American Journalism

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uamj20

Conservative News Cultures and the Future of

Journalism History

A. J. Bauer

To cite this article: A. J. Bauer (2023): Conservative News Cultures and the Future of Journalism
History, American Journalism, DOI: 10.1080/08821127.2023.2237398

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08821127.2023.2237398

Published online: 28 Aug 2023.

Submit your article to this journal

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=uamj20
AMERICAN JOURNALISM
https://doi.org/10.1080/08821127.2023.2237398

Conservative News Cultures and the Future

of Journalism History
A. J. Bauer
Department of Journalism and Creative Media, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa,
Alabama, USA

Political historians have long identified a gap in the literature on US conser-

vatism surrounding that movement’s relationship to journalism and mass
media. This essay calls on journalism historians to fill this gap and theorizes
why they have thus far failed to do so. It notes the field’s tendency to
engage with ahistorical and anachronistic concepts, which make journalism
history legible to journalism studies but also subordinates historical work to
the imperatives of social science. It uses “conservative news cultures” as a his-
torically rooted theoretical framework for narrating discrete works of journal-
ism history that, when put into conversation, comprise an unrealized subfield.
More broadly it advocates for recognizing journalism history as political his-
tory and for theorizing new, historically rooted objects of study in need of
social scientific analysis.

I recently came across a new archive—a microfilm reel containing back

issues of a newspaper that served some of the toniest white neighbor-
hoods of Birmingham, Alabama from 1962 to 1969. Calling itself the
Cahaba Valley News, then the Birmingham Independent, then, finally, the
Alabama Independent, the paper provided readers with accounts of school
board and other municipal meetings, events hosted by various fraternal
organizations and women’s clubs, the comings and goings of Girl and
Boy Scout troops, the sorts of hyper-local stories one expects of a weekly
paper with a circulation between 1,800 and 6,000. It was also a John
Birch Society front. The paper carried syndicated columns from then-
leading voices of the modern conservative movement in the United
States, such as Clarence Manion, Tom Anderson, Paul Harvey, and
Fulton Lewis Jr. It ran locally reported exposes of college professors, reli-
gious leaders, and activists—accusing them of communist sympathies.

CONTACT A. J. Bauer [email protected] Department of Journalism and Creative Media,

University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA
ß 2023 American Journalism Historians Association
2 A. J. BAUER

It featured front page editorials supporting Barry Goldwater, opposing

the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and spinning conspiracy theo-
ries about the civil rights movement that had made Birmingham an epi-
center of its struggle against Jim Crow.
What am I, a journalism historian, to make of the Birmingham
Independent? Is it “community journalism,” “partisan news,” both? Is it
“propaganda,” despite its owners’ insistence to the contrary?1 Does it
expand our understanding of contemporarily salient concepts like polar-
ization, misinformation, or the endless debates over objectivity/subjectiv-
ity? As John Nerone has noted, journalism history typically plays one of
two roles vis-a-vis the broader field of journalism studies: “One is to
deconstruct the familiar object of study. The other is to expand the range
of objects of study.”2 Insofar as journalism studies has centered
“journalism as a discipline of verification,” with other forms like tabloid
or partisan reporting mostly taken up as deviations from that norm, the
Birmingham Independent might be a fruitful case for destabilizing over-
facile (if resilient) binaries between reporting and editorializing, between
news and opinion, even between the hyper-local and national. Then
again, perhaps the Birmingham Independent is a case in point supporting
my own call for a more capacious definition of journalism itself, inclusive
of “agonistically unprofessional forms, like those historically practiced by
conservative reporters and commentators.”3

The Perils of Legibility

The search for labels or concepts, for abstract categories with which to
make sense of historically specific journalistic practices, both makes jour-
nalism history legible to journalism studies and subordinates historical
work to the ahistorical imperatives of social science. Terms like agenda
setting, objectivity, framing, or priming enable trans-historical generaliza-
tion and comparison of journalistic practices and their effects. Similarly,
journalism genres like community, advocacy, partisan, tabloid, main-
stream, and alternative, enable trans-historical classification and norma-
tive assessment. Narrating journalism history using ahistorical or
anachronistic concepts like these may be key to the field’s relevance but
doing so has costs in terms of historical theory-building. As Andrew
Abbott has noted, “It is precisely in the reflection about what x is a case
of that real theory arises.”4 By limiting our choice to generalizable but
ahistorical categories, we miss an opportunity to build a less subordinated
and more dialogical relationship between journalism history and journal-
ism studies. We miss an opportunity to theorize new, historically rooted
objects of study in need of social scientific analysis.
 AMERICAN JOURNALISM 3

Take, again, the case of the Birmingham Independent. I could compare

its reporting and sourcing to non-partisan local outlets, either of its own
time or now. I could compare it to other examples of right-wing periodi-
cals of the era, or in the contemporary. I could study its spread of misin-
formation about civil rights activists, or how it negatively framed that
movement. I could examine its agenda setting role among white
Alabamans, how it undermined trust in more mainstream local news
sources and primed the white residents of Birmingham to defend Jim
Crow institutions in their day-to-day lives. Each of these choices would
use conservative news as a means toward the end of understanding and
further developing other more abstract and ahistorical processes and
social scientific objects. What would it look like to treat the history of
conservative news outlets, like the Birmingham Independent, as an object
unto itself?

Conservative News Cultures

This was one of the driving questions behind “conservative news
cultures,” the concept I developed with Anthony Nadler in our 2019 book
News on the Right. Conservative news cultures involve the day-to-day
production and consumption of conservative news, and the circulation of
that news within and beyond the modern conservative movement in the
United States and abroad.5 They correspond with “structures of feeling”
as theorized by Raymond Williams: capturing not merely how it felt to
live and act in a particular period of human history, as James Carey once
described, but “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt,
and the relations between these and formal or systematic beliefs.”6 As a
theoretical framework, conservative news cultures are designed to enable
multi-methodological, interdisciplinary dialogue among scholars exploring
different facets of a discrete and coherent socio-historical phenomenon.
Situating the Birmingham Independent within this concept means identi-
fying the role the small paper played in cultivating the conservative news
of its day—in circulating ideas and interpretations of happenings that bol-
stered the conservative worldview at the grassroots, in shaping how its
readers approached and the extent to which they trusted other non-
conservative news sources, in situating its role and position within the
broader context of US conservative movement media and activist initia-
tives. In short: it means unpacking the significance of the Birmingham
Independent within its own historical milieu.
Conservative news cultures “exist” insofar as they correspond with
what was once a demonstrated gap in the historiographical literature.
Writing in her 2011 “state of the field” review of the historiography of
modern conservatism in the United States, Kim Phillips-Fein noted the
4 A. J. BAUER

outsized role of radio and television commentary in the movement’s rise.

In spite of this, she wrote in the Journal of American History, “The roll of
mass media in the creation of the Right has also not yet received full
attention from historians.”7 The past decade has seen marked improve-
ment in this regard. Media historian Heather Hendershot’s monographs
on ultra-right Cold War broadcasting and William F. Buckley’s Firing
Line television program have begun the task of exploring the role of radio
and television in the growing circulation of conservative ideas in the mid-
twentieth century.8 Political historian Nicole Hemmer has examined what
she terms the “first generation” of conservative media activists, who lever-
aged radio, print, and book publishing to shift US public opinion right-
ward from the 1950s-1970s.9 Historians Paul Matzko and Brian
Rosenwald have chronicled the role of right-wing radio commentary in
the Fairness Doctrine and post-Fairness talk radio eras, respectively.10
Cultural studies scholars have also contributed vital context: Reece Peck
has traced the pre- and early history of Fox News Channel, while Richard
M. Mwakasege-Minaya has illuminated the role played by anti-communist
Cuban exiles in mid-century conservative media activism in the United
States.11 Notably, none of these works are by journalism historians.

Conservative News in Journalism Historiography

As a field, we have been slow to recognize right-wing media as within
our purview—often more inclined to see conservative journalists and
commentators as political activists and propagandists than as reporters
and editors.12 This is not to say that we have been entirely silent on the
matter. In recent years, especially, journalism historians have offered up a
slew of case studies investigating conservative journalists, press critics,
and publications. While journalism historians have largely shied away
from analyzing conservative movement-aligned publications (such as
Human Events, National Review, American Opinion, Review of the News,
Conservative Digest, etc.), as Matthew Pressman has pointed out, nomin-
ally “mainstream” newspapers have arguably played a more significant
role in the development of conservative news cultures in the United
States. Pressman’s analysis of the New York Daily News—the highest-
circulation newspaper in the US during the mid-twentieth century—
illustrates the power of mass-audience local newspapers, even in sup-
posedly “liberal” New York City, to cultivate conservative populism at the
grassroots. Unaligned with the movement, locally oriented conservative
news outlets like the Daily News did not necessarily share William F.
Buckley’s investment in respectability politics, allowing for stances and
interpretations of daily events even further to the right in both style and
ideology than the National Review.13
 AMERICAN JOURNALISM 5

The journalism historiography of the past decade or so is replete with

similar examples of conservative news and commentary at the local level,
some with considerable national impact. In New Hampshire, a small state
with outsized influence in the US presidential primary process and there-
fore a key site of internecine battles within both major political parties,
Nackey Scripps Loeb and her husband William used the Union Leader to
platform burgeoning conservative movement orthodoxy in the mid-
twentieth century. As Meg Heckman writes in her 2020 book Political
Godmother, in addition to being early and ardent supporters of Ronald
Reagan, the Loebs, “championed not just McCarthy but also southern
segregationists, hard-right presidential hopefuls like Barry Goldwater, and
the anti-feminist efforts of Phyllis Schlafly.”14 Journalism historians have
also chronicled the role of the Memphis Commercial Appeal in opposing
the garbage workers strike of 1968 and agitating against Martin Luther
King Jr. in the days leading up to his assassination, and the Charleston,
South Carolina News and Courier’s crusade against racial integration in
the 1950s.15 They have demonstrated the role of national conservative
groups like the National Association of Manufacturers, and of syndicated
columnists like Victor Riesel, Roy Wilkins, Westbrook Pegler, and James
J. Kilpatrick in shaping political discourse to the benefit of the right, par-
ticularly surrounding issues of race and labor—achieving national scale by
circulating ideas through local media.16 Further, press historians have
highlighted the political agency of local newspaper owners who, despite
being embedded in conservative white power structures in the South and
Appalachia, chose not to side with the voices of reaction during the strug-
gles for the New Deal and Black freedom.17
Journalism historians have also led the way in historicizing the concept
of “liberal media bias.” Rich Shumate’s 2021 book focuses on a growing
disconnect between conservative audiences and mainstream journalists in
the early 1960s, offering a useful framework for interrogating the conser-
vative news reading strategies that have historically resulted in percep-
tions of bias.18 Julie Lane’s work has foregrounded the McCarthy era as a
key moment in the discursive construction of the American
Establishment at the heart of the “liberal media” trope, and its role in cul-
tivating conservative press criticism from the 1950s onward.19 Others
have traced the anti-Semitic roots of “liberal media” rhetoric, and even
clandestine efforts by one New York Times music critic to stoke percep-
tions of liberal media bias in the South in the wake of the Brown v.
Board Supreme Court decision.20 Journalism historians have also illumi-
nated how conservatives have pushed back on mainstream journalistic
values, in some cases forcing concessions. Steven Bates has chronicled
Old Right press baron Colonel Robert McCormick’s full-fledged assault
on the Hutchinson Commission on Freedom of the Press—which
6 A. J. BAUER

advocated for an approach to journalism rooted in social responsibility,

anathema to many conservatives.21 Kevin Lerner has traced the rise of con-
temporary newspaper corrections at the New York Times in part to pressure
from then-Nixon administration adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who
penned an influential essay in the neoconservative magazine Commentary
critiquing press coverage of the presidency.22 Kathryn McGarr has
chronicled the Times’ role in Republican presidential endorsements designed
to take the steam out of candidates deemed too far to the right.23 And I
have unpacked the forgotten role of conservative radio commentator Fulton
Lewis Jr. in the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to replace
its Mayflower ban on broadcast editorials with the Fairness Doctrine.24
Collectively, these articles and books greatly improve our understanding
of conservative news and of the distinct cultures that have historically pro-
duced and perpetuated it. Individually, however, they face the same dilemma
that has long plagued journalism history as a field—a lack of shared theoret-
ical framework or meta-historiographical narrative.25 This has prevented the
recent boom of conservative news scholarship from cohering into a mean-
ingful subfield. What would it look like if the above scholars engaged with
one another more as I have engaged them here? What if they saw their dis-
tinct case studies as pieces of a bigger, shared puzzle? What if they used their
cases to theorize that broader object, what Anthony Nadler and I have called
‘conservative news cultures,’ or, if you’d rather, what Mark Major once called
the “conservative countersphere”?26 We need more work that identifies,
understands, and theorizes the endogenous logics of right-wing media itself,
both within specific country contexts, and in the global borrowings and col-
laborations among right-wing journalists and media activists around the
world. But we also need a shared commitment to collective historical theory-
building among scholars already doing that work.

Toward a Political History of Journalism

Obviously not all journalism historians are going to drop their areas of
expertise and research interests to study conservative news, nor should
they. There are plenty of other areas of journalism history in need of his-
torical theory-building, particularly modes of journalistic practice by
groups who have been historically marginalized in both US political life
and historiography. The field’s future lies in identifying those historical
phenomena, in cultivating subfields committed to cohering their driving
logics, rhetorics, political economic and infrastructural conditions of pos-
sibility, and key figures—in freeing ourselves from the ahistorical concepts
we have relied upon for relevance. It also involves recognizing, as exem-
plified in Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield’s award-winning
edited volume Journalism and Jim Crow, that journalism history is
 AMERICAN JOURNALISM 7

political history.27 Gaps in the journalism historical literature are them-

selves reflective of the political history of journalism and its many era-
sures. As McGarr put it in her call for renewed historical perspective in
the field of political communication, “Any argument about either society
or the media being more polarized than ever before, or trust in the media
being at a low point, or even the hostile media phenomenon as new to
the second half of the twentieth century, overlooks much of American
history. More often than not, rancor, divisiveness, and partisanship have
been the default settings for the country’s polity.”28 They have also been
the default settings of this country’s journalism. As journalism historians
we have an obligation, first and foremost, to tell that story.

Notes
1. Writing in a front-page editorial introducing their editorial philosophy, the
paper’s owners wrote, “For we are a NEWSPAPER. We are not a
propaganda medium. … we have carried, almost alone in this community,
the story of the doctrine of the complete American patriot.” See “Dedicated
To A Free America,” Birmingham Independent, January 1, 1964, 1. Whether
we ought to take their word for it depends on the normative stakes of our
research, and whether we are primarily concerned with understanding or
judgment. For more on these distinctions, and their implications for
researching right-wing news, see A.J. Bauer, Anthony Nadler, and Jacob L.
Nelson, “What is Fox News? Partisan Journalism, Misinformation, and the
Problem of Classification,” Electronic News 16, no. 1 (2022): 18-29.
2. John Nerone, “Why Journalism History Matters to Journalism Studies,”
American Journalism 30, no. 1 (2013): 15-28, 17-18.
3. A.J. Bauer, “Journalism History and Conservative Erasure,” American
Journalism 35, no. 1 (2018): 2-26, 5.
4. Andrew Abbott, quoted in Lauren Berlant, “On the Case,” Critical Inquiry
33, no. 4 (2007): 663-72, 669.
5. Anthony Nadler and A.J. Bauer, eds., News on the Right: Studying
Conservative News Cultures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 5.
6. James W. Carey, “The Problem of Journalism History,” Journalism History 1,
no. 1 (Spring 1974): 3-5, 27; Raymond Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” in
Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128-35.
7. Kim Phillips-Fein, “Conservatism: A State of the Field,” The Journal of
American History 98, no. 3 (2011): 723-43, 735-36.
8. Heather Hendershot, What’s Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-Wing
Broadcasting and the Public Interest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2011); Open to Debate: How William F. Buckley Put America on the Firing
Line (New York: Broadside Books, 2016).
9. Nicole Hemmer, Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the
Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2016).
10. Paul Matzko, The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the
Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2020); Brian Rosenwald, Talk Radio’s
8 A. J. BAUER

America: How an Industry Took Over a Political Party that Took Over the
United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).
11. Reece Peck, Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Richard M. Mwakasege-Minaya,
“Cold War Bedfellows: Cuban Exiles, US Conservatives, and Media Activism
in the 1960s and 1970s,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 41,
no. 1 (2021): 114-35; Richard M. Mwakasege-Minaya, “Exiled Counterpoint:
Cuban Exile Reception, Media Activism, Conservatism, and the National
Educational Television Network,” Chiric u Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts,
and Cultures 4, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 37-61.
12. Bauer, “Journalism History.”
13. Matthew Pressman, “The New York Daily News and the History of
Conservative Media,” Modern American History 4, no. 3 (2021): 219-38.
14. Meg Heckman, Political Godmother: Nackey Scripps Loeb and the Newspaper
That Shook the Republican Party (Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books/University of
Nebraska Press, 2020), 13.
15. Thomas J. Hrach, “‘Beyond the Bounds of Tolerance’: Commercial Appeal
Editorials and the 1968 Memphis Garbage Strike,” Journalism History 41, no. 1
(Spring 2015): 21-30; Gwyneth Mellinger, “Saving the Republic: An Editor’s
Crusade against Integration,” Journalism History 42, no. 4 (Winter 2017): 212-24.
16. Vilja Hulden, “Employer Organizations’ Influence on the Progressive-Era
Press,” Journalism History 38, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 43-53; Philip M. Glende,
“Victor Riesel: Labor’s Worst Friend,” Journalism History 44, no. 4 (Winter
2019): 241-51; Sid Bedingfield, “The Journalism of Roy Wilkins and the Rise
of Law-and-Order Rhetoric, 1964-1968,” Journalism History 45, no. 3
(2019): 250-69; Philip Glende, “Westbrook Pegler and the Rise of the
Syndicated Columnist,” American Journalism 36, no. 3 (2019): 322-47;
Elizabeth Atwood, “Reaching the Pinnacle of the ‘Punditocracy’: James J.
Kilpatrick’s Journey from Segregationist Editor to National Opinion
Shaper,” American Journalism 31, no. 3 (2014): 358-77.
17. Edgar Simpson, “‘A Traitor to His Class’: Race and Publisher W.E. “Ned”
Chilton III, 1953-1984,” Journalism History 42, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 70-80;
Donna Lampkin Stephens, “The Conscience of the Arkansas Gazette: J.N.
Heiskell Faces the Storm of Little Rock,” Journalism History 38, no. 1 (Spring
2012): 34-42; Sid Bedingfield, “The Dixiecrat Summer of 1948: Two South
Carolina Editors—a Liberal and a Conservative—Foreshadow Modern Political
Debate in the South,” American Journalism 27, no. 3 (2010): 91-114; Melita M.
Garza, “Pine Straw in an Evil Wind: A Study of James Boyd and the Pilot of
Southern Pines, NC, 1941-1944,” American Journalism 29, no. 1 (2012): 85-113.
18. Rich Shumate, Barry Goldwater, Distrust in Media, and Conservative Identity:
The Perceptions of Liberal Bias in the News (New York: Lexington Books, 2021).
19. Julie B. Lane, “Positioning for Battle: The Ideological Struggle over Senator
Joseph McCarthy and the American Establishment,” American Journalism 33,
no. 1 (2016): 61-85; Julie B. Lane, “Getting the Story Right: Reader Critiques of
‘The Last Days of Joe McCarthy,’” American Journalism 38, no. 4 (2021): 471-92.
20. William Gillis, “The Anti-Semitic Roots of the ‘Liberal News Media’
Critique,” American Journalism 34, no. 3 (2017): 262-88; Sid Bedingfield,
“Who Is Nicholas Stanford? The New York Times Music Critic and His
Secret Role in the Rise of the ‘Liberal Media’ Claim,” American Journalism
35, no. 4 (2018): 398-419.
 AMERICAN JOURNALISM 9

21. Stephen Bates, “Prejudice and the Press Critics: Colonel Robert McCormick’s
Assault on the Hutchins Commission,” American Journalism 36, no. 4 (2019):
420-46.
22. Kevin M. Lerner, “A System of Self-Correction: A.M. Rosenthal, Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, Press Criticism and the Birth of the Contemporary
Newspaper Correction in The New York Times,” Journalism History 42, no.
4 (Winter 2017): 191-200.
23. Kathryn J. McGarr, “When the New York Times Liked Ike: The Newspaper’s
Controversial Presidential Endorsements of 1952 and 1956,” American Journalism
39, no. 2 (April 2022): 118-41, https://doi.org/10.1080/08821127.2022.2064365
24. A.J. Bauer, “Propaganda in the Guise of News: Fulton Lewis Jr. and the Origins
of the Fairness Doctrine,” Radical History Review no. 141 (October 2021): 7-29.
25. Chris Daly, “The Historiography of Journalism History: Part 1: An Overview,”
American Journalism 26, no. 1 (2009): 141-147; “The Historiography of
Journalism History: Part 2: Toward a New Theory,” American Journalism 26,
no. 1 (2009): 148-55; John Nerone, “Does Journalism History Matter?”
American Journalism 28, no. 4 (2011): 7-27; Amber Roessner, Rick Popp, Brian
Creech, and Fred Blevens, “‘A Measure of Theory?’: Considering the Role of
Theory in Media History,” American Journalism 30, no. 2 (2013): 260-78.
26. Mark Major, “Bridging the Marginal and the Mainstream: Methodological
Considerations for Conservative News as a Subfield,” in Anthony Nadler
and A.J. Bauer, eds. News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2019): 213-31.
27. Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield, eds., Journalism and Jim Crow:
White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America (Champaign, IL:
University of Illinois Press, 2021). Political historians, for their part, have
noticed this and have started to engage more with the history of journalism,
if not always the field of journalism history, see especially Julian E. Zelizer
and Bruce J. Shulman, eds., Media Nation: The Political History of News in
Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
28. Kathryn J. McGarr, “The Importance of Historical Perspective and Archival
Methods in Political Communication Research,” Political Communication
37, no. 1 (2020): 110-16, 111.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on Contributor
A. J. Bauer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and
Creative Media at the University of Alabama. He is co-author of News on the
Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures (Oxford, 2019). His work has
appeared in American Journalism, Radical History Review, Misinformation Review,
Electronic News, and elsewhere. He is currently writing a book on conservative
press criticism tentatively titled “Making the Liberal Media.”