Member-only story
Where Did ‘Conservative Media’ Come From?
‘Messengers of the Right’ gives a 20th-century U.S. history
Nicole Hemmer’s Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) examines conservative media in the United States between the 1940s and 1970s. Specifically, Hemmer looks at the influence of “broadcaster Clarence Manion, book publisher Henry Regnery, and magazine publisher William Rusher.” These men, as she puts it, “made this habit of conservative media consumption part of what it now means to be a conservative in America.”
What They Believed in the Early Days
Manion and Regnery “broke with the Roosevelt administration over foreign policy” and entered media, where “they criticized bipartisanship as well as what they saw as an ingrained liberal bias in media and the academy.” Rusher came onto the scene later, in the 1950s, nervous about communism.
What did these conservatives take issue with? Generally, they were anti-New Deal and anti-labor union. Some may have thought the U.S. was too harsh on postwar Germany (see a 1949 review in the New York Times of a book published by Regnery; subscription required), and they thought liberals didn’t get the Yalta agreement right.
Early Conservative Media
It’s possible to speak of “conservative media” in the United States in the 1950s. This is an argument of Hemmer’s book.
“Sharing national reach and overlapping coverage, enterprises like the Manion Forum, National Review, Human Events, and Regnery Publishing were for many people the center of conservatism in America. Listeners and subscribers regarded them as part of a single project dedicated to advancing conservative ideas…[and] as authorities on conservatism.”
In 1964, the article “Hate Clubs of the Air” published in The Nation (see a reference to it in the New York Times) identified politically influential conservative media of this era.
‘Elite Populism’
Conservative media professionals in the early 20th century had elite educational backgrounds and were accustomed to being taken seriously and having some…
