Conservative News Studies

This chapter maps several lines of academic inquiry that speak to the yet unrealized field of conservative news studies. The chapter explores how scholars have approached the notion of “liberal bias” and conservative news; three different approaches to studying the influence of conservative media—as propaganda, as media effects, and as “deep stories”; and the place of media in historical accounts of the growth of modern conservatism in the United States. Scholars have been researching various components of conservative news cultures for decades, but disciplinary silos, differing methodological assumptions, and a lack of standardized terminology have precluded the sort of focused scholarly dialogue that typically constitutes a field. This chapter highlights the extant disciplinary and interdisciplinary debates that a field of conservative news studies would ideally weave together and build upon.

National Review and the Changing Narrative of Civil Rights Memory 1968–2016

This chapter analyzes the National Review’s shifting narratives and historical memories of the contentious relationship between the modern conservative movement, Martin Luther King Jr., and the US civil rights movement. National Review writers largely opposed the civil rights movement up until the mid-1960s, casting Black freedom activists and their goals as threats to civilized order and the spirit of the US Constitution. Yet, the National Review would ultimately take on a leading role in reconsidering the conservative movement’s animosity toward King and civil rights—drawing parallels between conservative principles and civil rights claims, and even making fraught color-blind conservative claims to King’s legacy.

The British Right-Wing Mainstream and the European Referendum

This chapter examines the 2016 Brexit campaign as a window into how the right-wing establishment press in the United Kingdom influences the country’s broad political agenda. The chapter demonstrates how right-wing news cultures of the tabloid press played a crucial agenda-setting role in the European referendum debate. The right-wing press exploited the Remain/Leave dichotomy and the BBC’s notion of “strategic balance” to frame the debate within discursive limits set by the conservative elite. The result further undermined trust in British broadcasting, while largely excluding organized labor from the referendum debate. This chapter also provides comparative fodder for scholars of right-wing news in the US context, as the EU referendum in many ways replicated the structural conditions that underpin the two-party horse race coverage common in US mainstream political reporting.

Containing “Country Music Marxism”

This chapter tracks the populist stylistic resonances between country western music and Fox News Channel programming. Using country musician John Rich’s 2009 song “Detroit” as a case study, it demonstrates how Fox News employed a unique mix of tabloid aesthetics and populist epistemic appeals to conscribe potentially progressive interpretations of Rich’s song. In doing so, the chapter illuminates how Fox endows its conservative political news brand with affective power and social meaning. Tracking the migration of country style from the music sector to the news sector, it elucidates how political-taste alignments factor into conservative news cultures. The chapter concludes with a call for greater scholarly attention to the way conservative news actively partisanizes national taste divisions while relying on those very divisions in framing news coverage.

Conservative News and Movement Infrastructure

This chapter analyzes US conservative media as it expanded into new forms in the 1970s. While a first generation of conservative media activists invested in more or less traditional media enterprises (e.g. magazines, newsletters, radio programming), by the 1970s movement activists associated with the New Right were investing in think tanks and foundations—not only diversifying the conservative movement infrastructure but also complicating the variegated means of sourcing and circulating conservative news and commentary. The chapter shows how the movement’s turn toward nonprofit organizational structures in the 1970s enabled its institutional proliferation. The result was a dizzying array of funders, organizations, publications, and activists whose efforts continue to wield outsized influence over both the conservative movement and the news cultures that surround it.

NRA Media and Second Amendment Identity Politics

This chapter considers the National Rifle Association (NRA) as not merely a lobbying outfit, trade association, or hobbyist group, but as a full-fledged mediasphere. Since the early 2000s, the NRA has aggressively expanded its footprint within the broader right-wing media environment—it publishes four print magazines and a highly integrated array of micro-targeted online print and video content, social media platforms, and original online television programming. Via a content analysis of NRA.org, a site that aggregates and prioritizes content from across the group’s multimedia platforms, this chapter employs critical discourse analysis to illuminate the site’s populist themes and rhetorical styles. It finds that the NRA combines the trappings of news genres and right-wing discourses with populist modes of expression to amplify and reinforce the deep affective ties between gun ownership and conservative political identity.

Weaponizing Victimhood

This chapter analyzes a rhetoric of “weaponized victimhood” and its crucial role in uniting disparate factions of the contemporary American Right. Weaponized victimhood speaks to a felt sense of loss of power and esteem among social groups facing challenges to their traditionally privileged status positions. This expression of grievance takes on a hyperbolic form through assertions that groups such as whites, men, and Christians face great social oppression. These groups are portrayed as victims of such projected threats as a “War on Christmas” and “feminazi” activists. Such victimization narratives circulate across various types of conservative news and right-wing media—from Fox News to alt-right and men’s rights websites. A common rhetoric of victimization cultivates a shared affective sensibility among groups ranging from avowed white supremacists to anti-feminists to others reacting against a perceived challenge to their social power and standing.

Bridging the Marginal and the Mainstream

This chapter examines the growth of the “liberal media” discourse by analyzing its historical formation in terms of public sphere theory. The chapter advances a discursive institutionalist approach to conservative news that is rooted in sustained analysis of the actors, ideas, and institutions that give conservative news its cultural form and force. Conservative journalists, commentators, and media activists began conceptualizing the “liberal media” within the institutions of the conservative countersphere by the 1950s and early 1960s. Once this discourse had been crystalized and legitimized among conservative commentators and their audiences, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, and other prominent Republican voices promoted its circulation far beyond the conservative countersphere, as it moved into the national public sphere at large.

Cultivating Distrust of the Mainstream Media

This chapter traces the origins of the “the Establishment” as a rhetorical figure appropriated by National Review writers, who successfully used it to construct a unifying, besieged mentality that opened space for the nascent conservative media countersphere. William F. Buckley and other National Review writers placed a critique of media bias within a broader narrative of a smug and elite “liberal Establishment” that operated across many institutions as a gatekeeper of acceptable opinions. The chapter documents that National Review writers made a case of liberal bias in media that was not solely tied to a critique of professional objectivity. Critics writing in the magazine saw purportedly objective professional coverage as tainted with the same bias as liberal journals of opinion that demanded conformity to liberal views.

Making Media Safe for Corporate Power

This chapter contends that a corporate libertarian vision of media policy established the discursive terrain in which conservative media thrived in the United States after World War II. The corporate libertarian approach conceives of news media as a commodity—as opposed to a public resource—best left under private control and ownership. This vision became a hegemonic common sense that came to dominate US media policy discourses beginning in the late 1940s—thanks in part to a propagandistic influence campaign executed by corporate interests. This led to insufficient resources invested in a democratic news system. Such a policy orientation created conditions for a commercial media system driven by a competition to meet consumer demand. It also created a space for right-wing media activists to mobilize and cultivate conservative publics through outlets propped up by patronage networks and ideologically motivated venture capital.