I have made an executive decision and decided to start book club discussions at around 6 pm eastern. This is largely because my Wednesday evenings over the next few months will not exactly allow me to be particularly free at later times. I feel this is justified because these discussions usually carry over into Thursday anyway, so what's wrong with starting them early enough for people to comment before going to bed?--Chris

I became interested in reading this book when talking with Peter Daou about David Stein's famous, though unpublished, presentation on The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. I had learned over a conference call that Daou had actually seen the presentation and I called him to ask if he could clue me in. Instead, he told me that if you just read David Brock's The Republican Noise Machine, you would already know everything in the presentation. The next day I nominated it for a MyDD book club discussion, and was pleased when it won the voting.

So, what follows is my hopefully brief summary of Brock's book (Brock also runs Media Matters for America). Post your review in the comments, and discussion will follow from there. (Also, place your nominations for the next MyDD book discussion here). I feel that this book is particularly useful in that is forms a sort of tetralogy with the first three discussions, altogether making for a pretty decent introduction to the rise of the modern conservative movement.

In May, over at Salon, David Brock reprinted the introduction to the book. I post it here because if you do not have a copy of the book, reading the opening chapter, which presents the basic thesis, will allow you to participate in the discussion.

The Republican Noise Machine is a detailed description of the gargantuan machinery conservatives have created over the past thirty years in their successful attempt to dominate the American media landscape. This was an enormous effort that first arose out of Nixon's political campaign in 1968, and before that out of Nixon's hatred of the media who he believed was always out to get him. In fact, Borck calls the rise of the Republican Noise Machine "Nixon's revenge," and devotes considerable time in the early parts of the book describing Nixon's important role in this movement:

Though politicians of both parties are frequently unhappy with media coverage, Nixon was in a category all by himself. After growing up lower-middle class-in a small town in Orange County, California, attending Whittier College and Duke University Law School, and then getting rejected for job by prominent law firms in the Northeast, Nixon nursed status resentments to what he considered to be East Coast elites. Primary among those elites Nixon resented were journalists. His former aide William Safire wrote in his White House memoir Before the fall:

Nixon, who always knew he had a deep and dark rage within him, mastered his temper in about every other area, but kept "flicking off the scab," in his skin crawling metaphor, when it came to the quintessential "them," the press. He had contempt for them, as elitist, antidemocratic, lordly, arrogant lookers-down-their-noses at the elected representatives of the folks, and he did everything he could get away with the destroy them--becoming, along the way, elitist, lordly, and dangerously arrogant.

Throughout his public life, Nixon believed in his bones that the press was out to avbenge his promotion of charges that New Dealer Alger Hiss was a Communist agent and to avenge his slanderous Red-baiting campaign for the California Senate seat against liberal Democrat Helen Graham Douglas in 1950... As his political troubles mounted in the White House, Nixon became further obsessed with subduing and controlling the "media," a word that the White House insisted on using to describe the press "because [it] had a manipulative, Madison Avenue, all-encompassing connotation, and the pres hated it," Safiie reported. Documents and tapes form his White House years, published by Richard Reeves in his book President Nixon, showed a preocuupation "witht eh type of people who are in the press corps... truly a third house supporting the Democratic candidates," Nixon wrote in a memo to top aid H. R. Halderman. In april 1971, several months before the release of Efron's book [Twisting the News], Nixon wrote Halderman: "We need the kind of attack which will get to their vulnerable spot--their total support for ultra-liberal causes... Naturally the press has a vested interest in seeing the United States lose the war and they are doing their desparate best to repeat all the bad news and to downplay the good news. As far as the election is concerned, they will be absolutely vicious and vilent on that score.... I cannot emphasize too strongly my feeling that much more than any single issue that we are going to emphazie, the discrediting of the press must be our major objective over the next few months." (p. 22-24)

That task, which is actually a joint goal of discrediting the press and building a large, conservative counter-machinery, became not just the major objective of the Nixon White House during the 1972 Presidential campaign, but the primary goal of the conservative movement over the next three decades. It was such a successful project that thirty years later, Al Gore can offer the following insightful words, and simultanesouly be destroyed by the Republican Noise Machine for uttering them: Two years after the election, Gore gave an extraordinary interview to the New York Observer that could be read as an explanation of what happened to his presidential campaign. Gore charged that conservatives in the media, operating under journalistic cover, are loyal not to the standards and conventions of journalism but, rather, to politics and party. Gore said:

"The media is kind of weird these days on politics, and there are some major institutional voices that are, truthfully speaking, part and parcel of the Republican Party. Fox News Network, the Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh -- there's a bunch of them, and some of them are financed by wealthy ultra-conservative billionaires who make political deals with Republican administrations and the rest of the media.... Most of the media [has] been slow to recognize the pervasive impact of this Fifth Column in their ranks -- that is, day after day, injecting the daily Republican talking points into the definition of what's objective as stated by the news media as a whole....

Something will start at the Republican National Committee, inside the building, and it will explode the next day on the right-wing talk-show network and on Fox News and in the newspapers that play this game, the Washington Times and the others. And then they'll create a little echo chamber, and pretty soon they all start baiting the mainstream media for allegedly ignoring the story they've pushed into the zeitgeist. And then pretty soon the mainstream media goes out and disingenuously takes a so-called objective sampling, and lo and behold, these RNC talking points are woven into the fabric of the zeitgeist...."

True to form, the right-wing media greeted this factual description with yet another frenzy of repetitive messaging portraying Gore as crazy. Speaking of Gore on FOX News, The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes said, "This is nutty. This is along the lines with, you know, President Bush killed Paul Wellstone, and the White House knew before 9/11 that the attacks were going to happen. This is -- I mean, this is conspiratorial stuff." Also on FOX, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer said of Gore, "I'm a psychiatrist. I don't usually practice on camera. But this is the edge of looniness, this idea that there's a vast conspiracy, it sits in a building, it emanates, it has these tentacles, is really at the edge. He could use a little help.""It could be he's just nuts," Rush Limbaugh said of Gore. "Tipper Gore's issue is what? Mental health. Right? It could be closer to home than we know.""He [Gore] said it's a conspiracy," Tucker Carlson said on CNN's "Crossfire.""I actually think he's coming a little unhinged," The Weekly Standard's David Brooks, now at the New York Times, said of Gore on PBS. (p. 6-7)

Gore senses the presence of the Noise Machine, but is unable to put his finger on it. Perhaps fearing that the curtain is being pulled back by Toto, but mostly because the Machine finds it necessary it trash all opponents, the Machine quickly pounced on Gore with eh full brunt of its message discipline, and the full scope of its wide reaching media domination.

How did this happen? How did the media come to be utterly dominated by new-wave radical conservatives? The general theory on how the Noise Machine was built was put forward in the 1970's by three people: journalist Edith Efron, Justice Lewis Powell, and former Nixon Treasury secrtary William Simon.

Efron'a Contribution

Edith Efron famously wrote a book in 1971 entitled The News Twisters, which, in a true Astroturf moment, by purchasing several thousand copies through his campaign funds, Nixon managed to vault into the New York Times bestseller list. The book was the forerunner to hundreds of books and complaints by wingers over the past three deacees that news coverage is unabashedly biased against conservatives, in this case focusing on network news coverage of the 1968 campaign. However, while the book has been very influential and made something of a splash in its time, what Efron is really remembered for are her ideas concerning television deregulation and opinion journalism, and how they could be used to shift the national media in favor of Republicans:

Efron foresaw that, with the advent of cable television and other new technologies, markets for subjective news would emerge. Pay cable was not regulated in the same way as the public airwaves were. And cable's business model was close to that of the old ideologically oriented newspapers, based on attracting a much smaller audience of dedicated subscribers who paid to watch predictable formats appealing to their specialized interests. Viewers would choose their news the way they subscribed to political magazines. Clearly, there was an underserved market for niche for right-wing opinion in the millions of people who bought The Conscious of a Conservative and A choice, Not an Echo. If their presence were felt in the media market, the media as a whole might change its standards and conventions to stay competitive.

Efron believed that both deregulation and the introduction of pay cable were many years away. Though she said she was a libertarian, she was not beyond using government power to forward ideological ends in the meantime. So, she suggested that the government require the networks to include in their broadcasts less stright news and more of what she considered "a full spectrum of opinion."

Efron was prophetic, too, in seeing that infusing regular news broadcasts with more opinion would fundamentally change the medium, blurring the distinction between news and commentary and giving the organized Right an important opening for the airing, legitimizing, and reinforcement of its views that it could not win through the fact-based filters of objective journalism. By turning public discourse into a matter of highly partisan opini0on, the right wing could shatter political consensus and sidestep questions about the veracity or mendacity of its arguments. Opinions can't be false. (p. 36-37)

These are two aspects of televised news that we see everywhere now: complete deregulation of media ownership, a total lack of news programming in the public interest, and complete dominance of "news" programs with pundits, opinion-heads, and other perpetrators of subjective discourse on all television news programs. Now the media is allowed to lie as much as it likes, with no repercussions possible except on the bottom line.

Powell's contribution

Borck writes:

Three months before the publication of Efron's The News Twisters, in a memorandum dated August 31, 1971, and printed in the U.S. Camber of Commerce's periodical Washington Report, Powell, a well-respected former president of the American Bar Association and a conservative Democrat, argued that the American system of free enterprise was attack by the four institutions that shaped American public opinion: the academy, the media, the political establishment and the courts....

Powell then laid out the strategy that the Right would follow in the coming deaces, whereby conservative business interests would create and underwrite a "movement" to front its agenda in the media. Under Powell's plan, heavily subsidized "scholars, writers and thinkers" speaking "for the movement" would press for "balance" and "equal time" to penetrate the media, thereby shaping news coverage, reframing issues, influencing the views of political elites, and changing mass public opinion. These would be the manufactured "intellectuals" referenced by Efron, marketed in the media to "expand the spectrum." They would be housed in new "national organizations" in an effort "undertaken long term" with "generous financial support." (p. 39-40)

There's more: Though most of Lewis Powell's 1971 memorandum to American business leaders concerned the building of a conservative counter-establishment, Powell also proposed a second track through which "the movement" would directly harass the media into conforming to its ideology. The subsidized right-wing ideas and spokespeople could not compete in the media marketplace without a subsidized campaign to make it happen.

Business, Powell advised, should underwrite "monitoring of the media--particularly the broadcast networks--to enforce its demand for "equal time" for right-wingers. "The movement" would play a coordinated double game, seeking to co-opt the media, while at the same time scorching it as biased against conservatism and conservatives. The latter tactic would enforce the former. "The staffs of [media] experts," Powell wrote, should commence a "constant examination of the texts of adequate samples" of TV programs, newspapers, magazines and books; such systematic scrutiny and criticism of the media would provide "incentives" to "induce" the media to put the heavily subsidizing pro-business commentators in print and on the air. (p. 74)

Like with Efron's vision, once again, we know that all of these things have come to pass. Conservative complaints about the "liberal media" being "biased" against conservatives are as common as anything else that comes out of the mouths and keyboards of conservatives. There is a huge apparatus of well-paid conservative spokespeople who appear on news programs far in excess of liberals and progressives. The alternative apparatus has been built, the conservative complaints about bias are more fervent than ever.

William Simon's contribution

Simon saw that deregulating the news media, shifting it more toward opinion journalism rather than fact-based journalism, creating a huge apparatus of well-paid, media savy conservative spokespeople to fill the new wave of opinion journalism, and constantly shaming the media into not doing so more often, could still be improved upon. Thus, enter the "thinks tanks":

Published in 1978, Simon's A Time for Truth pealed the same alarm bell as had Lewis Powell. "The target of the `consumer movement is business, the target of the `environmentalists' is business, and the target of the `minorities' at least where employment is concerned, is business," Simon wrote. Business, he argued, was losing politically because it had not intellectual firepower so savvy media spokespeople, the same problem that handicapped Goldwater in 1964. Simon frankly suggested conservatives go out and buy the public debate in a bid to make their ideology look respectable and appealing. So, pace Simon, the coal industry would begin funding research to undermine support for environmental regulation, and the financial services industry would pay for a pseudoscholary campaign to destroy public confidence in the Social Security system.

The ideology of Barry Goldwater and Phyllis Schafly and William Buckley would no be dry cleaned for mass media consumption, and along with it came a neolexicon--a language invented by conservative practitioners trained in the use of manipulative, often Orwellian, rhetoric. Agenda items like gutting, rolling back the civil rights movement, and slashing taxes would be smoothed out with deceptive Madison Avenue--type branding slogans of the kind used to sell commercial products: "privatization,""the new federalism," the "flat tax," and so on. Americans would be told that poverty is a "behavioral" condition, that any advance gained by a member of a minority group amounted to "reverse discrimination," and that providing government sudsidies for private and parochial schools while draining resources from public education was to be though of as "school choice."

Just as objective journalism was an obstacle for the Right, so was objective scholarship. Simon laid out a "blue-print for a counter-intelligensia"--hired guns who could legitimize and popularize right-wing opinion through the media and do battle in the media on behalf of conservative business interests, the wealthy, and the cultural Right with spokespeople for the consumer, environmental, civil rights and feminist movements. Under Simon's plan, academic studies that were damaging to right-wing ideological goals and to the imperatives of business were to be countered at every turn by scholarship for sale. Simon advocated "nothing less than a massive an unprecedented mobilization of moral, intellectual and financial resources" with funds rushing by multimillions" from corporate-backed foundations to a network of pro-business scholars, writers, pundits, and publicists, as well as to conservative book projects, publications, and policy research.(p. 41-42)

That is the main thrust of the plan, at least in one important area.

An Example of How It Works

Using "think tanks" as an example, here is how the Republican Noise Machine came into being and how it is so successful. This was a bold plan, but it took money and organization to make it work. First, the message gets to the rich donors:

In 1972, after reading the Powell memo, Colorado beer brewer Joe Coors, a Goldwater supporter, notorious union buster, and opponent of minority hiring, donated $200,000 to the forerunner organization that would become the Heritage foundation, today's the right's premier think tank.(p.43) Aides are dispatched to help grow the fledging organization, and a network, something else we don't have much of on the Left, forms: After reading the memo, Coors dispatched an aide to Washington, where he met Paul Weyrich, press secretary to recently defeated GOP Senator Gordon Allen of Colorado. Weyrich's coworker in Allot's office was a young staffer named George F. Will. Weyrich and Will, along with Trent Lott, the future Republican Senate leader then serving as a legislative aide in another congressional office, had formed a "Conservative Lunch Club." (43) Fundraising begins: Also spearheading the Right's p.r. efforts in the mid-1970's was Irving Kristol, a tireless ideologue who called himself a neoconservative.... Kritol joined the American Enterprise Insitute, where he spent much of his time in the 1970's working to shape the funding strategies of a small group of right-wing, family-controlled foundations and politically conservative corporations. Joinging Kristol in these early fundraising appeals was the AEI's Michael Novack, a right-wing Catholic theologian... This money financed a colossal new network of multi-issue research and advocacy groups hat technically do not lobbying and provide no services, other than the production, marketing and promoting of conservative ideology to lawmakers, opinion leaders, the media, and the general public. Because the think tanks were mult-issue, their names were popping up routinely in the press, across a broad range of subjects; several groups pushing the same issues, and reinforcing them through repetition of the same jargon, created an appearance of validity and popular consensus and the impression that the Right suddenly was bursting with new ideas. (45-46) Hiring "academics" along the way, it didn't take long to make a huge impact:By 1980, Heritage was positioned to provide the important quasi-academic veneer that Goldwater lacked to the Presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan, who had made his political debut in 1964 when he endorsed Goldwater at the Republican National Convention. Upon Reagan's election, Heritage delieered Mandate for Leadership the policy blueprint for his new administration; concurrently, leaders from the burgeoning right-wing think tank network, which by 1980 encompassed seventy organizations, assumed top cabinet posts--e.g., Attorny general Edwin Meese III (Institute for Contemporary studies), Interior Secretary James Watt (Rocky Mountain Legal Foundation), and CIA Director William J. Casey (Manhattan Institute for Policy Research).(45) It is all incredibly media savvy, and there are hundreds of them: Heritage is the mother of all think tanks in its single-mided focus on co-opting the media, and its methods have been followed by hundreds of right-wing think tanks. According to the book Do Think Tanks Matter? by Donald E. Abelson, "In 1998 Heritage spent close to $8 million, or 18 percent of its budget, on media and government relations." Heritage's public relations program, Abelson reported, is based on a single premise put forth by the foundation: "Make sure journalists never have a reason for not quoting at least one conservative expert--or for not giving the conservative `spin' in their stories."

According to its highly trafficked Web site, Heritage has eight employes doing p.r. work full-time, runs a 365-day-per-year, twenty-four-hour-per-day media hot line, disseminates to the pres a weekly "hot sheet," has its own TV and radio studios in its Capitol Hill offices, and syndicates op-eds through the Knight-Ridder wire service. When Heritage is mentioned in a major publication like the Washington Post, it blast-faces and e-mails the piece to hundreds of smaller newspapers, op-ed editors, syndicated columnists, and talk show producers. An examination of the Web site in psring 2003 showed that Heritage was gaining about forty mentions in just the major print press alone per week. (58)

Which shows in its domination of the news: The center-right slant in media citations of think tanks continued in 2002, with conservative groups receiving 47 percent of last year's citations, centrists 41 percent and progressives 12 percent--the least representation for the left since 1998.Its getting worse: Even as media reliance on think tanks increased in 2003, the slant in coverage toward conservative groups and away from progressives held steady. While mainstream media citations of the top 25 think tanks increased 13 percent from 2002 to 2003, right-leaning institutions received 47 percent of last year's citations, with centrists getting 39 percent and 13 percent going to groups that leaned to the left.(...)

Conservative think tanks, buoyed by their appearances on cable news outlets such as Fox News and MSNBC, received 52 percent of electronic citations. Centrists garnered 37 percent of citations in the electronic media, while progressives received only 11 percent of such mentions.

This all came from huge donors, and is well coordinated: In addition to the Olin and Coors family foundations, run by two brothers who own a huge oil and natural gas firm, Kock Industries, founded by their father, Fred Koch, a charter member of the John Birch society.... The Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, founded by automotive parts manufacturer Harry Bradley, also an active member of the John Birch Society; and Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to the Mellon banking and oil fortune and a major Goldwater and Nixon supporter.... Along with the Smith Richardson Foundation, funded by the Vicks VapoRub empire, Olin, Bradley, and Scaife are known with the movement as the "Four Sisters."

Run by neocon ideologues, these foundations provide the crucial seed money, and sustained general operating funds, that are critical to successful institution building. Their multimillions are then matched by donations from top corporate foundations, including the Amoco and Alcoa foundations, the JM Foundation, the Rockwell International Corporation Trusts, and the Ford Motor Company Fund. The funding strategies of the donors are coordinated by a directorate of top conservative leaders who sit on the Philanthropy Roundtable, while the overall agenda of the movement is loosely set by shadowy organizations of top conservative activists and Far Right politicians, such as the Council for National Policy (a secretive organization of leaders with a religious Right bent) and the Library Court group0 (named after a small street in the nation's capital and convened biweekly by Paul Weyrich).

Another important coordinating function is performed by conservative activist and New Gingrich protégé Grover Norquist, president of an anti-tax group, Americans for Tax Reform. (79)

And it has no competition:When they started Heritage and its spin-offs, Paul Weyrich and his fellows believed that they were setting up what he called "mirror organizations" that could match the media and organizational powress of contemporary liberalism. But the conservatives knew nothing of liberalism, and they did not imitate it. The architects of the conservative movement had learned their craft either by consciously imitating Communist tactics to take over the GOP in 1964 or by direct involvement in various Communist sects. In Weyrich's case, the impulse seems to have sprung from an odd mix of Germanophilia and theological fanaticism. The right-wing Council for National Policy, the secret directorate of religious Right leaders, bears no resemblance to the Council on Foreign Relations, the foreign affairs debating society on which it is modeled. Nor is the right-wing Philanthropy Roundtable, with its strategic dictates, an analog to the group it is supposedly copying, the nonpartisan Council on Foundations. The conservatives built the kind of machinery they thought they were up against but never were.(70) In other words, we have nothing to compare with this. * * * * * That is but one small example of the Noise Machine, and how it has come to corrupt our Democracy and dominate the national discourse. Without going into further detail on how the noise Machine spreads its institutional power throughout not just think tanks and TV pundits, but also into newspaper columnists, talk radio, cable news, Sunday morning talk, FOX, news magazines, print magazines, college newspapers, and literally every single medium you can possibly name, it is safe to say that it does. Read the rest of the book if you want details on how it all operates. Also, read Matt Bai's famous piece for information on what progressives are finally, at long last, finally doing about this. I will close with exceprts from Brock's closing words:Yet as I have detailed throughout the book, the appeal of right-wing media is deeper than its ideological, psychological, and anti-intellectual roots: Right -wing programming takes on a show business aesthetic that people seem to like; allows listeners a viewers a sense of participation in the broadcasts; and has a strong populist component, positioning itself against established political and cultural authorities (real or imagined). Liberals ought to keep those qualities in mind when fashioning hteir responses.

For the moment, progressives will have to find ways to compete within the existing ownership structure, and according to the corrosive commercialized values, of media institutions. But with an eye to the long run, progressives must undertake political and educational efforts now to begin restoring the media to its original mission: serving the public interest and providing the space for the airing of the full diversity of views on which American democracy depends.

This will involve reversing the damage done to the media by the waves of deregulation, and ownership concentration and consolidation that were ushered in by the Reagan administration and continue today under George W. Bush. More government regulation is necessary to break up media monopolies and reintroduce legitimate competition....

In the meantime, existing progressive alternative media--magazines like The American Prospect, The Nation, Mother Jones, and The Washington Monthly, among others, and the web magazine Salonm, need more financial support from the progressive community so that they may more effectively compete with the massively subsidized right-wing media. We need to see more writers from these publications on television and radio.

Speaking of Salon, many view the Internet as a promising new media vehicle for progressives. While only about 20 percent of the public consider themselves liberal, close to 40 percent of those who say they get their news from the Internet are self-identified liberals....

In writing this book, I came to the conclusion that there is a need for another type of organization, whose specific mission is to restore accuracy and reliability to the public discourse...

The situation I have described in The Republican Noise Machine is intolerable in a democracy. It is well past the time that concerned citizens organize to redress it. (p. 382-383)

Your turn.