, laughed in agreement. A young writer for Rupert Murdoch's neoconservative Weekly Standard named Matt Labash -- whom I hired into right-wing journalism at The American Spectator -- was probably laughing, too, when he was interviewed by Columbia Journalism Review partner Web site JournalismJobs.com. The interviewer asked, "Why have conservative media outlets like The Weekly Standard and FOX News Channel become more popular in recent years?" In his answer, Labash conceded that conservatives reject in their own media the standards of fairness, accuracy, and unbiased coverage that they demand from the "liberal media." He unmasked the hypocrisy at the heart of these endeavors:
"Because they feed the rage. We bring pain to the liberal media. I say that mockingly but it's true somewhat ... While these hand-wringing Freedom Forum types talk about objectivity, the conservative media like to rap the liberal media on the knuckles for not being objective. We've created this cottage industry in which it pays to be un-objective ... It's a great way to have your cake and eat it too. Criticize other people for not being objective. Be as subjective as you want. It's a great little racket."
Matt Labash's "great little racket" is the subject of "The Republican Noise Machine." This is a book about the explicitly right-wing media and about how mainstream media, sometimes under the direction of executives who are conservative Republicans, has succumbed to an undue conservative influence and tilt. It is about the right-wing media's history, its reach, its appeal, its practices, its methods, and its financing. It is also about the beliefs of those who populate right-wing media and the beliefs that people derive from it. My conclusion is that right-wing media is a massive fraud, victimizing its own audience and corrupting the broader political dialogue with the tacit permission of established media authorities who should, and probably do, know better.
I argue, moreover, that the creation of right-wing media, and of the strategies by which the right wing has penetrated, pressured, co-opted, and subdued the mainstream media into accommodating conservatism, was not an accident. Once upon a time, right-wing strategists, operatives, and financiers believed that they could never win political hegemony in the United States unless they won domination of the country's political discourse. Toward this end, a deliberate, well-financed, and expressly acknowledged communications and deregulatory plan was pursued by the right wing for more than thirty years -- in close coordination with Republican Party leaders -- to subvert and subsume journalism and reshape the national consciousness through the media, with the intention of skewing American politics sharply to the right. The plan has succeeded spectacularly.
The implications of this right-wing media incursion extend well beyond particular political outcomes to the heart of our democracy. Democracy depends on an informed citizenry. The conscious effort by the right wing to misinform the American citizenry -- to collapse the distinction between journalism and propaganda -- is thus an assault on democracy itself.
The problem is really not so much one of "bias," to use the Right's favored terminology, as it is where bias leads: In the biased right-wing media, among biased right-wing commentators, and in a mainstream media susceptible to right-wing scripting, it leads to verifiable journalistic malpractice, to the publication of misinformation, and to ethical malfeasance. At a deeper level, the existence and influence of the right-wing media as presently constituted is an affront to logic, rationality, and the maintenance of a shared knowledge base from which political consensus and correct public policy choices can be forged. While the right wing cleverly has achieved its greatest gains in mainstream media sectors that ostensibly present opinion -- columns, TV punditry, talk radio, and books -- this opinion is predicated on a raft of distortions, misrepresentations, and outright lies presented to readers and viewers as fact. To further confuse the picture, the right wing has funded an array of its own media institutions, including newspapers, magazines, Internet sites, and a cable news channel, that produce a large volume of "news" that is not only offensive and unfair but misleading and often false.
Because technological advances and the race for ratings and sales have made the wall between right-wing media and the rest of the media permeable, the American media as a whole has become a powerful conveyor belt for conservative-generated "news," commentary, story lines, jargon, and spin. It is now possible to watch a lie move from a disreputable right-wing Web site onto the afternoon talk radio shows, to several cable chat shows throughout the evening, and into the next morning's Washington Post -- all in twenty-four hours. This media food chain moves phony information and GOP talking points -- manufactured by and for conservatives, often bought and paid for by conservative political interests, and disseminated through an unabashedly biased right-wing media apparatus that follows no rules or professional norms -- into every family dining room, every workplace, and every Internet chat room in America.
Equally troubling is that the cable and radio talkers who shape the national political conversation have the ability to censor news that does not serve the interests of the right wing. Every day, professional news organizations, primarily in the prestige print press, report facts, across a broad range of subjects, that are essential to an informed view of politics and policy. More often than not, these stories die on the page and never reach most Americans, owing to right-wing command of the new media "echo chamber."
The right-wing drive for media power must also be understood as an overturning of the First Amendment, which posits that good information will drive out bad information given diversity in the marketplace of ideas. As I will show, the Right's premeditated undermining of the media as a public trust in favor of crass commercial values, its coordinated attacks on noncommercial media, and the Republican-led drive for greater consolidation of media ownership have all but wiped out liberal and left-wing views and voices in entire sectors of the American media. Perhaps most ominous, right-wing verbal brownshirts of late have used their mighty media platforms to chill the free speech of their political adversaries and to neuter aggressive journalistic fact-finding that threatens Republican power.
My view is that unchecked right-wing media power means that in the United States today, no issue can be honestly debated and no election can be fairly decided. If California voters recall their governor in the belief that the state budget deficit is four times higher than it actually is, if Americans think Saddam Hussein was behind September 11 before hearing any evidence, if 19 percent of the public thinks it is in the top 1 percent tax bracket, if Americans view criticism of the government's national security policies as tantamount to treason -- thank the right-wing media and those who abet it.
June 14, 2004
David Brock, Author of "The Republican Noise Machine: Right Wing Media and How it Corrupts Democracy"
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
David Brock is back!
Author of one of BuzzFlash's all-time best sellers, "Blinded by the Right," the former journalist for the vast right wing conspiracy, the man who came in from the wrong, has penned another knock-out book whose title says it all, "The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How it Corrupts Democracy."
BuzzFlash vigorously promoted and interviewed Brock while he came under withering attack from the mainstream press, including the Washington Post, for his candid, thoughtful expose in "Blinded." We found the book and Brock to be honest, sincere and tremendously informative -- which, of course, made him vulnerable to a right wing dirt slinging and feigned indignation from the shills in the mainstream media.
Brock's new book is a comprehensive analysis of the right wing media echo chamber -- and it is indispensable to anyone who believes that the GOP has taken a few pages out of the Goebbels handbook and run with it. And if you don't think that is the case, you will by the end of reading "The Republican Noise Machine." It will explain how we have ended up with a whole army of "Stepford" right wingers.
And Brock's done more than write about the ministry of Republican media propaganda, he's started a research center to expose the deceptions and lies that are disseminated daily by the likes of FOX News and Rush Limbaugh. Just go to MediaMatters.org for a sampling of what Brock's new project is up to.
But, in the meantime, buy the book. You won't be disappointed.
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BuzzFlash: We last talked with you when your bestseller Blinded by the Right came out and you were being blindsided by the right as a result of the book. We came to your defense and got a lot of out, and our readers got a lot out of our interviews with you. I think they’re among our most read interviews. You’ve got a new book out, The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How it Corrupts Democracy. But before we get into that, you’re doing something about the right-wing media echo chamber. Tell us what it is.
David Brock: Media Matters for America is a progressive research center that monitors, analyzes and corrects conservative misinformation in the media. It’s primarily web-driven, and we are posting our analysis and corrections in real time, every day, as the result of our monitoring. For example, we’re recording and transcribing Rush Limbaugh, and we’re TIVO-ing and analyzing and correcting what’s on cable. We’re looking at a lot of the right-wing websites with the hope that we can spot this conservative misinformation before it spreads into the mainstream media. And then we’re also analyzing print as well.
BuzzFlash: Do you plan to do any studies?
David Brock: Yes, absolutely. It is a research center; it’s not just a website. We’re going to do longer-term analysis of trends and issue reports. We just launched this last week, and so we’re in our very, very first iteration of this. But I think there’s a lot of room for longer-term analysis of the trends, trying to document the echo chamber by which a piece of conservative misinformation might start on a right-wing website or with talk radio, and then ends up being legitimized and repeated throughout the mainstream media. And so we will be doing that as well.
BuzzFlash: When BuzzFlash started we took a look at the Drudge Report, and we took it seriously, whereas a lot of progressives and independents dismissed Drudge.
David Brock: That’s right.
BuzzFlash: We thought Drudge was unfortunately having a tremendous impact on bottom-feeding the mainstream media. And while we hope our standards are a bit above Drudge, nonetheless we took that as a model for the way that our site is constructed with headlines and commentary from a progressive perspective. Have you taken into account what Brent Bozell has done with the conservative Media Research Center?
David Brock: Yes, I have. In fact, the idea for this organization – the book I’m publishing next week, The Republican Noise Machine, goes into the history of how the conservative movement has over time and through strategic funding been able to come to a point where they dominate our discourse. And part of that strategy was the formation of several media watchdog or monitoring groups, going back to 1969. Today, the premier one is Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center, which has roughly a $6 million annual budget, and, I believe, something like 60 employees who monitor the media. And obviously what they are trying to do is to market and brand the notion of liberal bias.
BuzzFlash: Perceived liberal bias.
David Brock: Yes, what they consider to be liberal bias. I don’t believe they ever proved that. But the fact is that they are moving the media itself to the right by dominating the debate over the politics of the media, and by convincing – including, I think, close to a majority of Democrats – that the media is liberally biased. The monitoring concept is very similar to what they’re doing, but we are focusing on misinformation. We’re not focusing on bias, because I believe bias is a very slippery and subjective term. You’ll always have some people who agree with your opinion about what may have been the motivation of a newscaster or a reporter. We’re not going into that, because those are not provable things. What we’re trying to do is focus on accuracy, reliability and credibility -- all under the rubric of misinformation. So we’re carrying out what we’re doing very much differently than what they do, because I think a lot of what they do is just fraudulent. However, the concept of monitoring itself was a very effective device that the right came up with, and it is modeled on that concept.
BuzzFlash: I think your book Blinded by the Right was so instructive for us in particular, because independents, Democrats, liberals, progressives and so forth are dismissive of this sometimes – of understanding what the right has done, and to grant that while the substance of what they do may be perhaps immoral, unethical, or untruthful, they have had successful strategies. We have to differentiate between content and strategy.
David Brock: Correct. That is actually, I think, the most important point. I’ve obviously been in conversations that have been ongoing since I published Blinded by the Right – about fashioning effective responses, and what kind of institutions could be built. And there is a lot of cognitive dissonance on the question. I think you said it perfectly – distinguishing between content and strategy. There is today The Center for American Progress, a liberal, progressive version of The Heritage Foundation. It does not mean that the research coming out of there is of the low quality of the research coming out of The Heritage Foundation. I worked at Heritage for a year, and people don’t have to take my word for it. There have been plenty of analyses – and, in fact, books written – that talk about how shoddy the research is, and that it’s basically public relations and propaganda.
So the same thing is not going on at the several at the Center for American Progress. They’re doing good, factual, solid research. But the idea of creating an institution – that it’s funded in perpetuity to wage what the right wing calls the war of ideas – is a very good one. And that’s a war that I think progressives have not waged in this way, by creating these institutions that are meant to be there. They’re not connected to political campaigns. They’re meant to be there before an election, and they’re meant to be there the day after the election, no matter the outcome of the election.
BuzzFlash: You ran the risk of opening yourself up to personal attacks due to Blinded by the Right from so-called liberal newspapers like the Washington Post, which ran a lacerating review of your book.
David Brock: Yes. Still today – this is our ninth day of Media Matters operation – they have not noted that we exist.
BuzzFlash: And this used to be, at least, considered a liberal paper. It’s held up by the right wing as a liberal paper. And that’s a bit of a joke, because we know while The New York Times editorial page continues to be what one might call traditionally liberal, its news page, along with the Washington Post, tends to be extremely hard on Democrats and extremely easy on Bush.
Even if they occasionally write good articles and have some good journalists who do some good pieces, overall they’ve hardly done the investigative type of work that this administration merits, and have tended to foster, once again, these stories about Kerry and his medals, and all sorts of trivial nonsense, instead of comprehensively getting into the morass of the Bush administration.
David Brock: We commissioned a poll for our launch and we asked a question about people’s perception of the mainstream media’s coverage of the Bush administration. Unfortunately I’m not looking at it right now, but if people go to our website they’ll see that a majority, or at least a plurality, have thought that the mainstream press was far too soft on the Bush administration, which is backup for some of what you’re saying there.
BuzzFlash: You’ve moved beyond what was a combination of insight through your personal experience of what the inner workings of the right wing media sausage machine is into analysis in your book, The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How it Corrupts Democracy. In it you concentrate almost entirely on an analysis of the right-wing media echo chamber, if we can call it that, and the relationship to think tanks, along with the role of Rush Limbaugh and so forth.
As we know, there’s an ongoing debate within the Democratic Party between the DLC and the progressive wing. Let’s characterize it as the DLC looks at polls and says, well, this is where the country is, so we need to adapt our language to that, while the progressives say, the country is where it is because we’re not leading them to a different spot. Now the Republicans took a country that was kind of centrist-to-left on social welfare issues, New Deal issues, Social Security, Medicare, and so forth, and moved the debate way to the right, although a lot of the polling still supports this sort of center, moderate, liberal, New Deal concept of America. Hasn’t the Republican media machine shown that you can do this successfully?
David Brock: Let me describe what happened on the right-wing side. Yes, I think it is correct in the sense that they took ideas that if you go back to the Goldwater era and then forward into the early 1970s when they really started funding these think tanks, they took ideas that were considered fringe and extreme. The conservatives were a minority within their own party. And through this strategy that I lay out in the book – a specific strategy that was specifically funded – they took what were considered some of the planks for Goldwater: the hostility to civil rights, hostility to the United Nations, the privatizing of Social Security – things like that. That is still, to a large extent, the Republican agenda today.
What they were able to do is to mainstream these ideas first within the Republican Party, and then through the whole political culture. The only thing I think is significant is that they did not rely on elected politicians to do this for them, so that when Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981, the Heritage Foundation had been working for six or seven years on what would become the policy blueprint for the Reagan administration, and they handed it to them.
But the people who led this conservative movement in the early 1970s were ideological people who were passionate, who had the financial resources to do this. And they were unelected people, such as the person who’s still the head of the Heritage Foundation today, Ed Fulmer. So that was where the leadership came from. I would argue that it was not actually Ronald Reagan or either Bush who really moved the ball. The ball was moved through effective communication and strategic philanthropy that was organized by the right, and not primarily through their elected politicians. The only one who really understood this, I think, was Newt Gingrich. But the others are the beneficiary of all this work that was done by non-elected leaders.
BuzzFlash: Newt Gingrich – if we kind of look at his doppelganger or his alter ego in the media, from my perspective it would be Rush Limbaugh. Rush kind of idealizes the Gingrich approach, which a cultural media populism appealing to emotional flashpoints – call it demagoguery – to get people emotionally on the side of the right wing, and then repeating falsehoods that become engrained in their heads. As you point out in your book, they become circulated among other Republican officials. Limbaugh legitimizes certain ways of thinking and certain thoughts.
David Brock: Right, and it’s a kind of inverted populism where, by playing to primarily cultural prejudices, he was able to take the Republican-conservative right-wing economic agenda -- which I don't think there was a lot of popular support for, and there still may not be -- but by emphasizing those cultural issues, he was able to bring a lot of people along who I think otherwise would be voting more their economic interests; i.e., voting with progressives and liberals. Through all of the bashing he does of feminism and gays and that kind of thing, he’s able to get them to side against their own economic interests by highlighting the cultural divisions.
BuzzFlash: It’s not coincidence that Cheney appears fairly regularly on his show. And that after Limbaugh was first charged with illegal use of prescription drugs, Bush was asked about him, and he said, “He is a great American.” He seems a vital link because without him the right wing could lose some of the blue-collar voters, because he emotionally targets them on the so-called gays, gods and guns issue – wedge issues.
David Brock: I think the phenomena of Limbaugh is understood in the conservative movement, but not well understood outside of it. Someone asked me this today – when did the right wing start to really get mainstream media attraction for its talking points, and its propaganda, and its lies and disinformation? I wrote about this in Blinded by the Right, but the period that I was in the conservative movement, from 1986 to, say, 1997, there was a critical shift, and I think Limbaugh is really the key to it.
Part of that had to do with sales. For example, once Limbaugh went into national syndication in 1988, and then he started to get huge audiences into the early 90s, he could take information from places like the Washington Times or from National Review, or he could take a book, as he did with my book, The Real Anita Hill, and he could sell that book. Then it would make the best seller list, and there would be a perception in the regular media that, well, if a book is selling, then there must be something to it, or it must have some kind of credibility.
Then you could go on the Today Show with your misinformation, as I did. And then you’d reach another 6 million people who are not the Limbaugh audience. He’s really a critical piece of this entire thing. In 1986, I was at the sister publication of the Washington Times, Insight magazine. Back then, the Washington Times was seen as a fringe and unreliable, and it had a circulation of about roughly 100,000. The critical shift that I try to describe in The Republican Noise Machine is that 18 years later, because of Limbaugh, and then because of all the Limbaugh imitators on radio, because of cable and particularly Fox, and because of the Internet – all those things happening subsequent to ’86 – a wrong or false article in the Washington Times that was done in ’86 only reached the circulation of the Washington Times.
Today, that author of that wrong or false piece – Limbaugh can read it to 15 million. The author could go on Bill O’Reilly’s show and reach whatever it is – 2-3 million? And Drudge could post the Washington Times story and have another several million. This is a structural change in the media environment. And I think that that is the critical reason why progressives – although they still win elections – seem to steadily be losing the hearts and minds.
BuzzFlash: This is an issue that interests us very much. In 2000, the conventional wisdom of the mainstream media was Gore was becoming too populist, whereas we would argue that he probably should have been more populist and gotten so far ahead that Bush couldn’t steal the election. As we know, he still won the popular vote by 542,000 votes, so I don’t know how that’s being too populist. But in any case, it seems the Democrats are always on the defensive in the DLC, saying, oh, we can’t afford to be too populist, whereas the Republicans are brazenly populist in the sense of appealing to a value populism.
But the Democrats are definitely afraid to bring up economic populism. The Republicans say, oh, you’re trying to create class warfare, while the Republican Party basically rules in Congress and got within enough distance to steal the presidency because of a cultural populism. So it seems to work for the Republicans, and the Democrats haven’t figured out yet that that’s what they’re doing.
David Brock: Well, it’s certainly the case that this is where the absence of liberal radio, I believe, is an enormous problem for liberals and progressives because the populism of the Republican right is largely coming out of radio. And radio is a populist medium. Without that kind of voice -- I believe one study showed 310 hours a day of right-wing talk, and five hours of liberal talk, in something like the top 45 U.S. radio markets -- when you have that kind of disproportionate influence, when you have one ideological faction controlling that medium to that level, I think you have – and this is in the subtitle of my book – serious questions about the proper functioning of the democracy, which is predicated on the idea that people need correct, and good, and solid information.
Their dominance of that media has led to a lack of an even playing field to such an extent that I question whether any issue could be fairly debated, and whether you can actually have a fair election. Because if you go back to what they did to Gore, and the false caricature of Gore as a liar – that was repeated and repeated through radio day after day. Eventually it did shape the coverage in the mainstream media. If you look at the exit polls, the majority of voters went with Gore on the issues and on the platform, including on taxes, but the election was won by Bush on this issue of integrity and who you trusted. There was a completely fraudulent propaganda initiative to go after Gore’s character because they knew, in their own internal polling, they couldn’t win any other way.
I reprint in the book an interview that Al Gore gave to the New York Observer in November 2002 where he lays this out absolutely correctly – that this was what happened – that the Republicans were able to change the entire zeitgeist of the country through these right-wing media organs.
I’ve been saying for months that no matter who the Democrats nominated this year, that person would face the same problem because the machinery is in place. The particulars of the story having to do with the particular backgrounds of the candidates would mean that the script would be slightly different. But the machinery is in place, and the ability to create those caricatures is in place. What I’ve tried to talk about is I think a lot of people, even progressives, misunderstood what happened in the ‘90s, to the extent that they felt that what had happened had something to do with the Clintons. And I believe it had very little to do with the Clintons; the same smearing that happened to the Clintons happened to Gore, and then it also happened to Daschle. If you looked at Al Franken’s book and the way he lays out what happened during the Wellstone memorial, and how that whole thing was completely distorted and misrepresented right before another election, this is a really critical issue.
BuzzFlash: If you go back to the famous Joe McGinnis book The Selling of the President about Nixon in 1968, it discusses that Nixon was posed as a commodity to be sold. We saw that leap exponentially when Reagan was nominated. Here you had an actor who was really a blank slate in many ways, even though he espoused a right-wing ideology. The Reagan presidency was sold on Morning in America commercials. It was the complete triumph of image over substance of leadership. And with Bush, although he’s become a better sort of scripted speaker – obviously not extemporaneous, but better scripted – he carries that one step further, because he’s an even lighter candidate than Reagan in terms of image. Isn’t this really the advertising model of branding an image, and no matter what appears contrary to that image, you just keep going on with the brand?
David Brock: One of the points I try to make in The Republican Noise Machine is the superior understanding that the conservatives have had for three decades. but it accelerated so much because of the development of new media – the Internet and cable and radio. They have an understanding of branding, marketing and PR. It’s well more than a billion dollars that has been spent in just the subsidized parts of the right wing – the partisan think tanks and many of the pundits you see on cable, and the Washington Times and New York Post and things of this nature.
Within the think tanks, they create jargon: faith-based initiatives and school vouchers. They create a language for talking about their ideas, and they package the ideas, and then they sell them. And they come up with the phrases as you would if you were selling any product. These are all products. Liberal bias is a product too. They funded it, they branded it, and they kept repeating it and repeating it. And they convinced people of it.
BuzzFlash: We’re seeing that as Bush continues to talk about democracy in Iraq when it seems, at this point, the Iraqis don’t want us and the only democracy would be one that we impose and run. But he still keeps saying nothing will deter us from this mission. The flowery appeal to democracy and patriotism continues to flow out of Bush despite reality. We’ve got a script and we’re sticking to it, no matter what happens.
David Brock: Right. And they have an operation, which I go into in a lot of detail in the book, to disseminate and to keep people on those messages. From all of these investments and think tanks, you have talking points and research flowing into the distribution channels, which are the media channels such as radio, so that all those hours on the air are not being filled by the hosts or by the staff of the hosts themselves. They are getting their content out of what began to be created in the early 1970s, and what is today a vast interlocking network of partisan think tanks and research centers. They’re provided all that.
And that extends as well to cable, where the conservative hosts and conservative guests are supplied in real time with what the message of the day is, and what the party line is. It’s still coming out of this multi-billion dollar communications apparatus that the right set up.
BuzzFlash: How does that work in terms of the corporately owned CBS, NBC, ABC, and affiliates? What role do they have to play in their news operations?
David Brock: What seems to have happened is that the right wing wanted to mainstream its ideas and wanted to infiltrate and penetrate the mainstream media. I think they’ve had the easiest time with cable partly because there’s so much airtime to fill and partly because, if you look at the demographics, the people watching cable – not just Fox, but the other cable – it skews conservative. It’s something like 40 percent of above. And the numbers for liberals watching cable are quite low – it’s less than 20 percent. Part of this is what you’re saying, which is that it’s ratings-driven and advertiser-driven. As far as the big network morning shows and the evening news, I think the right has an effect, but I think it has had less of an effect, in putting out bad information in those places.
Then again, through creating pundits like Ann Coulter and having a conservative book club in place, where you can drive a book like that onto the best seller list, she still does end up on Today or Good Morning America with books that are just page after page of lies. So they are everywhere, and it’s spreading. One of the parts of this organization is to combat and to push back against it, because these ideas are not reliable or credible, and that has to be documented. We have to move the mainstreaming in reverse.
BuzzFlash: What role does technology play? A barrage of information is distributed in headline fashion. Even print media, with the emergence of USA Today, has its own McNews, and you’re starting to see even the larger papers run shorter articles and fewer investigative articles.
It seems that the Bush administration in particular relies on the media sort of being ahistorical – that is, each day it sort of begins freshly to cover the news, and you rarely see context of what Rumsfeld said a week ago. You might see that in some of the magazines, or occasionally in a longer article, but news is basically whatever the White House dictates that day.
David Brock: Well, that is true, and it is the case that because information travels so fast, the context is often lost. Where they have had their greatest impact, I think, is with the media that lends itself to illogic, which is radio and a lot of the crossfire formats on cable. The insidious effect in the mainstream media, which I go back and show started in the early 1970s, was the conservative promotion of the idea of balance. So the groups that they funded to pressure the media were agitating for equal time and balance. And once the mainstream media accepted that as the correct way of reporting, what you ended up with was, under the rubric of balance, they had to report things that were false and wrong that conservatives were saying, because they had to give the other side. And the media stops its quest for truth and accepted that all they had to do was balance. So there are many assertions in the regular press, and one of the reports we have up on our website talks about the way the conservatives were able to convince a majority of Americans that the economic recession began under Clinton, when in fact it began in March of 2001. And what you see in that report is that over time mainstream media quote Republican officials saying falsely that the economic recession began under Clinton. And then there’s a missing paragraph; the next paragraph should be: But it didn’t.
BuzzFlash: Someone who reads The Republican Noise Machine, what will they get out of it?
David Brock: I think what they’ll get out of it is an understanding of how the conservative system works, from heavy documentation going back to the early 1970s that there were specific plans put in place. The plans are in writing and I identify what those plans were, and how they were funded, and what exactly the strategies were over time to achieve what they’ve achieved.
The book does deal with the present media landscape, but a lot of it is tracing how, through a lot of patience and a lot of money – it’s all about following the money – the Republican right was able to achieve the goal of infiltration and penetration of the media. They understood from the beginning that all politics is translated through the media, so that has been their focus. And the irony is that at the same time they mounted a simultaneous strategy to bash the media as liberally biased. The two worked hand in hand to change the entire complexion of the media.
http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/04/06/int04029.html
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0409.warren.html
What Ailes Us
Are ideologues or market forces pulling the media to the right?
By James Warren
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David Brock is a former arsonist now hawking fire extinguishers, and his makeover humbles any on display in the pages of Cosmopolitan or Glamour. This may explain the unease among both his prior co-conspirators on the political right and new allies on the left as he surfaces as a pop culture Margaret Mead, here dissecting the purported hijacking of the American media by strange tribes of conservatives.
The Republican Noise Machine
by David Brock
Crown, $25.95
Brock was a self-acknowledged journalistic butcher who plied his falsehood-filled trade at the Heritage Foundation, The Washington Times and The American Spectator, gaining notoriety for sliming Bill Clinton in the fabled "troopergate" opus for the Spectator and in a book trashing Anita Hill, the critic of Clarence Thomas's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. His awful oeuvre was so vast that most don't even recall one of the most hideous magazine pieces of our time--an overwrought, misogynistic 1999 Esquire profile of former California congressman Michael Huffington's decision to come out of the closet. This world-exclusive by Brock, who is also gay, was crafted with the agreement that the demonette of Huffington's tale, ex-wife Arianna, would not even be allowed to respond to allegations of skullduggery and gold-digging manipulation. Esquire's "The Strange Odyssey of Michael Huffington" served as a melancholy reminder that journalism has no minimum standards for entry.
Well, Brock says he subsequently saw the light (largely due to belatedly perceiving injustices done to Bill Clinton), switched political sides, and learned the benefits of rigor in reporting. His crossing this ideological bridge is not unlike treks by more notable figures in the annals of media, notably Walter Winchell (who supported, then excoriated President Franklin Roosevelt), Westbrook Pegler (who went way, way right) and William Randolph Hearst (a liberal Democrat transformed into another Roosevelt hater). Brock's book on Hillary Clinton is said to have inspired his transition, which in turn generated a book-length confession of his past misdeeds and a frantic assertion of how deeply he craved redemption.
The Republican Noise Machine is a lengthy, and not uninteresting, look at the impressive rebound of right-leaning thought in American (mostly Washington-based) media, personified by the current ascendancy of the FOX News Channel, riding its wonderfully effective and disingenuous slogan, "fair and balanced." His case for a right-wing conspiracy would make Hillary Clinton smile. Funded by deep-pocketed conservatives and intellectually inspired by various partisan think tanks, it encompasses right-wing talk radio hosts (Rush Limbaugh and Rush wannabes) along with aggressive book publishers, Internet impresario Matt Drudge, and of course, their beloved FOX. Frustrated by what they all deem traditional "liberal" domination of media and culture, they are said to constitute a propaganda machine to rival anything ever created in the old Soviet bloc.
Brock reminds the reader of a multitude of significant curiosities: How former Capitol Hill staffer Paul Weyrich, "an organizational genius," played a crucial role in the 1970s by beginning to redefine media on conservatives' terms; the domination of newspaper op-ed pages by conservatives; the dramatic reshaping and "awesome market power" of talk radio, and the coming of Limbaugh, once the courts had struck down the FCC's Fairness Doctrine; the head-turning smears of Bill Clinton, including The Wall Street Journal's editorial page; the red-baiting and error-filled legacy of Robert Novak, now an improbable eminence grise of cable punditry; the occasionally paper-thin credentials of authors of numerous conservative think-tank reports gobbled up by the media; the rise of loony commentators such as Ann Coulter, Alan Keyes, and Michael Savage; the very way in which the CNN "Crossfire" mode of debate has favored those on the right with little penchant for nuance; and the increasing gulf between right- and left-leaning media definitions of basic fairness.
Along the way, Brock seems to touch upon virtually every figure, big and small, in the modern conservative movement--Irving Kristol and son William, Pat Buchanan, Richard Viguerie, George Will, Cal Thomas, Robert Bork, Rupert Murdoch, Bill O'Reilly, Ronald Reagan, Reed Irvine, Roger Ailes, Newt Gingrich, Barry Goldwater, Grover Norquist, Phyllis Schlafly, William F. Buckley, William Safire, Amway Corp. founder Richard DeVos, publisher Richard Mellon Scaife, and beer mogul Joseph Coors, among many others. He establishes connections among the think tanks, their patrons, and the skewed studies which the think tanks feed to an all-too-obliging and lazy press. He reminds one of the woeful histories of wrongheaded declarations by Limbaugh and Drudge, but also why they tend to be more potent proselytizers than their ideological opponents.
Central to the right's success has been money, and Brock is good at collating various disclosures over the years about lucrative and conservative politics. In a Washington world in which the Brookings Institution was long dominant, the rise of the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, and CATO Institute, among others, was significant, and none could have happened without the funding of ideologically-driven Scaife, Olin, Bradley, and Coors foundations and families.
To a far greater extent than their "liberal counterparts," notably Ford, Rockefeller, and Pew, these groups coordinated efforts and had scant desire to support open-minded, empirical research as they threw hundreds of millions of dollars the way of like-minded groups and individuals, including former Judge Robert Bork, William Kristol (a close childhood chum and a friend of mine), Richard Perle, and Dinesh D'Souza, who has received an estimated $1.5 million in conservative grants to boost his speaking and writing careers on subjects such as affirmative action.
As an undergraduate, D'Souza was associated with the right-wing, at times racist and homophobic Dartmouth Review, one of many campus papers funded by a group called the Institute for Education Affairs. That organization, the handiwork of the Olin Foundation and Irving Kristol, led a successful effort to cultivate conservative journalists and pundits nationwide. As Brock outlines it, this outreach to young conservatives also benefited existing journalists on the right, such as columnist Robert Novak. Novak, as Brock shows, made a mint off his connections, not just by operating a paid newsletter but also by holding twice-yearly conferences for subscribers at which they could hobnob with the same conservative officials whom he used as sources. Today, Novak, a sterling beneficiary of First Amendment protections, closes his gathering to the media--a gambit that would simply not be allowed if he were a full-time employee of any respectable newspaper (he slips through the cracks of ethics rules as a syndicated columnist with a loose affiliation with the Chicago Sun-Times, as well as a regular contributor to CNN, which clearly does not care about his ethically-challenged buckraking).
As important, if not depressing, is the generally correct assertion that the right plays by a different set of journalistic standards. Brock is most informative when reminding one of the unceasing string of unabashed atrocities published and broadcast by conservative magazines and television pundits. Whether it was a bogus Heritage paper on Bill Clinton proposing "the largest tax increase in world history" or one on African-American males being shafted by Social Security due to their lower life expectancies, such claims found a ready conduit in the likes of MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, FOX's Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh. A CATO Institute study discrediting the Head Start program, claiming that "heredity so strongly determines behavior that early intervention is a waste of time," was the handiwork of a man with no credentials in the field.
The Clinton years showed this rough network at its most effective, and at times scurrilous. Brock recalls how outlandish claims of Clinton-related drug running and murder were matter-of-factly spread by a wide spectrum of people including Jerry Falwell, the Spectator, Limbaugh, and The New York Post.
Limbaugh routinely proffered the notion that White House deputy counsel Vince Foster's death was "a suicide cover-up, possibly murder," with the producer of his short-lived TV show, Roger Ailes, parroting the same during a Don Imus appearance, heralding the anti-Clinton craziness of a Scaife-backed journalist named Christopher Ruddy who heavily promoted the murder notion. All this played out with no small help from perhaps the conservative network's most provocative handmaiden, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. The Journal even produced five books of hyperbolic editorials on the Whitewater non-scandal.
With Clinton gone, the right hasn't lacked for new targets to attack and causes to promote, focusing in recent years on subjects such as Saddam Hussein. Conservative magazines such as William Kristol's Weekly Standard went into overdrive promoting a link between Saddam and al Qaeda; one cover story simply declaring, "Case Closed," while beating the drums for a preemptive invasion and suggesting that failure to support such an endeavor was unpatriotic.
Together, Brock contends, these cadres of individuals and conservative institutions form a seamless web whose intent is not just to discredit but also to smash opponents and dominate the means of communication. And with growing consolidation of ownership, he argues, is coming incipient control by a single ideology.
It is a tempting but very untidy argument, reflecting someone who has perhaps spent too long in the media echo chamber of Washington, not to mention someone too given to caricature of corporations and individuals alike. At best, it's a nice and provocative clip job. For the most part, the analysis is reliably executed, though Brock occasionally tilts his data. For example, he conveniently omits Brookings in comparisons of the number of times conservative think tanks and liberal think tanks are cited in the media.
But someone who so hungers, as does Brock, to be taken seriously by us supposedly bona fide journalists should have exhibited a bit more ingenuity and grit to dig out new information and provide new analysis, for example, revealing how exactly the Republican National Committee seems to work in such lockstep with Limbaugh, Novak, and others to position issues.
Absent specific explanation, he falls back on conspiratorial suspicions and innuendo. For example, there is media ownership and his belief that it forces an ideology upon the national marketplace. Brock seems to forget that Murdoch and Ailes, the savvy tactician who runs FOX News Channel, aren't forcing a view down American throats as they are adroitly filling a clear, if small, market niche; mostly older, white males of conservative stripe who are the core of the modest cable news audience and simply felt CNN was not their cup of tea. These are people who can make a plausible argument that key institutions in the society, including the elite print and broadcast media and academia, have long exhibited a general consensus on issues such as abortion, affirmative action, school prayer, welfare, and military spending--and they simply do not share that consensus.
As for individuals, few are more ham-handedly dealt with here than CNN's mercurial founder, Ted Turner. He's portrayed as a virtual nutbag conservative for, among other things, having supported Barry Goldwater for president in 1964 and having given Novak and others prominent airtime on CNN. This characterization overlooks Turner's admirable internationalist streak, suspicion of organized religion, huge donations to the United Nations, and ironclad environmentalism, all of which endear him to liberals, not conservatives. When Brock rings his hands over the growth of FOX, he forgets to mention the debilitating effect that Turner's departure has had on CNN. Murdoch and Ailes have succeeded in no small measure because once-proud CNN--where I was once a paid contributor and have good friends--has self-immolated, at this moment having no apparent long-term strategy and lacking a mensch like Turner, a tough-minded and brilliant soul who would defend CNN against FOX, shredding the "Fair and balanced" mantra, in a manner seemingly foreign to Turner's successors.
To declare that the right has won in certain sectors of the media is not to acknowledge a conspiracy. After all, the market itself tends to win out. That is also why it is wrong to find the current polarization and fragmentation of media consumption anything but an incremental return to a past of far greater polarization and fragmentation. Does anyone not recall those days of six and seven newspapers in a big city, with coverage so slanted as to make FOX and Drudge look more like C-Span? Lord, Chicago reporters used to routinely identify themselves to grieving families as cops so they could con their way into a home to fetch a photo of the murder victim. Detroit reporters got freebie cars from General Motors and Ford to take on vacation. I worked side-by-side with one Pulitzer Prize winner who had exterminating contracts with the city government on which he reported, and with another who took booze, sports apparel, and U.S. Open tennis tickets from firms on which he reported. Let us not get too misty-eyed about days gone by or too anxious about the fumbling and declining standards of today.
So what is really going on? Yes, Republicans are more effective in communicating their ideas, and clearly do exploit a nexus of think tanks, pundits, and both cable and radio hosts in an aggressive, frequently error-filled manner simply not seen on the left. (The notion that the National Public Radio is as ideologically-driven as, say, Limabaugh or O'Reilly may comfort the right, but is simply inaccurate.) But Democrats are not exactly ham-handed, as one sees with the filmmaker Michael Moore, a sort of Limbaugh with a camera, or the millions being spent by George Soros and MoveOn.org to prevent the reelection of President Bush.
Yes, a group of largely Republican TV viewers have found a comfort zone in watching FOX, though they remain a piddling-sized audience (roughly two million a day) compared to those lured to HBO and pro wrestling, not to mention those of broadcast TV's prime time shows. Yes, one does have a surface sense of a more partisan media, largely due to all that shouting going on at FOX, CNN, and MSNBC. But don't forget where Americans still get their news by and large: the inescapably bland and often dumb local TV stations where happy talk, not ideology or conflict, dominates. The dumbing down of America, not its political shaping by sinister forces, is our real challenge.
Yes, a growing group of media executives may look at the success of more strident competitors and wonder if that's the way to go. But those same pinstripers are increasingly throwing money at niche products with narrow audiences of various genders, demographics, and politics because advertisers have begun to turn away from the mass audience and hunger for those slices. Heck, mainstream advertisers are beginning to support Internet blogs and videogames. And the pinstripers have shareholders whom they rightfully aim to please. If Murdoch had the choice between creating a moneymaking, liberal-leaning cable channel and going back to Sydney, you really think he'd be on the next Quantas flight?
And don't forget, as President Bush and John Kerry won't, the middle. It's where this election will probably be won, per usual. It exists, no matter how many lies spread by journalists and assorted fakers are believed by various media constituencies. There may be a Republican Noise Machine, as Brock contends. But no matter how much it pushes a set of views, such as the one heralding our invasion of Iraq (flag waving at the top right or left of your screen), the machine won't convince a majority that the loss of lives was worthwhile if their gut and good sense tells them otherwise. And that consensus appears to be growing. As Mikhail Gorbachev and his Soviet predecessors learned the hard way, there are always limits to the selling of a faulty product.
James Warren is a deputy managing editor at The Chicago Tribune and a former Washington bureau chief.
http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/york/york200405281333.asp
May 28, 2004, 1:33 p.m.
David Brock Is Buzzing Again
And the gadfly’s main target is Rush (and Bush, of course).
EDITOR'S NOTE: This article appears in the June 14, 2004, issue of National Review.
Susie Tompkins Buell was very, very impressed with David Brock. A California businesswoman who co-founded the fashion giant Esprit and went on to become a major donor to Democratic causes, Buell was in Washington last fall attending a meeting of friends and supporters of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton when she met Brock, the self-described former "right-wing hit man." Buell listened as Brock, now a defector to "progressive" causes, presented plans for Media Matters for America, his new Internet-based project to monitor and criticize conservative media. In a short time, she was sold.
"It just made so much sense to me," Buell recalls. "All this garbage that's coming out of the Right is like the worst contamination of this country. . . . He brought so much understanding of what goes on over there. He's very articulate, and very, very bright."
After Brock's presentation, Buell introduced herself and offered to hold a fundraiser for him at her home in San Francisco. Brock accepted, and at that gathering Buell introduced him to other potential contributors, whose donations would become part of the more than $2 million Brock has so far raised for Media Matters.
Launched in early May, the organization says its purpose is to keep an eye on "conservative misinformation" in the American media. "Conservative misinformation," according to the group's mission statement, is defined as "news or commentary presented in the media that is not accurate, reliable, or credible, and that forwards the conservative agenda." While in its first few weeks of operation Media Matters published attacks on the usual targets — Fox News, for example — Brock seems to be devoting particular energy to what he calls an "aggressive ad campaign" against radio host Rush Limbaugh.
In addition to a series of critiques on the group's website, Brock has produced a television commercial attacking Limbaugh for comments he made about the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal. Media Matters spent $100,000 to air the spot on CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and a few other television outlets. Brock also commissioned Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin to conduct a survey on a variety of media issues, including perceptions of Limbaugh. Among other things, Garin found that a majority of those surveyed believe Limbaugh often presents views that are biased, "rather than impartial and balanced." Garin also found that a large part of Limbaugh's audience is politically conservative.
Conservatives — anyone, actually — might question whether such insights are worth whatever Brock paid for them, but the poll, together with Brock's anti-Limbaugh television ad campaign, suggests that Media Matters is much more than a traditional media watchdog group. Indeed, it is probably more accurate to view Media Matters as part of the constellation of groups — the so-called "527" organizations, the voter-turnout group America Coming Together, John Podesta's liberal think tank the Center for American Progress, MoveOn.org, liberal talk radio, and others — that have come together on the left in the last year or so, all aimed at electing a Democratic president this November.
Certainly some of Brock's donors see it that way. Leo Hindery Jr., a cable-television executive who contributes to Democratic causes, says he sees Media Matters as part of a coordinated action on the left. "I thought this was a piece of the puzzle," Hindery says. "There are people like Mike Lux [a Democratic consultant who runs an important ad agency], who are into the strategy point of view, there's Podesta, who's into the think tank/intellectual side, and I think the third part of the triangle is David's initiative."
Brock's donors read like a Who's Who of those who have financed the new, activist Left. Besides Buell and Hindery, donors to Media Matters include Peter Lewis, chairman of Progressive Corp., who has contributed more than $7 million to the 527s in partnership with his friend, the financier George Soros. There is Democratic activist Bren Simon, wife of shopping-mall tycoon Mel Simon, New York psychologist and donor Gail Furman, California philanthropist James Hormel, and others. Two anti-Bush organizations, the New Democratic Network and MoveOn.org, have also contributed to Brock's project.
In addition to his donor list, Brock's staff at times resembles that of a political campaign. In the group's K Street offices, there are a number of veterans of Democratic causes. One Brock aide did opposition research for the recent presidential campaign of Sen. John Edwards; another did the same thing for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee; yet another worked on the Wesley Clark presidential campaign; another worked for Massachusetts Democratic representative Barney Frank, and so on.
Given all that, it seems fair to say that Media Matters is only partly about the media. It is also very much about defeating George W. Bush.
Whatever its political orientation, Media Matters is what is known as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, meaning it is tax-exempt and can accept tax-exempt contributions (similar tax-exempt strategies are used by groups on both the left and the right). But since Media Matters has just been formed, it does not yet have the formal structure in place to accept tax-deductible donations, so, like other new charitable organizations, it has had to form a "fiscal sponsorship" relationship with an existing charity, which is already set up to accept such contributions. For that, Brock turned to the Tides Foundation, a wealthy but little-known institution that funds a variety of left-wing causes.
Finally, the creation of Brock's new organization happens to coincide with his drive to publicize his new book, The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy. The book purports to tell Americans that the "verbal brownshirts" of the Right are far more dangerous than many believe. In Brock's telling, conservatism is close to an all-powerful political movement, while liberalism, once formidable, now "seems a fringe dispensation of a few aging professors and Hollywood celebrities."
The right wing is so dominant, Brock writes, that even if Democrats win the presidency this year "they still face the prospect of being brutally slammed and systematically slandered in such a way that will make governing exceedingly difficult." The brutal conservative noise machine will keep going, Brock warns, "until its capacities to spread filth are somehow eradicated."
Hyperbole aside, it should be said that some of Brock's supporters genuinely believe such things. But at least so far, their faith in Brock does not appear to be shared by the mainstream press. Other than a friendly interview by the Today show's Katie Couric, Brock has received far less attention for his new project than he received in 2002 when he published Blinded by the Right, the book in which he confessed to having lied in some of the stories he wrote for conservative publications in the 1990s.
The book did what many — even those on the left who share Brock's contempt for conservatives — consider fatal damage to Brock's credibility. When Blinded by the Right appeared, Timothy Noah, the liberal "Chatterbox" columnist for Slate, wrote that "Chatterbox yields to no one in his eagerness to believe the awful things Brock is now saying about himself and the conservative movement in America. But the more Brock insists that he has lied, and lied, and then lied again, the more one begins to suspect Brock of being, well, a liar."
Now that same David Brock is trying on a new role as guardian of accuracy in media. It all seems, well, a little much. But in this year of 527s, mega-donors, and Democrats determined to "fight back," it appears that anything is possible.
Republicans create falsehoods about Kerry
http://www.review.udel.edu/article.php?article_id=2731
THE REVIEW/Kristen Margiotta
“Our nation has the best health care in the world, and President Bush is making it more affordable and more accessible to all Americans.% Really, Mr. Cheney? What about the additional 1.4 million Americans who went without health care in 2003. This quote from Cheney’s Republican National Convention speech is just one of many falsehoods the Republicans in general and the Bush-Cheney camp in particular have been spewing in their campaign. My favorite, because it’s so easily transparent and yet they continue to use it anyway, is the fact that John Kerry voted to allow President George W. Bush to go to war in Iraq but then voted against the $87 billion that was later needed to fund the war. What they don’t want you to know is there was a bill in the Senate at the same time that would have provided the $87 billion by rolling back just a part of President Bush’s ridiculous tax cuts for millionaires.
Kerry voted for this bill, instead of the one Bush, Cheney and the other Republicans like to talk about, which has simply produced $87 billion out of where? Thin air?
Another striking example of the Republican noise machine is its abuse of Kerry’s statement that we need to lead a more “sensitive% war on terror. Cheney said at the convention, “He talks about leading a more ‘sensitive’ war on terror, as though al Qaeda will be impressed with our softer side.% Admittedly, this sounds bad. But if you care enough to listen to what Kerry actually said, it sounds a little different. His actual quote was, “I believe I can lead a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side and lives up to American values in history.%
To me, this clearly says that the people Kerry intends to be “sensitive% with are the other countries whose help we need to effectively fight the terrorists who threaten the security of the entire world. As attacks in Spain and more recently in Russia and France show, terrorism is not a uniquely U.S. problem and it needs a solution that includes the cooperation of the entire world. But of course none of that matters to our commander in chief. All that matters is that he, or anyone else, can twist Kerry’s words into something that can get a cheer from a podium. Cheney also said, “Sen. Kerry began his political career by saying he would like to see our troops deployed only at the directive of the United Nations.% This doesn’t take into account, of course, that this remark was made 34 years ago, when Kerry had just returned from the Vietnam War, and before he was elected to any political office. Or that he has never voted for any law advocating any such thing. But none of this matters, because it got the Republicans at the convention all riled up.
I could go on and on with examples of how the intensely negative campaign from the Republican ticket has been churning out lies and twisted half-truths about everything from the statements of Kerry to Bush’s record on health care to Iraq, but I think I’ve made my point. I hope the next time you hear them saying something that sounds a little too ridiculous to be true, you’ll do your homework, because it probably is. Or just e-mail me, and I’ll do it for you. But please don’t take anything they say at face value.
Jennifer Lucas is a News Features Editor for The Review. Please send comments to jenlucas@udel.edu. |
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