Talking Points from David Brock's The Republican Noise Machine

The seed out of which David Brock cultivates a whole catalog of noise has 3 parts :

Edith Efron’s phony description of “liberal bias” gets wide public attention.
Richard Nixon implements repetition of that lie through the office of the presidency.
Lewis Powell’s (!!!) construction of the process by which a parallel lie would be systematically created, financed and repeated ad infinitum.

The modern right-wing domination of media was initiated by the confluence of three factors provided by : Edith Efron, Richard Nixon, and Lewis Powell.

<some snips + my own paraphrasing>

Public awareness/Motivation : Edith Efron, an Ayn Rand devotee and a writer for TV Guide (published by Republican Walter Annenberg), wrote a New York Times best-seller that was published in 1971 called The News Twisters in which Efron, a person with no research credentials, published “research” exposing the “liberal bias” in network news. This book is also seen as an anti-regulatory response to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Twisters was subsequently critiqued as the pseudoscience it is, but that didn’t stop it from being wildly lauded by an extremely long list of names you still see in media today, but also including the likes of Richard Nixon and Lewis Powell, as well as a clique with racist blood lines extending from George Wallace and Barry Goldwater, who equated the media’s “liberal bias” with being anti-segregation and used Twisters to motivate their segregationist base.

A powerful mechanism : Richard Nixon helped Efron’s book make the NYT’s bestseller list by ordering Charles Colson to get it there. Colson told Newsweek how he used a Republican slush fund to buy up all of the copies in the targeted markets that the NYT used for compiling its bestseller list. Nixon helped further by getting a Senate subcommittee hearing on government regulation of the broadcast industry before which Edith Efron was allowed to grandstand. The reason for Nixon’s support was that The News Twisters dovetailed nicely with Nixon’s strategy of assaulting and discrediting the journalism profession for their “vengeance” against him dating from the McCarthy hearings and his subsequent unsuccessful campaigns for president and for governor of California. As president Nixon surrounded himself with functionaries who implemented not only his attacks but also to build a Nixon counter-revolution by implicating the media in the racial and cultural tensions of the day. Brock’s book has a very good index which the reader can use to see who these functionaries are. Believe me, those who aren’t dead, are still being heard almost every day.

An organizing principal : Lewis Powell, as a wealthy corporate lawyer, board member, and former president of the American Bar Association, wrote a memorandum, dated August 31, 1971, that was printed in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s periodical Washington Report. Powell argued that American free enterprise was under attack by four institutions that shape public opinion: academy, the media, the political establishment, and the courts. (Shortly after writing this memo, and perhaps because he was a conservative Democrat, Powell was a successful Nixon appointment to The Supreme Court.) In his memo, Powell said business was up against saboteurs and propagandists and he laid out an agitprop strategy by which the Right would create and underwrite a “movement” to front its agenda in the media, including heavily subsidized “scholars, writers, and thinkers” pressing for “balance” by aggressively criticizing as unbalanced anything that wasn’t Right.

Further assistance to this dynamic was provided by the likes of William E. Simon and Irving Kristol. Simon was Nixon’s Secretary of Treasury and one of the country’s wealthiest individuals who had used junk bonds to finance hostile corporate takeovers. He had openly suggested conservatives should go out and buy the public debate in order to make their ideology look respectable and appealing, resulting in things like the coal industry funding “research” to undermine support for environmental regulation and financial services paying for “scholars” to destroy confidence in the social Security system. Kristol, father to Bill Project-for-a-New-American-Century Kristol, was an ex-Trotsky-ite who contributed a belief in the importance of spreading ideology, rather than empowering votes, as a way to gain political power, i.e. ideas not for their own sake, but for the purpose of influencing public opinion through a “war of ideas”, read that Fascism. In his description of the right-wing cadres that helped the Right dominate media, Brock traces other ex-Communists, ex-leftists, and disaffected liberals who drifted out of the Democratic Party when the political leaders with whom they had allied themselves failed to gain national power.

This book is densely cited and nicely indexed, so it is very user friendly.

He did well.

Thanks for the mini-review.

Looking forward to it. Blinded by the Right was good.