Kirsten Gillibrand is about to have a bad week

[nolabels]

225. The Rise of the Right-Wing Media Machine

MARCH 1995

The Rise of the Right-Wing Media Machine
ROBERT PARRY

In 1970, angered by critical reporting on the Vietnam War, President Nixon told his men what needed to be done. Nixon was “pushing again on [his] project of building OUR establishment in [the] press,” his chief of staff H.R. Haldeman wrote (Haldeman Diaries, 9/12/70).

It was a theme that Nixon would repeat often. The president was convinced that “the press and TV don’t change their attitude and approach unless you hurt them,” Haldeman recorded on May 29, 1971. As dozens of Haldeman diary entries make perfectly clear, Nixon was never one to miss a chance to “screw” his “enemies” in the media. “The only way we can fight the whole press problem, Nixon feels, is through the [Charles] Colson operation, the nutcutters, forcing our news and in a brutal vicious attack on the opposition,” Haldeman (4/21/72) wrote.

Yet even Nixon, the grand strategist, could never have guessed how well his plans would have worked out a quarter century later—and how much of his chip-on-the-shoulder paranoia would still resonate today in a powerful conservative press establishment.

In the 25 years since Nixon started “pushing” this project, the conservatives have constructed a truly intimidating media machine. It ranges from nationwide radio talk shows by Rush Limbaugh and scores of Limbaugh-wannabes, to dozens of attack magazines, newspapers, newsletters and right-wing opinion columns, to national cable television networks propagating hard-line conservative values and viewpoints, to documentary producers who specialize in slick character assassination, to mega-buck publishing houses that add footnotes to white-supremacist theories anti a veneer of respectability to journalistic fabrications, and even to narrowly focused organizations that exist simply to hurt the surviving mainstream journalists who still won’t toe the line.

https://fair.org/extra/the-rise-of-the-right-wing-media-machine/

I try to understand where the money is coming from to fund the story before I try to understand the story