In her book Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics, Nicole Hemmer uncovers the long history of conservative media in the US since the last World War. The conventional wisdom has been to trace the emergence of current forms of conservative media back to the 1980s, when The Rush Limbaugh Show pioneered (or so the story goes) a form of combative, popular, vitriolic conservative talk radio, which was later translated to television by Roger Ailes at Fox News, founded in 1996. However, Hemmer shows that many of the patterns we see in today’s powerful right-wing media go back to what she dubs a “first generation” of conservative media activists in the postwar era.

Based on extensive archival research, Hemmer follows the trajectory of the magazines Human Events and National Review, the radio show Manion Forum, and the publishing house Regnery, along with a couple of other ventures. Her main (though not only) protagonists are Clarence Manion, creator and host of the Manion Forum, William Rusher and William F. Buckley, Jr., publisher and editor of National Review, respectively, and Henry Regnery, co-founder of Human Events and CEO of Regnery Publishing. Following these actors, who formed a close network in which they often pooled resources, Hemmer shows that the postwar conservative movement in the US was built and sustained to a large degree by “media activists”. They ventured into other political fields as well, from grassroots activism to electoral politics, helping to build up important conservative infrastructure in the process. In doing so, they brought specific media-related mindsets, expertise, networks, and understandings of politics to the table. Hemmer is not the first to write about conservative media, and some of her actors, like Buckley or Rusher, are usual suspects when it comes to the history of the conservative movement.1 But her narrative makes it possible to look at these histories from another perspective: What did it “mean […] for the movement,” she asks, “that media activists were its architects”? (p. xii).

The investigation starts with the Second World War. Hemmer reconstructs the beginnings of the conservative movement as not only a reaction to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, but also to the broad alignment of American politics around war intervention, which antagonized many of the later media activists – Regnery, for example, had studied in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and opposed an American entry into the war as much as did Manion or Felix Morley, one of the founders of Human Events. All of these important media activists had an elite background that supplied them with vast resources of financial, social, and cultural capital. For these influential white men, the experience of being outside the mainstream – both in the run-up to the war and later in times of what conservatives described as a “liberal consensus” – came as an unpleasant surprise. “Yet unlike most groups excluded from power,” Hemmer argues, “these conservative activists had extensive resources to challenge their exclusion” (p. xv). Thus, the emergence of the conservative movement in the US is a good example to show that while popular discontent is frequent, its expression in media and politics (or the lack thereof) may, at times, depend on realignments among elite coalitions much more than on shifts at the social base. In Hemmer’s words, a sense of “thwarted entitlement” may lead to the establishment of an “elite populism” (p. 130).

Hemmer's central argument – and her most important contribution to the growing literature on postwar American conservatism – is that media activists played a pivotal role in building and leading the conservative movement, and that their importance accounts for some of the central tenets and specificities of American conservatism.2 She finds plenty of instances in conservative history in which media activists took active and central roles: from the foundation of organizations such as Young Americans for Freedom, which was deeply embedded in National Review’s networks (pp. 82 f.), to the media’s patrolling of the movement’s borders towards its own potentially harmful fringes, as was the case with the John Birch Society (ch. 5, 9), to (maybe most strikingly) the rise of Barry Goldwater to the Republican presidential candidacy in the early 60s, engineered to no small degree by media activists (ch. 8). But how did this effect the overall trajectory of the movement?

Generally, it helps explain why ideological purity often prevailed over pragmatism. Hemmer recounts how media activists wrestled with this problem, taking a more pragmatic approach at times but generally sticking to their ideological guns, both within and outside the Republican party (ch. 7, 10), even though they did move towards more realistic schemes for electoral politics throughout the 1960s and '70s (ch. 8–10). But more specifically, the media activists inserted the concept of a “liberal media bias” into the conservative imagination. This idea became a pivot justifying an ideology and rhetoric of oppositional populism against the East Coast elites who controlled much of the “mainstream media” and supposedly suppressed conservative speech. This concept made it possible for conservative media elites to paint themselves as victims, a pattern which is still a striking feature of many right-wing movements today.

Within “mainstream” journalism, the corresponding ideology of the “centrist consensus” were the practices and norms of what journalists termed “objectivity”, with its separation of opinion and reporting joined by “impersonal narration, an emphasis on fairness and accuracy and deference to official sources and institutions” (p. 9). By re-designating “objectivity” (with all its obvious problems and flaws) as “liberal bias”, conservatives put themselves in an outsider position so absolute as to redefine the very construction of reality and “facts”. Instead of clinging to an ideal of objectivity, they wanted to counter the alleged “media bias” of the “liberal media” with their own unabashedly partisan takes in order to restore “fairness”. In the process, as Hemmer’s extensive archival research shows, they also threw corresponding considerations of journalistic ethics overboard. For example, conservative media provided continuous and concerted positive coverage of the industrialist Herbert Kohler and his firm in an ongoing labor conflict with unionized workers in the 1950s. In turn, Kohler bought advertisement space and book copies, in effect financing the effort (pp. 61–72). Instances like these are plentiful and show the ease with which the ideology that conservative media disseminated merged with the business interests financing the movement.

As Richard Nixon’s dealings with the “liberal media” show, the aim was by no means to create a less biased media sphere, or less biased institutions. Although conservatives opposed much of Nixon's foreign and domestic politics, they cherished his attacks on the media, especially his weaponization of the Federal Communications Commission, vehemently opposed by conservative media as long as the federal government was in liberal hands, in the fight against liberals (pp. 216–218, 224): “Believing all institutions were ideological, conservatives sought not to strip out the ideology but to change it. Institutional conservatism, not neutrality, was their goal” (p. 218). At the same time, the regular appearance of conservatives like Buckley and Rusher as debaters on TV and other media, as well as the beginnings of the conservative media watchdog industry, set the stage for “one of the greatest victories: shifting the meaning of objectivity from factuality to balanced reporting” (p. 223).

Here and at other points, a lack of reflections based on media theory and media history in a broader sense is notable. Was the increasing employment of debating formats really a victory engineered by conservatives or might it have been a result of media actors searching for more engaging and successful formats in a time of technological and social change? Were there not important differences between conservative TV, radio, magazine and book publishing, just by virtue of them being very different kinds of media – and what effect did these dynamics have on the transformation of the conservative movement? How can we make full conceptual use of the category “media” – as opposed to, for example, “ideas” or “intellectuals”?

However, this lack (which might be attributable to the absence of “media history” as a separate field of study within history departments in the US) is compensated for by Nicole Hemmer’s stylistic and narrative virtuosity. Her eminently readable book combines a straight-forward narrative with an array of innovative and intriguing arguments which deserve to be discussed in further studies. During a time when the relevance of conservative media and their histories becomes painfully obvious, this book should be read far beyond the narrow confines of academic history.

Notes:
1 Cf., among others, Heather Hendershot, What’s Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest, Chicago 2011; Heather Hendershot, Shaking the World for Jesus. Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture, Chicago 2004; Heather Hendershot, Open to Debate. How William F. Buckley Put Liberal America on the Firing Line, New York 2016; Ronald Lora / William Henry Longton (eds.), The Conservative Press in Twentieth-Century America, Westport, CT 1999. National Review especially has been written about extensively, though often from a sympathetic perspective.
2 Just how specific these tenets are to American conservatism as opposed to conservative movements in other countries remains a question that can only be answered with a much more transnational approach. Unfortunately, Hemmer joins the better part of histories of American conservatism in implicitly following the trajectory of methodological nationalism. The exclusive concentration on US politics, justifiable as it may be for practical and narrative reasons, should at least have been explicitly discussed.