How do political organizations and politically-minded rich people translate money into media influence? Differently than they used to.

Back in the day it was simple. You want to influence public opinion, you start a newspaper. You want to influence elite opinion, you start a magazine. From the other direction, if you have a newspaper or a magazine, you can use it to spread messages that you support, or get funding from wealthy people or organizations that feel you’re already leaning in their directions and can use a nudge.

It’s my impression that, up until the early 1900s, partisan newspapers were the standard in this country, but then in the early part of the last century, the newspapers became less nakedly partisan. I guess this was because there was so much money to be made by attracting mass audiences, and mass audiences are less interested in reading one-sided presentations of the news.

In recent decades, there have been some partisan newspapers created from scratch, but they’ve mostly been representing extremist political views and funded by foreigners. The first of these was the Washington Times which was founded by the Moonies in the early 1980s and continues to push a right-wing agenda. Also of course there’s Fox News, which is pretty much part of the Republican party and has been very successful, both as a propaganda outlet in its own right and also in doing its part to set the national news media agenda. The Republican party is not a fringe group like the Unification Church; the point is that these news organizations are ideological and partisan in a way that is common with political magazines (the Nation, National Review, etc.) and websites, but different from major twentieth-century U.S. media, which even when they had strong political slants (for example, the Chicago Tribune’s isolationism or various New York newspapers’ internationalism in the 1940s) were still mostly reporting straight news. With the Washington Times and Fox News, the Moonies and the Republican Party are going back to an earlier tradition, more like the partisan-aligned newspapers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Which is not to say that they’re bad guys for doing this. Running a partisan newspaper or TV network is a legitimate strategy, and if the Democrats have not gotten their act together to do this, that’s on them.

I’ve written earlier about the asymmetry of media bias, with Democratic reporters–a survey awhile ago found that twice as many journalists identify as Democrats than as Republicans–biasing their reporting by choosing which topics to focus on, and Republican news organizations (notably Fox News and other Murdoch organizations) biasing in the other direction by flat-out attacks. I’ve never been clear on which sort of bias is more effective. On one hand, Fox can create a media buzz out of nothing at all; on the other hand, perhaps there’s something more insidious about nonpartisan news organizations indirectly creating bias by their choice of what to report.

Moving aside from major newspapers and TV news outlets, there were some more partisan, or ideological, outlets on the fringes of the U.S. media from the 1960s through the early 2000s. I’m thinking here of talk radio, which mostly fell in the spectrum from sports talk to far-right ranters, with a lot of religious programming thrown in, and of weekly city newspapers that featured entertainment listings, sex ads, and mostly left-wing journalism of the muckraking variety. Some of these programs and newspapers must have been created primarily for ideological reasons, but they were also a way to make money, and I guess there was a natural market segmentation, with weekly newspapers in liberal cities and conservative talk radio in other parts of the country.

Nowadays it’s all the internet, so you don’t get this sort of geographic segmentation. Maybe that will be good news in the sense of reducing geographic political polarization. Nowadays you can get your left-wing or right-wing take on anything, from anywhere with an internet connection.

But, to return to the 1900s for a moment, somewhere along the way, the model switched from creating news organizations to buying ads. In the mid-twentieth-century, political advertising was seen as somewhat disreputable, but by the end of the century, it was accepted that the way to run a mass campaign was to raise tons of money and then spend lots of it on TV ads.

The basic setup was this: The mass media–newspapers, radio, local and network TV–exist. You can pressure them on the margin (“working the refs,” etc.) but mostly you just accept them as part of the system, you pay for ads and you do your best to get free media time via press releases or whatever.

One thing that you didn’t see was political organizations buying or trying to take control of the mass media. The most notable exception may have been Henry Ford buying the Dearborn Independent and turning it into a racist rag, but the Dearborn Independent was not a major newspaper before that purchase. It’s not like he tried to take over the Detroit News. Similarly, political organizations would start new magazines and new think tanks, only rarely taking over existing institutions.

Recently, though, we’ve been seeing more instances of political shutdowns or takeovers of existing media. The big step might well have been the shutdown of the left-wing gossip site Gawker by the right-wing investor Peter Theil. More recently there was the alignment of CBS News with the Trump administration and threats against the New York Times.

So the far right has been operating on four tracks: (a) following the Fox News template with increasingly extreme fringe media outlets (Newsmax, One America News Network, etc.), (b) giving arms-length encouragement to extremist provocateurs such as Alex Jones, (c) taking over formerly independent outlets (CBS, Twitter, etc.), and (d) attacking or trying to neutralize remaining mass media (New York Times, Washington Post, etc).

And one question is why this wasn’t being done earlier. Back in the 1970s, say, why didn’t a bunch of rich guys get together and buy one of the big 3 TV networks, or some major metropolitan dailies? Or, for that matter, why didn’t some rich left-wingers do this? I can give a few answers:

1. There were some super-rich men in the oil industry etc., but it’s my impression that industrial money at the time was more tied up in the companies and not so much at the discretion of a few tycoons. So, for example, Gulf + Western acquired Paramount Pictures, but this was for their investment portfolio, not so they could get Paramount to release corporate propaganda.

2. There were restrictions on what you could do on TV, politically. The Fairness Doctrine said that you had to present both sides of any issue, so it wouldn’t have been possible, before 1980, to have the TV equivalent of a partisan newspaper.

3. There was less partisan polarization, so even if you were a right-wing Republican tycoon or, less likely, a left-wing Democratic tycoon, you wouldn’t just support your party straight-up on almost every issue. There could be a logit to a conservative tycoon buying a newspaper and giving it a conservative line, but it might just seem weird for it to follow a partisan Republican line. Such a thing would look too much like Pravda, which in the mid-to-late 1900s would be an embarrassment. And there were some newspapers back then that took pretty hard-line free-market, anti-communist lines, so in lots of cities there’d be no need for any action in that direction.

4. I guess the other thing is that major newspapers were mostly not for sale. I don’t know the full story on this one . . . before Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, did any other rich guys make a bid for it? What about the Miami Herald or other influential papers?

5. It wouldn’t make business sense. It’s my impression that, in the mid-to-late twentieth century, city newspapers mostly represented the local business elite. This again ties into the relative lack of partisan polarization in that earlier era. Suppose you were a rich guy 50 or 80 years ago with a strong attachment to the Republican party. Would it have made sense for you to buy a major newspaper and turn it into a partisan rag? Maybe not. The paper was probably already supporting your business interests already, and by making it partisan you might just antagonize a lot of people and hurt your bottom line. It would make more sense to let the mass media do its thing and exert your influence through donations to campaigns and to political magazines, think tanks, etc.

There’s also the question of how things are different for the left and the right. In the late twentieth-century, the news media had a center-left tilt on national politics–for example, surveys found that about twice as many journalists identified as Democrats than as Republicans–so this perhaps explains some of the Democratic party’s relative lack of aggressiveness in media strategy. Nowadays, though, there’s a lot less of traditional independent media, and web platforms are more important. Twitter’s gone in the Nazi direction but still has lots of left-wing stuff on it too; platforms such as Facebook and Google seem to be trying to keep all sides happy; I don’t know how this all shakes out.

There’s also an interaction with political polarization in the activities that the parties might choose to do, or not do, because of the fear of backlash, either in their party or among the electorate.

This all seems worth studying from a political science perspective. Back in 2012, Justin Gross, Cosma Shalizi, and I reviewed a book on media bias by political scientist Tim Groseclose. We wrote:

In Left Turn, Groseclose concludes that, in a world without media bias, the average American voter would be positioned at around 25 on a 0-100 scale, where 0 is a right-wing Republican and 100 is a left-wing Democrat. In this world, a balanced media might include some TV networks promoting the view that abortion should be illegal under all circumstances and subject to criminal penalties, whereas others might merely hold that Roe v. Wade is unconstitutional; some media outlets might support outright discrimination against gays whereas others might be neutral on civil unions but oppose gay marriage; and on general politics there might be some newspapers that endorse hard-right Republican candidates (0 on Groseclose’s 0-100 scale) whereas those on the left would endorse positions near those currently held by Senator Olympia Snowe. But instead of this, Groseclose must endure a world where he estimates the average voter is around 50, with all that follows from this, and he attributes this difference to media bias.

With a dozen years of hindsight, we can say that some of this happened and some of it didn’t. The news media landscape really has changed to the extent that far-right views are in the mainstream much more than before. The median opinion hasn’t changed so much, though. It’s just that extreme opinions are more respectable. More recently, political scientist Eunji Kim has argued that reality TV is a major influence on politics and has its own slant. In a study of data from 1869-1928, Gentzkow et al. estimate that “newspapers have a robust positive effect on political participation, with one additional newspaper increasing both presidential and congressional turnout by approximately 0.3 percentage points.” A lot has happened since 1928: newspapers were supplanted by TV which in turn is being taken over by the internet which in turn is being colonized by AI slop. But it makes sense that a steady stream of political news will make it more likely that people will vote. A third of a percentage point is pretty close to zero, which I guess is telling us that, even in the period from 1869-1928, there were many other information sources out there. Including having a friend or neighbor who is politically connected.

Finally, let me emphasize that the above discussion, while focusing on Republican strategy, is not intended to take a partisan stand in either direction. The Republicans have had a more active media strategy than the Democrats in recent years, but I don’t think this implies that the Democrats are more moral or principled on the issue; they’ve just been more constrained in being more vulnerable to criticism from the independent news media.

For the liberals out there who are annoyed at the flood of right-wing propaganda being spewed by Fox, Twitter, etc., or, earlier, right-wing talk shows on the radio, or “copaganda” in popular entertainment, just think of how frustrating it was for urban conservatives to have to wade through left-wing political takes every time they picked up the local free paper to check the band listings. Or to watch big-budget movies and TV shows with a liberal agenda. But I guess that will be changing with these TV networks and movie studios being bought by partisans on the right.