Customer Reviews

The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy

5 star:		(45)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(20)

 

 

Brock explores the history and structure of the right wing propaganda machine, and its impressive success in influencing mainstream media.

The book has two principal virtues: it goes into history, tracing the right from the Goldwater era, thereby including much valuable material not found in some similar volumes which focus more exclusively on events of the Clinton/Bush years. This gives the book a distinct and more thoughtful perspective. And it shows the endless interconnections of the various people and organizations discussed in substantial, occasionally numbing detail. By the time you finish this book, you will realize that Hillary's famous 'vast right wing conspiracy' is very real.

The main fault is that it is often overly partisan and indulges in some gratuitous attacks. For instance, Kevin Phillips is spoken of as being influenced by two obscure Italian writers I've never heard of, who Brock says were also major influences in Fascism. Offered without further elaboration, this amounts to nothing more than a cheap exercise in guilt by association.

Compared to the similar books by Franken and Conason, this one has, as I noted, more detail and more historical perspective. It isn't written as well, and certainly lacks the humor of Franken. It also focusses more on media and propaganda and has little exploration of issues and policies, except those, such as the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, that relate specifically to the media. (Perhaps the most comparable to this book would be the recent book by Alterman, which I haven't read.) Conason is far more interested in broad policy questions, while Franken's book, the most entertaining but a disorganized grab-bag, bounces unpredictably between media criticism, satire, and serious policy argument.

I got an advance copy of this book, having been an observer of Mr Brock's trajectory over the years. He has done an amazing service in this orderly, calm and utterly devastating history of the rise of the radical right's propaganda machine and its subversion of our nation's media. Brock begins at the beginning, with a treatise by a woman named Efron arguing that the GOP and business interests need their own distinct media. Efron gets Nixon's attention, Nixon tries to put Efron's plan into action, Nixon runs into the Watergate buzzsaw. But the seed is planted, back in the 1970's, and then cultivated by GOP activists like William Simon, financed heavily by Richard Mellon Scaife, Olin, Coors dynstasties etc. (who Brock calls the four sisters). Until the whole thing flowers: all of a sudden a huge battery of propaganda houses like Heritage and American Enterprise, funded by oil companies and GOP financiers, are churning out a counter history of the American experience. ANything counter to GOP orthodoxy is branded 'liberal'; Murdoch and Sun Myung Moon's media empires swiftly join the cause, whose committed purpose is to subdue America's independent media and convert it into service of corporate interests generally and GOP political figures specifically.

Throughout this book, which will be the standard text in colleges and for historians, Brock's tone is calm and steady and he lets the facts speak for themselves (very unlikehis earlier books, which are overly polemical -- duh). The research here is encyclopedic. (In a book about media, virtually every quote is on the record).

It is amazing to this reviewer how our media could have been so thoroughly corrupted. How our politicians could have so haplessly junked the Fairness Doctrine which would have smothered the entire Fox News Propaganda Machine in its cradle. It is amazing to me that a small and toxic band of right wing ideologues, (nevertheless armed with billions of dollars of their patrons' money) could so effectively intimidate and cow the so-called guardians of our democracy. Is the triumph of the radical right wing the fault of the Neo-cons, or is it our fault, for our complacency and our timidity?

No reasonable argument can really be presented against the now commonly held view that our country's media outlets were almost completely bought out a decade or so ago by the Right Wing. Millions upon millions of dollars have been spent by a small but powerful group of conservative-financed conglomerates in order to ensure that many of the nation's radio programs, periodicals, web sites and TV news programs continually spew unrelentingly shrill pro-Republican rhetoric all over us. Clear Channel alone owns over 1,200 radio stations across the country, each and every one of them gleefully twisting and manipulating news and opinion 24 hours a day for millions of listeners.

David Brock was once an extremely well paid shill for the Republican Party, and he knows first hand exactly what kind of dirty tricks are involved in the furtherance of their takeover of the media. Unlike most of his ilk, he became consumed by remorse for spreading the party line (via misinformation and downright lies). Having developed a true sense of morality and decency, Brock ultimately rejected the dark side forever. His superb book, BLINDED BY THE RIGHT, detailed his years as a propagandist and fully disclosed exactly what he saw and heard while within the conservative ranks that led to his conversion.

In THE REPUBLICAN NOISE MACHINE, Brock provides us with an insider's history of the extremely well financed movement that has deliberately and insidiously taken over our media. He compares the conservative media's use of relentless propaganda to Communist subversion activities. Ever wonder why every nonsensical anti-liberal rumor and innuendo makes it to the front page of your local newspaper? Brock shows how the Republicans have deliberately destroyed the fine line between fact and opinion in order to allow conservative-fueled smear campaigns full rein. Ten years ago, it would have been impossible for the hideous Ann Coulter to appear on a cable news program and proclaim to millions of viewers that Bill Clinton is "a rapist"; now, thanks to the Republican Noise Machine, these kinds of odious and slanderous comments -- always aimed at liberals -- are simply par for the course.

Joe Conason's excellent BIG LIES tackled many of these same issues, but Brock takes it all a step further and lets us all see exactly how and why the Republican Party has been able to corrupt and, perhaps, forever destroy every last bit of journalistic credibility our once great and fair media had. Brock's penetrating critique and his undeniable credibility make THE REPUBLICAN NOISE MACHINE one of the most powerful exposes of our media ever published.

Let's nip this in the bud. David Rhodes has never read Brock's book but is simply attempting 'dirty tricks' for which the radical right wing is famous. See his host of other reviews, raves for Ann Coulter, etc. Phony balonies like Mr Rhodes are of course very much the subject of Brock's book -- and his outing of them, although part of a much larger and more comprehensive story, makes interesting reading. Buy this book and you will understand why right wing thugs like Mr Rhodes lurk on these message boards trying to subvert an open forum. It is all part of The Republican Noise Machine -- and their days are coming to an end.

David Brock's book points out how, how, over the past 20 years, a wish list of beliefs that the far right wanted to be echoed by mainstream america has been beaten in to the public conversation by a massively financed corporate media -

Think about it: Almost all broadcast news comes from one of six huge conglomerates: Viacom, General Electric's NBC, Time Warner, Disney, Fox NewsCorp, and Clear Channel. A republican controlled congress and White House means tens of billions extra profit for each of these companies via favorable Tax and Deregulation policies. Yet the right would like you to believe that these companies generate liberal spin ?!?! Please.

This is the same "Liberal" media that rapidly labeled 2 tour Vietnam combat veteran John Kerry a coward, and labeled George Bush, the man who went AWOL from a cushy slot in the Texas Air Guard, a gutsy, heroic straight shooter.

This is a great and informative book.

David Brock knows whereof he speaks, having left in disgust the depraved thought ghetto erroneously known as Bush compassionate conservatism. The eruption of displeasure in the form of reviews downgrading his book without any refuting comments is evidence of the feathers he has ruffled.

Brock existed in an ozone of hatred working for Reverend Moon's Washington Times and Richard Mellon Scaife's The American Spectator, and was part of the evidence manufacturing campaign to discredit and hopefully impeach Bill Clinton. He eventually felt ashamed of what he had become and courageously turned his back on the right wing hate machine.

After turning his back on rightist hate Brock took one more courageous step forward, using his writing skills and knowledge of a vicious movement to expose it in print. "Blinded by the Right" was his first effort. Now that the hate is out there for all to see thanks to Brock's first effort at exposing rightist hypocrisy, revealing that they are not the compassionate religionists they claim to be, his next step is to reveal how the hate machine operates.

Brock's revelations prove eloquently the statement made by Hillary Clinton that was ridiculed at the time, that a well nurtured, highly organized right wing conspiracy exists. It begins with the mega dollars of Scaife and Moon, who finance not only partisan right wing journals, but orchestrate propaganda proclaiming that the major media are leftist-dominated. Bill O'Reilly has stated with a straight face that Faux News is objective, and that what appears as right wing to leftist zealots is really only balanced coverage. Anyone who believes that might as well believe that Sean Hannity is a socialist.

Through dollar might and skilled repetition, the right has been able to take lies manufactured from the Drudge Report and send them to the most watched and read media channels. All this is done in the interest of letting the news be read and heard, all under the disguise of objectivity and fair commentary.

Brock takes you beyond the facade and provides the raw facts. He knows these people, is willing to tell what he knows, and the right cringes. The right's only response is to huff and puff, stating that he is producing trash. He has too much ammunition for them. To know them is to expose them. Having been exposed, they are revealed, in the manner of Bush and fellow emperor Cheney, as wearing no clothes.

David Brock knows whereof he speaks, having been a highly paid member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. Fortunately for the country, he has changed his ways and is now seeking to make amends for the damage he and his former cohorts have done. The Republican Noise Machine, like its predecessor Blinded By The Right, gives names, dates, and places in stunning detail of the ways in which the Right Wing has seized control of a significant portion of the media resources of our nation. Using their access to the airwaves to spew propaganda, the Right Wing has sought to set the political agenda of this country as effectively as Goebbels managed the Third Reich's news organs. To a frightening extent, they have succeeded so well that truly "fair and balanced" reporting is threatened. Brock gives example after example of how dissenting points of view are drowned out or squeezed to the sidelines, how the party line is set by the powerful and transmitted verbatim to the faithful, and how ruthlessly opposition is squelched. The true victims,besides the truth itself, are the honest, honorable citizens who are misled and manipulated.

Fortunately, Brock and a few other brave souls have taken on the job of exposing this power hungry, hypocritical media machine. With daylight, it is to be hoped, the shadows threatening us will withdraw.

David Brock details the successful efforts of conservatives to literally control the political dialogue in our country and how hapless the liberals have been to put forth a conherent message in the battle for ideas in modern day government.

Mr. Brock's arguments are done both honestly and with total attention to details. It is a fair lambasting of how pathetic the progressive/liberals have been to communicate through the media and how successful the right wingers have been in not only getting their word out but in taking over the Republican Party pushing out the gentlemen of the stripes of Bob Michel, Hugh Scott and so on who worked with Democrats and replaced these fine men with uncompromising ideologues like the Senate Majority Leader, Bill Frist.

What is scary about Mr. Brock's book is that he is right. What is worse is that the entire mess in Iraq is in part what is the fruit of one voice-the conservatives-dominating the airwaves and dialogue. This horrible fiasco can find it's root in a society where one voice acts unstopped and where a media has not done their job by questioning the party in power.

In fact, Sean Hannity often uses "the war" to call into question anyone who challanges the Bush Administration saying they are unpatriotic. This is called having your cake and eating it too for if the conservative voice is in power and makes mistakes they can silence their critics by invoking patriotism and continue to make mistakes unchecked.

Mr. Brock concludes his book by saying their is room for hope as the internet is a freeing voice in the total domination by the conservatives of the media. I hope he's right. This crazy war has taken so many lives and permanently damaged others that their must be a role for all political voices or else this democracy we all love is doomed. Really doomed.

Anyone familiar with the history of propaganda and public
relations is aware of how much the strategies of mass persuasion
have served ideologies representing radically different
worldviews. Ideologues can benefit deeply from one another
because content is less important than form: it didn't matter to
Goebbels that Edward L. Bernays was Jewish, what mattered was
the utility of the latter's technique of massive indirection
called Big Think. Soviet propagandists learned from Nazi

propagandists (and often vice versa). Brock has done the
American public a big service in this book by showing all the
craft and design that has gone into the Republican
talking-points apparatus. Not only does he document the huge
decades-long financing that has stealthily and steadily
(with the
complicity of centrist media) created a radical right-wing
juggernaut, but he also demonstrates how right wing
ideologues have circumvented the standard academic peer-review
processes that are in place to weed out junk research and
impression mongering disguised as consequential results. The
researchers in this tradition often cry that academic
institutions are against their research, but what they
don't tell you is that they'd rather publish in venues
where their work is looked at less critically, because
it is often unsupportable, and where they simply earn
more than they ever would at universities.
Perhaps the biggest boondoggle to deliberative discussion
in American public discourse is how the media misrepresents
these researchers as "scholars" affiliated with think tanks,
giving a patina of depth and authority to ideology driven
drivel. What the media audience generally doesn't know is
that these think tanks are bastions of uniformity with
coordinated messages spread by well-dreesed commentators
whose ideological conformity are the envy of former
Soviet apparatchiks. For those who want to understand
why American discourse has coarsened in style and
become monochromatic in content, this book provides a
good starting place. For those with a broader
historical perspective, it helps one to see that
America's ideologues may be more dangerous than
ideologues of other perspectives because they've
been demonstrably more successful: their success
is not predicated on physical threat, (as the less
succesful political/economic ideologies of past), but
on proven marketing techniques lushly financed by

corporatist hereditary and new wealth. (It is intriguing
to note that for all of O'Reilly's fuss, Soros's
political support for left-wing causes is
miniscule in comparison to the largesse given by
individuals and foundations to the radical right wing.
The fact that O'Reilly doesn't lambast Soros's right
wing analogues provides elegant evidence for how tilted
and spun his program is.)
As nicely shown in Brock's book this success is also
sadly
attributable to a complacent press. You don't have to
dislike Bush to want to understand the mechanisms by
which populations can be manipulated. And, if you're an
American, there is no better way to understand this than
by understanding how the Republican Noise Machine operates.
This is a substantive book and it is partly so because of
the richness and complexity of the history of the radical
right and its present influence on American political culture.
If the books by Coulter, Stossel,
Hannity, Goldberg and company seem considerably less
substantive and considerably more shrill this is likely
because the influence on modern day America of the moderate
(let alone, the radical) left is a useful ideologically
driven phantom with, accordingly, less to document and
describe. Brock teaches us what to look out for by using
the strategems of the Republican right as a case study in the
perils of ideology.

Q. Why does Rush Limbaugh frequently insist that he is honest?

A. Because the average person would never come to that conclusion on their own.

The honesty of a commentator should be self evident. On Limbaugh, Shakespeare might say, "I think thou dost protest too much". A writer once said about Ann Coulter's book `Treason', "The distain for the reader is hard to believe, but apparently well placed". Coulter could not possibly be so blatantly dishonest with her readers and have the slightest respect for them. Rush and Ann are just two examples of the Republican `Echo Chamber' that has grown over the last three decades.

The Republican Noise machine began when conservatives discovered that the wealthy and powerful were willing to pay big bucks to have their ideas polished and disseminated. The money was/is funneled into think tanks whose raison d'ętre is to parrot the views of their patrons. There is a misconception that think tanks are analysis groups when in actuality they're more like marketing firms with ideas as products. You can't possibly do acceptable analysis of a problem when you're working a priori. Unlike traditional marketing, which is generally recognizable as marketing, think tanks present their products to news sources as opinion pieces and often as legitimate analysis. When a viewer reads an article on the Fox News website about Global Warming it may well be written by an individual or think tank bankrolled by Exxon Mobile. How much cheaper is it for any news organization, right leaning or not to simply accept a prepackaged propaganda piece from the Heritage Foundation or Cato Institute and present it as a legitimate news item rather than do their own investigation?

Think tank writers may be correct in their opinions or they may be wrong but the viewer is almost assuredly misled. Steven Milloy is never going to include evidence supporting Global Warming because he's paid by big oil not that you'd know that by reading his articles. The one absolute in think tanks is ideological purity. It has to be a soul crushing experience to be compressed into such narrow thinking. The result is a consistent message that gets echoed through conservative news sources until it becomes conventional wisdom even among moderates. Even subtle details like specific emotion evoking buzz words are included in the taking points. The goal is to produce an all encompassing propaganda barrage that literally leaves society less informed.

Conservatives have no tradition of respect for freedom of speech or diversity of opinion and Fox news owner Rupert Murdoch and news director Roger Ailes are quite open about there disrespect for journalism. This creates a toxic combination that renders the news, at best, biased opinion pieces, at worst government propaganda. Fox News is blatantly biased because conservatives feel no need to be balanced. If you're convinced unequivocally that you have the absolute right answers and the right cause why bother giving equal or even marginal credence to other ideas. As the writer points out Fox news, as the prototype for future news casting, is literally destroying journalism which surely puts a smile on Murdoch's face.

This is a terrific book packed with tons of information. It's certainly not a feel good book but it is enlightening and I highly recommend it.