Thirty years ago, conservatives embarked on a plan to subvert journalism and skew America to the right. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
May 11, 2004 | 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 hahahahahars, 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 hahahahahar" 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 hahahahahahahahaed, 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.