Conservative Media, Liberal Bias, and the Origins of Balance

In the late 1940s, a group of conservative media activists began creating a set of institutions to propagate their political message and to organize like-minded Americans. Their efforts were explicitly ideological. The statement of principles for the newsweekly Human Events state that it was “not impartial,” while the Publisher’s Statement for National Review defended its purpose as a “vigorous and incorruptible journal of conservative opinion.” But these media activists did more than create ideological outlets – they insisted (to varying degrees) that all media were ideological. Though they denounced relativism, they denied the possibility of objective journalism. By the early 1970s, they were winning the argument, as networks began substituting balance for objectivity.

This paper argues that the end of objectivity and the rise of balanced journalism had its origins in the conservative media outlets of the 1940s and 1950s. Human Events, National Review, the radio show The Manion Forum, and Regnery Publishing made “liberal media bias” a constitutive element of their work. Run-ins with the Federal Communications Commission, the Kennedy administration, and reticent bookstores in the 1960s, as well as coverage of the 1964 Goldwater campaign, convinced these media activists their analysis was correct.  By 1969 the bias charge had trickled up to the Nixon Administration, and after the publication of Edith Efron’s News-Twisters in 1971, networks began shifting their news coverage toward balance. Though it would take a few more decades, this shift fundamentally transformed American news media and has lasting consequences for democratic governance.