National Review senior editor Jay Nordlinger (Corner, 3/24/10), responding to CNN pairing disgraced Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer with a not-conservative-enough-for-National-Review Kathleen Parker, muses:

I'm reminded why conservatives had to build their own media outlets. It's sort of like Jews and country clubs. Jews built their own, not because they wanted to, necessarily, but because the other clubs wouldn't let them in. They weren't being "clannish." They wanted to play golf, on first-class courses....

Well, we conservatives built our own media outlets--because the other clubs wouldn't let us in. I guess it's working out OK.

Blogger Ryan McNeely (Yglesias, 3/24/10) takes issue with the comparison of put-upon conservative pundits with ethnic discrimination. But the idea that conservatives were ever excluded from corporate media in the first place is nothing but a delusion.

Presumably one of the outlets conservatives built that Nordlinger has in mind was his own National Review.  One of the writers founding editor William F. Buckley first recruited for his staff was Whittaker Chambers, the famous former Communist turned arch-conservative. Chambers' previous perch was at Time magazine,  where he was considered the magazine's most important writer. He had already made his conversion to the right when he went to Time ("Pinkos who did not bat an eye when the Soviet government exterminated 3,000,000 peasants by famine will go for a good cry over the hardships of the Okies," he wrote in a movie review of The Grapes of Wrath--2/12/40), but Henry Luce had no problem taking him on board. (Buckley himself, of course, had a prominent 33-year-career on that notorious suppressor of conservatives, PBS.)

In the bad old days, when no one would let conservatives work in the media, who was the country's most prominent columnist? Walter Winchell, defender of Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. Similar politics didn't stop Paul Harvey from getting a daily slot for commentary on the ABC Radio Network.

The fact is that many of the people who owned newspapers, magazines and radio stations--as you might expect of millionaire businessmen--were quite conservative: people like Robert McCormick, Harry Chandler and Frank Gannett. These are the bosses who would have been barring conservatives from working in the media industry.  Doesn't make a whole lot of sense, does it?

An enterprising Washington Post report by Joe Stephens (1/23/10) uses  the Freedom Of Information Act to uncover the close and creepy relationship between folksy far-right broadcaster Paul Harvey and longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.  The documents Stephens uncovered show Harvey as just the kind of journalist that Hoover liked: sycophantic ("If the Republic has survived, history will record that it was largely due to your vigilance") and servile ("For a number of years, you have been kind enough to send me your daily copy," an assistant FBI director noted to Harvey in 1957).

On its side, the Bureau appeared to view Harvey as a cracked though useful tool: Despite "a history of emotional instability," said one 1952 memo, Harvey had become "very effectively anti-Communist." The broadcaster "devoted entire shows to Hoover's heroism," the article notes.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Stephens' story is how Harvey and the Bureau got acquainted in the first place, a McCarthy Era "meet-cute" story: Harvey had been interrogated in 1951 (during the Truman administration) after jumping the fence at the Argonne nuclear laboratory in Illinois, hoping to demonstrate lax security at the federal facility, but instead being apprehended within seconds. The telling thing is that Harvey had written the script for his stunt beforehand,  indicating that he planned to lie to his audience about what had happened:

I hereby affirm the following is a true and accurate account.... My friend and I were driving a once-familiar road, when the car stalled. . . . We started to walk. . . . We made no effort to conceal our presence. . . .

Suddenly I realized where I was. That I had entered, unchallenged, one of the United States' vital atomic research installations. . . . Quite by accident, understand, I had found myself inside the 'hot' area. . . . We could have carried a bomb in, or classified documents out.

This combination of mendacity and right-wing politics would serve Harvey well throughout his career. See Extra!: "The Right of the Story: Paul Harvey Peddles Tall Tales--With a Conservative Kick" (9-10/97) by Dan Wilson.

On the death of radio's Paul Harvey, it's hard for me not to think of his June 23, 2005 broadcast as his most revealing moment.

That's the episode where he delivered this memorable rant (Extra! Update, 8/05):

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill said that the American people…he said, the American people, he said, and this is a direct quote, "We didn’t come this far because we are made of sugar candy."

And that reminder was taken seriously. And we proceeded to develop and deliver the bomb, even though roughly 150,000 men, women and children perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With a single blow, World War II was over.

Following New York, September 11, Winston Churchill was not here to remind us that we didn’t come this far because we’re made of sugar candy.

So, following the New York disaster, we mustered our humanity...and we sent men with rifles into Afghanistan and Iraq, and we kept our best weapons in our silos.

Even now we're standing there dying, daring to do nothing decisive, because we’ve declared ourselves to be better than our terrorist enemies--more moral, more civilized.

Our image is at stake, we insist.

But we didn’t come this far because we’re made of sugar candy.

Once upon a time, we elbowed our way onto and across this continent by giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans. That was biological warfare. And we used every other weapon we could get our hands on to grab this land from whomever.

And we grew prosperous. And yes, we greased the skids with the sweat of slaves.

So it goes with most great nation-states, which--feeling guilty about their savage pasts--eventually civilize themselves out of business and wind up invaded and ultimately dominated by the lean, hungry up-and-coming who are not made of sugar candy.

To Harvey, in other words, failing to use nuclear and biological weapons because we feel guilty about genocide and slavery means that we're "made of sugar candy." And this will mean the end of U.S. civilization.

It's hard to know how to respond to that worldview, or to the fact that the person who promulgated it was one of the most popular and longest-running personalities, other than to note that he was taking Churchill out of context.   Churchill followed up his observation--which was made about the "peoples of the British empire," not about Americans--with the vow that "we shall never descend to the German and Japanese level," meaning the Nazis and the World War II-era Japanese Empire. Harvey seemed genuinely worried that we wouldn't descend to that level soon enough.

See also Extra!: "The Right of the Story: Harvey Peddles Tall Tales--With a Conservative Kick" (9-10/97) by Dan Wilson.