Top Highlights

• In the country’s earliest years, the process of assessing a person’s fitness for the presidency was superintended by the nation’s property-owning elites; in later times, party leaders claimed that role. Today, in Republican circles, the conservative opinion media shoulder part of that function. As we will show later, by so doing, they helped underc...
• Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal constitute a conservative media establishment.
• we argue that these conservative media create a self-protective enclave hospitable to conservative beliefs. This safe haven reinforces the views of these outlets’ like-minded audience members, helps them maintain ideological coherence, protects them from counterpersuasion, reinforces conservative values and dispositions, holds Republican candidates...
• make it possible for them to gather information and opinions about politics within a protective shelter from which they emerge holding polarized attitudes about Democrats and armored against discrepant information.
• key players on Fox News (including Brit Hume, Sean Hannity, and Carl Cameron) adopt similar lines of argument, shared evidence, and common tactical approaches in their defense of conservatism and their attack on its opponents. In the process, we identify one overarching defining argument characterizing the content of these three outlets: the “liber...