Dog whistles wag the dog...

The Deep Roots of Trump’s War on the Press

Long before cries of ‘fake news,’ there was Brent Bozell and his Media Research Center.

By TIM ALBERTA

You couldn’t miss it. Arriving in Cleveland for the 2016 Republican National Convention, visitors found themselves staring at an enormous white billboard, slapped across the top of a tall concrete building in the city’s bustling downtown, screaming a simple directive: “DON’T BELIEVE THE LIBERAL MEDIA!”

The signage—black letters against a white backdrop, save for “LIBERAL MEDIA” in bloody red—was ample around town the week of Donald Trump’s coronation in Cleveland. It was carried on top of taxicabs; projected with lights onto a sleepy city building; and held on posters behind live cable news broadcasts throughout the week. The message paired splendidly with Trump’s remarks in accepting the GOP nomination. “Remember, all of the people telling you that you can’t have the country you want are the same people telling you that I wouldn’t be standing here tonight,” he said. “No longer can we rely on those elites in media and politics who will say anything to keep a rigged system in place.”

But the displays in downtown Cleveland weren’t paid for by Trump’s campaign, or the Republican National Committee, or an affiliated super PAC. They were a victory lap of sorts for conservative activist Brent Bozell and his advocacy group, the Media Research Center—one of the most active and best-funded, and yet least known, arms of the modern conservative movement. It was as if the billboard was announcing that the right’s decadeslong jihad against the mainstream press had reach its apogee in Trump, a candidate who made vicious rhetorical attacks on journalists a staple of his raucous campaign events, railed about the “crooked” and “lying media” in nearly every debate, and even went after individual reporters by name.

It remains something of a myth that Vietnam and Watergate shattered Americans’ innocence and launched an era of institutional mistrust. As of 1986, Gallup was finding that 65 percent of Americans still felt a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the press. The next year, inside a rickety townhouse in Alexandria, Virginia, the Media Research Center—or MRC—was born. Its mission was simple: Highlight examples of alleged bias from the nation’s major news organizations and hold them accountable. Bozell, born into right-wing royalty—the nephew of National Review founder William F. Buckley, and son of Brent Bozell Jr., Barry Goldwater’s speechwriter and the ghost-writer of his book, Conscience of a Conservative—had not yet distinguished himself in the conservative movement. That would soon change. Over the ensuing decades, with the assistance of tens of millions of dollars from prominent Republican donors, the MRC moved to the front lines of America’s culture wars, relentlessly assailing what it viewed as a godless, condescending, out-of-touch national media—and systematically chipping away at its credibility in the minds of voters. The results were manifest: 30 years after that 1986 survey, as Trump steamrolled his way into the White House, Gallup released new numbers showing confidence in the press at all-time low of 32 percent. Among Republicans, it was just 14 percent.

Bozell and his organization can claim only so much credit. American journalism has suffered from plenty of self-inflicted wounds. And, more broadly, polls show that voters have lost faith in nearly every institution over recent decades, from public education to organized religion; that much is not a myth. Yet there is no denying that the targeted, well-financed efforts of the MRC and its allies succeeded in sowing deep distrust of the media on the right and in creating the conditions Trump exploited to win the presidency. If Richard Nixon and his administration pioneered the depiction of the press as a liberal boogeyman, the MRC turned it into a science, carefully documenting every instance of perceived bias and blasting them out to a burgeoning network of aggrieved conservatives. All the while, Bozell’s shift from polite media critic to burn-it-all-down revolutionary mirrors a fundamental evolution among GOP voters and party leaders: from doubting the press, to criticizing it, to opposing it, to waging a relentless war upon it.

I discussed this transformation with Bozell last fall as he prepared to celebrate the MRC’s 30-year anniversary—a spectacular black-tie gala, with special guests at his head table including talk radio legend Rush Limbaugh and Republican megadonor Robert Mercer. When I visited the group’s headquarters in suburban Virginia, Bozell—an excitable 62-year-old with a rust-colored beard and a cackling belly laugh—recalled how, long ago, he once told Limbaugh that his goal was “to succeed, to shut down this organization and get a real job.” Success, he explained, meant seeing the media self-correct and eradicate its inherent bias. “You need a news media doing their job correctly for democracy to function,” Bozell told me. “There are two options facing conservatives: Either get them to do their jobs correctly, or neutralize them.”

The distance between those two poles—in an era when animus toward the press colors every aspect of our politics, and the president of the United States is calling reporters “the enemies of the American people”—is profound. So I asked him: Is your goal to improve the media—or to destroy it?

Bozell took a lengthy pause. “Once upon a time, I felt we could help. I felt we could work with journalists,” he finally responded. “I think the press now has become so militant, so radicalized, that it sees itself on a mission. And it has nothing but disdain for conservatives.”

“I believe right now,” he added, “it’s a useless proposition.”

***

For those on the American political right, hostility toward the media is hardly new. Feeling underrepresented in major newsrooms in the 1950s, conservatives launched publications like National Review and Human Events to bring parity to journalism. But this did little to change the perception among Republicans of inherent, and increasingly shameless, bias among the premier news outfits. Dwight D. Eisenhower, after leaving the White House, ripped the “sensation-seeking columnists and commentators” at Goldwater’s 1964 convention, saying they “couldn't care less about the good of our party.” Vice President Spiro Agnew ratcheted up the rhetoric a few years later on behalf of Nixon, giving his famous 1969 speech in Des Moines decrying the “small and unelected elite” who possess a “profound influence over public opinion” without any checks on their “vast power.” And, revisionist history notwithstanding, “The truth is, Ronald Reagan was in a fight with the media his entire career,” says former Speaker Newt Gingrich. “Years ago, one of Reagan’s campaign advisers told me, ‘Don’t forget that none of these people are your friends. They despise your values, they despise your party.’”

Heading into the twilight of the Reagan era, conservatives still had no real mechanism for challenging the press. Enter the Media Research Center in 1987. Equipped with seven phones, two desks and a black-and-white TV, its small staff got up and running thanks to one big donor—who has since died, but whose eternal anonymity Bozell guaranteed. Working around the clock, the team began cataloging every instance of perceived ideological prejudice in the major print outlets and on the evening newscasts.

“The first thing we had to do was make the argument. Conservatives believed that there was a bias in the media, but nobody had ever demonstrated it,” Bozell recalled. “The most you could do was say, ‘Last night Dan Rather said ‘X’ about the Vietnam War.’ But you didn't know what he said the night before, or the night after. So you couldn't demonstrate a pattern of bias.”

Bozell’s staff compiled it all—the most slanted coverage, the most ideologically charged assertions, the most outlandish corrections—and published a monthly newsletter, “MediaWatch,” that quickly became a hit in Washington. It included a tip of the cap to journalism done right in a section called “The Bright Side,” and added levity with the tongue-in-cheek “Janet Cooke Award,” named for the Washington Post reporter whose fictitious story about a heroin-addicted child won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981. Establishing itself as an effective watchdog from the right, Bozell’s group quickly amassed influence among the Beltway media, with reporters and editors suddenly under the microscope in a publication devoured by Republican officials and activists throughout the nation’s capital.

Little changed in the ensuing decades—the media continued to aggrieve the right, and Republicans exploited this under-siege mentality to mobilize the conservative base. George H.W. Bush earned cheers in a presidential debate for mentioning a popular bumper sticker: “Annoy the Media, Re-Elect President Bush.” Conservatives dubbed CNN the “Clinton News Network” for its alleged kid-glove treatment of the 42nd president. George W. Bush’s White House seethed over the media caricaturing him as a nepotistic numbskull and saw Rather’s repudiated “60 Minutes” report as proof of the press’ mission to undermine him. Finally, and most impactfully, Republicans accused the media of buying into Barack Obama’s messianic rhetoric and giving him a free pass on everything from the Benghazi catastrophe to the IRS targeting scandal to “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”

What has changed are the tactics central to the battle between conservatives and the media—and that has made today’s MRC less relevant. Allies of the organization, including several of Bozell’s friends and numerous former employees, describe an outdated operation and misplaced emphasis on traditional news mediums with ever-shrinking audiences. Meanwhile, any number of partisan interests are calling attention to accusations of bias in a more agile and modern fashion, contributing to a continuous, asymmetrical chorus of media loathing that can be traced back to Bozell. It’s no coincidence that the loudest voice on the left, Media Matters, modeled itself after the MRC—only to take Bozell’s playbook and turbo-charge it through social media and its supersonic distribution of transcripts, background and opposition research meant to embarrass the right.

“Mainstream journalism began bending over backwards to accommodate the conservative activism around media bias—and in so doing, I think moved the balance of coverage into a situation where it was actually skewed in a conservative direction,” says David Brock, the former self-described “right-wing hit man” who later became a top Democratic operative and founded Media Matters in 2004. As he prepared to launch the group, he would ask journalists around Washington whether Bozell’s criticisms had been successful in shaping their coverage. “Inside those newsrooms, it couldn’t help but have an effect,” Brock recalls them saying, citing the 2003 invasion of Iraq as the most glaring instance of reporters checking their aggressive instincts for fear of being called out by conservatives loyal to the George W. Bush administration.

By that time, however, the media landscape had changed dramatically. Limbaugh had burst onto the scene not long after the MRC debuted—ushering in the era of conservative talk-radio dominance—and in 1996, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes had launched Fox News Channel as a right-wing counterweight to CNN and the liberal-leaning networks. There was a new reality. The impact of attacks on the mainstream media by Republicans like Bozell could no longer be measured by changes to coverage; but rather, by the number of conservatives tuning them out entirely and seeking their information from less reputable and reliable sources.

This same dynamic, decades later, is what drove conservatives into the arms of Sean Hannity, Breitbart.com and Alex Jones—and ultimately, into the Twitter feed of Donald J. Trump.

***

It’s no secret that the majority of journalists working in national newsrooms are left-of-center, at least culturally. Few of them own guns, for instance, or attend church every Sunday. But most of the reporters at respected, mainstream outlets check their worldviews at the door when covering the news and strive for impartiality. The irony, as Brock alluded to, is that many liberals believe this quest for balance has benefited Republicans, with media outlets giving equal airtime to both sides on issues such as climate change or gun control where scientific consensus or public opinion is wholly one-sided. Indeed, just ask a Bernie Sanders voter about the corporatist news networks, or a Hillary Clinton aide how he or she feels about the New York Times, and you’re bound to get an earful about how Republicans “worked the refs” so effectively that the supposed bias has turned in the other direction. “If you hassle the media enough, they’ll throw some news your way. This has been going on since the mid-1960s, with enormous success,” says Eric Alterman, a liberal journalist and a professor of journalism at the City University of New York. “Conservatives have drawn the mainstream media to the right with a gravitational pull because the Republican Party has moved so far right on so many things.”

Bozell and his allies agree that the media have changed—to become more liberal, not less. Whereas the MRC was once primarily concerned with subjective assertions from prominent anchors and columnists, he said, in recent years left-wing partisanship has permeated the news business, from top executives and editors to everyday producers and beat reporters. Bozell sees this shift manifested in the media’s “hatred” of Trump, which colors its coverage of stories about everything from his mental health to his attitude on race relations.

The paradox here is that Bozell was once more antagonistic toward the president than any journalist. As an early supporter of Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign, Bozell was an outspoken adversary of Trump throughout the Republican primary, warning allies both publicly and privately that the Manhattan billionaire was inconsistent, untrustworthy and immoral. When National Review published its “Against Trump” issue in February 2016, featuring some two dozen essays by conservatives opposed to his candidacy, Bozell was among the most strident, comparing Trump to fraudulent politicians and calling him “the greatest charlatan of them all.” Bozell also called Trump a “huckster” and “shameless self-promoter” in a Fox News appearance, concluding, “God help this country if this man were president.” It cost him: Multiple sources familiar with the situation told me that the MRC’s fundraising took a serious hit. When it became clear a few months later that Trump would be the nominee, Bozell abandoned his crusade and refocused his attacks on the media—for, of all things, crusading against Trump.

Today, Bozell says he is sufficiently thrilled with the president’s policy achievements—from deregulation to judicial nominations to tax reform—that he can happily admit he was wrong. But he’s smart enough to realize, albeit not admit, that the media have been tough on Trump for many of the reasons he once was. (Bozell is also self-aware enough to joke, after eight years of accusing Obama of bankrupting America, about the hypocrisy of a unified Republican government raising spending earlier this year by more than $300 billion.)

Bozell is certainly a true believer who savors his place in the arena, battling against everything from secularism in pop culture to adult content on cable. He was instrumental, for example, in whipping up outrage when “The View” co-host Joy Behar joked that Vice President Mike Pence has a “mental illness” for believing that Jesus speaks to him. Bozell raised the issue with multiple White House staffers during a March event he attended with Trump on video game violence and worked with allies throughout the conservative movement to coordinate pressure on ABC. Eventually Behar called Pence to apologize and then repeated her mea culpa on the air.

At the same time, Bozell has monetized fights big and small in a way that raises questions about the sincerity of MRC’s mission of holding the media accountable. “I got into it because I wanted to have a more fair media, a politically diverse media, but along the way I realized that they’re not interested in bringing impartiality to the press,” says Matthew Sheffield, a nine-year employee at MRC who co-founded its popular NewsBusters blog before quitting in 2014. “What they really want to do is promote their political agenda and make a lot of money.”

The MRC generated more than $15 million in revenue in 2016, according to tax filings, and Bozell’s total compensation topped $490,000. The group’s headquarters, consuming the entire sixth floor of a sparkling office-park building in affluent Reston, Virginia, is home to 65 full-time employees, not counting an annual horde of seasonal interns and bloggers sprinkled around the country. Bozell told me that Sheffield, who now writes for Salon (and considers himself an independent), was fired from MRC and is “a repugnant human being.” But Sheffield isn’t alone in his criticisms. Several well-known journalists who once dealt often with MRC told me they no longer do because the group operates in bad faith—preferring to leverage allegations of bias rather than discuss them honestly. It isn’t just members of the fourth estate who feel this way: Numerous conservatives expressed concern to me that Republicans have turned media-blasting into a fundraising niche, with profound and troubling implications for the democratic process.

“The whole hate-the-media complex has been very financially remunerative for some of these people, and to feed this paranoia on the right is a business,” says Mona Charen, a longtime conservative commentator who also wrote an essay in National Review’s anti-Trump issue. “I spent many years criticizing the media, pointing out bias. But, as with so much in the conservative world, things changed, and suddenly you had people hammering away," saying "not just that there was bias that needed to be rebutted, but that they were actively lying, and that they were the enemy. They took the whole question of media bias and weaponized it to become a very large part of the right-wing critique of the world.”


***

Journalists will remember 2016 as the year that media loathing became a standard in politics, rather than an anomaly. In reality, Trump took advantage of a relationship between conservatives and the press that had been deteriorating for decades—and had probably bottomed out in 2012.

For one thing, there was the coverage of Mitt Romney himself. The scrutiny of his business record was obviously fair game. But the obsessive focus on the Republican nominee’s weirdness—dog crate on top of the family car; “binders full of women”; pretending a waitress had pinched his butt—so aggravated many on the right that they willfully ignored news reports four years later of real concerns about the character of the next Republican nominee. CNN’s Jake Tapper, who frequently engages critics from both left and right—and is widely viewed as one of the fairest reporters in Washington—raised that point unsolicited in a conversation about media bias.

“I think there are legitimate reasons why conservatives distrust the media,” he told me. “It’s hard to look at the coverage of Mitt Romney, and compare it to the modern-day coverage of Mitt Romney, and think it’s the same person that the media is writing about. Back then he was a dog-torturing robber baron. And, you know, now he’s the white knight of the Republican Party.” (Tellingly, Bozell describes Tapper as “one of the worst offenders” in the mainstream media for his coverage of Trump; meanwhile, several senior MRC employees told me on the record that Tapper is a model of fairness and equal-opportunity toughness in his approach.)

Something more fundamental also happened in 2012—the discovery that for certain candidates, running against the media was more effective than running against their political opponents.

Gingrich’s candidacy was on life support in January 2012, having been uncompetitive in both Iowa and New Hampshire. His campaign was poorly funded, out-organized and lacking grass-roots enthusiasm. South Carolina was his last stand. Gingrich settled on a novel strategy: an all-out assault on the media. He lampooned the moderators from Fox News and CNN in back-to-back debates in the Palmetto State, launching an indignant rant in the latter event that quickly went viral, concluding, “I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans!”

Kevin Madden, Romney’s longtime messaging guru, said it was “an electric moment”—and a turning point in what would become a protracted primary campaign. “We came into that debate trending high,” he said. “And literally overnight, Newt’s favorables and unfavorables flipped in our tracking.” Gingrich won the South Carolina primary by double digits—an unimaginable result one week earlier—validating his anti-media barrage and building a model that Trump expanded upon four years later. “The thing that struck me,” Gingrich recalled, “was what conservative audiences reacted to, even more than attacks on Obama, was attacks on the media.”

Where does it go from there? Attacking the press has long been politically advantageous for the Republican Party, but Trump’s zero-sum approach—and the base’s labeling as “Fake news” anything that damages the White House, no matter how factual—is new and foreboding. It has some conservatives wondering whether, after decades of pressing the liberal-media narrative, they’ve unwittingly created a monster. “This has shades of authoritarianism,” Charen told me. “The state-run media in countries where political authoritarians reign tries to persuade people that no other media can be trusted, except for what the great leader tells you. And, you know, there’s a sinister undertone with some of this—'If you see it in the New York Times or the Washington Post, then it didn’t happen.’ It’s a scary kind of nihilism.”

Bozell, for his part, accepts no responsibility for this—and argues that news organizations have only themselves to blame. “That suggests that we made the situation toxic,” he tells me. “I’m telling you that the left-wing media made the situation toxic. And when conservatives stand up to them, suddenly it’s conservatives who are on trial?” He lets out an exasperated sigh. “I make absolutely no apologies.”