Interview w/David Brock, Author of "The Republican Noise Machine: Right Wing Media and How it Corrupts Democracy"

"Brock's new book is a comprehensive analysis of the right wing media echo chamber -- and it is indispensable to anyone who believes that the GOP has taken a few pages out of the Goebbels handbook and run with it. And if you don't think that is the case, you will by the end of reading "The Republican Noise Machine." It will explain how we have ended up with a whole army of "Stepford" right wingers.". . .

BuzzFlash: When BuzzFlash started we took a look at the Drudge Report, and we took it seriously, whereas a lot of progressives and independents dismissed Drudge.

David Brock: That’s right.

BuzzFlash: We thought Drudge was unfortunately having a tremendous impact on bottom-feeding the mainstream media. And while we hope our standards are a bit above Drudge, nonetheless we took that as a model for the way that our site is constructed with headlines and commentary from a progressive perspective. Have you taken into account what Brent Bozell has done with the conservative Media Research Center?

David Brock: Yes, I have. In fact, the idea for this organization – the book I’m publishing next week, The Republican Noise Machine, goes into the history of how the conservative movement has over time and through strategic funding been able to come to a point where they dominate our discourse. And part of that strategy was the formation of several media watchdog or monitoring groups, going back to 1969. Today, the premier one is Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center, which has roughly a $6 million annual budget, and, I believe, something like 60 employees who monitor the media. And obviously what they are trying to do is to market and brand the notion of liberal bias.

BuzzFlash: Perceived liberal bias.

David Brock: Yes, what they consider to be liberal bias. I don’t believe they ever proved that. But the fact is that they are moving the media itself to the right by dominating the debate over the politics of the media, and by convincing – including, I think, close to a majority of Democrats – that the media is liberally biased. The monitoring concept is very similar to what they’re doing, but we are focusing on misinformation. We’re not focusing on bias, because I believe bias is a very slippery and subjective term. You’ll always have some people who agree with your opinion about what may have been the motivation of a newscaster or a reporter. We’re not going into that, because those are not provable things. What we’re trying to do is focus on accuracy, reliability and credibility -- all under the rubric of misinformation. So we’re carrying out what we’re doing very much differently than what they do, because I think a lot of what they do is just fraudulent. However, the concept of monitoring itself was a very effective device that the right came up with, and itis modeled on that concept.

BuzzFlash: I think your book Blinded by the Right was so instructive for us in particular, because independents, Democrats, liberals, progressives and so forth are dismissive of this sometimes – of understanding what the right has done, and to grant that while the substance of what they do may be perhaps immoral, unethical, or untruthful, they have had successful strategies. We have to differentiate between content and strategy.

David Brock: Correct. That is actually, I think, the most important point. I’ve obviously been in conversations that have been ongoing since I published Blinded by the Right – about fashioning effective responses, and what kind of institutions could be built. And there is a lot of cognitive dissonance on the question. I think you said it perfectly – distinguishing between content and strategy. There is today The Center for American Progress, a liberal, progressive version of The Heritage Foundation. It does not mean that the research coming out of there is of the low quality of the research coming out of The Heritage Foundation. I worked at Heritage for a year, and people don’t have to take my word for it. There have been plenty of analyses – and, in fact, books written – that talk about how shoddy the research is, and that it’s basically public relations and propaganda. . . .

David Brock: Let me describe what happened on the right-wing side. Yes, I think it is correct in the sense that they took ideas that if you go back to the Goldwater era and then forward into the early 1970s when they really started funding these think tanks, they took ideas that were considered fringe and extreme. The conservatives were a minority within their own party. And through this strategy that I lay out in the book – a specific strategy that was specifically funded – they took what were considered some of the planks for Goldwater: the hostility to civil rights, hostility to the United Nations, the privatizing of Social Security – things like that. That is still, to a large extent, the Republican agenda today.
What they were able to do is to mainstream these ideas first within the Republican Party, and then through the whole political culture. The only thing I think is significant is that they did not rely on elected politicians to do this for them, so that when Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981, the Heritage Foundation had been working for six or seven years on what would become the policy blueprint for the Reagan administration, and they handed it to them.
But the people who led this conservative movement in the early 1970s were ideological people who were passionate, who had the financial resources to do this. And they were unelected people, such as the person who’s still the head of the Heritage Foundation today, Ed Fulmer. So that was where the leadership came from. I would argue that it was not actually Ronald Reagan or either Bush who really moved the ball. The ball was moved through effective communication and strategic philanthropy that was organized by the right, and not primarily through their elected politicians. The only one who really understood this, I think, was Newt Gingrich. But the others are the beneficiary of all this work that was done by non-elected leaders.

BuzzFlash: Newt Gingrich – if we kind of look at his doppelganger or his alter ego in the media, from my perspective it would be Rush Limbaugh. Rush kind of idealizes the Gingrich approach, which a cultural media populism appealing to emotional flashpoints – call it demagoguery – to get people emotionally on the side of the right wing, and then repeating falsehoods that become engrained in their heads. As you point out in your book, they become circulated among other Republican officials. Limbaugh legitimizes certain ways of thinking and certain thoughts.

David Brock: Right, and it’s a kind of inverted populism where, by playing to primarily cultural prejudices, he was able to take the Republican-conservative right-wing economic agenda -- which I don't think there was a lot of popular support for, and there still may notbe -- but by emphasizing those cultural issues, he was able to bring a lot of people along who I think otherwise would be voting more their economic interests; i.e., voting with progressives and liberals. Through all of the bashing he does of feminism and gays and that kind of thing, he’s able to get them to side against their own economic interests by highlighting the cultural divisions.

BuzzFlash: It’s not coincidence that Cheney appears fairly regularly on his show. And that after Limbaugh was first charged with illegal use of prescription drugs, Bush was asked about him, and he said, “He is a great American.” He seems a vital link because without himthe right wing could lose some of the blue-collar voters, because he emotionally targets them on the so-called gays, gods and guns issue – wedge issues.

David Brock: I think the phenomena of Limbaugh is understood in the conservative movement, but not well understood outside of it. Someone asked me this today – when did the right wing start to really get mainstream media attraction for its talking points, and its propaganda, and its lies and disinformation? I wrote about this in Blinded by the Right, but the period that I was in the conservative movement, from 1986 to, say, 1997, there was a critical shift, and I think Limbaugh is really the key to it.
Part of that had to do with sales. For example, once Limbaugh went into national syndication in 1988, and then he started to get huge audiences into the early 90s, he could take information from places like the Washington Times or from National Review, or he could take a book, as he did with my book, The Real Anita Hill, and he could sell that book. Then it would make the best seller list, and there would be a perception in the regular media that, well, if a book is selling, then there must be something to it, or it must have some kind of credibility.
Then you could go on the Today Show with your misinformation, as I did. And then you’d reach another 6 million people who are not the Limbaugh audience. He’s really a critical piece of this entire thing. In 1986, I was at the sister publication of the Washington Times,Insight magazine. Back then, the Washington Times was seen as a fringe and unreliable, and it had a circulation of about roughly 100,000. The critical shift that I try to describe in The Republican Noise Machine is that 18 years later, because of Limbaugh, and then because of all the Limbaugh imitators on radio, because of cable and particularly Fox, and because of the Internet – all those things happening subsequent to ’86 – a wrong or false article in the Washington Times that was done in ’86 only reached the circulation of the Washington Times.
Today, that author of that wrong or false piece – Limbaugh can read it to 15 million. The author could go on Bill O’Reilly’s show and reach whatever it is – 2-3 million? And Drudge could post the Washington Times story and have another several million. This is a structural change in the media environment. And I think that that is the critical reason why progressives – although they still win elections – seem to steadily be losing the hearts and minds.