They’ve already proven adept at innovating in digital content creation – using apps like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Spotify to produce and amplify far-right video blogs, live streaming services like the Broadcast Network on right side and podcasters like Ben Shapiro. They have also launched a seemingly endless array of conservative news sites, from The Daily Caller to Breitbart to Gateway Pundit.
But this surge of online content is merely the latest front in a 70-year effort by conservative activists to cultivate an alternative media system to rival the hegemony of the mainstream media. There is no comparable left wing counterpart. What explains the fixation on the right in the media? Why do conservatives seem more interested in and more adept at media activism than their leftist and liberal opponents?
The answer lies in a series of historical struggles, now largely forgotten, that continue to structure the conservative drive toward media ownership, innovation, and activism. These struggles have not only shaped the strategy of the conservative movement, but they have also established media criticism as a core component of conservative political identity. All of this stems from a desire to promote deeply unpopular ideas to a largely skeptical public.
To understand conservative antipathy toward the press, we need to remember how bleak things looked for conservative activists nearly a century ago.
The modern conservative movement began in the 1930s among businessmen who opposed Keynesian economic solutions to the Great Depression, particularly President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. Popular support for these programs, designed to moderate the boom cycle of laissez-faire capitalism and create a social safety net for the working class, strengthened throughout World War II. After the war, conservative activists redoubled their efforts to reduce federal intervention in the economy—but their appeals failed to resonate.
By 1948, conservatives were desperate enough to justify publishing a self-help book. How to be popular, although conservative. The book, which included tongue-in-cheek political cartoons and was advertised in the Reader’s Digestoffered advice to conservatives hoping to win over adherents to their deeply unpopular ideology.
While some conservative activists were pessimistic about the prospect of widespread adoption of their beliefs, wealthy Texas oilman HL Hunt sought to build a popular conservatism.
In 1951, Hunt launched the Facts Forum, a series of loosely coordinated local discussion groups designed to make conservatism more palatable to the grassroots. Hunt soon expanded the idea, using his vast wealth to produce Fact Forum radio and television programs that aired nationwide.
These broadcasts were created to fulfill the mandate of the Federal Communications Commission’s Fairness Doctrine that ordered radio and television stations to present balanced perspectives on controversial issues. While nominally nonpartisan, the Fact Forum leaned to the right—making weak arguments for liberal ideas and enthusiastic defenses of conservative ones.
At the end of 1953, Providence Journal published an exposé on the Fact Forum, documenting Hunt’s financial support and pointing out the far-right group’s clear motivations. The article was picked up by the Associated Press and prompted additional criticism from other national media such as time magazine. By 1954, the Fact Forum was playing defense against what its supporters perceived as an unrelenting hostile press.
In the last two years of its existence, the Fact Forum increasingly published and aired commentaries designed to appeal to a conservative audience that felt underserved and even targeted by the mainstream media—providing platforms for conservative activists who would later to play crucial roles in building the modern conservative movement, including professor and writer Medford Evans (later an organizer of the John Birch Society) and William F. Buckley Jr. (later founder of National Review).
Although little remembered today, the Facts Forum was the first concerted effort of the postwar conservative movement to build popular support. Its demise, precipitated by a flood of attacks from mainstream journalists, informed later conservative movement efforts such as the John Birch Society and Young Americans for Freedom, which themselves often faced considerable press scrutiny in the decades that followed.
Conservative antipathy toward the press also dovetailed easily with the concerns of white southerners—many Democrats still supporting the New Deal—who viewed the northern-based media as complicit with the Civil Rights Movement. Nationally televised images of violent attacks by white mobs and police against black freedom activists in the 1960s helped discredit Jim Crow segregation. They also turned many white southerners against the national press, driving them toward the growing conservative media sphere, which steered their economic thinking to the right.
Conservative media innovations continued in the 1970s. Richard Viguerie revolutionized the use of direct mail advertising in politics, helping to unify Reagan’s Republican coalition from a series of single-issue hot-button demands, such as those opposing school busing, abortion and gun control.
While conservatives have consistently won elections since the 1980s, they have continued to struggle in their long battle for public sentiment and a stronger place in popular culture. The Republican Party has won the popular vote in only one presidential election since 1988 (George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004). So even after Reagan was elected in 1980, the conservative movement’s penchant for media innovation and activism continued apace.
After the Reagan administration repealed the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, Rush Limbaugh developed a conservative talk show format that almost single-handedly revived AM radio. After a series of false starts by activists to create a conservative television network, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes launched the Fox News Channel in 1996. In its early days Fox boasted the highest ratings in cable news and paved the way for further imitative rights such as Newsmax and One America News Network.
The need to build a robust alternative media system was more than a practical concern for conservatives; it was also an animating vision that helped the movement calm its internal ideological conflicts. Hostility to the mainstream press became a core element of conservative identity.
This distrust of the media is reflected in conservative enthusiasm for Ye and his purchase of Parler.
Ye drew criticism from the right after declaring that then-President George W. Bush “doesn’t care about black people” amid the carnage of Hurricane Katrina. But he has been a conservative darling since his endorsement of Donald J. Trump during the 2016 US presidential election.
Ye’s penchant for self-serving, insensitive and anti-Semitic remarks has drawn widespread condemnation from much of the mainstream media. This criticism has only strengthened the mutual affinity between You and the right. The fact that Ye is Black provides an added benefit at a time when the Republican Party is once again becoming more brazen in its racist appeals to white voters. Ye’s wearing a “White Lives Matter” t-shirt and appearing on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News-promoting “The Grand Replacement Theory” show gives conservatives a credible rebuttal to well-documented accusations of white supremacy.
Conservatives and Parler enjoy Ye’s approval because of his A-list status – he gives them a form of culture that the right has long craved and rarely achieved. However, the rapper’s fame is unlikely to translate into popularity for conservatives: Ye’s drift to the right has tarnished his image among blacks, Jews and many of the liberal white millennials who made up his former fan base.
Even when capable of stable majority electoral coalitions, conservatism remains stubbornly unpopular. This is one reason why, despite having already amassed a vast and extremely powerful right-wing media network, conservatives cannot stop gaining and building more.
