Journalism History and Conservative Erasure

Journalism history's object of analysis has been increasingly politicized from without, eclipsed by a modern conservative movement that has successfully mobilized around a belief in a "liberal media." The elision of right-wing forms of journalism and media criticism has been a constitutive feature of the field to date, as evidenced by gaps in the critical interventions of James Carey. Narrating the long history of conservative news media criticism from the 1930s through the emergence of Accuracy in Media in the early 1970s serves to historicize the contemporary conservative "echo chamber" and demonstrates the historiographical value of an expanded conception of "journalism" as a culturally embedded and politically contested category, simultaneously defined from within and without the profession.