How Conservative Media Learned to Play Politics

[Commentary] When Donald Trump announced his new campaign CEO in mid-August—Steve Bannon, the pugnacious CEO of the conservative news site Breitbart—the world reacted like wires had been crossed. A figure from the media jumping straight into politics? Even in the world of partisan media, it seemed unusual to give up all pretense of removal from the contest for power to directly pulling the strings. But if it seemed surprising, it shouldn’t have.

Conservative candidates have been able to count on more or less the direct support of networks like Fox for a generation, to say nothing of hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Hugh Hewitt. And in fact the connection is much, much older than that—older, in fact, than most people assume conservative media is. If you want to understand just how deeply this kind of activism is entwined in the DNA of modern conservative media, you have to go back to 1956, and to the case of a Steve Bannon-esque figure named Clarence Manion, who tried to run his own outsider candidate for president.

[Nicole Hemmer is assistant professor at the University of Virginia's Miller Center and co-host of the Past Present podcast.]