In the latter part of the 1970s, angry Republicans and right-wing ideologues began to team up under the leadership of Nixon’s former Treasury Secretary Bill Simon, who used his control of the Olin Foundation to pull together like-minded foundations (Smith-Richardson, Scaife, etc.) to inject money into a right-wing media infrastructure and anti-journalism attack groups.
This initiative gained momentum with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, a former actor and ad man who surrounded himself with media savvy advisers. They, in turn, began collaborating with CIA propaganda experts in devising “perception management” tactics that could be directed against the American people as well as at troublesome mainstream journalists.
To get around legal prohibitions on the CIA influencing U.S. politics, CIA Director William Casey transferred Walter Raymond Jr., one of the CIA’s top propagandists, to Reagan’s National Security Council where Raymond headed up a government-wide task force on “public diplomacy.” [For details, see Robert Parry’s Lost History.]
The right-wing media infrastructure continued to grow with the influx of mysterious money from the likes of Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the Korean theocrat who launched the Washington Times in 1982. Later, Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch got into the act with purchases of U.S. newspapers and eventually the founding of the neoconservative Weekly Standard and right-wing Fox News.
By the late years of the Reagan-Bush-41 era, right-wing talk radio was taking off with Rush Limbaugh and other angry white men filling the AM dial with venomous attacks on liberals. When Bill Clinton managed to eke out a victory in 1992, he immediately came under sustained attack from this potent right-wing media machine.
Meanwhile, in the mainstream press, generally conservative (or neoconservative) owners began cracking down on independent-minded journalists as early as the mid-1970s. But that trend grew stronger in the 1980s when journalists found it harder and harder to challenge the propaganda and cover-ups of the Reagan administration.
As journalists with integrity were weeded out – and as the American Left largely stayed disengaged and silent – the MSM survivors came to understand that their livelihoods required them to tilt their stories right-ward. By the Clinton years, it made perfect sense to join the Right’s media in piling on regarding the trivial “Clinton scandals.”
After years of getting pounded as “liberal,” the MSM was determined to shed the liberal label by being tougher on a Democrat than on any Republican. That tilt contributed to the Republican Revolution of 1994 and eventually to Clinton’s impeachment in 1998 (though he managed to survive a Senate trial).
The spillover of the MSM/Right’s animosity toward Clinton influenced the harsh coverage of Al Gore in Campaign 2000, as Washington’s insider community pined for what was expected to be George W. Bush’s restoration of “the adults” in Washington. [For details, see our book, Neck Deep.]
Growing Asymmetry
This de facto MSM/Right merger meant lots of shoddy anti-Gore reporting and mostly fawning coverage of the Bush campaign. Resistance to this biased journalism fell mostly to small Web sites and a handful of under-funded liberal/progressive magazines and radio stations.
However, the asymmetry was devastating. Even though Gore succeeded in narrowly out-polling Bush, the results were close enough – and the right-wing media imbalance strong enough – to allow Bush to sneak away with the presidency, aided by five Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court.
With Bush in the White House, the dominant MSM/Right media refrain suddenly shifted to the need for national unity. Then, after the 9/11 attacks, this MSM/Right alliance marched the nation in lockstep behind Bush and headlong into the Iraq War.
There were a few dissident voices in mainstream American journalism, particularly from the Washington bureau of the Knight-Ridder chain. But the sustained opposition came mostly from small Web sites and a few scattered independent or progressive voices.
Only after Bush's Hurricane Katrina debacle in 2005 and the public’s growing disillusionment with the Iraq War did the MSM begin to deviate somewhat from the Right’s fealty to Bush. Even then, however, key MSM institutions, such as the Washington Post’s editorial section, staunchly defended Bush’s neocon policies in Iraq and elsewhere.
Now, in the early weeks of the Obama administration, there are already signs that the alliance between the MSM and the Right is strengthening again. [See, for example, Consortiumnews.com’s “Obama & the Media Dilemma” and “’Bitter’ Gore; ‘Principled’ McCain.”]
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