A.J. Bauer, "Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against The Press" (Columbia UP, 2026)

A. J. Bauer's Making the Liberal Media traces the origins and development of the idea that the mainstream press is biased toward liberalism, focusing on how conservative activists, institutions, and media entrepreneurs adopted and adapted media-critique techniques to build a movement. Bauer shows how earlier progressive structural media criticism was repurposed by anti-communist and conservative actors from the 1940s onward, creating practices and audiences that sustained conservative media activism. Drawing on extensive archival research, he follows key figures, organizations, and moments—such as Facts Forum, Fulton Lewis Jr., H.L. Hunt, the Fairness Doctrine debates, and the John Birch Society—to map continuities and changes in conservative media strategy. The book emphasizes how conservatives taught their audiences to perform media criticism and how that cultivated an imagined conservative community that perceived itself as embattled by mainstream journalism. Ultimately, Bauer links these historical developments to contemporary efforts at media ownership and capture, offering insights about the political productivity of the belief in a "liberal media. "