What Democrats Can Learn From the Right’s Media Strategy

Author A.J. Bauer says that over the last eight decades, conservatives have both created a massive alternative media ecosystem and successfully undermined traditional news outlets.

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here. 

Conservatives attacking the mainstream as “liberal” and biased against them didn’t start with Donald Trump or even Richard Nixon. In his new book, Making the Media Liberal, author A.J. Bauer says conservative mobilization against the media first started back in the 1940s. The Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and Watergate were events that further entrenched the  chasm between the media and rank-and-file conservatives. Conservative activists and politicians seized on that tension and stoked it. They also developed right-wing media, from the National Review to Fox News. Bauer, a journalism professor at the University of Alabama, argues that the right’s parallel efforts reinforced one another. Casting the mainstream media as liberal created more demand for conservative news outlets; the conservative outlets kept up the drumbeat that the mainstream media is biased against conservatives. Bauer says that the right-wing media has become more powerful than conservative elites originally intended, helping elevate a candidate (Trump) of whom those elites were initially skeptical. Bauer argues that conservatives succeeded in both building a huge right-wing media ecosystem and pushing the mainstream media to cover conservatives more favorably. He says the left should create a similar ecosystem. 

Right Now With Perry Bacon is a twice-weekly show about national politics with a focus on the radicalism of the Trump administration and tactics to combat it. The program, hosted by New Republic staff writer Perry Bacon on Substack, features in-depth discussions with experts and politicians. It goes beyond the daily headlines to explain why things are happening and put them in a broader context.

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