News Brief: How the Right Invented — and Exploited — the "Liberal Media" Trope
Citations Needed
Citations Needed
4.8 • 4.1K Ratings
🗓️ 22 April 2026
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this News Brief, we talk with A. J. Bauer, assistant professor at the University of Alabama, about his new book," Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against the Press". In our discussion we break down the corporate and ideological forces that shaped the popular idea mainstream media was crawling with fifth columnist agitators hostile to the values of Real America.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I'm Nima Shirazi. I'm Adam Johnson. |
| 0:08.1 | You can follow the show on Twitter and Blue Sky at CitationsPod, Facebook, Citations Needed, |
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| 0:32.9 | We release these news briefs in between our regularly scheduled full-liked episodes |
| 0:36.9 | of Citations Needed, now in its ninth season. And today, we are joined now by... these news briefs in between are regularly scheduled full-length episodes of citations needed, |
| 0:38.0 | now in its ninth season. And today, we are joined now by A.J. Bower, a historian, ethnographer, |
| 0:44.0 | and former journalist, now assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative |
| 0:48.9 | Media and Programming Chair of the Office of Politics, Communication, and Media at the University of Alabama. |
| 0:55.5 | His writing has appeared in Bloomberg, Politico, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Columbia Journalism, Review, The Guardian, and elsewhere. |
| 1:01.9 | And he is the author of the newly published book, Making the Liberal Media, |
| 1:06.3 | how conservatives built a movement against the press, which was published by Columbia University Press |
| 1:12.0 | in March of this year, 2026. The book chronicles how the right wing developed its own concept |
| 1:18.6 | of the so-called liberal media, incorporated opposition to said media into U.S. |
| 1:24.8 | Right Wing political identity, and then use that hostility as a springboard for |
| 1:29.6 | a media industry marked by the likes of William F. Buckley, Rush Limbaugh, and more recently, |
| 1:35.3 | the Ellison family. So let's get right to it. AJ, thank you so much for joining us today on |
| 1:40.8 | citations needed. Of course. Thanks y'all for having me. So I want to begin by talking about the kind of origins of the liberal media narrative, |
| 1:48.9 | something that went from a sort of fringe to a conventional wisdom over a set period of time, |
| 1:53.0 | but I think fairly quickly all things considered. |
... |
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