Review Essay: The Critique of Conservative Media

Note from amanda Lotz, editor:

Scholarship on right-wing media consistent with the approaches common to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and Cinema Journal remains limited. In commissioning books to review for this issue, we found ourselves with a smaller pool of titles than usual, so we tried to place those titles in conversation with other works via two review essays while also offering some of the depth that comes from reviews centered on single books. Daniel Marcus first offers an overview of books focused on right-wing talk radio and its central figures. Tim Raphael then compares two recent biographies of Glenn Beck, and standard reviews by Steve Classen and Jonathan Kirshner complete the conversation.

While media explicitly allied to conservative political movements have played crucial roles in the American polity in recent decades, there has been little sustained, serious analysis of their structures, discourse, and impacts. Perhaps media scholars in academia have been satisfied to leave it to Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and the left-wing blogosphere to parse the meanings of conservative media and to offer quick responses; perhaps it is simply that few analysts have the stomach to immerse themselves in the work of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, and Glenn Beck for very long. The paucity of scholarly treatments of conservative outlets and pundits stands as a significant absence in critical and cultural studies of contemporary political communication.

A few analysts of varying backgrounds have done serious work on the subject in previous decades. Political scientist Murray B. Levin's Talk Radio and the American Dream offered an early analysis of both conservative and liberal discourse during the Fairness Doctrine era. Cultural theorist John Fiske treated important threads of 1990s right-wing opinion in Media Matters: Everyday Culture and Political Change. Journalist David Brock, an apostate from the Right who created the crucial watchdog information center and website Media Matters for America, wrote The Republican Noise Machine, a sprawling survey of the mid-2000s conservative message-making apparatus. More recent work has also come from various analytical traditions: Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph Cappella's Echo Chamber uses social science methods to trace the tendencies and impacts of several well-known sources; David Neiwert's The Eliminationists uses discourse analysis to examine some of the more extreme tendencies on the Right; and Alexander Zaitchik provides a biographical treatment of the Right's most recent shooting star, Glenn Beck, in Common Nonsense.

Jamieson and Cappella's study, begun in 1996, focuses primarily on Rush Limbaugh and his listeners; the study is supplemented by material on other talk-radio hosts, Fox News, and the Wall Street Journal in the 2000s. The authors confirm several commonplace arguments regarding conservative media: speakers use evocative and polarizing language to demonize the political opposition, they castigate rival information sources as captured by liberals, and they offer tightly constructed frames of information with little inclusion of countervailing facts or opinions. Limbaugh distinguishes himself by his sustained focus on specific liberal figures and domestic politics, and by his practice of using other media sources against themselves. He consistently takes stories from the "liberal" media and reframes them in accord with a conservative worldview, hoping to inoculate his listeners from liberal influences if they expose themselves to other sources.

Jamieson and Cappella's survey and experimental research lead them to moderate some of the more extreme criticisms of Limbaugh's "dittoheads" and other consumers of conservative media. They find that in the 1990s, Limbaugh listeners also sought information from other sources and were not noticeably more emotional in their responses to news events, although they did feel more polarized from liberals than did conservative nonlisteners. Listeners of other political talk radio were a surprisingly mixed group, not just conservative diehards. In the 2000s, Limbaugh fans gravitated to Fox News as their alternative information source, and their reliance on Fox News in the 2000s offers an interesting contrast to their more varied practices in the 1990s. The authors' claims are closely tied to narrowly constructed studies of broadcast material and fan...