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The idea of “the liberal media” and its roots in the civil rights movement
Abstract
Scholars often ask whether the mainstream news media exhibit a liberal bias, but rarely where the idea of such a bias first came from. This article traces the idea’s origins to the civil rights movement. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, white Southerners grew resentful toward national journalists who covered the movement, whom they saw as advocating desegregation. Losing the battle for public opinion, Southern spokesmen such as Alabama Governor George Wallace adopted a populistic idiom, promoting the notion that an elite, left‐leaning Northeastern media were distorting the news to fit their politics – an idea that soon, under President Nixon, became conservative dogma.
... A recent Gallup poll (2017) found that six in ten Americans believe the news media favors one political party over the other, of which a majority claims the press has a liberal bias. Because of this, much of the public believes certain policies, positions and politicians are routinely discriminated against in coverage or covered unfairly (Greenberg 2008 This chapter is centered on perceptions of media bias in the United States and will pay attention to what constitutes allegations of bias; explore the origins of the dominant liberal media bias narrative; identify various ways perceptions of media bias impact journalists; and discuss related issues facing journalists today, specifically the emerging 'fake news' narrative. ...
... Prior to this time, an overwhelming majority of both conservatives and liberals believed the press to be fair and reported a high level of trust in media (Major 2015). In fact, until the 1960s most reports of media bias focused on the fact that the press favored more conservative positions (Greenberg 2008), specifically in opposition to New ...
... Deal programs (Major 2015). Other researchers have advanced this origin story as well, detailing how the civil rights movement was a culmination of conservative resentment to what was believed to be rampant liberalism taking over the country, infiltrating colleges and universities, the Supreme Court, the federal government and other elite institutions (Greenberg 2008). The media was a natural next target for this conservative resentment. ...
The media industry in the United States has faced numerous challenges and undergone immense changes in recent years—the Internet has upended traditional business models, social media has changed how the public interacts with journalists, partisan media outlets have flourished and politically motivated attacks on the media have increased. This thesis presents the results of an original online survey of 169 journalists at non-partisan, national mainstream outlets across the country. It offers a new perspective on how the practice of journalism has been impacted by the changing media landscape, the intersection of partisan media and polarization, and perceptions of media bias—the purpose of this study was to gain a deeper understanding of how journalists perceive and assess these subjects, which was identified as a gap in current scholarship. Overwhelmingly, journalists indicated pessimism about the future of objective journalism in the United States; shared numerous anxieties related to industry business models tied to online advertising; and expressed concerns that partisan media and an increasing public desire for ideological-confirming news have increased political polarization. Data also showed that journalists worry about the effects of the liberal media bias narrative on public trust in media and are themselves affected by an internalization of this dominant media bias narrative, which may impact news coverage. Further, journalists expressed a great deal of concern about the current administration of President Donald Trump and new attacks on media credibility emanating from conservative political elites, such as the campaign to label the mainstream press as ‘fake news.’
... Many politicians and opinion leaders persistently characterize the press as having a liberal bias (Lee 2005) and that sentiment is pervasive in public opinion. Accusations of media bias are hardly novel (Greenberg 2008), but the 2016 election cycle, via Trump's candidacy, provided an especially pronounced and steady does of elite political rhetoric criticizing the mainstream news media industry. Such rhetoric likely contributed to a further erosion of media trust during the 2016 election-particularly among conservatives (Swift 2016). ...
... Strong support for press freedoms, on principle, was perhaps secondary for some individuals. In sum, even as elite hostility toward the press existed well before Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and his presidency (Greenberg 2008), the study findings demonstrate the difficulty of completely disentangling a "Trump bump" from the more general influence of elite hostility toward the press. ...
This experimental research effort highlights the mobilizing potential of elite hostility toward the press, examining causal mechanisms related to public support for the news media, as conditioned by perceptions of the news media’s importance. The study used a national sample (N = 330) to probe the influence of a “mashup” of video footage featuring President Donald Trump’s hostility toward the news media and, separately, the influence of footage depicting the Trump administration’s political activity. Employing the concept of elite cues, principles of appraisal theory, and the concept of Perceived News Media Importance (PNMI), the study demonstrates that exposure to elite hostility—in the mold of Donald Trump’s anti-media rhetoric—indirectly served as a catalyst for prompting intentions to support the press, via the elicitation of anger in response to the message exposure. Moreover, the indirect influence of exposure to Trump representations on press support was most pronounced when highly valuing journalism’s core normative functions (i.e., PNMI). A post-hoc analysis further confirms that perceptions of Trump posing a threat to the freedom of the press were positively associated with a willingness to express support for news media, as amplified by PNMI.
... Nevertheless, for some reason, these incidents have not been considered important enough to be brought to the attention of the nation. (COFO 1964: 2) The significance of this document is how it represents an effort by US-based civil rights organizations to engage US society in discussions about the power-laden flow of information in the US media ecosystem (Greenberg 2008). Throughout the modern civil rights movement, civil rights groups employed research departments and media relations departments to fight a discursive battle over the meaning and significance of the Movement for African American freedom (Hogan 2013;Inwood and Alderman 2020;Murphree 2004;Perlstein 1990). ...
Exacerbated but by no means invented by President Donald Trump, post-truth politics are defined as a disregard for facts in political discourse and policymaking. The post-truth era is dominated by two forms of informational praxis: misinformation and disinformation. Through the archival record of civil rights organizations, we argue we should not see the present era of post-truth politics as new but instead see it as part of a more prolonged struggle over white supremacy and the broader effort to contain challenges to the US economic and racial order. By contextualizing the geography of post-truth politics, the strategies and tactics civil rights groups use to counter white supremacist lies are important to understand, especially in an era where social media can spread lies and disinformation at lightning-quick speed. Thus, we also explore how civil rights organizations challenged disinformation and the control and suppression of information perpetuated by those in power.
... In the 1960s the U.S. Republican party decided on a new and enduring strategy: to go on the offensive against the news media. Thus, they launched the strategy of labelling and attacking the dishonest, even "lying" "liberal media" (Greenberg, 2008;Feldstein, 2010;Levy, 2013;Schoen, 2016). While one can find examples of the practice elsewhere in the world before that point, this was a systematic, ongoing strategy and practice. ...
PLEASE REFER TO PUBLISHED VERSION FOR CITATION (THIS VERSION MAY CONTAIN TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS, AND ITS BIBLIOGRAPHY IS INCOMPLETE): https://link.springer.com/book/9783031641770#overview 978-3-031-64177-0
(October, 2024)
Abstract: This chapter is a theoretical and conceptual contribution to the research on post-truth politics and populism studies, with an emphasis on epistemic questions (especially those focused on ‘disinformation’/‘misinformation’). It proceeds in two parts. The first part critically analyzes the much-cited Oxford Dictionaries’ definition of post-truth, which authorizes a study of ‘posttruth politics.’ The definition is dismissed as unusable, and a different definition and theory of post-ftruth is proposed, which sees it as only secondarily epistemic. Arendt’s concept of public truth is proposed as a better starting point, with the caveat that current treatments of post-truth misunderstand how public truth can be known (since it is not ‘scientific’ truth), which requires acknowledging its crucial technologically and socially mediated status depending on performative trust. Thus, posttruth is an affective state, an anxious and future-looking public mood about the difficulty of trust-making for securing publicly accepted facts. The ‘post’ refers to an anxiety about what might be on the horizon. Part II, exploring a potential theoretical overlap between post-truth and populism studies, reverses the epistemic focus of populism studies from populists’ ‘counterknowledge’ problems taken as self-evident by researchers. Instead, it explores epistemic problems in populism studies on the researcher side: the epistemic risks built into the ‘ideational’ definition of populism; and in the tacit understandings of political rhetoric reduced to ‘information’ (transmission and reception) at the expense of more complex notions of mediated communication as performance or ritual, speech acts, and, especially, political rhetoric. The latter is unrigorously reduced to ‘false information,’ and it requires a very different interpretive analytical approach for comprehending the empirical phenomena being called ‘populist’ and ‘post-truth’—disinformation, misinformation, lying, rumor, and conspiracy theory
... Media historians have explored how, throughout the 20 th century, conservative activists forged a political identity in opposition to the mainstream media. Greenberg (2008) describes how modern day journalistic norms became hegemonic following WWII, with a collection of national news organizations -led by the New York Times-embracing values like objectivity 2 and nonpartisanship and eventually becoming institutionalized as the "mainstream media" by the mid-1950s. At the same time, a collection of anti-New Deal radio personalities laid the roots for a growing conservative media sphere that would only grow in popularity in the following decades (Hemmer, 2016). ...
... The collaboration between media and anti-racist movements has consistently been recognised as very important by the latter. The coverage of the Civil Rights Movement in the US between 1950 and 1960 is an example of how the impact of accurate but not neutral news coverage matters for real change (Greenberg 2008). Activists in the Civil Rights Movement were not oblivious to the importance of the media, and neither were the leaders of the movement (Philley 2012). ...
This chapter analyses opinion articles on a case of police violence and racism, known as “the Alfragide Police Station Case”, in the Portuguese daily newspapers Público, Observador, and Correio da Manhã between 2015 and 2019. Drawing from critical discourse analysis, it showcases how processes of othering and deothering are put forward, chiefly the role of racialisation in said procedures, and the ways in which these operate in tandem with broader public debates. The chosen discursive event will be examined as both a moment where racism was normalised and reproduced by opinion-makers (othering) and as an instance where anti-racist activists and scholars fought against it and at times succeeded to counter these opinions, thus affirming anti-racist narratives (deothering) in the public realm.
... Advancing the notion that there is no such thing as non-ideological or neutral media, conservative activists and ideologues called for establishing Right-leaning news outlets (Burack & Snyder-Hall, 2013). Historians such as Greenberg (2008 ) trace the origins of the liberal media critique to the late 1950s and early 1960s. More specifi cally, he contends that white Southerners began resenting journalists who they believed were advocating for desegregation during the Civil Rights Movement. ...
After the removal of Donald Trump and other prominent Right-wing actors from social platforms, U.S. Republicans have alleged corporate social media of “liberal bias.” They charge that mainstream platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube working in tandem with Democrats have conspired to deny Republicans a chance to articulate their views. To better understand the nature of these accusations and meanings for the future of political (and journalistic) communication, this chapter explores the dominant criticisms made by conservatives against corporate social media through a thematic analysis of social media-related articles that appeared in two leading Right-wing media portals, http://Foxnews.com" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Foxnews.com and http://Newsmax.com" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Newsmax.com. This analysis reveals that conservatives adopted various discursive strategies to undermine the credibility of corporate social media. Such strategies include: a) the accusation of corporate social platforms pursuing an anti-conservative agenda, b) highlighting the need for a regulation of Silicon-Valley based tech companies, and c) emphasizing the need to embrace alternative social media like Gab, MeWe, BitChute, Parler, etc., to counter the popular social platforms. These alternative platforms collectively form what I describe as “Counter-net,” a discursive alternative to corporate social media. The implications of such partisan social media for the future of online communication, public discourse, and democracy are discussed.
... 13 The Palestinian Idea, as Burris envisages, is not anti-Palestine or anti-Jewish; rather it is antiinequality, and can be just as critical of Israeli institutions as Palestinian. 14 The Palestinian idea, as per Burris, struggles against Zionism, as much as anti-Semitism. One of the very first Palestinian fiction, "Return to Haifa," did not only not denounce the Jews, but went on to criticize European anti-Semitism and acknowledge the holocaust. ...
American Indian Studies is just as much a journey as it is an exploration of the role “relatedness” has on American Indian rhetorical tradition. The author, Kimberly G. Wieser, shares her thoughts and personal “blanketing” in Cheyenne while examining American
indigenous communications and how scholars can apply intertribal approaches to conversations, as well as decision making on key political and social issues.
... The subgenre of populism which is dedicated to undermining journalism has been tackled from several angles. First, historical studies have examined the roots of the antimedia movement, mostly in the United States (e.g., Greenberg 2008). Second, antimedia statements have been analyzed alongside other forms of antielite rhetoric as a specimen of populist discourse (e.g., Engesser et al. 2017). ...
As populist campaigns against the media become increasingly common around the world, it is ever more urgent to explore how journalists adopt and respond to them. Which strategies have journalists developed to maintain the public's trust, and what may be the implications for democracy? These questions are addressed using a thematic analysis of forty-five semistructured interviews with leading Israeli journalists who have been publicly targeted by Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The article suggests that while most interviewees asserted that adherence to objective reporting was the best response to antimedia populism, many of them have in fact applied a “strategic bias” to their reporting, intentionally leaning to the Right in an attempt to refute the accusations of media bias to the Left. This strategy was shaped by interviewees' perceived helplessness versus Israel's Prime Minister and his extensive use of social media, a phenomenon called here “the influence of presumed media impotence.” Finally, this article points at the potential ramifications of strategic bias for journalism and democracy. Drawing on Hallin's Spheres theory, it claims that the strategic bias might advance Right-wing populism at present, while also narrowing the sphere of legitimate controversy—thus further restricting press freedom—in the future.
This chapter is a theoretical and conceptual contribution to the research on post-truth politics and populism studies, with an emphasis on epistemic questions (especially those focused on ‘disinformation’/‘misinformation’). It proceeds in two parts. The first part critically analyzes the much-cited Oxford Dictionaries’ definition of post-truth, which authorizes a study of ‘post-truth politics.’ The definition is dismissed as unusable, and a different definition and theory of post-truth is proposed, which sees it as only secondarily epistemic. Arendt’s concept of public truth is proposed as a better starting point, with the caveat that current treatments of post-truth misunderstand how public truth can be known (since it is not ‘scientific’ truth), which requires acknowledging its crucial technologically and socially mediated status depending on performative trust. Thus, post-truth is an affective state, an anxious and future-looking public mood about the difficulty of trust-making for securing publicly accepted facts. The ‘post’ refers to an anxiety about what might be on the horizon. Part II, exploring a potential theoretical overlap between post-truth and populism studies, reverses the epistemic focus of populism studies from populists’ ‘counter-knowledge’ problems taken as self-evident by researchers. Instead, it explores epistemic problems in populism studies on the researcher side : the epistemic risks built into the ‘ideational’ definition of populism; and in the tacit understandings of political rhetoric reduced to ‘information’ (transmission and reception) at the expense of more complex notions of mediated communication as performance or ritual, speech acts, and, especially, political rhetoric. The latter is unrigorously reduced to ‘false information,’ and it requires a very different interpretive analytical approach for comprehending the empirical phenomena being called ‘populist’ and ‘post-truth’—disinformation, misinformation, lying, rumor, and conspiracy theory.
Alternative Political Commentators (APCs) have gained prominence on digital platforms as new opinion leaders to politically engaged young adults. This study responds to a growing demand for an audience-focused exploration of perceptions and use practices of what has been described as reactionary digital media. We specifically examine the case of Ben Shapiro, a leading conservative voice on YouTube, employing a mixed-methods approach, triangulating computational analyses of YouTube comments (n = 711,909) with in-depth interviews with young (18–33) daily Shapiro viewers based in Belgium (n = 15). Positioning Shapiro as an ambivalent online political figure, our study conceptualizes the two primary roles he fulfills for his audiences: (1) the rational articulate and non-emotional news provider, and (2) the affective witty and sometimes rude entertainer who skillfully ‘destroys’ opponents in so-called YouTube drama. Within their everyday life context, we reveal how audiences, in a likewise ambivalent manner, oscillate between casual use of Shapiro the entertainer and structured use of Shapiro the news provider. Through a reconstruction of Shapiro's dual role, our contribution suggests his style, particularly his voice, as a central quality through which audiences navigate Shapiro's ambivalence in their sense-making practices of him as an Alternative Political Commentator.
In July 1975, a federal judge ordered the Jefferson County, Kentucky, school district to desegregate its public schools by busing 11,000 white students from the county s predominantly white suburban schools to mostly black Louisville schools and vice-versa. The order sparked a massive anti-busing campaign, including rallies and marches that attracted as many as 12,000protesters. Busing opponents, the vast majority of whom were white, targeted Louisville's two daily newspapers, the Courier-Journal and the Times, which backed the busing plan. They boycotted the papers, demonstrated in front of their downtown offices, and published their own newspapers. The Courier-Journal and the Times were indicted because they represented powerful liberal elites whom anti-busers believed had stripped ordinary Americans of their individual rights andfreedoms.
A focus on political consensus in the United States in the early 1950s has created a false sense of a period of national unity and of the press in that period as a trusted institution. This article uses listener hate mail to radio reporters during a divisive moment—President Harry Truman’s removal of General Douglas MacArthur from his command in the Korean War in April 1951—to identify a politically rancorous discourse, aimed at the press. This period of high emotion for Americans provides a case study in audience members’ sometimes hostile relationship with journalists and does so at an early moment in the creation of a truly mass national news audience. I analyze hundreds of unpublished, archival letters, from a time when public opinion polling was relatively new and still problematic, to rethink what our baseline measurement is for media trust and better contextualize claims about its trajectory. I find three tropes that are especially resonant in the present day and became more visible parts of the public discourse with the presidency of Donald Trump: anti-press attitudes, isolationism, and antisemitism.
The purpose of this chapter is to examine how the fake news has originated. This term has been in existence for decades, since the evolution of the printing press, which also disseminated false information. The mainstream media and non-mainstream media or just individuals in general have their own biases and agendas, so misinformation, disinformation, exaggerations, and deceptions will exist. This chapter will provide individuals from any political perspective or other beliefs evidence to make their own judgements. Digital citizenship and literacy will be explored using various examples of obtaining information and use of devices. In addition, this chapter will consider how researchers should take risks to explore controversial topics such as fake news to inform an audience using research.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a host of Black and minority journalists are spearheading a national conversation about how racism within the news media has resulted in its failure to adequately and accurately cover the Black community and to report on racial injustice. This article puts that conversation into historical context by considering its antecedents in calls to address the news media’s whiteness problem in the mid-1960s and beyond. Focusing predominately on the television news industry and the print press, it reveals how American newsrooms appeared to lower their colour barriers but did not commit to substantive change. The article shows how the journalists of colour speaking out today inherit a struggle waged by generations before them. The biggest obstacle they faced in turning desegregation into full-blown integration, however, has not been overt white supremacist racism in American news media, but the enduring commitment of white media owners, managers, and editors to white-defined ‘objectivity’.
In this article, we focus on the Washington Post’s coverage of busing for racial desegregation between 1968 and 1973. Drawing on work done in the history of emotions, we argue that the Post’s reporting of busing articulated the feelings of an emotional community of local white suburban hostility that operated in reference to a larger national emotional regime of reactionary conservativism that was embodied in the anti-press and anti-busing politics of Nixon and Agnew. We identify three emotives: indignation, fear, and anger, which were the binding forces of an emotional community whose activism had material effects on schooling in the County. Our research demonstrates how while The Washington Post was an integrationist newspaper, the outlet helped to circulate the very emotions that reinforced and justified the organized local opposition to busing.
La présidence Trump a installé un climat politique menaçant pour les médias d’information grand public. En partant de la prémisse que celle-ci incarne une forme de populiste autoritarisme, cet article développe la thèse que Donald J. Trump déploie 4 types de stratégies d’intimidation : menaces de représailles institutionnelles, manœuvres d’opacification de la communication sur le processus décisionnaire, remise en cause de l’éthique des journalistes, et encouragements adressés à ses partisans à exprimer leur colère contre les médias.
Depuis les campagnes présidentielles de 2016, l’hostilité envers les médias d’information grand public s’est très nettement intensifiée. Aiguillonnés par leur candidat, les partisans de Trump expriment publiquement leur colère envers les journalistes de ces médias, notamment en marge des rassemblements publics du candidat. En mobilisant les travaux sur le lien entre statut social et expression publique de la colère, la présente étude suggère que, dans le cas des partisans de Trump, l’impression de « frustration relative » (relative deprivation) par rapport à d’autres groupes sociaux préside à l’expression publique de la colère. L’influence des médias d’information sur la façon dont les soutiens de Trump évaluent leur « statut social subjectif » s’explique par les entrechoquements axiologiques entre ces derniers et les journalistes.
This article argues that the discourses and techniques of political journalism worked to make White working class identity sensible as an assumed norm in American politics during the 2016 US presidential campaign. Throughout the campaign, many news organizations sent journalists to small towns and various Donald Trump rallies to understand what was driving a burbling resentment among his base of White working class voters, and by interrogating the explanatory and long-form reporting produced by these journalists, we can come to understand how the White working class began to cohere as a particular political subjectivity. By documenting the economic decline and social peril borne from neoliberal policies, acts of journalism substantiate the conditions that animate White working class identity and legitimate its resentments. However, that same journalism also failed to adequately deal with the consequences of policy and the way economic conditions and cultural identities reflexively constitute one another, instead focusing on the ways class- and race-based resentments formed a well of political support, constraining any sense of agency to the discursive bounds of a political campaign. This article concludes by arguing that in order to decenter the primacy of whiteness in American politics, it is incumbent upon scholars and observers alike to attend to the various cultural discourses and techniques that render it simultaneously central and invisible.
Journalism history's object of analysis has been increasingly politicized from without, eclipsed by a modern conservative movement that has successfully mobilized around a belief in a “liberal media.” The elision of right-wing forms of journalism and media criticism has been a constitutive feature of the field to date, as evidenced by gaps in the critical interventions of James Carey. Narrating the long history of conservative news media criticism from the 1930s through the emergence of Accuracy in Media in the early 1970s serves to historicize the contemporary conservative “echo chamber” and demonstrates the historiographical value of an expanded conception of “journalism” as a culturally embedded and politically contested category, simultaneously defined from within and without the profession.
Against all odds, the seeds of social change found purchase in mid-twentieth century South Carolina. Newspaperman John McCray and his allies at the Lighthouse and Informer challenged readers to “rebel and fight”--to reject the “slavery of thought and action” and become “progressive fighters” for equality. Newspaper Wars traces the role journalism played in the fight for civil rights in South Carolina from the 1930s through the 1960s. Moving the press to the center of the political action, Sid Bedingfield tells the stories of the long-overlooked men and women on the front lines of a revolution. African American progress sparked a battle to shape South Carolina’s civic life, with civil rights activists arrayed against white journalists determined to preserve segregation through massive resistance. As that strategy failed, white newspapers turned to overt political action and crafted the still-prevalent narratives that aligned southern whites with the national conservative movement. A fascinating portrait of a defining time, Newspaper Wars analyzes the role journalism played--and still can play--during times of social, cultural, and political change. © 2017 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. All rights reserved.
Anti-Semitic beliefs that associated Jews, especially New York Jews, with the news media helped create the idea of a “liberal news media.” Anti-Semites around the world have linked Jews with “control” of the news media since the nineteenth century. In the postwar United States, anti-Semitic critiques of the news media were closely linked with Cold War–era anticommunism, Christian conservatism, and reaction to the civil rights movement by white conservatives. Anti-Semites of the postwar period were usually fervent Christian anticommunists who believed that Jews secretly manipulated and masterminded the news in order to promote the civil rights movement, destroy the Christian United States, and pave the way for communist world government.
Nearly as soon as television began to enter American homes in the late 1940s, social activists recognized that it was a powerful tool for shaping the nation’s views. By targeting broadcast regulations and laws, both liberal and conservative activist groups have sought to influence what America sees on the small screen. Public Interests describes the impressive battles that these media activists fought and charts how they tried to change the face of American television. Allison Perlman looks behind the scenes to track the strategies employed by several key groups of media reformers, from civil rights organizations like the NAACP to conservative groups like the Parents Television Council. While some of these campaigns were designed to improve the representation of certain marginalized groups in television programming, as Perlman reveals, they all strove for more systemic reforms, from early efforts to create educational channels to more recent attempts to preserve a space for Spanish-language broadcasting. Public Interests fills in a key piece of the history of American social reform movements, revealing pressure groups’ deep investments in influencing both television programming and broadcasting policy. Vividly illustrating the resilience, flexibility, and diversity of media activist campaigns from the 1950s onward, the book offers valuable lessons that can be applied to current battles over the airwaves.
IN FEBRUARY 1963 the United Auto Workers (UAW) put together an in-depth report on what they called "That Other Subversive Network," the conservative movement. In a series of articles in the UAW newspaper Solidarity, the union blasted three conservative men who had emerged as political threats. The first, Roger Milliken, funneled millions of dollars into conservative organizations. The second, Clarence Manion, hosted a weekly national radio program to promote conservative ideas. And the third, Barry Goldwater, had become the most recognizable conservative politician in the United States. Together they were the faces of "that other subversive network": "the Donor, the Dealer, and the Darling."1.
This article examines the construction of conservative consciousness toward the establishment press, namely the articulation of the idea of the liberal media. Using discursive institutionalism and Nancy Fraser’s critique of Habermas’s conception of the public sphere as a theoretical lens, it is argued that the liberal media bias critique was developed and solidified in what the author calls the ‘conservative counter-sphere’, a sub-public sphere for right-wing activists and thinkers. A content analysis of the conservative publication Human Events empirically demonstrates that right-wing news outlets provided a public space for the emerging modern conservative movement to articulate a hegemonic discourse and mode of thought about the seeming liberal bias of the mainstream media.
Republican Congressman Louis McFadden and Jehovah's Witness leader Joseph Rutherford promoted a 1934 legislative proposal to open American broadcasting indiscriminately to all who could pay, thus effectively making it a public utility. Debate on the proposed bill illuminates some of the tensions in the construction of network broadcasting's liberal public sphere—not only the intolerance of intolerance at its heart but also the tension between the open pluralism of modern liberalism and the strident defense of truth by fundamentalist religious and populist political crusaders who sought to broadcast their views. Conservative populists astutely identified the intrinsically liberal framework of corporate network broadcasting, specifically its need to present an appearance of fostering diversity under a regime of tolerance.
This article contends that we have little understanding of why the idea of the “liberal media” became an article of faith among conservatives. This study looks to the past by examining the construction of the “liberal media” in conservative thought to understand the present state of right-wing populism. The objective is not to determine whether the news media has a liberal bias, rather it is to understand the origins and development of this political and rhetorical project. It is argued that the liberal media critique was developed in the “conservative counter-sphere,” a public sphere for right-wing activists and thinkers. Based on a content analysis of the conservative publication Human Events from 1957–1965, this study finds that the presidential campaign of 1964, and the political actors and issues surrounding it, played a critical role in solidifying the right-wing critique of the liberal media.
Using the Poor People's Campaign of 1968 as a case study, this essay explores the considerable influence media framing had on the social justice movements of the time. While campaign organizers including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. sought the nation's rededication to the War on Poverty, national press coverage flattened out the campaign's complexities. A systematic examination of such reporting reveals that common media practices helped obscure many of the campaign's class‐based goals and the practical impact the experience had on those who participated.
Donald Ritchie here offers a vibrant chronicle of news coverage in our nation’s capital, from the early days of radio and print reporting and the heyday of the wire services to the brave new world of the Internet. Beginning with 1932, when a newly elected FDR energized the sleepy capital, Ritchie highlights the dramatic changes in journalism that have occurred in the last seven decades. We meet legendary columnists--including Walter Lippmann, Joseph Alsop, and Drew Pearson (voted “the best ratcatching reporter in town”)--as well as the great investigative reporters, from Paul Y. Anderson (who broke the Teapot Dome scandal) to the two green Washington Post reporters who launched the political story of the decade--Woodward and Bernstein. We read of the rise of radio news--fought tooth and nail by the print barons--and of such pioneers as Edward R. Murrow, H. V. Kaltenborn, and Elmer Davis. Ritchie also offers a vivid history of TV news, from the early days of Meet the Press, to Huntley and Brinkley and Walter Cronkite, to the cable revolution led by C-SPAN and CNN. In addition, he compares political news on the Internet to the alternative press of the ‘60s and ‘70s; describes how black reporters slowly broke into the white press corps (helped mightily by FDR’s White House); discusses path-breaking woman reporters such as Sarah McClendon and Helen Thomas, and much more. From Walter Winchell to Matt Drudge, the people who cover Washington politics are among the most colorful and influential in American news. Reporting from Washington offers an unforgettable portrait of these figures as well as of the dramatic changes in American journalism in the twentieth century.
Few contemporary political contests have attracted so much attention and aroused so much controversy as the 1972 Florida primary, when George C. Wallace swept the event, winning 42 per cent of the vote, or 515,604 votes and 75 of the state's 81 delegates to the Democratic Convention. In addition, he collected eleven of Florida's twelve Congressional districts and did nearly as well in the North as in the Southern areas of Florida. Wallace's overwhelming victory in Florida culminated a drive for recognition that he could do well running as a Democratic candidate among a diverse block of voters, and set the stage for future primaries. The relationship between his success, prior to the attempt on his life, and his selective use of media in Florida and earlier campaigns is the subject of this study.
This article incorporates the ideologies, symbolism, and strategies employed by Martin Luther King Jr. to radically transform public opinion regarding the rights of blacks to become integral participants in the “American Dream”—a dream that would allow them the same privileges accorded to those in mainstream society.It illustrates his ability to infuse Christian philosophy with democratic values which ultimately provided continuous momentum for the Civil Rights Movement. Furthermore, it offers a basic understanding of the relevance of the church in healing inequities to which blacks were subjected.Dr. Kern-Foxworth is an associate professor in the Department of Journalism at Texas A&M University. In 1991 she was named an Agnes Harris Postdoctoral Fellow by the American Association of University Women
The purpose of this research is to describe and analyze the public relations elements of the civil rights movement from 1955 to 1968. The focus is the communications strategies and programs of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), headed by Martin Luther King, Jr. A descriptive section outlines the situation that led to the Montgomery bus boycott, the birth of the SCLC, the goals of the SCLC, and the SCLC's public relations department. The SCLC's public relations strategies and programs are then analyzed by examining rhetorical communication, situational use of one- and two-way models of public relations, alliance building, political advocacy, consumer boycotts, and grassroots communication, including political and citizenship education, voter registration, and King's people to people tours. The author concludes that the SCLC's communication programs and strategies did help the organization achieve its basic goal of eradicating state-supported segregation and discrimination. However, the SCLC's ultimate mission—full equality for African Americans in all aspects of society—remains unaccomplished.
D. F. Fleming is no stranger to readers of The Journal. He is Research Professor at Vanderbilt University.
If the mass media act as the instruments through which people of the dierent regions of a country keep in touch with the mass
culture, one would expect greater exposure to the media to be positively correlated with attitudes which conform to the values
of the larger society. The author confirms this hypothesis by relating measures of exposure and tests of readiness for desegregation
- Hammond William M.