Table of Contents
More Praise forSouth Park Conservatives
Brian Andersons riveting account of the media revolution is a revelation. In a brisk and highly entertaining way, he gives chapter and verse on how the new media is rapidly breaking a liberal stranglehold on both news and entertainment.
Harry Stein, author of How I Accidentally Joined
the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace)
Highly entertaining and colorful ... Brian Anderson is one of a limited few writing about the new conservative generation who really gets it. South Park Conservatives should be required reading for anyone surprised by the reelection of George W. Bush.
Lorie Byrd, Polipundit.com
Introduction
A New Era
CBSs cancellation in late 2003 of its planned four-hour miniseries The Reagans marked a watershed in Americas culture wars. Ten years earlier, CBS would have happily aired the libelous seriesthe working script of which depicted, based on zero evidence, the fortieth president declaring himself the Antichrist, dismissing AIDS sufferers with a cruel They that live in sin shall die in sin, and raging at his staff. Thanks to the remarkable transformation in mass communications and culture that this book chronicles, such left-wing humbug no longer gets a free pass. The consequences for our political life are momentous.
Conservatives have long lamented the Lefts near monopoly over the institutions of opinion and information, a monopoly that has enabled liberal opinion-makers to present their views as rock-solid truth and to sweep aside ideas and beliefs they dont like as unworthy of argument. But as CBS discovered to its dismay, the Right now has a sizable media presence of its own. Almost overnight, conservatives have mastered the proliferating new media of talk radio, cable television, and the Internet, and they have benefited from a big shift in book publishing. No longer do the New York Times, the big networks, and the rest of the elite liberal media have an all-but-monolithic power to set the terms of the nations political and cultural debate.
It was Matt Drudges Internet news site, the Drudge Report, that first leaked script excerpts from The Reagans (excerpts that were scheduled to appear in the New York Times the next day) and then drove the story. With billions of hits a year, the Drudge Report, which shows no bias against the Right, is impossible to ignore. Just ask ultraliberal Barbra Streisand: after Drudge reported that she had spent weeks on The Reagans set (where her husband, James Brolin, was portraying the president), she quickly distanced herself from the film. Soon the whole blogospherethe rapidly expanding cybercosmos of commentary and discussionwas buzzing about The Reagans distortions, led by conservative-friendly opinion sites like National Review Online (NRO) and current-event blogs (web diaries) like InstaPundit. Writer Michael Paranzino began a web-based campaign to boycott CBS, and conservative talk radio weighed in. Cable-ratings colossus FOX News, launched in 1996 as a corrective to the media mainstreams left-wing biases, fanned the controversy, booking Paranzino on several shows.
Faced with this new mediadriven revoltunthinkable just a few short years agoand the subsequent pullout of sponsors, CBS ducked. Network boss Les Moonves shunted The Reagans to advertising-free cable subsidiary Showtime, agreeing that the series was unfair to the former president. It just doesnt work, Moonves told staffers. Listen, we are not afraid of controversy, wed go out there if it came in at 5050, pro and con, but it simply isnt working. Its biased.
In the election year of 2004, the new media turned up the heat. It put CBS right at the center of an even more significant controversy: Rathergate, the liberal medias gtterdmmerung. On September 8, CBS News anchor Dan Rather famously took to the air on 60 Minutes II trumpeting newly obtained Texas Air National Guard documents from the early 1970s, which purported to show that President George W. Bush had neglected his guard duties three decades ago. In a close election, the revelations hurt W.s reelection hopesor would have, had they been true.
Rathers scoop began to unravel almost instantly, thanks to intrepid bloggers.
Later that afternoon, Little Green Footballs host Charles Johnson, a webpage designer by trade, used Microsoft Word default settings to create a seemingly exact replica of one of the memos. At this point, anyone following the blogosphere sleuthing knew that CBSs story was bogus. These sites had readerships of thousands. But when Drudge linked to Power Line60 Minutes Documents on Bush Might Be Fake blared the headlinemillions learned of the rising scandal.
CBS dug in, calling the bloggers partisan political operatives. Former CBS News exec and now CNN news head Jonathan Klein, appearing on FOX News, sniffed that the typical blogger was a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing what he thinks, nothing like CBSs professional news operation, with its multiple layers of checks and balances. (Kleins comment inspired Jim Geraghty of NROs campaign blog the KerrySpot to dub the agents of the blogosphere the pajamahadeen.) NBC anchor Tom Brokaw accused bloggers of waging a kind of political jihad against Dan Rather and CBS News.
But CBS couldnt suppress the truthnot in 2004. A few years ago, noted InstaPundits law prof host Glenn Reynolds, CBS would have flashed the documents on TV for a few seconds and no one would have seen them again. Even the people with doubts would have assumed that CBS had done its legwork. Now the blogosphereNRO, HughHe-witt. com, BeldarBlog, RealClearPolitics,
At last, the pressure grew so great that mainstream outlets ABC News and the Washington Post began reporting the story. The New York Times held out a bit longerit so wanted to believe that the story would hurt Bush that it actually ran a headline proclaiming the memos Fake but Accurate. But even the Times, which had been embarrassed the year before by the blogospheres role in uncovering reporter Jayson Blairs in-print fabrications, started to snoop around.
What emerged under this new-media and old-media spotlight wasnt pretty. CBS, it turned out, had received the memos from notorious Texan Bush-hater Bill Burkett. The networks own document experts refused to authenticate the memos, and Rathers crew had ignored relevant sourcesand anything else that countered the storys anti-Bush thrust. Worse still, CBS producer Mary Mapes had urged a campaign aide to Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry to contact Burkett about the storythe old media conspiring with the Democratic Party to bring down a Republican president. It was a paradigmatic case of liberal media biasmendacity, even.
Anchorman Rather grudgingly admitted the memos were suspect on September 20. CBS News, its reputation shredded, appointed a two-member investigative team to determine how the unreliable story had made it onto the air. Rather announced he would step down as anchor in March 2005. The investigative panels 234-page reportdecried by some critics as a whitewash, since it refused to acknowledge the role liberal bias at the network played in the scandal and left unanswered several key questions about sourcesresulted in CBSs firing of four senior executives, including Mapes.
