Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (18 page)

An article in
Mother Jones
magazine attributed Hightower’s unpopularity with radio listeners to an invisible force that kept him “locked out of major urban areas.” The same article said Limbaugh’s success was due to his “pandering” to listeners.
¹⁹
Liberals have thus accused Limbaugh both of being manipulated by his audience and of manipulating them—to blow up buildings, for example.

The “pandering” accusation was interesting. It raised the intriguing possibility that the mysterious force holding Hightower back was his unpopularity with listeners. Could the invisible force be the hidden hand of the market? After Hightower was finally canceled, both
Mother Jones
and High-tower were still relentlessly pursuing the riddle of the free market. A
Mother Jones
interviewer asked Hightower, “Do you think it’s possible for a show like yours to actually attract advertisers?” Hightower responded, “We’re exploring that right now.”
²⁰

Until his show was canceled, Hightower recognized that consumer choice determines success on radio, extolling radio as a “very democratic little box.”
²¹
But when Hightower was canceled through lack of audience interest, he blamed “program directors and general managers,” who think, “Hey, Rush Limbaugh seems to be working, I need a Limbaugh, too.”
²²
That is a pretty good working definition of how capitalism produces goods and services that people want.

Meanwhile, all of Limbaugh’s conservative rivals have skyrocketed while taking none of his audience. Of the “top ten” radio shows in ratings—and there are actually twenty-seven on account of ties—nine are political shows. Eight of the nine are conservative. This includes, of course, Rush Limbaugh, consistently ranked as the most-listened-to radio show, followed by G. Gordon Liddy, Mike Siegel, Neal Boortz, Mike Gallagher, Michael Savage, Matt Drudge, and Michael Reagan.
²³

In July 1995, Cuomo and Gary Hart were laboring along on one lonely radio station apiece. Former Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder was stuck at eight stations. Jerry Brown was the liberal talk radio champion with forty-two stations. That same year, Pat Buchanan was on 170 stations, Oliver North on 122, and Rush Limbaugh was heard on well over 600 stations.
²⁴

It’s curious how difficult it is to obtain information on LexisNexis about the failure of liberal talk radio hosts. It is easy to track every single radio station that has ever canceled a conservative talk show host because those cancellations will be played up as evidence of a national trend. When one tiny little station with one hundred listeners in Ohio cancels Rush Limbaugh, there are breathless headlines—”Station is not amused, pulls plug on Limbaugh.”
²⁵
But liberal market failures are immediately washed down the memory hole. Consequently, though the dates are murky, among the liberal talk radio hosts who have been canceled are Jerry Brown, Ed Koch, Mario Cuomo, Lowell Weicker, Alan Dershowitz, Gary Hart, Jim Hightower, and Douglas Wilder.

The one ceaseless liberal presence in this sea of consumer choice is National Public Radio—which is largely sheltered from market forces by the government. NPR stations are subsidized by the government, and most beneficially, they do not have to compete in any meaningful sense for their FCC licenses. Evidently, ABC, CBS, NBC, and every major newspaper and magazine in the nation is not a sufficiently powerful propaganda machine.

Even long after the crazed, cost-cutting, Grinch Republicans took a hatchet to “public” funding of liberal radio, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money, with more coming.
²⁶
“Public” broadcasting typically receives more than 36 percent of its funding from forced taxpayer “support.”
²⁷
If you can’t beat them, pay yourself with tax revenues.

Radio may not be the beautiful dog-eat-dog capitalism of the Internet, but consumers have more choices than ABC, NBC, and CBS. Even with the increasing consolidation of radio stations into a few big corporate hands, there are more than a thousand talk radio stations.
New York Times
columnist Thomas L. Friedman has expounded upon the democracy-promoting properties of the radio. The “real information revolution,” he said, is in radio. Give them radio and the people “will do the rest.”
²⁸
He was talking about dictatorships in West African countries, but it seems to work just as well right here in America in circumventing the left’s media dictatorship.

Book publishing has long been another method for the ruling class to take in one another’s laundry and give each other jobs. Vast agglomerations of money are deployed to publish and promote liberal authors. National magazines and newspapers give hallucinatory reviews of books by their fellow liberals and snub books by conservatives. Ludicrous uncompensated advances are made to support liberal authors, and liberal jeremiads make it to print without the most cursory fact-checking.

Meanwhile, the entire information industry works overtime to suppress conservative books. The left’s control of the monopoly media has its greatest crossover effect on books. While the radio and Internet can bring conservatives to people’s homes “with the flick of a dial or modem, conservative books have to clear three sets of liberal censors before making their way to readers. First the books have to be published. Then the public has to know the book exists. Finally, potential readers have to find a bookstore where they can buy it. All this is complicated by the fact that publishers don’t like conservative books, the major media ignore them, and bookstores refuse to stock them.

But, frustratingly, liberals can’t stop Americans from buying conservative books. Once a book has been published, even monopoly control of the establishment media can’t repeal the free market. Inasmuch as mainstream publishing houses would prefer to ignore the free market entirely and publish only books with the hectoring anger of a
New York Times
editorial, publishers hide sales figures. Arbitron ratings are public, Nielsen ratings are public, movie box office numbers are public, but book sales are treated like Coca-Cola’s secret formula. Try finding out how many copies of Frank Rich’s flop of a book
Ghost Light
sold.

Still, some facts are available on the public record and they add up to a grim picture. Mistakes can be made even in industries not driven by ideological zeal. But in publishing it’s striking how it’s always the same mistakes. Though regularly rejected by the big publishers with marketing muscle, conservative books keep ending up on the best-seller lists. The best-seller lists themselves are biased against conservative books by virtue of excluding books sold through Christian bookstores—about one third of all bookstores—as well as books sold through book clubs.
²⁹

Not all books by conservatives are best-sellers, but conservative books are vastly more popular with book consumers than they are with book publishers. Indeed, the empirical evidence does not contradict the thesis that conservatives read books and liberals don’t. While the typical nonfiction best-seller is about cats or diets, substantial, serious books by conservatives have sold well for half a century. The average nonfiction book sells about five thousand copies, and a best-seller is generally one that sells thirty thousand copies or more. These are the sales figures for some conservative classics:

Conservative Best-Sellers
Copies Sold

Friedrich Hayek,
The Road to Serfdom
(1944) 206,000

William E Buckley Jr.,
God and Man at Yale
(1951) 69,700

Whittaker Chambers,
Witness
(1952) unknown
(became an instant best-seller)

Russell Kirk,
The Conservative Mind
(1953) 37,750

Ayn Rand,
Atlas Shrugged
(1957) 4,132,000

Barry Goldwater,
Conscience of a Conservative
(1960) 3,500,000

Phyllis Schlafly,
A Choice, Not an Echo
(1964) 3,000,000

Edward C. Banfield,
The Unheavenly City
(1970) +100,000

William E. Simon,
A Time for Truth
(1978) unknown
(sold more than 150,000 in hardcover)

Milton Friedman,
Free to Choose
(1979) 1,240,000

George Gilder,
Wealth and Poverty
(1981) 350,000

Francis August Schaeffer,
A Christian Manifesto
(1981) 312,000
³⁰

Among the
New York Times
best-sellers only since 1999 and only out of tiny little Regnery Publishing are: David Limbaugh’s
Absolute Power: The Legacy of Corruption in the Clinton-Reno Justice Department;
Bill Sammon’s
At Any Cost: How Gore Tried to Steal the Election;
Bill Gertz’s
Betrayal: How the Clinton Administration Undermined American Security;
Bernard Goldberg’s
Bias;
Barbara Olson’s
Final Days;
Ted Nugent’s
God, Guns & Rock and Roll;
Bob Zelnick’s
Gore: A Political Life;
Barbara Olson’s
Hell to Pay: The Unfolding Story of Hillary Rodham Clinton;
Roger Morris’s
Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America;
Patrick J. Buchanan’s
A Republic, Not an Empire;
David Schippers’s
Sellout: The Inside Story of President Clinton’s Impeachment.

There is a reason
Pravda
once called Henry Regnery “the most dangerous man in America.”
³¹

The reluctance of the mainstream publishing houses to publish conservative books stems from two factors: (1) the public seems to like them; and (2) they are often profitable for the publisher. Unable to learn from the second kick of a mule (or the third, fourth, or twentieth), the elite media invariably describe the frequent conservative best-sellers as “surprise bestsellers.” It’s been the same surprise for twenty years. Excluding alternative phraseologies such as “a bigger hit than anticipated” (Dan Quayle’s
Standing Firm: A Vice-Presidential Memoir)
³²
or “an unexpected success”
(The Real Anita Hill),
here is a partial list of conservative books that have been described in the mainstream media as “surprise best-sellers” (italics added):

“Another
surprise national bestseller
is
Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-Up.
... in fact, president Al Regnery says it’s been No. 1 most of the summer.”

Washington Post
³³

“The Closing of the American Mind...
became a
surprise best seller”
¹
’’’ and “Allan Bloom’s
surprise 1987 bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind..
.”
³⁵

New York Times

Alan Bloom “detonated a cultural bomb when he published the
surprise best seller The Closing of the American Mind.”

Newsweek^

“... such
surprise bestsellers
as Dinesh D’Souza’s
Illiberal Education
and David Brock’s expose
The Real Anita Hill
...”

United Press International
³⁷

“The Bell Curve,
by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, a
surprise best-seller
...”

Report Newsmagazine
³
*

“Parliament of Whores
remains a
surprise best seller.”

Newsweek
³⁹

“The hilarious
Politically Correct Bedtime Stories: Modern Tales for Our Life & Times,
by James Finn Garner has become a
surprise best seller.
”

USA Today
⁴⁰

“Last year, Chicago writer James Finn Garner’s
Politically Correct Bedtime Stories
became a
surprise bestseller.”

U.S. News & World Report
⁴¹

“The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America,
a scathing indictment of regulatory law and a
surprise best seller.”

New York Times
⁴²

“The book,
Unlimited Access,
with its fierce and often undocumented critique of the Clinton White House by retired FBI agent Gary Aldrich, is a
surprise best-seller.”

National Public Radio
⁴³

“... in [Robert Bork’s] new,
surprise bestseller, Slouching Toward Gomorrah.”

Chicago Tribune
⁴⁴

“Inspired by
The Book of Virtues,
a
surprise best seller
edited by former Secretary of Education William Bennett...”

Buffalo News [Dallas Morning News]
⁴⁵

“Stephen E. Ambrose’s
Undaunted Courage,
a scholarly history book that extols the accomplishments of dead white males, was the
surprise best seller
of 1996.”