Matthew Brooke (Harvard University)

A Case of Twins: The Birth of Conservative Media During the “Golden Age” of Media Objectivity

Conventional accounts view the postwar period as a golden age of media objectivity in the US, a time when impartial newspapers and broadcast networks controlled the flow of information to the public. I argue that this characterization has depended on inadequate historical data and a narrow focus on the US case. Building on recent historical scholarship on the extent and political influence of early right-wing media, I provide evidence that mid-20^th century US media was a case of “twins,” in which the dominant “objective” media of the broadcast networks co-existed with an insurgent conservative media that was developing alongside, and especially in the South. I use an original dataset on the universe of US radio stations in 1965 that includes station-level data on conservative programming to demonstrate that conservative broadcasting was extensive during the supposed golden age of media objectivity. I moreover compare the US case with "most similar" cases of Australia and Canada to show that US right-wing broadcasters flourished during the 1960s because of an overlooked aspect of mid-20th century "American exceptionalism." That is, at a time when public broadcasting was the norm in advanced democracies, the US built its broadcasting system atop thousands of privately owned, lightly regulated local stations, allowing right-wing broadcasters to flourish.

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