A.J. is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama. His research focuses on conservative news and right-wing media. He is currently working on a book for Columbia University Press titled Making the Liberal Media.
1. What is the primary focus or central question (s) of your history research?
How did right-wing media come to exert such an outsized influence over U.S. politics and culture? How has conservative news challenged professional journalism over the cultural authority to narrate and interpret public life? These questions are at the heart of my work and are key to understanding how contemporary U.S. politics have become so contentious and intractable.
2. How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?
I grew up in a conservative household listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio. As my politics shifted leftward, with age, I started to notice a disconnect between how critics and audiences of right-wing media understand its appeal. Critics of Limbaugh, for instance, still tend to focus on his propensity to stoke outrage, anger, and hatred. But, for many of his most avid listeners, Limbaugh’s primary appeal was his humor and advocacy for conservative interpretations of the news of the day. This disconnect made me interested in studying how and why conservatives consume news and political commentary the way that they do.
3. What archives or research materials did you use? Please share strategies or tips and tricks.
When I decided to focus on conservative news, I quickly realized two things: 1) there is relatively little secondary literature to engage with, 2) modern conservative news has existed for nearly 100 years, with countless figures and outlets to somehow account for. There is no one archive that captures all of right-wing media or conservative news. Rather than pick one outlet or influential figure, I decided to research the political, cultural and regulatory conditions that enabled modern right-wing media. While more challenging, this approach was better suited to my questions and helped me justify which archives to include.
Given conservatives’ longstanding complaint of being marginalized by “mainstream” media, I started by investigating the origins of mass communication as an academic field, and of the broadcast regulations that served as the foundation of 20th Century political communication. I researched the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, a short-lived but influential media literacy effort launched by a group of progressive scholars who were concerned with the rise of propaganda. This was choice was both theory-driven and practical. Given that the IPA was a leading proponent of the “propaganda analysis” paradigm, which has long shaped critical scholarship of right-wing media, I wanted to understand how the group defined its terms. That their papers were housed at New York Public Library and Brooklyn College made that work affordable to me, as a New York-based graduate student. I discovered that the IPA was primarily concerned with right-wing media, and that it was effectively redbaited out of existence. I learned more about redbaiting by accessing the Counterattack Research files, housed at the Tamiment Library at NYU, which helped me see the origins of a conservative critical disposition toward the press, and its many conceptual and tactical borrowings from progressive media reformers in the 1940s.
My next move was to visit the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, where I accessed the Federal Communications Commission docket on the Mayflower Hearings, which resulted in the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine was a broadcast policy between 1949-1987 that required balanced coverage of controversial issues of public concern. Conservative activists in the mid-20th Century shaped their media to meet this requirement, often facing accusations of bias that stoked a sense of animosity between conservatives and the press. Reading against the grain, I discovered a largely forgotten battle between conservative broadcaster Fulton Lewis Jr. and the consumer cooperative movement, which was a key subtext of the Mayflower Hearings. I put the FCC archives into conversation with materials I found at Lewis’s papers at Syracuse University, re-narrating the history of U.S. broadcast policy to account for the influence of fears of right-wing bias.
Focusing on the contentious relationship between conservative activists and the press also took me to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library (to learn why his administration overturned the Fairness Doctrine in 1987), to Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah (to learn about Accuracy in Media and the American Conservative Union, which hosts the Conservative Political Action Conference or CPAC), and to other smaller but relevant collections across the country to fill in gaps. I also had the privilege of gaining exclusive access to the privately held papers of a John Birch Society activist in Birmingham, who was an amateur journalist for a hyper-local right-wing community newspaper. These archives are allowing me to tell a new story about the origins of right-wing media: not as a result of secret machinations of a cabal of well-connect activists in the Midwest and Northeast, but as a diffuse and messy process spanning decades in which various conservative activists attempted to leverage discursive and regulatory affordances while facing pushback from the mainstream press. This conflict between conservatives and the press shaped conservative movement infrastructure and political identity. It also gave rise to the widespread belief in “liberal media” bias.
4. What’s your organizational strategy when working on a project? Any advice or recommendations?
When I go to an archive I scan as many files as I can from the boxes and folders that are pertinent (I’m usually a scanning completist, capturing everything and not just what I think I may need). I pay for an extra storage DropBox account and organize my files the same way they are structured in the finding aid (for ease of searching/access). I use the numbers my phone/camera automatically assigns to images as a way of guiding my internal organization of individual documents within the box/folder structure of the archive. I then use Scrivener for notetaking, organizing my notes in folders that parallel the archive structure as well. This allows for ease of access so that I can track down information and citations as needed. Benefit of having all archival notes in Scrivener is ease of searching (so if I remember seeing a name or need to see what I have on a topic, I can find out which boxes/folders contain pertinent materials, so that I can go back to the scans and re-read).
Brains are weirdly particular, so I don’t know if my organizational structure would work for others. The key is to find one that works for you.
5. How does your research relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?
My research documents the longstanding conflict between the modern conservative movement and mainstream press in the United States. While it is more focused on how conservatives used the press as a foil to bolster their sense of in-group solidarity, it has implications for better understanding the limitations of professional journalism ideology and the regulatory tools with which we’ve attempted to affect a rational-critical public sphere. My in-process book, Making the Liberal Media: U.S. Conservatism in Conflict with the Press tells the story of how conservatives came to distrust the mainstream media, and how that shaped conservative political identity and movement strategy in the 20th Century, in ways we are still reckoning with today.
6. What advice do you have for other historians working on projects related to your topic?
As I mentioned in my recent essay in American Journalism, I think the biggest challenge facing journalism historians is a lack of citational practices. There have been dozens of scholars who have dabbled in research of conservative journalists and right-wing media outlets, broadly conceived. But these are mostly biographical or organizational case studies that don’t deliberately build a common historical metanarrative. While archival work is much needed and crucial, our field needs to redouble its commitment to developing historiographical debates regarding conservative news: Its origins, its leading or marginal figures, its effects on journalism and political culture more broadly across time. We need to cite each other more.
7. What would be your six-word pitch about your research if you met a book editor or grant funder in an elevator?
Conservatives distrust the press. Wonder why?