Conservative Political Communication

How Right-Wing Media and Messaging (Re)Made American Politics

Sharon E. Jarvis, Sharon E. Jarvis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351187213
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Process
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Conservative Political Communication examines the evolution of appeals, media, and tactics in right-wing media and political communication, tracking trends and shifts from the early days of contemporary conservatism in the 1950s to the Trump administration.

The chapters in this edited volume feature the work of senior and junior scholars from the fields of communication, journalism, and political science employing content analytic, experimental, survey, historical, and rhetorical research methodologies. Analyses of the rise of the 24-hour news cycle, the range of partisan news sources, and the role of social media algorithms in political campaigns yield insights for our media and information ecosystems. A key theme across these chapters is how right-wing channels and communications help and hinder partisan fragmentation, a condition whereby novice elected officials create personal conservative brands, appeal to the base through partisan media, and complicate senior leadership's ability to engage in bargaining, compromise, and deal-making. This volume interrogates conservative media and messaging to track where these processes came from, how they functioned in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, and where they may be going in the future.

This book will interest scholars and upper-level students of political communication, media and politics, and political science, as well as readers invested in today's political media landscape in the United States.

1
Placing Media in Conservative Culture

Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins

Beginning in the spring of 2011, real estate developer and reality television host Donald Trump began to appear weekly on the Fox News Channel morning television program Fox and Friends in a segment “Monday Mornings with Trump.” Trump used this regular platform on conservative media’s most influential outlet—which ended only when he announced his presidential candidacy four years later—to pontificate on current events, practicing his appeals to Republican base voters and earning the Fox News audience’s trust as a conservative in good standing. Trump proceeded to ride his newfound popularity with conservative viewers to capture the Republican presidential nomination and the White House in 2016 despite a lack of enthusiastic support from most conventional party leaders. Fox News has not only continued to serve as a welcome source of reliably favorable publicity for Trump during an otherwise tempestuous administration but also functioned as an important instigator of presidential action. Aides have revealed that President Trump remains an avid Fox News viewer who regularly speaks privately with Fox prime-time anchor Sean Hannity; journalists have noted a repeated correspondence between Fox News segments and Trump’s subsequent tweets or comments on the same topic, and a number of conservative media figures have jumped directly from cable news perches to top positions in the executive branch during the first few years of the Trump presidency—following in the footsteps of the president himself.

More than any other single person, Trump personifies the substantial influence of the conservative media universe within the contemporary Republican Party. But the emergence of prominent media outlets on the right presenting themselves as necessary alternatives to a biased mainstream press significantly predated Trump’s rise to power. Long before Fox News Channel and Breitbart, conservative talk radio generated calls to Congress, Republican politicians campaigned against the mainstream media, and media figures helped transform the party. Conservative candidates have also long grappled with the challenge of attracting electoral support for an ideological movement primarily dedicated to the perennially unpopular objective of limiting or rolling back major government programs and social benefits, with Trump-style “populism” representing merely the latest strategy for combating liberal accusations that the American right is primarily dedicated to the promotion of wealthy and corporate interests at the expense of average citizens. Both the role of ideological media as key actors in party affairs and the limited appeal of party leaders favored domestic policy agenda—even among their own voters—which are unique to Republicans, with no true parallel among the Democratic opposition.

Today’s multimedia conservative infrastructure reflects the conscious efforts of activists to mobilize popular conservative values and to counteract a mainstream media perceived as hostile to their beliefs, thus moving American politics to the ideological right. Like the officeholders and candidates of their party, most Republicans in the wider electorate identify themselves as political conservatives and hold a common set of general views about the proper role of government and direction of society. But Republicanism at the mass level is less motivated than its elite counterpart by commitment to a coherent policy agenda and is habitually frustrated by the continued resilience—and, in some cases, growing prevalence—of liberal ideas and social trends. Conservative media figures can thus win and maintain a large popular audience not only by attacking other media sources, Democratic politicians, and “the left” more generally but also by accusing Republican politicians of ineffectiveness in opposing, if not outright complicity in, the enduring nemesis of liberalism.

The rising power of the conservative media thus represents a mixed blessing from the perspective of Republican politicians and traditional conservative elites. Fox News, talk radio, and right-wing websites allow Republicans to communicate with their party’s popular base and help to mobilize conservative activists and voters against the Democratic opposition. But the distinctive popular conservative culture that these media outlets both reinforce and promote is also fertile ground for repeated challenges to the party’s existing leadership by self-styled political outsiders—including, most notably, Donald Trump—who are rewarded for their antipathy to liberalism and the “establishment” despite frequent difficulties in achieving broad appeal among the American public or demonstrating skill in governing.

The Distinctive Characteristics of American Conservatism

The modern conservative movement in the United States emerged in the 1950s as a response to the national expansion of government capacities and responsibilities during the New Deal era. From the movement’s earliest days, conservative politicians, interest groups, and intellectuals attacked the mainstream media for being part of a liberal ruling class that favored and protected the newly enlarged domestic state. Conservative activists funded their own networks of print and broadcast media as part of their larger efforts to gain organizational control of the Republican Party and to build a broader social movement. They rooted their appeals in the popular principles of social traditionalism, limited government, and American national strength, largely uniting the mass constituencies associated with each of these causes. The movement rapidly ascended within the Republican Party between the 1960s and 1980s, with media figures such as William F. Buckley Jr. playing important roles in connecting party activists and politicians with the conservative electoral base.

The key contribution made by conservative media to the resurgence of the American right over the past several decades reflects a larger asymmetry between the two major parties. The Republican Party is uniquely aligned with a symbolic ideological movement premised on a fundamental political conflict between left and right, whereas the Democratic Party is best described as a coalition of diverse social groups with distinct and practical policy interests (Grossmann & Hopkins, 2015, 2016). As a consequence, only the Republicans provided an opportunity for the rise of a consciously ideological media to unite their party’s voters, define their shared concerns, and advance their agenda. The conservative media ecosystem has further reinforced the existing differences between the parties, becoming a cause as well as a consequence of Republicans’ distinctively ideological self-definition, symbolic predispositions, and aggressive political style.

Conservative media thus represents a key component of the broader cultural character of the Republican Party, reflecting the historical influence of the modern conservative movement in the United States. This movement has a number of important characteristics that have remained fairly consistent throughout its history and are not equally prevalent on the American left. Among them:

1. Conservatives, at both the elite and mass levels, view themselves consciously as members of a single political cause and principled tradition that extends over time and across specific policy issue domains.
2. Conservatives regard the Republican Party as their natural political home and conservatism as the sole proper doctrine of the party. But conservatism and Republicanism are not equivalent in practice; Republican politicians are often judged by critics within the movement as having unacceptably betrayed conservative principles, fueling recurrent efforts to “purify” the party.
3. American conservatism is fundamentally oppositional in nature, responding to and defining itself in relation to a “liberal establishment” that it views as having captured many of the nation’s most important social institutions, including government bureaucracies, the educational system, and the mainstream news media. Much of the organizational energy of the conservative movement has been devoted to discrediting these institutions in the eyes of the American public while building a parallel network of conservative alternatives. The perception of a formidable and entrenched liberalism accounts for the rhetoric of conservative leaders and media figures, who frequently portray themselves, their followers, and their ideas as besieged by hostile forces perpetually advancing in power. Preoccupation with a menacing left is therefore a perennial characteristic of conservative rhetoric in America even during periods of Republican electoral ascendance.

Conservative media content draws upon these long-standing attributes, adapting them to the specific issues, leaders, and events of the moment. Writers and speakers on the right routinely use ideological terms and concepts to evaluate political developments, bestowing a rhetorical seal of approval on individuals and ideas deemed faithful to the tradition of American conservatism and its patron saint Ronald Reagan. But much of their time is spent on the offensive, repeatedly expressing outrage at conservatism’s many perceived apostates and opponents—from insufficiently faithful Republican Party leaders to liberals both in and out of government. The conservative media’s persistently negative tone and penchant for sharp attacks on a familiar series of targets are in part an effective strategy for holding and mobilizing a loyal audience, reflecting the power of anger as a motivating force in politics. But this approach also has the advantage of activating the deep well of symbolic conservatism in the American electorate, uniting and rallying citizens who identify as conservatives against a common set of ideological enemies.

The Nature of Conservative Ideology in the Mass Public

The conservative movement’s strategy and success in building an alternative network of ideological media has required accommodating the perennially ambivalent structure of public opinion in the United States. The American electorate has consistently leaned to the left in its specific policy preferences, even during periods when the Republican Party has achieved considerable electoral success at the national level. Yet citizens have collectively held more conservative attitudes on the general scope of government and the relative merits of liberal and conservative ideology. Conservatism as a brand name, or as a collection of general principles and values, is consistently more popular than conservatism as a package of detailed policy positions.

Figure 1.1 illustrates the enduring gap between the public’s operationally liberal policy views (and preference for the Democratic Party over the Republican Party) on one hand and its conservative symbolic commitments on the other. It displays the average percentage of respondents giving liberal answers on questions about public policy issues out of all those giving liberal or conservative answers, the percentage identifying as Democrats out of those identifying with one of the two major parties, the percentage identifying as liberals out of all those identifying with an ideological group, and the percentage giving a liberal answer on broader questions about the size and scope of government out of those giving a liberal or conservative answer. All measures are coded such that higher scores indicate greater relative liberalism; the value of 50% denotes an equal number of liberal and conservative responses.

The results show that the public has long been relatively liberal on specific policy issues and relatively conservative on ideological self-identification and general attitudes toward government. To court greater popular support, conservative politicians seek to shift the terms of partisan debate away from specific policy proposals and toward larger ideological or symbolic predispositions on which they enjoy a corresponding numerical advantage in the American electorate (Grossmann & Hopkins, 2016). They emphasize the concepts and themes of limited government, individualism, patriotism, nationalism, moral traditionalism, and conservatism as a cause in itself—along with stoking Americans’ antipathy toward socialism, communism, and “the left.” The indicators in Figure 1.1 follow a thermostatic pattern: they tend to move against the party in power, with conservative attitudes gaining support during Democratic administrations (as national policy shifts leftward) and losing it during periods of Republican rule—including the Trump presidency.

Conservative elites have long perceived the mainstream media, including both print and broadcast outlets, as hostile to their viewpoint, but it took considerable time to transmit these suspicions to conservative citizens. Reporters have long disproportionately self-identified as liberals compared to the general public, but Republicans in the electorate did not always distrust them at dramatically higher rates than Democrats. Aversion to the (nonconservative) media has increased significantly among Republican citizens over the past 15 years, producing a substantial gap between the parties (see Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.1 Party, Policy, and Ideology in the American Public, 1958–2018

Source: James Stimson data collection (stimson.web.unc.edu), updated with Gallup polls.

From the beginning, conservative media groups adopted a strategy of criticizing mainstream sources as tainted by liberalism and thus untrustworthy, positioning themselves as the sole source of legitimate information and promoting conservatism as a salient political identity. Conservatives created organizations to monitor liberal bias in the media and repeatedly complained of slanted coverage during campaigns. They organized themselves via ideologically oriented media attached to conservative organizations as early as the 1950s, in both elite print publications and popular radio broadcasts. Their strategy was self-reinforcing, as right-leaning citizens came to rely more on conservative media and became less trusting of other news sources. Conservative organizations’ emphasis on ideology rather than partisanship as the primary divide in American politics similarly represented a strategic calculation, since the number of self-identified conservative Democrats consistently outnumbered liberal Republicans in the national electorate and were particularly concentrated in the politically shifting South.

Although conservatives have maintained an advantage over liberals in talk radio programming since the 1950s and long sought a television channel that similarly promulgated their views, they lacked a large broadcast infrastructure until the rise of Rush Limbaugh and his imitators in the 1990s and the subsequent founding of the Fox News Channel network. As Figure 1.3 reveals, Fox and MSNBC both attracted low ratings during their early years in the late 1990s, when MSNBC offered a mix of liberal and conservative commentators and Fox was far less stridently conservative than it is today. In the wake of George W. Bush’s 2000 election, and especially in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Fox became a nationalistic conservative outlet with a prime-time lineup of commentary from the right. As a result, it gained a much larger audience, eventually surpassing CNN to become the most popular news channel on cable. Fox still attracts a more limited viewership than local or network news—but it effectively reaches the Republican base, with some activists watching Fox for hours per week.

Figure 1.2 Confidence in the Media by Party, 1997–2018

Source: Gallup polls, gallup.com.

Studies taking advantage of plausibly exogenous variation in Fox News viewership based on its early roll-out or its arbitrary early channel position estimate that exposure to Fox exerted large positive effects on voting for Republican candidates (see Martin & Yurukoglu, 2017) and produced more conservative voting records among congressional representatives (Clinton & Enamorado, 2014). Although studies of MSNBC do not show these same aggregate effects, experiments that force subjects to watch the channel do produce some changes in political attitudes (Levendusky, 2013), suggesting that the surge in MSNBC viewership since the election of Trump (see Figure 1.3) may eventually influence public opinion in the opposite direction.

Like previous conservative media sources, Fox News combines its ideological advocacy with repeated denunciations of other journalistic sources, persuading its audience that the coverage of rival organizations such as CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and t...