Summer Travels in the

Right Wing Mediasphere

By Kevin Howley, July 8, 2022

Americans are taking to the skies at pre-pandemic levels this summer. That’s good news for the airline industry, but with all of the flight cancelations, travelers may be spending most of their time in airport terminals. Still, it’s nice to get away once in a while.

As for me, I’m staying put. I spent a bitter Independence Day Weekend – marred by yet another mass shooting – exploring the Upside Down that is the right wing mediasphere, the whirlwind in the desert of a dying democracy.

In the short time I’ve spent reading right wing media, I’ve come to realize that it is not, as former FCC chairman Newton Minow once described US commercial television, a vast wasteland. Rather, it is the fountainhead of vitriol and demagoguery laying waste to democratic principles and the rule of law.

Anti-Dobbs Sky-Screamers

Consider the coverage of the recently completed, precedent-defying Supreme Court term.  

Within hours of the Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, effectively overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, right wing media began demonizing activists, healthcare workers and politicians lamenting the High Court’s rebuke of reproductive rights and legal precedence.

In addition to the standard-issue hyperbole – “riots” in the streets, hostage-taking in the Arizona state legislature, and incendiary speech from “the pro-abortion crowd” – conservative pundits could scarcely constrain themselves from lacing their copy with misogynist language describing “hysterical” reaction to the Court’s upending a 50-year precedent that established the constitutional right to safe and legal abortion.

The New York Times editorial board got it right when they observed that overturning Roe is “an insult to women and the judicial system.” Adding insult to injury, conservative news outlets made it clear that their fight goes on. What was once a matter of states’ rights quickly morphed into calls for a national prohibition on abortion, with renewed assaults on everything from access to contraception, to  transgender rights, to same-sex marriage.

Protest Is Not Insurrection

Since the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection began its televised hearings last month, conservative media have been uncharacteristically quiet, but blockbuster revelations by former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, a surprise witness, proved too explosive to ignore. Several right wing outlets, including Breitbart and The Federalist, sought to undermine Hutchinson’s portrayal of the twice-impeached former president, and his enablers, as seditious conspirators who knew full well that they were playing with fire when they schemed to overturn the 2020 election.

Others likened the peaceful protests and civil disobedience against the overturning of Roe with the Capitol insurrection: a trope that, as Vanity Fair reported at the time, first appeared last May in the wake of a leaked draft opinion of the Court’s Dobbs decision. A none-too-subtle reminder that, as conservative pols and pundits extol the virtues of law and order, all roads in the right wing mediasphere lead to false equivalence.

Burn, Baby, Burn!

Incredibly, the Supreme Court followed up its outrageous decisions on gun control, abortion and school prayer with a ruling in West Virginia v. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that dealt a blow to the federal government’s ability to address our unfolding global climate catastrophe.

In yet another 6-3 vote along ideological lines, conservative justices handed the fossil fuel industry a major victory by curtailing the EPA’s authority to regulate coal plants and safeguard the environment. Speaking with the journal Nature, legal scholar Lisa Heinzerling put it bluntly, “It’s a very dangerous decision.”

Legal scholars and climate scientists agree, as does Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, whose scathing dissent included this portentous insight: “If the current rate of emissions continues, children born this year could live to see parts of the Eastern seaboard swallowed by the ocean.”

Predictably, right wing media fired back, not with legal opinion or scientific evidence, but with personal insults. The Gateway Pundit, for example, described Kagan as a “crackpot” and a “lunatic.” For all their talk about the right to life, conservative justices, and the pundits who love them, seem to believe that those rights end at birth.

Putting the recently concluded Supreme Court term in perspective, The Hill likened it to a “revolution.” That’s one way to put it. But as we make our way through another long hot summer in America, we may be witnessing the devolution of our democratic experiment. As I’ve learned the hard way, you can read all about it in the right wing mediasphere.

Kevin Howley is a writer and educator whose work has appeared in Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, Social Movement Studies, and Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture. His most recent book is Drones: Media Discourse and the Public Imagination.

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