Right-wing media ‘hijacking’ Republican Party, concludes Harvard report

It’s only fitting that Republican candidates are lobbying Fox News intensely to be among the 10 selected for the first GOP presidential debate on Aug. 6. The Fox role as sponsor bolsters the thesis of a new study that argues conservative media now have undue influence in the Republican Party. Jackie Calmes, a veteran Washington correspondent for The New York Times, makes the case that it’s now no longer Republican Party leaders setting the party agenda. No, “It is conservative media -- not just talk-show celebrities Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Laura Ingraham, but also lesser-known talkers like Steve Deace, and an expanding web of ‘news’ sites and social media outlets with financial and ideological alliances with far-right anti-government, anti-establishment groups like Heritage Action, Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth and FreedomWorks. Calmes did her research and writing during a recent Harvard fellowship.

Her report is published by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She’s now back at her paper’s DC bureau. Calmes and others concede that the existence of very conservative media is nothing especially new. Indeed, other books and academic research have explored the same terrain, including a very revealing 2004 book, “The Republican Noise Machine,” by David Brock, a onetime conservative polemicist who by then had made an ideological turn and is now a high-profile Hillary Clinton acolyte. And while conservative media will surely discount Calmes’ analysis merely due to her affiliation with what some deem the Great Liberal Nemesis, namely The New York Times, it’s clear that their impact has grown sharply since Brock’s own transformation, as detailed by many longtime Washington observers of the nexus of politics and media.