This morning on RCP we’ve posted an important essay by Brian Anderson appearing in the Winter edition of City Journal (a fantastic quarterly published by the Manhattan Institute that always carries superb, thought-provoking articles) discussing attempts by the left to silence conservative media outlets.

There are a few core reasons why Republicans have become the majority party in America. David Brooks hit on an important one yesterday, outlining how the Democrats’ antipathy towards the traditional values of their 1930-1980 working-class base has driven millions of voters to the GOP.

One of the other reasons Republicans have become the majority party is they have begun to achieve a greater degree of overall media parity. The mainstream networks and newspapers are still overwhelming biased toward the liberal viewpoint (CBS, ABC, NY Times, etc….), but the rise of talk radio over the last 20 years, and the rise of the Internet and FOX News in the last ten years has significantly leveled the playing field for conservatives.

Last year, Tom and I wrote an article for The Masthead discussing how this change had a significant impact on the 2004 election:

The massive growth and reach of the Internet and FOX over the last four years, combined with a thriving network of local and syndicated talk radio programs created an alternative channel through which large portions of the country could receive news and information.  The result is that for the first time ever vital parts of the news agenda were set and opinion was framed by members of the new media.

Nothing illustrates the significance of this shift and its impact on the political landscape better than the Swift Boat Veterans story.  The group originally held a press conference on May 4, 2004 where they announced their opposition to John Kerry. At the time, the story was widely noted in the blogosphere but barely received a mention in the mainstream media.

This lack of initial coverage no doubt contributed to the Kerry campaign’s decision three months later to try and ignore the Swift Boat Veterans when they resurfaced in August with the publication of Unfit for Command.  This strategy hinged on the assumption that the 800-pound gorillas of the “big media” would ignore the story as well, keeping it relegated to the fringes of political debate and deflecting any potentially serious damage away from Mr. Kerry.

Initially, this is exactly what transpired as most members of large, mainstream media outlets deemed the Swiftees’ charges baseless, partisan, and unfit for coverage. 

Members of the new media, however, dove in and began fact-checking the accusations, leading to yet more questions and contradictions. Two weeks after the Swift Boat Veterans ran their first ad and Unfit for Command started zooming up the bestseller lists, it became clear that blogs, talk radio and FOX News had combined to generate such a high degree of public interest over the story that it simply became impossible for other major media outlets to ignore.

On August 19 John Kerry was forced to make a public statement responding to the Swift Boat Veterans’ charges. The following day The New York Times ran a front page story attacking the Swift Boat Vets and alleging a web of connections with Karl Rove and the Bush campaign.

Twenty, ten, or perhaps even five years ago the Kerry campaign strategy might have worked because traditional media outlets still held a monopoly over deciding which news stories were disseminated to the public. If big media deemed a story wasn’t worthy of coverage, then it didn’t get covered.  The 2004 election proved that those days are gone.

In his essay, Anderson notes that John Kerry bitterly acknowledged this new reality after the election as well:

“There has been a profound and negative change in the relationship of America’s media with America," John Kerry told the Boston Globe’s Thomas Oliphant after losing the 2004 presidential race. “We learned that the mainstream media, over the course of the last year, did a pretty good job of discerning,” he said, inaccurately. “But there’s a . . . sub-media that talks and keeps things going for entertainment purposes rather than for the flow of information,” he complained. “This all began, incidentally, when the Fairness Doctrine ended,” Kerry maintained. “You would have had a dramatic change in the discussion in this country had we still had a Fairness Doctrine in the course of the last campaign.”

Anderson goes on to quote Al Gore and Howard Dean, both of whom call for a need to “renew the Fairness Doctrine” - which of course is nothing more than a back-door way to silence talk radio, FOXNews, and other right-leaning media voices. Anderson warns:

If the Dems take back Congress or the White House, watch out. Nothing would please them more than to drag the country back to the good old days, when liberals didn’t have to put up with Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham and Bill O’Reilly and Matt Drudge and the countless other upstarts recasting our public debate.

The left is making a mistake with this attempt to silence their opponents’ political speech. First, because it reinforces a misconception on their part: namely, that if they only didn’t have to contend with the “lies” from Rush, Hannity and O’Reilly they would be winning elections. Second, it delays the real solution to their minority status which is coming up with a new set of ideas and policy prescriptions that they can take to the American people and defend in open and free debate.