Table of Contents

This election year has been an explosive one for political books. From conservative Sean Hannity's Deliver Us From Evil to liberal David Corn's The Lies of George W. Bush, the bookstore tables fairly groan with shout-and-scold titles, passionate essays, and frothing diatribes from the left and the right -- though mostly from the right, which has long had an edge in the anger and doomsday game. Just as the nation is sharply divided politically, it's also split in its book-buying, news-watching, and even moviegoing habits -- all the more so on the cusp of a hotly contested presidential balloting.

Into all this noise comes a book about the noise itself, David Brock's The Republican Noise Machine. It's not news that both Republicans and Democrats have developed multimedia message machines that now run day and night. But Brock's book is fascinating in the detail it provides about how the operation actually works. What he gives us is the vast right-wing conspiracy as an interlocking media machine.

A famously apostate former conservative, Brock has now reinvented himself as one of the most committed and thorough political commentators on the left, gleefully skewering the movement he once fed but left behind in the late 1990s. Brock's greatest sin, he admitted in his autobiographical 2002 book Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, was in fueling the scandal-mongering juggernaut aimed at the Clinton administration with his books on Anita Hill and Hillary Clinton, and articles in The American Spectator. Brock was arguably the key writer in the cascade of events that led, finally, to President Clinton's impeachment and the tarnishing of his legacy.

Not everyone is ready to forgive Brock for that, apostate or not. Turncoats must live through a period of cleansing and purity before being fully accepted by the side they've newly chosen. Yet Brock's latest book, a super-detailed history of the rise of the political right as seen through its media machinery, should go a long way toward earning Brock a permanent spot at the left-wing table. While occasionally tinged with the zeal of the convert, this work is, literally, chapter and verse on the amazing and not-so-accidental 30-year campaign by conservatives to build the institutions and, eventually, the media outlets, to take over the political debate in America -- and, of course, the very machinery of government. That campaign reached fruition in 2000 as Republicans won the White House and both houses of Congress. That they also unofficially control the Supreme Court only completes the trifecta.

What makes Brock's book more than just an excellent, sometimes tediously detailed, history is his point of view. The conservative movement, he argues, hasn't succeeded politically through fair and open competition for hearts and minds. On the contrary, it has gone beneath the usual low norms of political knife-fighting to a level of lying, deception, character assassination, and calculated distortion -- coordinated through its machinery of think tanks, media outlets, and political organizations -- that so deforms the public debate as to make it no longer a democratic process, but rather anti-democratic and dishonest. Brock accuses the right of pursuing "a deliberate, well-financed, and expressly acknowledged communications and deregulatory plan ... to subvert and subsume journalism and reshape the national consciousness through the media, with the intention of skewing American politics sharply to the right." The plan, he avers, "has succeeded brilliantly."

The result is that conservatives have now infiltrated and taken over, or gained heavy influence in, wide swaths of the media -- from newspapers like the Washington Times to publishing houses like Regnery, Free Press, and ReganBooks at the Murdoch-owned HarperCollins, to Fox News (Murdoch again) and even at a place like ABC News, which gives dour pundit George Will a place of privilege on its Sunday morning talk show. "Through the media, conservatism had been thoroughly mainstreamed; and Republicans had taken control of the U.S. House for the first time in forty years," notes Brock. This new influence is based on such a profound undermining of journalistic standards and suppression of informed debate that, according to Brock, it "must also be understood as an overturning of the First Amendment." While that seems feverishly overstated, the author does do a good job of making the case that the long tentacles of the conservative noise machine suppress and distort the national debate.

It all began with Edith Efron. A somewhat obscure right-wing ideologue, says Brock, Efron's work was typically dismissed as too extreme for notice by the mainstream media. But her 1971 book, The News Twisters, became a seminal document around which conservatives, from Richard Nixon to the post-Goldwater wilderness wanderers, could focus their anger at liberal America. The News Twisters was a quasi-academic study of television news shows which purported to expose "the elitist-liberal-left line" running through all controversial stories broadcast by the three big networks. President Nixon ordered his henchman, Charles Colson, to spend $8,000 turning Efron's book into a bestseller by the time-honored method of buying out the bookstores.

The movement's second founding text, says Brock, was a memorandum written the same year by Richmond, Va., attorney Lewis E. Powell -- later a Supreme Court justice. Powell's memo appeared in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's periodical, and argued that the American business community needed to "launch a counter-attack" on four institutions that were influencing public opinion against the free enterprise system: the courts, the political establishment, the media, and the academy. Powell's plan started with the academy: The right needed to create and fund its own think tanks and subsidies for "scholars, writers, and thinkers" who would offset the influence of the liberal think tanks and reframe issues with a conservative tilt. That is, in fact, exactly what happened.

In Brock's telling, the bedrock of the right's takeover of both politics and large segments of American media is the flood of money provided for countless conservative causes by four foundations that are known in the movement as the Four Sisters: the John M. Olin Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and the Scaife Foundations. Along with the Coors and Koch family foundations, which heavily funded such 900-pound gorillas of conservatism as The Heritage Foundation, these dedicated funding streams effectively watered and grew a garden of conservative thinking that has now become a rain forest blanketing the political landscape.

From here, Brock connects the dots to the rise of the right-wing media, especially in talk radio. He considers Rush Limbaugh, who invented today's blustery style of radio-as-outrage and spawned scores of imitators, the most influential media figure in America. Thanks to the Internet and modern communications technology, the workings of this right-wing echo chamber have been speeded up and have found easy ways to penetrate the firewalls and filters of traditional journalism. "It is now possible to watch a lie move from a right-wing Web site onto the afternoon talk radio shows, to several cable chat shows throughout the evening, and into the next morning's Washington Post -- all in twenty-four hours. This media food chain moves phony information and GOP talking points ... into every family dining room, every workplace, and every Internet chat room in America," writes Brock.

The right, far more than the left, argues Brock, has understood that extremism makes for good media coverage, especially on radio and television. He blames CNN for creating a monster that changed television forever when it invented Crossfire, where heat is more important than light. Pattrick Buchanan, the prince of the politics of anger, was a dominant figure on The McLaughlin Group, hosted by John McLaughlin, himself a noisy conservative. And he dismisses Fox News, with its tilt to conservative ideas and famously patriotic coverage of the Iraq war, as anything but "fair and balanced." In a long portrait of Fox host Bill O'Reilly -- one of several excellent essays on the key players in the conservative media -- Brock documents everything from O'Reilly's penchant for misstating politically charged data (how many single mothers receive welfare; what percentage of blacks attend college in Florida) to a violent streak in the talking head's monologues.

The left is at another disadvantage, in Brock's analysis, because liberals are, by ideology and temperament, obliged to practice tolerance, indulge diversity, and respect the ideas of their adversaries. Often, he notes, the "liberals" in a right-left debate on TV are in fact journalists whose professional posture is one of nonpartisan objectivity, while those from the right are openly ideological and partisan. Brock convincingly demonstrates -- not least through the testimony of conservative journalists -- that the right-wing media machine today is bigger and more powerful than what passes for a leftleaning media elite. "We've basically taken over!" says Sean Hannity in Brock's pages. "It's a great little racket," adds Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard.

This great little racket -- or vast machine -- would appear to be the complete reversal of Edith Efron's nightmare and the fulfillment of Lewis E. Powell's dream, all in three decades. Brock has done more than yeoman's duty in bringing the whole story together between two covers (sometimes in tediously encyclopedic detail); he has raised serious alarums about democracy's health when an interlocking apparatus of foundations, think tanks, media outlets, and political organizations are so efficient in promoting their message as to give one side of the debate an artificial but unassailable edge. The seriousness of the problem has gone unnoticed by those who get their information from the "rarified media culture" of National Public Radio and the New York Times, says Brock, because they "live in a vacuum of denial." This book is a timely wake-up call for them.

Peter Ross Range is editor of BLUEPRINT.