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These new organizations should employ a "faculty of scholars" to publish in journals, write "books, paperbacks and pamphlets," with speakers and a speaker's bureau, as well as develop organizations to evaluate textbooks, and engage in a "long range effort" to correct the purported imbalances in campus faculties. "The television networks should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance." Powell added that this effort must also target the judicial system. Thirty years later, this is a prescient description of the Right and its rise to dominance in America. Understanding that political change takes time, several major right-wing foundations embarked on an unprecedented long-term campaign to implement Powell's suggestions. By 1999, researcher David Callahan, in a study titled "$1 Billion for Ideas: Conservative Think Tanks in the 1990s," found that the top 20 conservative foundations had spent over $1 billion on this ideological effort in the 1990s alone. For the past several decades the Free-Market Right - and with the advent of the Bush Administration, a rejuvenated Neoconservative movement - have influenced the parameters and content of key public policy debates in this country.
The Free-Market Right provided the theory and shaped economic and political initiatives that have dominated domestic discourse - nurtured, funded, supported, massaged and financed by far thinking right-wing foundations and philanthropists. Conservative foundations distinguished themselves by eschewing the "band-aid" approach of progressive, liberal and moderate-minded foundations. Right wing funders prioritized ideology over service while "liberal" foundations attempted (unsuccessfully) to mend a rapidly eroding social safety net. Lynde and Harry Bradley, Scaife, Olin Foundation, a string of Coors' Family funders, Smith-Richardson Foundation and other conservative foundations were single-minded in their quest to develop an enduring infrastructure that would create and market their agenda: From school vouchers to public school privatization; from welfare reform to the evisceration of environmental regulations; from the elimination of affirmative action to the destruction of the remainders of the New Deal; and in this age of the permanent war on terrorism, the huge increases in military expenditures. A Conservative Communications Revolution In a long (very long) recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, Brian C. Anderson, senior editor of City Journal, a publication of the conservative Manhattan Institute, discussed three reasons that "the left's near monopoly over the institutions of opinion and information…is skidding to a startlingly swift halt." "Three huge changes in communications have injected conservative ideas right into the heart of that debate," Anderson maintains. "Though commentators have noted each of these changes separately, they haven't sufficiently grasped how, taken together, they add up to a revolution."
Removing 'The Reagans': A Campaign for the Ages The skill of right wing organizations in managing the media through mobilizing the full scope of their resources was clearly evident during the recent brouhaha over CBS' four-hour miniseries on Ronald Reagan. The film - which revealed some of the former president's warts - became a lightening rod for the Right. By the time the dust cleared, a multi-pronged conservative mobilization had forced CBS to capitulate, possibly moving the miniseries to the pay cable channel Showtime, a sister network at Viacom. The New York Times reported that "The Reagans" "began life four years ago as an ABC production….but ABC passed on an early version of the film, in part because 'it was very soft; it was not controversial in the least,' said one network executive." CBS took over the project, and "the story line…changed. While the network announced that the television movie would be a love story about the Reagans' relationship, one executive involved in the production said the producers had made it clear in several meetings they were aiming to produce a highly controversial film." On October 21, the New York Times "provided details…and that alerted conservative backers of the former president that the film was not going to be entirely sympathetic." Those revelations brought a blitzkrieg of right wing organizing against CBS. Critics jumped on the so-called inaccuracy of the script (as revealed by the New York Times), and heaped scorn upon the lead actors - James Brolin, the husband of one of the Right's favorite targets, Barbra Streisand, and Judy Davis - criticizing them for being anti-Reagan. (After CBS surrendered, Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund wrote: "Mrs. Reagan is played by Australian actress…Davis, who told the New York Times last month that she deplores the 'ugly specter of patriotism' she has seen in America since 9/11. President Reagan is played by…Brolin….[who] has told reporters he believes Nancy Reagan 'took over' the White House as her husband's health allegedly failed. Producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, longtime collaborators of Ms. Streisand's, are liberal activists who next March will accept an award from the left-leaning Human Rights Campaign for 'their sensitive and positive portrayals of GayLesbianBisexualTransgender characters in numerous projects.'") The enormously popular Web site, The Drudge Report, quickly took up the issue; the president's son, right wing radio talk show host Michael Reagan got involved; the cable news networks, especially the Fox News Channel and MSNBC featured stories and interviews with mostly Reagan supporters; right wing groups sent out e-mail Alerts urging constituents to contact CBS chairman, Leslie Moonves. On October 28, the Media Research Center, a longtime conservative media watchdog group run by L. Brent Bozell III, wrote a letter to a list of 100 top television sponsors urging them to "refuse to associate your products with this movie." Michael Paranzino, a former Republican Congressional staff member, started up a Web site called BoycottCBS.com. Paranzino had his fifteen minutes: He appeared on Bill O'Reilly's Fox News program and Joe Scarborough's on MSNBC. The Republican National Committee entered the fray," as Ed Gillespie, the GOP chairman, "held a teleconference with journalists calling for CBS to appoint a team of historians and associates of Mr. Reagan to review the film for accuracy." CBS caved and another battle in the "culture wars" - albeit a small one - had been won. "We used technology that was not available 10 years ago to do in nine days what used to take months," Paranzino told the New York Times. "We created a genuine, national, grass-roots movement that forced a broadcasting titan to cancel one of its key sweeps weeks series." For years right wing organizations have kept their constituents mobilized by trumpeting the liberal threat to traditional family values. These campaigns - whether against same-sex marriage, partial-birth abortion, or a silly miniseries about the Reagans - use the best information technology available to instantly communicate with constituents and keep them on a permanent war footing: Ever active; ever vigilant; and always agitated and mobilized. How much is victory over the so-called liberal media on behalf of the legacy of a modern conservative icon worth? For the right wing movement, it is out of this whole cloth that electoral victories are made. |
Rupert Murdoch's Fox News cable station is credited with the rise of conservatives to increased power 
The Rev. Jerry Falwell and his Religious Right colleagues have organized a grassroots conservative movement through their churches 
Conservative gay columnist Andrew Sullivan's Web site also is playing a role in the growing influence of the right wing