National Review and the Idea of a Liberal Media Bias
Friday, January 2, 2015: 4:10 PM
Conference Room F (Sheraton New York)
Scholars and other critics have devoted much energy to proving or disproving the existence of a liberal bias in the mainstream news media, but only recently have historians questioned the origins of the idea of such a bias. The historian David Greenberg traced the idea to the response of white Southerners to media coverage of the civil rights movement, and Mark Major analyzed the idea’s development among contributors to the conservative publication Human Events. This study will explore the influence of National Review on the formation of this liberal-media narrative between 1955 and 1964. The magazine, founded in 1955, played a critical role in shaping the conservative intellectual movement that developed during the late 1950s and early 1960s and showed its might during the 1964 presidential election. A major argument of conservatives during this period was that a liberal political Establishment marginalized their ideas; thus, this paper will examine how and to what extent National Review used columns such as “The Printed Word,” which examined the content of various American newspapers; and “The Liberal Line,” designed to “keep a watchful eye on the day-to-day operations of the Liberal propaganda machine;” along with other content, to reinforce the idea of a liberal bias among the “Establishment” news media.