How the Right Lost Its Mind

by Charles J. Sykes

  On his nationally syndicated radio show, Mark Levin hammered Johnson, demanding that he come up with an alternative strategy to repeal Obamacare. In a tense exchange, Johnson tried to explain that the only path to repeal would be to get at least five Democratic senators to cross over. Without defections, he said, the only reasonable alternative would be for the GOP to stick together and elect more allies. Levin was having none of it.

  Afterward Peter Dominick, writing in the Daily Beast, described the confrontation as a perfect explanation of the showdown controversy. “The strategy Levin supports is great for ratings,” wrote Dominick, “but terrible for the country and the Republican Party.”21

  Levin and other radio performers, commentators, and columnists see it as their responsibility to demand purity on every vote and issue. They gain respect and larger audiences the more they vent the anger and frustration of their listeners by calling people names and hanging up on those who argue with them. If there is nothing to be outraged by, it’s their job to create something. That is how it works in radio. But that isn’t how it works in Washington, D.C., or any state capital in America.

  But Levin was not alone, as various conservative groups used the shutdown controversy to pump up their mail lists, generate clicks, and raise money. Other national talkers cheered them on and criticized members of the GOP “establishment,” who had not fallen into line. In October 2013, after the shutdown had failed to accomplish much of anything other than cause Republican support to drop in the polls, Limbaugh framed the failed strategy in “us vs. them” terms. He accused members of the “establishment” of having been “embarrassed” by Cruz, whom he described as “one guy with some supporters” standing up to challenge the status quo. What Republicans needed, Limbaugh insisted, was “45 Ted Cruzes” but that weak-kneed GOP leaders acted as if they were “terrified” of him.22

  Conservative anger and disappointment had been stoked. But, ultimately, Cruz would not be the beneficiary. And therein lies another story.

  THE FLAW

  The purists who backed the government shutdown ignored political realities in several ways; not only did they get the legislative numbers wrong, but they overestimated public support for their agenda.

  The reality that many conservatives have been unwilling to face is that despite their insistence that America was a center-right country, there has never been a strong constituency for the kind of tough budget cuts that would either limit the size of government or reduce the national debt. A 2013 Pew research poll found that only small minorities of the general electorate were in favor of spending cuts. Even as the deadline for the sequester’s spending cuts loomed, fewer than 25 percent of the electorate favored cutting spending on health care, environmental protection, energy, scientific research, agriculture, or “aid to the needy in the United States.” Fewer than 20 percent favored retrenchments on roads and infrastructure, Medicare, crime fighting, food and drug inspection, or disaster relief. A mere 10 percent favored decreased spending on education, Social Security, or veteran’s benefits.23

  There were, of course, sharp partisan differences, but few signs that even Republican voters had much appetite for spending cuts. Only 21 percent of Republicans said they wanted cuts in spending for Medicare, 15 percent wanted to decrease spending on education, and just 17 percent favored cuts in Social Security.

  The Pew Poll also found that Tea Party supporters made up only 37 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters, but had an outsized impact on Republican politics because they tended to be more engaged in the political process and more likely to vote in primaries. Support for the Tea Party peaked in 2010, but declined afterward. By 2015, just 17 percent of Americans said they supported the Tea Party, while a record 54 percent said they were neither supporters nor opponents.24

  But even at the height of the Tea Party influence in Washington, there was little support for entitlement reform. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that less than a quarter of Americans backed significant cuts to Social Security or Medicare. And even self-declared Tea Party supporters said that significant cuts to Social Security were “unacceptable.”25*

  None of this seemed to matter within the echo chamber that was demanding scorched-earth budget tactics. Long before Donald Trump descended the golden escalator and announced his presidential bid, the narrative had been set: the conservative “establishment” had betrayed conservatives. In the echo chamber, the volume was set at “Outrage.” As Caleb Howe later noted, this has become the business model of the Right media. “The problem, obviously, is that the talk/radio/conservative publishing/Fox opinion show model isn’t about conservative policy and ideas, or good governance, or increasing our liberty, or social conservative values, or even really about the Constitution,” he wrote. “To a great extent, it is essentially about getting the audience outraged. Outrage clicks on links. Outrage tunes in. Outrage buys books.”26

  At the center of this new media ecosystem was Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Breitbart, and Matt Drudge.

  PART II

  THE POST-TRUTH POLITICS OF THE RIGHT

  CHAPTER 7

  THE ALT REALITY MEDIA

  THIS IS WHAT IT is like to live in an ideological bubble:

  Throughout the day an American conservative can check out stories from Breitbart about crimes committed by illegal aliens and the headline “Paul Ryan Betrays America”; former congressman Allen B. West promises to tell them, “What Obama is doing now may be his most heinous and nefarious act yet.…” A quick click on the Drudge Report brings up a banner headline about “Bill Clinton’s Illegitimate Son Danney Williams.” On Facebook, a friend passes on a story headlined “Kellyanne Destroys Obnoxious Rachel Maddow In Her Most Incredible Interview Yet” (VIDEO). Their Twitter feed is exploding with attacks on the “lying, corrupt media.” Investigative reports in the media about conflicts of interest in the new administration are dismissed as “fake news.”

  Checking emails, a conservative voter might find several from friends and family, often written in ALL CAPS, including links to stories about the UN’s plans to confiscate guns; several emails from groups calling themselves the “Tea Party” offer deals on gold and silver. On television, the hosts on Fox & Friends are interviewing a Trump surrogate who defends the Russians against charges that they interfered in the election. On the way to work they can listen to talk show hosts warning of plans to impose Sharia law on Americans or Sean Hannity threatening congressional Republicans who might oppose the new president.

  As the Right has isolated itself from other sources of information, it has fashioned an alternate universe with its own facts, narratives, and truths. Of course, its members are not alone in doing so.

  Americans have segregated themselves into what the Associated Press called “intellectual ghettoes,” each with their own realities and narratives “What’s big news in one world is ignored in another. Conspiracy theories sprout, anger abounds and the truth becomes ever more elusive,” wrote reporter David Bauder.1 While conservatives can take their worldview from Laura Ingraham, Rush Limbaugh, or a host of other conservative outlets, progressives can dive into their own thought ghetto by immersing themselves in a world bounded by the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, and Salon. The silos are discrete universes that seldom talk to one another or seek to persuade or engage those of other viewpoints. As a result, the new media ecosystem rewards the loudest, most reckless voices, so the echo chamber gets louder and angrier and increasingly shrill.

  That echo chamber also has grown dramatically in recent years. A study by the Columbia Journalism Review noted that one of the remarkable features of the right-wing media ecosystem was “how new it is.” The study found that pro-Trump audiences “paid the majority of their attention to polarized outlets that have developed recently, many of them only since the 2008 election season.” Of the most voluble pro-Trump sites, the report noted, “only the New York Post existed when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. By the electi
on of Bill Clinton in 1992, only the Washington Times, Rush Limbaugh, and arguably Sean Hannity had joined the fray. Alex Jones of Infowars started his first outlet on the radio in 1996. Fox News was not founded until 1996. Breitbart was founded in 2007, and most of the other major nodes in the right-wing media system were created even later.”2

  The CJR study found that Breitbart sat in the middle of this new network, which effectively “turned the right-wing media system into an internally coherent, relatively insulated knowledge community, reinforcing the shared worldview of readers and shielding them from journalism that challenged it.” This media ecosystem did not develop spontaneously or on the cheap. Conservative mega-donors generously funded the new alternative media, with the Mercer family reportedly pumping at least $10 million into Breitbart, which not only boosted Trump’s candidacy, but became a shrill enforcer of Trumpist loyalty. (The Mercers also made major donations to the Media Research Center, which documents liberal media bias as well as groups like the free-market Heartland Institute, The Heritage Foundation, Citizens United Foundation, and the Federalist Society.)3 While other well-heeled donors on the right and left focused on more traditional types of politics, noted the Washington Post, “the Mercers have exerted pressure on the political system by helping erect an alternative media ecosystem, whose storylines dominated the 2016 race.”4

  THE WAR ON BIAS

  As the University of Virginia’s Nicole Hemmer explains in Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics, the history of the modern Right media is anything but a straight line. What we now see as the multimedia Right is actually the second generation of media activists; the first had its roots in the 1940s and 1950s, and as we have seen, fizzled out by the late 1970s.

  Although histories of conservatism tend to focus on Buckley’s National Review magazine, Hemmer notes that there was a broader network of conservative media activists that emerged as leaders of the nascent conservative movement. “The consequences of their leadership were profound,” she notes, because these early activists “crafted and popularized the … concept that established media were not neutral but slanted towards liberalism.…” At the time this was considered a radical idea, so it is easy to underestimate the impact of those early activists.

  Hemmer writes:

  Conservative media activists advanced an alternative way of knowing the world, one that attacked the legitimacy of objectivity and substituted for it ideological integrity. That attack was embodied in their notion of “liberal media bias,” which disputed not just the content presented by mainstream journalists but the very claims they made about their objective practices.5

  This marked the beginnings of what would eventually become the echo chambers of our current media ecosystem, but that lay far in the future. Given the paucity of conservative outlets in the 1970s and the continuing dominance of the mainstream media—most everyone still got their news from the major networks—the first generation of media voices were unable to create anything like the echo chamber of later decades.

  Those early efforts to fight media bias, Hemmer writes, represented “a battle over fundamentals, a struggle over how best to gauge the trustworthiness of information.” The early conservatives argued that “there was no such thing as non-ideological media, that objectivity was a mask mainstream media used to hide their own ideological projects.” This would have profound consequences for the development of the alternative media because the “conservative media activists in mid-century America provided their audiences—readers, listeners, and viewers—with a different way of weighing evidence: a different network of authorities, a different conception of facts and accuracy, and a different way of evaluating truth claims.” The conservative assumption that writers and editors were biased “allowed conservatives to develop a robust approach to observing contrary evidence.”6

  What this analysis misses is how much evidence the conservatives could muster for their complaints of media bias. For many members of the media, conservatives were an exotic and slightly scary new breed—and their coverage reflected it. Buckley’s account of his quixotic New York mayoral bid, The Unmaking of a Mayor, is replete with examples of slanted, tendentious, often erroneous reporting. As the country split apart during the 1960s and many news outlets opted for more ideologically active advocacy, conservative suspicion and disaffection grew, and was easily exploited by politicians like Vice President Spiro Agnew, who labeled the media “nattering nabobs of negativism.”

  With more than a little help from the media itself, that campaign has been remarkably successful. Not a single conservative activist I know would tell you they trust the mainstream media to be fair, and many of them have the scars to prove it. (Recall Dan Rather’s debunked report on George W. Bush’s alleged attempts to avoid the draft.) So the incentive to create alternative media outlets was strong and ultimately quite successful.

  In a sense, talk radio filled the gap left by the media’s failure to take conservative ideas and values seriously. For many conservatives, turning on talk radio in the late 1980s was the first time they felt the media was taking their ideas—and them—seriously. It was like pouring water onto parched ground.

  This tilt is not always apparent to those on the Left or their allies in the media, inasmuch as liberalism is often regarded as the default setting of American politics. Many journalists do not recognize their bias any more than a fish recognizes that it is wet: They swim in an ocean of like-minded professionals. Being pro-choice on abortion was simply the position of everyone they knew, while opposition to abortion rights was, by definition, “controversial.” It did not help that no one on journalists’ personal or social radar held such “retrograde” ideas.

  That explained why it was easy for the Washington Post to publish an article dismissing evangelical Christians as “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command,” because evangelical Christians were simply not part of their world. As Ralph Reed, the executive director of the Christian Coalition later noted, the comment revealed the blinkered worldview of members of the elite media, especially when it came to certain kinds of Christians. “They don’t rub shoulders with these people,” he said. “They don’t socialize with them.”7

  While the Washington Post backed off its slur of evangelicals, there was a notable lack of introspection in the legacy media at large. Rather than respond to the new media and the evidence that it was drawing an audience, many in the established media reacted with scarcely concealed disdain, defensively denying that there was any legitimacy to the criticisms. This refusal to take the complaints of its own customers seriously served to alienate the conservative base—which was increasingly learning to question and later abandon outlets they no longer trusted—even more. In Wisconsin, when I began my own talk radio show, the local media essentially ignored conservatives, even as they were surging toward electoral victories. So I fully understood why conservatives seek out their own bunkers; they were drawn to safe places, but also pushed.

  Conservatives simply gave up hoping that they would be treated with respect and honesty by the mainstream media and turned to their own alternative outlets for support and validation. The process accelerated in the 1990s, with Limbaugh’s growing popularity, the rise of Fox News, and the explosion of other conservative outlets. By the time Barack Obama became president, the Alt Reality silo was almost fully operational.

  In their 2008 study of the new alternative media, Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment, Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella argued that the new conservative infrastructure had helped “create a self-protective enclave hospitable to conservative beliefs. This safe haven reinforces the views of these outlets’ like-minded audience members, helps them maintain ideological coherence, protects them from counterpersuasion, reinforces conservative values and dispositions, holds Republican candidates and leaders accountable to conservative ideals.… It also enwraps them in a world in which facts that are supportiv
e of Democratic claims are contested and those consistent with conservative ones championed.”8

  It was about to get much worse.

  THE SOCIAL MEDIA SILOS

  The creation of competing bubbles was accelerated by the explosion of social media—a Pew survey found that 44 percent of Americans read or watch “news” on Facebook. The algorithms of social media further magnified the process by driving users deeper into their ideological corners, with other like-minded users. The sorting out process is intensified as readers are fed stories that tend to reinforce their worldviews. An article in the Economist noted that on Facebook “algorithms are designed to populate their news feeds with content similar to material they previously ‘liked.’” In Britain that meant that during the battle over Brexit, users who supported the exit from the European Union mostly saw pro-Brexit articles; those who wanted to stay in the EU were offered pro-EU material.9

  The process extended to search engines as well. In its study on the new media, BuzzFeed noted that the more users clicked on hyperpartisan websites, “the more Google will show them search results from these sources. The result is that over time people will likely become more polarized because algorithms and friends continue to feed them information that pushes them further in this direction.”10 In the Alt Reality silos, the feedback loop was also effectively closed, creating a hermetically sealed ideological cul-de-sac. BuzzFeed’s study found that right-wing pages “almost never used mainstream news sources, instead pointing to other highly partisan sources of information.” So, BuzzFeed noted, a story on a site called “Right Wing News” touting an NFL boycott because players were kneeling during the pledge of allegiance was linked to the site Young Conservatives, which linked to Breitbart, which had put its own spin on a poll by Yahoo!

  The result is a cycle of post-truthism. “The more we click, like and share stuff that resonates with our own world views the more Facebook feeds us with similar posts,” the British newspaper the Guardian noted. “Within Facebook’s digital echo chamber, misinformation that aligns with our beliefs spreads like wildfire, thanks to confirmation bias.”11