Uncovering the First Wave of Conservative Media - Part 1

About a month ago I began a series on the early rise of conservative media with a post entitled “A Father, A Daughter, and Politics.” I’m afraid I didn’t get beyond that initial post, and although you can find a link to it here, for the sake of convenience I’m going to reprint much of it below.

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It is a warm June day in 2004 and a youthful Nicole Hemmer—Niki to her friends—is on a pleasant car trip—pleasant because seated at the wheel of the car is her father, with whom she shares an affectionate relationship. Niki is old enough to have left the nest, and so the moment is made even more pleasant because it is taking place during her annual visit home.

Seemingly out of nowhere, Niki’s father announces: “My project this summer is to get you to vote for George Bush.”

Well, scarcely out of nowhere to Niki, because a prominent feature of the relationship with her father are frequent, earnest, but loving exchanges about politics. Her father is staunchly conservative. Once upon a time Niki had shared his conservatism, but over the years she had slowly shifted to the left, while her father had done just the opposite.

“The divergence of [political] opinion ended up drawing us closer together,” Niki would later observe. “Political debate became the secret language of our relationship, the way we conveyed love, respect, disagreement, and admiration. So there was nothing extraordinary about an afternoon spent debating politics.”

Nothing extraordinary, that is, except that on this particular afternoon, as the bland Indiana countryside rolled by, her father did something that would embark Nicole upon a years-long intellectual journey:

He turned on the radio.

***
That flip of the knob carried Niki and her father to one of the local AM conservative talk radio stations. For the rest of the summer, whenever they traveled together, they listened regularly to “The Rush Limbaugh Show” and “The Sean Hannity Show.”

“I found it both grating and captivating,” Niki recalls, “a heady mix of personality and passion and politics. During ad breaks we feasted on each segment’s arguments and insights, dissecting the surprisingly wide variety of philosophies and logics (and illogics) at play. In addition to engaging from my own adversarial perspective, I observed my dad’s response as a sympathetic listener. He absorbed some arguments, rejected others, and refashioned still others to fit with his life experiences. This dynamic interplay confounded the common stereotype of talk-radio listeners as sponges soaking up the host’s message. It was compelling stuff. And while it didn’t change my vote, it did change my life—and led to the book you are reading now.”

That book is “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics,” published in 2016. It’s a refinement of Niki’s PhD dissertation, done at Columbia University. From the dissertation’s acknowledgments section I can discern that Niki first grappled with the topic as a seminar paper in 2005, hard on the heels of the 2004 election, which underscores the weight of those sessions listening to El Rushbo and Sean Hannity with her father. As with all dissertation acknowledgments, it credits not just the institutions and faculty that gave her support, but also an array of family and friends. The final paragraph is poignant:

“This dissertation began with my dad and our spirited political debates. In an effort to better understand his outlook, I delved into the world of conservative media. He taught me it is possible to listen, understand, and disagree all at the same time, and convinced me that political debate is of little use absent respect for the other side’s humanity. He died before I finished this dissertation, but he never stopped shaping it. To him this work is lovingly dedicated.”

I’d like you to read that paragraph again, carefully. Yes, it’s sad that her father never saw the finished dissertation (much less the distinguished book into which it evolved), and it’s touching that she would dedicate it to him. But what stands out are the lessons he taught her:

“It is possible to listen, understand, and disagree all at the same time.”

“Political debate is of little use absent respect for the other side’s humanity.”

Those lessons are really principles to undergird the skill set required for constructive dialogue with people who disagree with us about politics, and I’m tempted to veer directly to that subject, which is close to my heart and one of my core concerns as a citizen. But I’ll discipline myself to stick with the main subject: the rise of conservative mass media, the topic with which I commenced this blog back in late October.

Nicole Hemmer—with the opening vignette out of the way, let’s refer to her professionally—began her research with the then-conventional interpretation of the rise of the modern American conservative movement. “The long accepted narrative,” she writes, “said that the modern conservative movement started with intellectuals in the 1950s, took root in organizations in the 1960s and 1970s, and won political influence in the 1980s. Only then did a powerful and influential conservative apparatus emerge, first in talk radio and then in cable news.” In other words, she assumed that when her father introduced her to Rush Limbaugh he was introducing her to the first wave of conservative mass media.

As often happens, however, the evidence soon declared otherwise. Her early research soon had her flipping through back issues of the Nation, where she encountered an article, published on May 25, 1964—early in the presidential campaign season that year—entitled “Radio Right: Hate Clubs of the Air.”

I pulled the article. Here’s the opening paragraph. It took no prisoners:

“Right wing fanatics, casting doubt on the loyalty of every President of the United States since Herbert Hoover, are pounding the American people, this election year, with an unprecedented flood of radio and television propaganda. The hate clubs of the air are spewing out a minimum of 6,600 broadcasts a week, carried by more than 1,300 radio and television stations—nearly one out of every five in the nation—in a blitz that saturates every one of the fifty states with the exception of Maine.”

The article included a map of the United States, with a dot representing each radio or television station from which a “right wing” broadcast emanated. Unsurprisingly, many of these are clustered in the South, but as a reminder that California was once upon a time not part of the Democratic blue wall, that state includes more than two dozen. Also surprising are the dozen or so stations in the Seattle area.

The article raised an obvious question: where on earth did this immense network of media activism originate? It was that question that carried Hemmer to the archives, which, in turn, soon led her to the central figure of her eventual dissertation: Clarence Manion, a college dean turned conservative activist who found himself shut out of the Republican Party of the 1950s—a party that had largely made peace with the New Deal order—and in 1954 launched the Manion Forum of Opinion.

The Forum began with 29 radio stations and over the next 25 years, as Hemmer puts it, Manion “built it into a national weekly radio and television show. From heads of state to housewife activists, from pundits to politicians, the Manion Forum emerged as the crossroads of conservatism from the 1950s to the 1970s.” Manion was a whirlwind of energy and his activities ranged well beyond the Forum, but the Forum was key. I’ll turn to it in my next post.