There is no question that the media landscape has shifted seismically in the last two decades.  In the Reagan years, I eagerly subscribed to National Review and the American Spectator; I even sent in an ad from National Review for a magazine called Chronicles of Culture.  Those publications, joined by Human Events and numerous syndicated columnists, made up a large portion of the conservative media cosmos.  A few years later, after Reagan’s FCC abolished the fairness doctrine (requiring broadcast radio and TV channels to provide balance to controversial opinions), Rush Limbaugh began a nationally syndicated radio program that dramatically changed both AM radio and political commentary.

As recently as ten years ago, political and cultural commentary was still substantially centralized, and the big event in the right-wing-media universe was the founding of the neoconservative Weekly Standard.  Today, that centralized media model lies in tatters.  This is part of the story that Brian C. Anderson is telling in South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias.  As the title makes clear, the author is concentrating on the successes of conservatives (meaning, in this context, Republican Party/Bush-administration loyalists) in advancing their agenda against the wishes of the mainstream media.  Anderson covers the rise of talk radio, Fox News, entertainment that mocks the left (primarily the crude cartoon South Park), blogs and other internet phenomena, and the campus cultural wars—as well as the intolerant response to these phenomena of many people on the left.

One of the stronger sections of South Park Conservatives is the chapter on the “illiberal left.”  At times, it seems as if liberals, suffering from Tourette’s Syndrome, are unable to keep such words as racist and sexist from escaping their mouths in their attacks on political opponents.  Anderson provides several examples of such behavior in response to the growth in conservative media, including a suggestion by former U.S. senator from South Dakota Tom Daschle that talk radio inspires would-be assassins.  Anderson also notes the acts of voter intimidation and vandalism practiced by some Kerry supporters during the 2004 campaign.

Of course, it is not as if Anderson’s allies on the right have been innocent of the same sort of behavior.  A brief web search reveals numerous charges of political intimidation occurring during the 2004 political season on both sides, including the bizarre case of a Florida man who threatened his girlfriend with a screwdriver because she refused to support George W. Bush.  The web allows bottom feeders of all stripes to have a voice, and, if Anderson is interested, he can find plenty of expressions of hate from posters at FreeRepublic.com and Lucianne.com.  He can also find numerous accusations of treason and the like being made against people who fail to march in lockstep with the Bush administration.  The followers of both the Republican and Democratic parties manage to convince themselves that they alone are virtuous, while the other guys are thugs.

The largest single media phenomenon that Anderson chronicles is the launch of the Fox News Channel in 1996.  Anderson simply gushes about Fox, and, indeed, it is fair enough that Republicans should have their own news channel, given that most of the other networks lean politically in the other direction.  However, I cannot swallow the working-class baloney that Anderson serves up when discussing Fox.  He practically spits Red Man chaw in quoting “pugnacious Irishman” Bill O’Reilly, who describes his show as representing a “working class point of view.”  Anderson also informs the reader that Fox’s CEO, Roger Ailes, who grew up in a “blue-collar Ohio community,” reports news for the “whole country that elitists will never acknowledge.”  Reading such hogwash gives me a new appreciation for ABC’s Peter Jennings, who couldn’t be any snootier if he read the news in French while enjoying a piquant Chardonnay.

Anderson skates on thin ice, however, when discussing the content of Fox News.  He credits Fox’s Jim Angle with discrediting Richard Clarke by revealing the contents of a background briefing from August 2002 that supposedly contradicted Clarke’s testimony (highly critical of the Bush administration) before the September 11 Commission.  The problem here is that the language of the 2002 briefing is so tepid that it does not come close to saying what Anderson and Angle want it to say.  In the briefing, Clarke charged that the Bush administration had “decided to initiate a process to look at those issues which had been on the table for a couple of years.”  Further, the “deputies then tasked the development of the implementation details . . . ”  The only thing that qualifies as aggressive here is Richard Clarke’s use of jargon.

South Park Conservatives credits Fox News for playing up the discovery of sarin gas in Iraq last year.  For those who blinked and missed it, the U.S. military did discover some banned WMD’s in Iraq in 2004, in the form of obsolete and ineffective mustard and sarin gas.  Anderson praises Fox for leading with the sarin story for a whole day, although the article at FOXNews.com notes that the shells, dating probably from before 1991, were inoperative.

Anderson briefly dismisses the 2004 left-wing attack documentary Outfoxed as being “so biased in its depiction of the network’s purported bias—quotes taken out of context, deceptive editing, you know the drill—that even some liberals criticized it.”  There are, in fact, many flaws in Outfoxed; even so, the film has its moments, the most embarrassing of which for the network’s supporters is a lengthy exchange (preceding an interview taping) between Fox’s Carl Cameron (whose wife was working for Bush/Cheney in 2000) and then-Governor Bush.  The business couldn’t have been more chummy had Cameron been sitting in Bush’s lap.

The book’s title refers to the extraordinarily crude (and funny) cartoon creation of Matt Parker and Trey Stone, perhaps the most salient example of growing antiliberalism in popular culture.  (In one episode, the children of South Park, on a field trip to visit a rainforest, discover that the place is filled with wild animals and other dangers; they are rescued by a crew of workers in the process of razing the forest.  Other episodes mock Rob Reiner’s antismoking fanaticism and the community’s attempts to keep a “Harbuck’s” coffee outlet out of town, regarding which one of the characters observes that “without big corporations we wouldn’t have things like cars and computers and canned soup.”)  While Stone and Parker claim to hate liberals (more precisely, they “f–king hate” liberals), it is not clear that they are making serious arguments for paving rain forests or leaving corporations unregulated.  Still, South Park Conservatives represents a growing sense of self-congratulation on the right.  Anderson believes that conservatives are “winning” the Culture War, and, if you think of politics as the ultimate team sport, perhaps they are.  Republicans control the elected branches of government, and they set the media agenda far better than their political opponents.  One has numerous opportunities to hear and read the views of Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and Bill O’Reilly.  Beyond all of that, however, the right has little to show in the way of solid results, other than tax cuts that will be undone in the near future to pay for the Iraq invasion and other spending ventures of the Bush administration.  On other fronts, the Bush administration is expanding the federal role in education and sending young mothers to fight in Iraq, while plotting to encourage illegal immigration with an amnesty plan.  In the end, conservatives will have received precious little of substance from the Bush administration.  But they will always have South Park.

 

[South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias, by Brian C. Anderson (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing) 1,283 pp., $24.95]