The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy, by David Brock, New York: Crown Publishers, 420 pages, $25.95
The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, New York: Penguin Press, 450 pages, $25.95
The polls as I write make it a mug's game to bet on the outcome of the presidential election. But the decision of the Americans who bother to vote this year is, to hear some tell it, a referendum on the direction of America. A victory for Bush, in the eyes of many supporters and opponents, would lock in a right-wing counterrevolution against the New Deal and Great Society values that have defined America for the last half-century.
Two new books promise enlightening looks at this supposedly dominant conservative establishment. David Brock, an apostate right-wing bomb thrower, looks primarily at that establishment's effect on news and opinion media in The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy. Brock is still more attack dog than thinker, so his book provides only a smattering of understanding -- but plenty of opportunities to slake partisan bloodlust. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, respectively U.S. editor and Washington correspondent for The Economist, try to chronicle and comprehend America's right wing, not merely deride and defeat it, in The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America.
Taken together, these two books demonstrate, with both their faults and their virtues, that obsessing about a right-wing/not-right-wing divide misses much of what's most interesting about the contemporary American conversation. It also obscures what's really important about America's present and future.
Brock's book is a headache. There's nothing wrong in principle with hundreds of pages of hateful invective, but The Republican Noise Machine has the added detriment of being humorless. Brock has never learned to be anything other than a partisan smear artist; he has merely switched sides. He appears to have no real interest in, or insight into, ideology or policy. All he knows is that he has evil people in his sights and it's time to attack, bludgeons flailing, wit and balance and perspective held in abeyance.
Brock is alarmed and incensed that in the past 20 years people have gained access to new tools for influencing the national political conversation: talk radio, a variety of cable news and opinion channels, the Internet. He correctly notes that many of the people using these tools are Republican partisans, spreading analysis and opinion that succor the GOP.
In Brock's telling, the cloud that darkened the sunlit realm of sweet reason that was America's press first appeared with the launching, via Edith Efron's not-widely-remembered 1971 book The News Twisters, of a deliberate and organized three-decade-long conservative march. The right-wing legions include the Murdoch media empire, think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, talk show hosts from Morton Downey (the mostly forgotten '80s TV loudmouth, who blitzkrieged himself in a faked Nazi assault, gets a whole chapter) to Chris Matthews, and TV journalists like the libertarian John Stossel of ABC News.
Brock sees the political conflict in contemporary America starkly: mainstream facts vs. right-wing lies. Consider his throwaway assertion that "when Senator Daschle made the factual statement that 'failed' diplomacy has led to war with Iraq, right-wing media accused him of siding with Saddam Hussein." Anyone who sees something uncontroversially "factual" in statements like that cannot be trusted to cut through the "noise" of contemporary political debate.
Judging the correctness of Daschle's claim requires assessing a range of facts, contested values, and even guesses about theoretically verifiable facts that for practical reasons cannot be ascertained. Daschle is drawing a conclusion that involves a subtle balancing of sometimes opposing values such as diplomacy and safety, assessments of the Hussein regime's trustworthiness, and value judgments about when it is appropriate to use American might. His statement is no more plainly and simply factual than the assertion that "George Bush's desire for world domination led to war with Iraq" or that "the evil of the Iraqi regime led to war with Iraq."
Brock's often stated, never demonstrated belief that only those he calls "right-wing" privilege ideology and values, while the "mainstream" stands foursquare for truth and fairness, is the only flash of humor in this tedious slog. He refuses to acknowledge the quiet biases that can influence thinkers and writers -- those often-unarticulated standards of what ideas are respectable and how things ought to be. This failure makes Brock's book merely an angry, frightened spray of obfuscating ink in the waters of media culture. Anyone who doesn't recognize the subtle (and often not subtle) biases that set most mainstream media outlets of the 1970s and '80s against the opinions and values of a certain set of Americans can't understand why Rush Limbaugh and Fox News succeeded so quickly with such large audiences.
But Brock doesn't really want to understand. He's too busy redbaiting Barry Goldwater and Irving Kristol. Both men, you see, used tactics to spread their conservative ideas that were also used by Communists -- in Kristol's case, such Bolshie trickery as "putting forth an endless series of journals, op-ed manifestos, position papers, public letters, and magazines."
To demonstrate the mainstream media's lack of bias, Brock notes that a nonpartisan journalism project found the most common theme in coverage of George W. Bush during the 2000 campaign was "positive" -- to wit, that he is a "different kind of Republican." Which is to say that being a normal kind of Republican is negative. Brock seems blithely unaware of what a giveaway that example is.
The best illustration of Brock's technique, though, is this gem: Discussing the cussing the success of right-wing books these days (after an age in which, "like followers of occultism, conservatives established their own bookstores and book clubs because existing stores did not stock their works"), Brock notes -- purely factually, mind you -- that "in its day, Mein Kampf was a best-seller."
By contrast, Micklethwait and Wooldridge are genuinely interested in explaining how and why conservatism has come to dominate America, and why that makes it unique among Western nations. Unsurprisingly, given their pedigree as correspondents for a European magazine, the book has a bit of a Eurocentric feel, as the authors set out to explain these curious right-wingers to the normal folk of the West. But their book is valuable for purposes other than the sour pleasure of hating your enemies.
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