THE COMING BATTLE FOR THE MEDIA: Curbing the Power of the Media Elite

From the publisher of National Review, author of The Making of a New Majority Party (1975) and The Rise of the Right (1984), a didactic brief against a perceived liberal bias of the media. It is almost two decades since Spiro Agnew's controversial criticisms of the media and Edith Efron's The News Twisters became conservative vanguards for an assault upon the Fourth Estate. Rusher argues that, while the press has not changed in the interval, conservatives have now more or less taken over the halls of power and coopted the future political agenda. This gives added bite to his concern that the media no longer represents establishment opinion, but hands down its own minority version of world events. Rusher uses various techniques to prove his point; one of the oddest is his ""word-counting,"" tallying the number of words pro or con on a particular issue or person. More supportive is his use of surveys conducted among media people--who pegged themselves as liberals or Demorcrats up to 80% of the time. Rusher considers the adversarial role of the media a 20th-century phenomenon, as he does the idea of the confidentiality of sources. Perhaps his most crucial point is that, as the media becomes dominated by large corporations, these corporations can shield themselves via the media they control. More a conservative's ambush than a skirmish in a battle, but nonetheless a cogently written polemic.