How Conservatives Used and Defined Alternative Media
On Nov. 4, 1980, the nation came face to face with a conservative movement that had been decades in the making. It was the day Ronald Reagan won a landslide victory over Jimmy Carter for the presidency. And it was the day that shocked the liberal media.
What those liberal elites had failed to recognize for so long was the impact of a grassroots movement to rally conservatives across the nation using alternative forms of media. While liberals controlled the evening news broadcasts of NBC, CBS and ABC, conservatives went under the radar.
America's Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New And Alternative Media To Take Power, by Richard A. Viguerie and David Franke, is not a history of the conservative movement, but an analysis of how that movement gained traction using forms of media that allowed them to circumvent liberal domination of the mainstream media, beginning in the 1950s.
The 1950s ideological landscape looked very much like today. Most Americans were conservative while liberals held a death grip on the media. Conservatives, as a result, were forced to get creative.
In 1955 William F. Buckley, Jr. launched National Review, which not only voiced the views of conservatives but also taught them to see themselves as a movement. (HUMAN EVENTS had first appeared in 1944 with a similar conservative message and had actually published an article by Buckley in 1951 that presaged God and Man at Yale.) A short time later, the nascent movement had gained enough momentum to see one of its own, Barry Goldwater, run against LBJ in the 1964 presidential election.
The liberal media scratched its collective head.
After Goldwater's resounding defeat-and a sigh of relief from liberals everywhere-the conservative movement kept plugging away. This is when the direct mail methods pioneered by Viguerie took off.
In 40 years, Viguerie has been responsible for over two billion letters. This election alone he has sent out 100 million. Direct mail, the authors point out, was a force from the early days of the movement and it remains a force today. Its effect has been devastating for liberals. Sevety-five per cent of Reagan's fundraising in 1980, for example, came through direct mail.
The Reagan presidency was instrumental in launching the next phase of the conservative media revolution when in 1987 it revoked the so-called Fairness Doctrine. Shortly thereafter Rush Limbaugh appeared on the scene. With Rush's success came other radio personalities and in the 1990s, Fox News was launched and Matt Drudge became a force on the brand new medium conservatives have come to dominate-the Internet.
"Put the four alternative media together . . . and you can appreciate why the liberals are on the run," the authors write. "They've seen the four horsemen of the conservative apocalypse."
We all know what the horsemen bring with them. It appears that liberals are going to need more than Air America to survive in the new media landscape.
Study: Immigrants Gained Jobs As Natives Lost Them
A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) calls into question the wisdom of both presidential candidates' proposals of amnesty for illegal aliens and increased levels of new immigration.
The report, based on an analysis of the latest Census Bureau data, shows that the number of adult immigrants holding a job increased by over 2-million between 2000 and 2004, while the number of adult natives holding a job decreased by nearly half a million. What's more, job losses among native-born Americans tended to be highest in areas with the largest immigrant influx. The report, entitled A Jobless Recovery? Immigrant Gains and Native Losses, is available in its entirety here. Among the findings:
The findings raise the very real possibility that immigration has adversely affected native employment. For more information, contact: Steven Camarota 202-466-8185; [email protected].
