some time mid-October
The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy, David Brock (2004)

If you're paying attention, you'll notice that the number in the headline is out of order. I finished reading this a few days before I finished Culture and Prosperity.

I had hoped to make a coherent argument about this book, since it's been so often recommended to me and I found it so disappointing. After more than a month of procrastinating, I've given up on that. Now I just want to wrap up all the booklogged book reviews before I leave for California tomorrow morning. Instead, I'll poach from an email dialogue with Darcy from a week ago.

This grew out of a larger political discussion (a retrospective of the recent election, mostly) from which I am now excerpting. In passing, Darcy mentioned the "Republican noise machine" -- just the machine, not the actual book yet -- prompting my reply:

Me (Nov. 23)

Brock's Noise Machine book is on my list of books I finished weeks ago and haven't gotten around to listing on Benzene yet. In short, I found it disappointing. I think the thesis is a very interesting one, but he does a shitty job of exploring it. Or rather, he barely explores it at all. Brock is part of the very problem he complains about. For whatever bizarre psychological reason, he's switched sides, but he still treats journalism as gathering ammunition rather than inquiry.

Me (Nov. 23)

[The letters in brackets key to Darcy's responses below. I would have used numerals, but part of his response includes parenthesized numerals.]

I should save this for Benzene, but in brief I was longing for a discussion of how the media works so that the right is better able to get their message out and tilt the discussion as they so successfully do. Instead, it was just a whole lot of statement of the fact that that happens with very little analysis of why or how [a]. Identification of the big funders of certain think tanks was pretty much the only useful information, I thought.

My other dislike of Brock's style is that he's so broad-brush as to be useless. Everyone is characterized as "hard-core right-winger" or similar emphatic label. The result is that you have everyone from Susan Molinari to Michael Savage lumped together in one giant undifferentiated mob called "the right". It's not that I'm offended by any "unfairness" of it; I just think it makes for an extremely shallow analysis if you don't distinguish between the different types of "conservatives" represented by the quasi-libertarian Cato Institute types, the nativist Pat Buchanan types, the shills for corporate profits, and the Christian evangelicals. It's a broad coalition, and the way in which it has come together to create a unified message is very interesting, but Brock sees none of the pieces. For him, all right-wingers look alike [b].

Here's an example. Somewhere in there he mentions that Bob Barr has become a spokesperson for the ACLU. Now it's quite true that Bob Barr is extremely conservative, but he's a very special kind of conservative with very specific core principles, which have since the book led him to become one of the Bush administration's harshest critics from the right. The fact that Barr and ACLU have found common cause tells us something very interesting about the falseness of the simple view of left-right as a one-dimensional spectrum. Brock fails to see that. To him, ACLU = left and Barr = right, so if ACLU welcomes Barr then it shows that the institutions of the left are being diluted by bipartisanship while the institutions of the right stay pure. I think that's just bad analysis [c].

But it's really not even analysis at all. It's just recounting of story after story. If I could take the book for what it is, it does provide some useful documentary information (albeit sloppy and not well marshalled, in contrast to, say, John W Dean's extremely tight and efficient Worse Than Watergate) [d], but I just can't get over the fact that such a good opportunity for analysis of the right's control of the media has been squandered.

Also, I think "extremely accurate" is an overstatement. Yes, it's predominantly factual, which puts it in another league from the whole class of smear books where they just make shit up. But the indiscriminate ideological labeling is damn sloppy -- Cato, for example, really was more libertarian than conservative in the 1980s, something you'd never guess from Brock's description [e]. (How it gradually evolved to the right is an interesting path of inquiry, which Brock doesn't choose to follow.) And you don't need to be a right-winger to find it laughable that Mother Jones and the Nation are "genuinely independent of partisan politics". There's nothing wrong with being a leftist magazine, but he's just wrong if he's going to try to portray leftist magazines as if they're somehow apolitical, even while characterizing the more ambiguous New Republic as belonging to the right [f]. There's also a few simple boners, like when he calls Richard Perle secretary of state [g].

That's as far as we got in the emails. Clearly, this discussion isn't complete, especially on my side, but it's not going to be completed today. For now, a few follow-ups, in order, starting with the first emails.

I gather that Brock's personal conversion from left to right is discussed more directly in his earlier book, Blinded by the Right. Not having read that one, I hadn't really meant to bring it up as a topic of discussion yet. "For whatever ... reason" was meant to indicate my lack of knowledge of the exact reason. "Bizarre" was an unfortunate choice of word which I should have left out.

I don't see that the "how" is at all explored. You say that the Republicans got where they are with a lot of money and a lot of grunt work. You say "the right's willingness to commit to a long-term strategy to change the landscape of ideas is something we Democrats really ought to emulate." OK, now you've got my interest. The right committed to a long-term strategy. What is that strategy? All I'm hearing from either you or Brock is that they spent a whole lot of money to fund think tanks and small subscription magazines. How does that translate into the big mainstream newspapers and cable news channels picking up the right's language and rebroadcasting it?

You don't manipulate the media establishment just by making noise. There's a skill involved in crafting a message so that it will be spread. There's a strategy for pushing a message that goes beyond just having more money. Why do talking points from the Drudge Report end up on CNN while those from Daily Kos don't? Why are right-wing demagogues so successful on talk radio while left-wing demagogues aren't? Those are the dots that I wanted to see connected. I expected to get that from Brock, and I didn't. His story is a narrative account of the campaign, not an analysis of the media campaign strategy and how it worked.

You're right that Bob Barr didn't speak out until after he left Congress. Doug Bereuter is another Republican who spoke out only after he had decided not to run for re-election.

On the ACLU, as you acknowledge, you and I just disagree. I don't buy the idea that the ACLU is just a "left-wing" organization. It's the group that defended the rights of the Nazis to march at Skokie, remember? The ACLU does not stand for the left. The ACLU stands for civil liberties. So long as the left is the side that believes in civil liberties, the ACLU will stand with the left. When someone on the right believes in civil liberties, then the ACLU will be with him, too. It does not mean that the ACLU has been compromised.

Yes, I like John W Dean's Worse Than Watergate quite a bit. I reviewed it in Benzene not long ago. Perhaps you missed it because the actual book review was buried under an enormous digression about foreign policy.

Believe me, I'm totally with you about fake libertarians. I rail against conservatives masquerading as libertarians all the time. My point was that in its early years, Cato was not fake-libertarian; it was real libertarian. In the early 1980s I was a Cato subscriber -- or supporting member, or whatever they called it: I sent them a small amount of money and I got all of their papers in the mail. They had guys like James Bovard and Nat Hentoff writing for them then. They were for drug legalization. I watched Cato get taken over by "free-market" (ie pro-corporate) conservatives. By my reckoning, the change corresponded with Stephen Moore's arrival there. (I hated that guy.)

Cato was indeed isolationist on foreign policy and wanted to reduce American military presence overseas, and to a certain extent they still are. One of my favorite Cato papers from the early 1980s was one advocating a dramatic reduction in American naval presence overseas. That sort of stuff faded into the background as Cato drifted right, but Cato is still significantly less internationalist than the mainstream of the Republican Party. I haven't kept entirely up to date, but I'm pretty sure Cato has consistently advocated an early exit from Iraq.

So when Brock talks about how Cato was founded, he's barking up the wrong tree. They weren't right-wing then.

I have no serious disagreement with you or the Wiki person about The New Republic. I was a regular reader and subscriber from about 1983 to 1997. I never liked TNR on foreign policy, but I liked them a lot through the 1980s on the whole "neoliberal" debate within the Democratic Party. Peretz certainly made TNR pro-Israel, but he didn't make it Republican. TNR started going downhill after Clinton was elected, I think. (I'm not saying that veering to the right is equivalent to declining in quality, but in the case of TNR, the two were definitely correlated.) Andrew Sullivan was a big part of that, but it was Michael Kelly who made the magazine almost unreadable.

With regard to left-wing magazines, your point on ideological vs partisan is well taken. Now I see what you (and Brock) mean on that. I didn't get that before.

My "making shit up" comment was in reference to Brock's pre-conversion works, like the ones on Anita Hill and Hillary Clinton, and similar works by other right-wing hatchet men. Though I quarreled with your characterizations of "extremely accurate" and "thoroughly fact-checked", Noise Machine is basically factual, whereas the other books aren't. I was mostly agreeing with you on this point.

Two friends of Benzene make cameo appearances. Orcinus, a blogger who was instrumental in the birth of Benzene 4, is quoted on the subject of the left's complacency in the right's campaign to move the center. A certain twin brother of a certain North Carolinian -- veteran readers of Benzene 3 will know who I mean -- is offered as an example of a young guy who ends up in a paid position at a right-wing think tank and then has his opinion paper quoted by the mainstream media as if it were expert analysis.

When referring to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, Brock says that they were used "to silence criticism from Republican newspaper editors". Yes, Jefferson's party of Democratic-Republicans was often called "Republican" for short, so this statement isn't wrong. Still, he might have been more careful to avoid any confusion with the Republican Party of Lincoln and of today. (Or perhaps said confusion was the intention?)

Describing an outrageous editorial in which Peggy Noonan presumes to quote God, God is referred to as "he" without the capital H. Is that a typo, or is Brock deliberately flouting tradition to make an anti-religious point?

Referring to the old radio show titled, "The 20th Century Reformation Hour", the "th" is superscripted. Aargh! The Microsoft bug! Kill it! Kill it! Why do people do that? It looks like shit.

"FOX's audience is slightly younger than CNN's, though not by much (an average age of sixty-one versus fifty-seven)." Fifty-seven? Sixty-one!? That's the average age, so there must be as much older than that as younger. Wow. I had no idea that the cable news viewership was so old.

It's not Bill Buckley (or even Joel Garreau) but there were a few words worth looking up.

Abeyant means temporarily set aside or suppressed. Early in the story -- discussing the 1970s, before the noise machine got going -- Brock refers to "abeyant right-wing frustration".

Mien is not new to me -- indeed, just yesterday my girlfriend used it in actual spoken conversation (to my immense satisfaction) -- but it's nice to see it in print. Brock describes how William Kristol's "academic mien provided cover" for the Weekly Standard's scurrilous mudslinging.

George Will, according to Brock, "set himself apart with a fusty Anglophilic bearing". Merriam-Webster's third definition for fusty is "rigidly old-fashioned and reactionary", which is plain enough, but it is given extra flavor by the first two definitions, which include "impaired by age or dampness" and "saturated with dust and stale odors".

Succor is familiar to me primarily from old religious texts in which the Lord's aid and succor is requested. In clouds of meaning, succor resides where aid and relief overlap. Brock sets an old-fashioned tone when he says, "The Democratic National Committee found no succor in the Wall Street Journal."

I like seeing uncommon words used in a way which highlights their unique connotations or etymological baggage. But trope, while perfectly correct, is no better than a synonym for figure of speech when Brock says, "Schlafly's catchphrase 'unisex bathrooms' was a perfect ilustration of the kind of rhetorical trope the conservatives would bring to television -- a crude and deceptive but highly evocative phrase."

I haven't had much friendly to say about this book, so let me end highlighting one of its excellent points:

For me, this is the real lesson -- and it is why I disagree with Darcy's suggestion that the left needs to build its own noise machine to counter that of the right. The problem with Fox News, and with the entire news media today, is not that right-wing opinion is drowning out left-wing opinion; the problem is that opinion is drowning out news.

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