A grinning Governor
Wallace posed for news photographers holding aloft a copy of The
News Twisters. At the White House, Richard Nixon, who appointed
Walter Annenberg ambassador to Great Britain, was pleased as well.
Two years later, testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee
revealed that Nixon special counsel Charles Colson took $8,000
from Nixon's reelection committee to purchase copies of The News
Twisters.6 Among a long list of dirty tricks, Colson
had been charged with planting phony letters to the editor in
newspapers to enhance Nixon's image to entertaining a plot to
bomb the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank the
Nixonites considered a symbol of the liberal establishment.7
During Watergate, Colson was designated to attack news accounts as
"a fantasy, a work of fiction," and he ordered up a
"butcher piece" on the Washington Post staff.8
After Nixon's death
in 1994, Colson told the story of The News Twisters to Newsweek:
"[Nixon] called me into his office on another occasion and
asked me if I had read Edith Efron's book about biased network news
coverage. I had. I had also concluded that it was a book destined
for obscurity. Nixon then ordered me to get it on the best-seller
list. I was used to cryptic
instructions, but never one quite like this. After finding the
particular stores that the New York Times and others regularly
checked to determine which books were selling, I enlisted the
assistance of some Nixon supporters in New York. We literally
bought out the stores."9 When Nixon aide E.
Howard Hunt quit the White House during the Watergate scandal, he
left behind several cartons of The News Twisters.10
Edith Efron was a
self-described libertarian and a onetime devotee of Ayn Rand, who
advocated free-market fundamentalism and dismantlement of the
welfare state in her theory of objectivism. Efron believed that
"historically . . . liberals . . . have always followed the
ideological leadership of the revolutionary left. . . ." Her
research was underwritten by a grant from the Historical Research
Foundation, established with a bequest from conservative lace
importer Alfred Kohlberg. According to a report in Variety at
the time, Kohlberg was "a close associate of Senator Joe
McCarthy, [who] earned the label as 'head' of the so-called
China Lobby for his work for Chiang Kai-shek," the
authoritarian leader of the Nationalist Chinese government. The
institute's "projects chairman" was National Review
founder William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley hyped The News Twisters as
"explosive," as did Irving Kristol, godfather of the
ideological movement known as neoconservatism, in an essay in
Fortune. Kristol's magazine, The Public Interest, and a second
neoconservative organ, Commentary (under the editorship of Norman
Podhoretz), heaped early praise on the book.
Hitting the best-seller
list thanks to Nixon's slush fund, the book broke through in the
wider media, where its methods did not survive scrutiny from
nonconservatives. It was no coincidence that Efron, whose work over
the years betrayed a fascination with the psychological phenomenon
of projection, called her tome The News Twisters. The St. Louis
Post-Dispatch editorialized, "The book is no genuine study of
TV news performance, but a 1972 campaign document designed to twist
network coverage to the right," while the New York Post labeled
it "right-angled paranoia." Writing in the Washington
Post, Ben H. Bagdikian called the book "dishonest, inaccurate .
. . [a] demonstration on how to doctor evidence."
The reviewers' criticism
focused on the fact that Efron's method-taping every broadcast
during the period studied and marking the transcripts for
"pro" or "anti" bias-was not objective but
subjective. Reviewers noted that in Efron's idiosyncratic world, a
report on Nixon being met by college hecklers was an example of
anti-Nixon bias, while a report on Humphrey being met by college
hecklers was listed not as an example of anti-Humphrey bias but as
liberal bias: "reporter supports demonstrators." Nor could
she explain how her own data tables contradicted her sweeping
conclusions, as when she counted the words spoken for and against
liberals on the three networks combined and found 20 percent for
liberals and 80 percent against.
When CBS News took the
extraordinary step of hiring a research firm to do an analysis of
the broadcasts Efron cited, it found that she grossly
misrepresented the plain meaning of the transcripts. One CBS script
that read, "Nixon says he is warning his staff against
overconfidence, but he himself hardly looks worried," was
listed by Efron as an "anti-Nixon editorial" that
"says Nixon is overconfident; suggests he is a liar."
Countering Efron's claim that CBS aired sixteen times the amount of
anti-Nixon material as pro-Nixon material, the CBS-commissioned
study found that 60 percent of all references to Nixon on CBS were
neutral, with the favorable and unfavorable references about evenly
divided.11
In providing a template
for what would become a well-organized and well-funded campaign by
the political Right to bring the media under its ideological
domination, The News Twisters was notable not only for the
transparent flaws of its central arguments, but also for its
imperviousness to documentation of those flaws. Efron was not the
first conservative author to show that a combination of polemical
skills, good timing, and a flair for publicity could carry the day,
though she was a pioneer of the technique. A political ideologue,
writing for an audience of true believers, could impute to his (or
her) critics a political motive and survive, the facts
notwithstanding. This was especially the case on the subject of
media bias, where criticism by the press could be made to look like
further proof of the original indictment.
Unbowed and unbound,
Efron managed to take her one-woman show before a Senate
subcommittee hearing on government regulation of the broadcast
industry arranged by President Nixon. She then published a second
book, a detailed rebuttal of the CBS report on The News Twisters,
under the self-dramatizing title How CBS Tried to Kill a Book. Had
that been the intention of CBS executives, who did not publish their
study until six months after Efron's book had become a best-seller,
they failed. The News Twisters validated abeyant right-wing
frustration with the media that dated back to the era when the
anti-Communist witch-hunter Joseph McCarthy, whose meteoric rise to
power in the Senate was due in part to his talents as a demagogic
media manipulator, was exposed as a smear artist by Edward R. Murrow
in his CBS documentary series See It Now. McCarthy fought back with
attacks on Murrow's patriotism, and CBS gave the senator time to air
a rebuttal, written by conservative columnist George Sokolsky of the
William Randolph Hearst newspaper chain. McCarthy's career, however,
did not recover. Twenty years later, sustained by funds from a
McCarthy sympathizer, Efron's pseudoscientific claims, and their
like, spread like a virus.
The publication of The
News Twisters in 1971 dovetailed with a political strategy of
assaulting and discrediting the journalism profession that had been
employed by President Nixon's administration two years before, when
White House speechwriter and former TV Guide writer Patrick J.
Buchanan approached Nixon with the idea of blunting media reports on
Nixon's Vietnam War policy by attacking the TV networks as biased in
favor of the North Vietnamese and the antiwar movement. When he left
the White House and published his 1973 book, The New Majority,
Buchanan revealed that his recondite concern was more with media
power than with bias. Buchanan flatly stated that the power of the
TV networks was an obstacle to conservative Republican governance.
"The growth of network power, and its adversary posture towards
the national government," he wrote, is "beyond the
[American] tradition."
Buchanan would become a
central figure in the Right's media strategies over the next thirty
years, always working inside the two institutions he attacked
relentlessly: "Big Government" and the "liberal
media." While plotting his political comeback in 1966, Nixon
had hired Buchanan as his sole aide from a job as the youngest
editorial writer on a major U.S. newspaper, the ultraconservative
Globe Democrat, where Buchanan used information fed to the
publisher, Richard Amberg, by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to smear
civil rights leaders.12
