Cultivating distrust of the mainstream media: Propagandists for a liberal machine and the american establishment

This chapter traces the origins of the “the Establishment” as a rhetorical figure appropriated by National Review writers, who successfully used it to construct a unifying, besieged mentality that opened space for the nascent conservative media countersphere. William F. Buckley and other National Review writers placed a critique of media bias within a broader narrative of a smug and elite “liberal Establishment” that operated across many institutions as a gatekeeper of acceptable opinions. The chapter documents that National Review writers made a case of liberal bias in media that was not solely tied to a critique of professional objectivity. Critics writing in the magazine saw purportedly objective professional coverage as tainted with the same bias as liberal journals of opinion that demanded conformity to liberal views.