Natalya Kosarevich/Vecteezy
If President Donald Trump can be counted on for anything, it is assailing the news media. His penchant for punishing critical coverage by suing journalists predates his career in politics, which itself has involved a constant barrage of aspersions cast against the press—from calling it “the enemy of the people” to describing reporting as treasonous. Among the arrows reached for most frequently in his quiver of insults is “fake news”—one of several phrases he falsely claims to have invented. And now, Trump’s legal and rhetorical attacks against the Fourth Estate coincide with a number of devastating regulatory structural threats.
Given Trump’s seemingly singular nature as a political force, it is easy to forget that he’s often less a fountainhead of the venom he spews than an adept conduit for deep-rooted, long-simmering grievances. Just as he only propagated “fake news,” rather than coined it, many of the seeds of rightwing hostility toward the press were sown well before his political lifetime.
The history of this anti-media hostility is now the subject of A.J. Bauer’s forthcoming book Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against the Press—a compact but rich contribution to the history of American conservatism. Perceptions of liberal bias in the press among the right, he writes, are “foundational to modern conservatism” and “embedded in every other discrete policy and ideological struggle” of the right to this day.
Bauer makes clear that conservative opposition to the press emerged in no small part as a reaction to progressive-backed criticisms and reforms of it. In the 1940s, for example, the leftwing press critic George Seldes’s rhetorical tactics against rightwing media bias included materialist analyses as well as some measure of conspiracy theorizing and guilt-by-association. But later, Bauer writes, these same tactics were co-opted against the left, including Seldes himself, during the Second Red Scare, when journalists and other figures were “red-baited” with tenuous accusations of communist associations.
Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against the Press
By A.J. Bauer
Columbia University Press, 288 pages
Publication date: March 31, 2026
In a similar vein, Bauer details how during the 1950s, the American oil tycoon H.L. Hunt funded a conservative foundation called Facts Forum, which smuggled McCarthyist conservative perspectives and biased polls into its print and broadcast political coverage—despite purporting to offer the sort of balanced content the FCC had sought to promote when it introduced the Fairness Doctrine in 1949.
Later in the book, Bauer describes how Southern segregationists lashed out against what they claimed to be unfair coverage by Northerners of Jim Crow during the 1960s; the Civil Rights Movement, he notes, is now mischaracterized as the origin of conservatives’ “liberal media” complaint, though it had at that point been festering for decades.
Bauer goes on to chronicle how rightwing press criticism entered the mainstream in the early 1970s, largely by way of former President Richard Nixon’s Vice President, Spiro Agnew. In a series of speeches, Agnew directed the right’s attention towards the “liberal media,” alleging that “a tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men” held a “monopoly” over the press. After the Reagan Administration’s 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to present balanced coverage of controversial issues, rightwing media quickly flourished; Bauer’s penultimate chapter covers the rise of a commercial “conservative media establishment” in the 1990s, including The Rush Limbaugh Show and Fox News (which launched under the since-abandoned slogan “Fair and Balanced”).
In profiling various individuals and organizations that helped cultivate the idea of a liberal media, Bauer sheds light on heretofore underappreciated episodes and figures in the history of the right, including Hunt and rightwing radio broadcaster Fulton Lewis Jr.. He also emphasizes that anti-press sentiments weren’t simply imposed onto the conservative masses from above; they spread organically among the grass roots. Bauer credits Facts Forum, for example, for doing under-acknowledged legwork, including by building a significant, conservative-identifying audience base, for the widely recognized catalysts of American conservatism that succeeded it, such as William F. Buckey Jr.’s National Review. And this audience was composed not of passive consumers, but of engaged lay mainstream media critics.
Bauer describes the pioneers and consumers of conservative media, as well as the radicals and moderates in the emerging conservative movement, as united in grievance against journalists for portraying a version of reality that fails to align with the world they perceive. While he chooses in this book to remain “agnostic” on the veracity of such complaints, the book’s conclusion notes that he once shared them as a Republican in his youth. In a brief personal narrative, he describes moving away from the rightwing worldview he inherited from his mother as he pursued a career in journalism and eventually began critically researching the right.
His final pages also contain a somewhat dizzying “provisional sketch” of the rightwing media landscape’s evolution beyond the period covered in the book, tracing the lineage of Rush Limbaugh to his successors in the digital age. Making the Liberal Media grew out of a dissertation in which Bauer endeavored to tell “the prehistory of Fox News,” but in the decade during which he was writing it, he notes, “a lot happened.” Indeed, it now feels all but inevitable that Fox News’s claim to the rightwing media mantle will be eclipsed by new media, including platforms like X/Twitter and influencers like far-right conspiracy theorist Candace Owens and white nationalist Nick Fuentes—both extremists who command sizeable audiences online.
And while the book describes the preconditions and flourishing of a “distinct rightwing media sector,” the right’s media strategy has much more recently turned outward with incursions into traditional mainstream outlets, including The Washington Post’s right-libertarian shift under Jeff Bezos and CBS’s MAGA-friendly turn under the ownership of Paramount Skydance, whose acquisition of CNN is now imminent.
Bauer only alludes to the rightwing takeover of social media platforms and The Post in his introduction and conclusion. After all, these Trump-era developments fall outside the scope of his book. But Making the Liberal Media will certainly help readers situate them in their fuller and, by his telling, quite fascinating history.