Messengers of the Right

Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics

By: Nicole Hemmer

Narrated by: Maria Rose

Length: 13 hrs and 42 mins

Publisher's summary

From Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to Glenn Beck and Matt Drudge, Americans are accustomed to thinking of right-wing media as integral to contemporary conservatism. But today's well-known personalities make up the second generation of broadcasting and publishing activists. Messengers of the Right tells the story of the little-known first generation.

Beginning in the late 1940s, activists working in media emerged as leaders of the American conservative movement. They not only started an array of enterprises - publishing houses, radio programs, magazines, book clubs, television shows - they also built the movement. While these media activists disagreed profoundly on tactics and strategy, they shared a belief that political change stemmed not just from ideas but from spreading those ideas through openly ideological communications channels.

In Messengers of the Right, Nicole Hemmer explains how conservative media became the institutional and organizational nexus of the conservative movement, transforming audiences into activists and activists into a reliable voting base. Messengers of the Right follows broadcaster Clarence Manion, book publisher Henry Regnery, and magazine publisher William Rusher as they evolved from frustrated outsiders in search of a platform into leaders of one of the most significant and successful political movements of the 20th century.

The book is published by University of Pennsylvania Press.

©2016 University of Pennsylvania Press (P)2018 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"Joins the must-read list for any student of the history of conservatism, the history of modern media, or indeed the history of the polarized political culture in which we find ourselves today." (David Greenberg, author of Republic of Spin)

"Read Nicole Hemmer's superb new book, and you'll never see 'liberal mainstream media' in the same way again. ...This is political history - and American history - at its finest." (Margaret O'Mara, University of Washington)

Dull and poor narration.

Dry recitation of the mid 20th century conservative movement. Far too little on contemporary right wing media. Poor narration with many mispronunciations and false starts. A disappointment.

Good story, fair narration

Interesting look at the roots of today's right wing media. Multiple times narrator mispronounced words and names. Toward the end, there were a few moments where the recording repeated a phrase or sentence.

Informative book, terrible performance

The narrator suffered from a lack of affect throughout, sounding more like a computer generated voice than a voice actor. Worse, the acoustic environment and volume level shift wildly sentence to sentence, as if each sentence were recorded in separate sessions then strung together with no post production.

An armature could have done better.

Very important content, very poor narration

Fascinating story of the first generation of conservative media marred by poor narration. Words and names mispronounced distract from this work of scholarship. At one point words and even sentences are repeated, thanks to poor editing. Narrator’s voice even sounds different as different recording sessions spliced together.

Dull as dirt

I wanted to like this. I'm fascinated by how conservative media has changed political discourse and corrupted fact-based dialogue. But here's the damning truth: It's boring. It reads like a plodding doctoral thesis (which it was). David Brock covered the same things in the superior "The Republican Noise Machine." Like this book, Brock outlines the right's broad strategy to control narratives and sway public opinion -- from think tanks to "liberal media" watchdog organizations -- but manages to hold his readers' attention.

Hemmer is an historian, so more attention is given to the origins of the conservative media complex than to its recent and far more influential phase.

Terrible sound production!

It's too bad that Ms. Hemmer's fine history of conservative media is so marred by the audio quality. I couldn't finish it and bought the book version. It sounds like it was recorded in a shower on a cellphone. Amateur Youtube videos have better recording quality than this audiobook.