Nicole Hemmer is a historian at Vanderbilt who studies the Republican Party, and she studies it particularly through the lens of its media. She’s the author of two great books about the conservative movement: “Messengers of the Right” and her new one, “Partisans,” which I highly recommend. And she’s a perfect person for this conversation. As always, my email ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
Nicole Hemmer, welcome to the show.
NICOLE HEMMER: Thanks for having me, Ezra. (...)
EZRA KLEIN: 1992 is so extraordinary to me. It’s one of these moments where the entire egg that is the Republican Party just seems to me to be hatching.
NICOLE HEMMER: Yes.
EZRA KLEIN: Because you have Buchanan, you have Limbaugh, you have Newt, you have Perot. But I want to go back to something you mentioned, which is this moment where Rush Limbaugh endorses Pat Buchanan. And the George H.W. Bush White House has a, I think, a fairly extraordinary response to that. Can you talk through that story?
NICOLE HEMMER: Absolutely. So the Bush administration is looking out over the political landscape in 1992. The threat from Pat Buchanan is much larger than they thought that it would be. Buchanan, even though he loses the New Hampshire primary to Bush by 16 points, he got a lot closer than any of the people in the Bush White House were comfortable with.
And as they were surveying the sources of Buchanan’s popularity, they lit upon Rush Limbaugh, who by 1991, ’92, was a juggernaut in right wing media. He was something that no one had ever seen before. He was making millions of dollars. He had millions of listeners. He was about to launch a new television show. He had best-selling books.
He was this very singular figure. And nobody knew how much influence he might have on the conservative base. But what the Bush administration knew was that Limbaugh liked Buchanan, and Buchanan was doing better than expected. And so they needed to harness some of that Limbaugh energy.
And so in order to do that, they tap the person who is going to be Limbaugh’s television producer and who has been a consultant to the Republican Party and to several Republican presidents — Roger Ailes. And they invite Roger Ailes, who would later become one of the founders of Fox News — they invite Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh to the White House to have a night at the Kennedy Center with George and Barbara Bush, to stay over at the Lincoln bedroom and really to court him.
And there is this one moment that Rush Limbaugh will talk about for the next 30 years where President Bush picks up his bag and carries it in. And in many ways, Limbaugh latches onto that moment not as Bush being this generous blue-blooded WASP from New England, but as the president carried my bags. I have the power in this situation. The president waits on me.
And that dynamic is going to define a lot of Limbaugh’s career, but also is pointing to some things that are shifting within the conservative movement and the Republican Party where candidates and presidents are becoming more reliant on the conservative media systems that people like Rush Limbaugh are building. (...)
EZRA KLEIN: I want to spend some real time here on the asymmetry in media structures because obviously it’s something that I’ve experienced to some degree. And I want to give some credit to the right-wing view that there is — I don’t exactly want to call it a bias, but there’s a liberal culturation in a lot of the media, that the people in major newsrooms are themselves much more liberal than they are conservative.
And there’s an integration, in a funny way, between what you might think of as liberal media, an MSNBC, or an “American Prospect,” which is a small magazine I started out at, and mainstream media. MSNBC is part of NBC. And I know, from having worked there, that if MSNBC is getting liberal in a way that NBC feels reflects badly on it, that the hammer comes down and people get very upset and it becomes a big internal political problem.
And there’s a way in which, of course, there is a liberalism, particularly a cultural liberalism in the mainstream media, but there’s also a restraint built around these business models and these organizations that at least have this self-conception of themselves as for everybody. The New York Times desperately wants to be a paper for everybody. NBC wants to be for everybody.
And they have business models, traditionally, from these local geographic monopolies and airwave monopolies, all the way up to these mass subscription operations, that put this pressure to try to be palatable to virtually every kind of consumer. And that’s become harder and harder and harder in recent years, but it is still a very, very present intention. And then as you go into the further reaches of liberal or left media, people who want to work at these organizations are somewhat restrained by knowing what it looks like to be in these organizations.
And I say all that to serve up to you the counterquestion, which is conservative media, because it isn’t intertwined, with the exception of maybe The Wall Street Journal, with these mainstream more establishment organizations that have these business models that are about appealing to everybody, develops a very different business model that I think helps create a different ideology instead of practices. How would you describe the business incentives of conservative media?
NICOLE HEMMER: I think that’s right. There’s both a difference in terms of the professional practices — ideas like objectivity are professional practices that have continued on at places like NBC News or at The New York Times, since the 1920s and 30s and 40s, that are not necessarily the same constraints on conservative media. But the economic question is really important, because in some ways, conservative media figured out the media landscape and the shifts that were happening in the business of media much better than some of these more mainstream institutions.
And that idea that if you have a devoted fraction of the potential viewing or listening audience, that that devotion means people are going to keep coming back, that they are going to trust the people who are speaking to them — so they’re going to trust somebody like Rush Limbaugh, they’re going to buy the products that are sold during the advertisements. And so you have this different conception of what it takes to make profitable media.
And Rush Limbaugh is really an innovator in this front. The conservative media that I was talking about earlier, like National Review, like the “Smoot Report,” they had not cracked the business code. So it’s not just about messaging to conservatives, but it is about offering a political message that seems like it is going to have a real effect on how elections turn out and how people govern while they are in office, and that triggers a set of emotions and attachments that make people fervent fans. (...)
So that idea of microtargeting or understanding narrowcasting, that you want a small devoted audience and you can make a lot of money that way, the right figure that out much more quickly, in part, as you noted, because they weren’t necessarily constrained by those professional practices that a place like CBS News would have.
EZRA KLEIN: I think part of it is that they figured it out. And I wonder how much they were forced into it. And something I think about here is about what attracts people to a media organization. When they come to you, what are they coming for? And in a lot of conservative media and some liberal media, they’re really coming for the politics. If you watch Fox News, if you listen to, back in the day, Rush Limbaugh, maybe today Ben Shapiro, if you watch MSNBC, you’re coming for the politics.
And so if that politics is conservative, that’s really, really important. If it’s liberal, it’s really important. A lot of other kinds of media organizations, more mainstream organizations, I think something that often gets missed and is really important is that politics is one of the things they do, often not the main one, often definitely not the one that keeps people coming back.
In local newspapers, the sports section and the classifieds were really, really important. At “The New York Times,” how do you feel about our cooking content or recipes? What do you think of Wordle? It really matters. That’s a big part of the business. It’s not the only thing. The Styles section is important. The Book Review is important. These things that are really not in that way political.
It’s a reason, I think, The Wall Street Journal has always been a different kind of institution than a lot of what we think of as conservative media. It is conservative in the sense that it is a place where you have more conservatives working. It’s owned now by Rupert Murdoch.
But it’s a business newspaper first. And so it has this other set of things it is doing before it gets into the question of its own politics. NPR is another good example of this where culturally, I think it’s fair to say, it is a liberal. But is what NPR is doing, is it first politics? No. They’re trying to be a news organization and have these local affiliates. It’s a bunch of other things.
So I wonder how much one of the things that has also happened here is that a lot of the space of these organizations that are crosspressured in their missions, crosspressured in their offerings, and so a little held back from going all in on politics — those organizations had taken up a lot of that room. And so as conservative media emerges, it is more explicitly conservative. The market niche it is filling is not a counternews or media establishment, but an unfilled political conservative niche.
NICOLE HEMMER: It’s such a smart observation, Ezra, because that’s exactly right. The kinds of stories that make their way into conservative media, they’re not always about electoral politics. But the hump that you have to get over to talk about a story on, say, Fox News, is that it has to have a politics to it, right? It has to fit into a broader narrative about politics, about the right, about conservatism and culture. (...)
If that is your identity and your mission from the start, that shapes why people come to you, but it also shapes the content that you put on. And if you stray too far from that, people might go with you a little bit if they are really attached to a particular host. So I think you’re exactly right about looking at the mission and the purpose of these outlets in order to understand why they function so differently.
by Ezra Klein, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ezra Klein, NYT
