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The write stuff: U.S. serial print culture from conservatives out to neo-Nazis

Library Trends, Wntr, 2008 by Chip Berlet

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This frame was circulated to mainstream daily and weekly newspapers in a syndicated column penned by Walter E. Williams and distributed June 4, 1991. Citing the Rockwell article above, Williams stated: "Since communism has been thoroughly discredited, it has been repackaged and relabeled and called environmentalism," and that the "radical animal-rights wing of the environmental movement has a lot in common with Hitler's Nazis" (pp. 3-4). The column swept back into the oppositional press in July when it appeared in Summit Journal (p. 3), but now instead of being an assertion from movement ideologues, it was the view of a mainstream columnist.

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A similar process of rhetorical migration was decried by the Clinton administration, which traced the source of many attacks on the beleaguered president to a network of oppositional right-wing media, including print serials and websites. (4) The office of the White House Counsel even prepared a memo titled "Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce," which tracked specific lurid (and generally later found to be false) allegations (White House [Clinton administration], 1995; see detailed discussion in Berlet & Lyons, 2000, pp. 310-320). The right-wing watchdog group Citizens United, run by Floyd G. Brown, had a general newsletter, Citizens Agenda, but added a special focus newsletter, Clinton Watch. Jerry Falwell joined in, with attacks on Clinton appearing in his National Liberty Journal, and The Falwell Fax. Citizens for Honest Government, launched by Pat Matrisciana, published the serial Citizen's Intelligence Digest, but the group became best known for its attack video, The Clinton Chronicles, which was followed by a book, cleverly named The Clinton Chronicles Book, edited by Matrisciana (1994). Lyons and I traced just a small part of this overlapping network, which included authors who regularly published in the right-wing oppositional press (Berlet & Lyons, 2000, p. 319). A number of alarming allegations against Clinton came from people funded or encouraged by ultraconservative activist and millionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, especially the conservative magazine, American Spectator (Berlet & Lyons 2000; Gullo, 1998).

When a social movement has a healthy and energetic set of media, including print serials, what is established is an interconnected set of rhetorical pipelines and echo chambers that amplify and repeat the messages and carry the ideology of the group into the mainstream society where it competes with other ideologies to become established as "common sense." This is how President Franklin D. Roosevelt became the godfather of "Big Government" and "Tax and Spend Liberals."

ROUND UP THE USUAL SERIALS

Secular

The flagship post-WWII secular conservative serial is the magazine National Review. While the country moved to the political right, National Review moved toward the center simply by not changing. Still, it remains oppositional in its editorial stance. Human Events, a newspaper, plays a similar role, although it is a rhetorical dirt bike to Buckley's Rolls Royce. While these two serials are published independently, many publications are attached to the array of national and state think tanks and advocacy organizations that flourished as the political right gained power.

The write stuff: U.S. serial print culture from conservatives out to neo-Nazis

Library Trends, Wntr, 2008 by Chip Berlet

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