"From the Start Conservative Media Activism Was a Group Effort"

"Human Events pledged to report, in a factual way, the stories and angles other media missed because of their liberal biases. In such news stories selection, not content, would be biased. (Human Events also ran conservative columnists, opinion pieces, and analyses that made no pretense at content neutrality.) The editors also believed their ideological worldview was correct, and so believed they did not need to sacrifice accuracy in order to be ideologically consistent. In other words, there was no contradiction to resolve.
"That logic would be worked out over the course of the 1950s, as other conservative media outlets joined Human Events. So many, in fact, that by the mid-1950s, an informal network of conservative media had emerged, bound by a shared belief in media bias and a shared sense of exclusion. Whatever their disagreements—and there were many, both of substance and personality—right-wing media activists agreed that established media were under the control of liberals. For each of these media figures, this state of affairs required more than just the exposure of liberal bias. They felt called to fight back with their own institutions, creating small, interlocking fields: conservative book publishing, conservative magazines and journals, and conservative broadcasting."

The New Republic runs an essay adapted from Nicole Hemmer's new book, Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics.