Building Movements Through Media

Abstract

Building Movements Through Media Brittany Bounds (bio) Nicole Hemmer. Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. xvi + 336 pp. Notes and Index. $34.95. Kevin M. Schultz. Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties. New York: W.W. Norton, 2015. 387 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $28.95. The publication of these books was well timed: Nielsen research recently declared Fox News the most-watched network in 2016; Breitbart made its own news in the media with the appointment of Steve Bannon as President Trump's chief strategist; and the declaration of Milo Yiannopoulos as the latest provocateur of the new Alt-Right movement is reminiscent of the scandals Norman Mailer generated in his day. New accusations resemble the old allegations of liberal media bias; except this time, it is being touted by a president who disseminates his own "alternative facts" and bans certain news outlets from the White House press room. A division used to exist between news and commentary, and the five main actors in these two books clearly fall into the latter category. We nearly always think of liberals when the word "activist" is used, but these books turn that paradigm upside down in their use of media activists, particularly those on the right. Other recent reviewers have covered the developing conservative historiography well, leaving little for this review to add, but these two works also fit nicely into the conversation about literary activism and movements. Both Nicole Hemmer and Kevin Schultz offer a glimpse into the history behind the growth of the movements that overtook the Sixties, and their two books complement one another. Hemmer's book sets the stage by explaining journalism's development toward objectivity in the twentieth century, mirrored in the centrist-liberal establishment that her three protagonists (William Rusher, Clarence Manion, and Henry Regnery) criticize through different types of media propagation in order to build a conservative movement through articles intentionally biased by selection (but not by content). Conservatives believed that liberals were the gatekeepers to power, thus in control of mainstream [End Page 511] media, higher education, the party system, and the federal government. Schultz also uses this backdrop of the 1950s consensus to explain well both Norman Mailer's and Bill Buckley's detestation of "liberal establishment" America: a nonconfrontational country, bland, and conforming, yet riddled with social problems. These two prolific authors were ideologically divergent, yet monumental in attacking the center, together, from their respective wings. The two books overlap at times, yet are not duplicative, as each offers a fresh perspective on some of the same events and developments. Messengers of the Right falls neatly into the historiography of the conservative movement but is the first to study the movement as a "coherent network of activists" whose leadership had profound consequences. Hemmer's story breaks out of the traditional narrative that claims the conservative movement rose in the 1950s; she instead traces their roots to the first generation of "media activists" in the late 1940s. These activists used their independent sources of media to turn consumers into activists who would ultimately vote conservatively and change U.S. politics. Hemmer makes three main points. First, she argues that conservatives won the rhetorical argument that liberal bias existed in both media and the academy during the 1950s age of post-ideology when the "vital center" illegitimated ideologues on both the left and right. Secondly, conservative media activists were able to articulate their "elite populism," which allowed them to speak on behalf of the "oppressed minority" of Americans (that became an "oppressed" majority in the mid-1960s). Thirdly, these activists tipped the scales between ideological purity and political pragmatism towards the former, and in their self-comparisons with radical revolutionaries like Thomas Paine and William Lloyd Garrison, they set themselves in opposition to party politics. The book is structured chronologically to appease the pickiest of OCD sufferers and the most alliterative of poets, with neatly named chapter titles such as: Networks (The Outsiders, The Outlets, The Obstacles); Leaders (The Movement, The Millstone, The Muzzle); Elections (The Purists, The Partisans, The Pivot); and Adaptations (The Compromise, The Contraction...