When the news came on Monday that Paramount is acquiring The Free Press, an online political commentary site, and giving its co-founder Bari Weiss the job of editor-in-chief at CBS News, it capped weeks of speculation—and of concern about what critics describe as a right-wing takeover of one of the nation’s most storied broadcasters.
CBS News has already made several recent moves that have read as concessions to conservative demands. The network also recently hired an ombudsperson—someone with no experience supervising a newsroom and a background leading the right-wing Hudson Institute think tank—to assess complaints of biased programming.
And yet, concerns that CBS News is a leading purveyor of “liberal bias” are not new. Such claims have circulated over the past 80 years, as a result of a longstanding and entrenched conflict between the modern conservative movement and the press.
Much of that history played out under low-choice media conditions. During the mid-to-late 20th century, most Americans got their news from one of the “Big 3” television networks: ABC, NBC, and CBS. The latter was perhaps the most watched and respected of the three, with anchor Walter Cronkite serving as the epitome of journalistic trustworthiness for many.
Under the regulatory constraints of the fairness doctrine—a mid-20th century Federal Communications Commission (FCC) policy that mandated balanced coverage of politically contentious topics—television journalism popularized the expectation that news ought to be informative, impartial, and reflect a wide array of political opinions.
However, modern conservatives found themselves firmly outside the prevailing political common sense of the era, which they saw reflected in mainstream news coverage. That bipartisan consensus supported Keynesian economics—or the belief in government-backed initiatives in a regulated economy—which clashed with conservatives’ free market philosophy. The dominant consensus also favored a diplomatic and proxy-based strategy for litigating the Cold War abroad, while conservatives favored a more directly-interventionist approach to fighting communism.
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CBS first raised the ire of modern conservatives in the early 1950s, when it stood up to Sen. Joseph McCarthy at the height of his anticommunist witch hunts. Edward R. Murrow’s critical See It Now report on McCarthy in 1954 is widely credited with hastening the bullying senator’s downfall. McCarthy’s advocates, early proponents of modern conservatism, reacted by giving CBS a pejorative moniker: “Communist Broadcasting System.”
The network also quickly ran afoul of Robert Welch, founder of the conspiratorial right-wing anticommunist John Birch Society. In May 1961, Welch alleged that a CBS reporter had used underhanded tactics to interview him against his wishes, resulting in footage that made the Birch leader look cagey and defensive.
“As I am sure future events will show, the Columbia Broadcasting Company [sic] is out to destroy the John Birch Society,” Welch warned members, mobilizing them against the network.
When CBS aired an investigation in November 1961 of an illegal gambling establishment in Boston, implicating some members of the city’s police department, Welch accused the network of anti-police bias. By March 1962, Welch was urging Birchers to write letters to local CBS affiliates, newspapers, and the FCC complaining of the network’s purported anti-conservative bias. These complaints made little impact on the network’s coverage.
By 1965, some conservatives even made a move to buy an ownership stake in the network. That year, David W. Dye, a 38-year-old businessman from Lubbock, Texas, barnstormed the country seeking participants in a scheme to take over CBS.
Dye was the founder of a company called Media Unlimited, Inc., which had a stated purpose of “influencing major media … to assume higher degrees of moral and responsible presentations and program content.” His goal was to convince “20,000 interested conservatives” to buy CBS stock and put it under his corporation’s control.
The goal was for Dye to act as proxy for approximately four million shares, which amounted to around 20% of the company. This, he reasoned, would allow him to outvote then-CBS chairman William S. Paley who, along with Leon Levy, controlled around 11% of the company and set its editorial policy.
When asked why he was targeting the network, he cited the “presence of extreme liberals” working for CBS News.
In addition to more politically conservative news judgment, Dye was interested in tamer entertainment programming on the network. He lamented the network’s penchant for “violence, crime, brutality, sadism and sex” at a time when CBS’s most popular programs included Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C, The Lucy Show, The Red Skelton Hour, and the Andy Griffith Show.
News of Dye’s effort circulated widely within the conservative movement press, including in the periodicals Human Events and Liberty Lobby, as well as hyper-local conservative newspapers like the Birmingham Independent in Alabama. It also got a boost from conservative syndicated columnist and radio commentator Paul Harvey, who framed Dye as David going up against the CBS Goliath.
When CBS refused to share the company’s stockholder list with Dye in 1966, he threatened to sue, promising a proxy fight for control of the network by 1967 that seems never to have materialized.
While that fight never came, conservative pressure on the networks increased dramatically by 1969, when vice president Spiro Agnew inveighed against television news broadcasters in two highly publicized speeches that fall, accusing them of being biased against President Richard Nixon and, he implied, a great Silent Majority of the American people as well.
As Agnew was making conservative allegations of media bias a matter of national discussion, a handful of anticommunists in and around Washington, D.C., were forming a new media watchdog group called Accuracy in Media (AIM). Launched in 1969, the group rose to national prominence in the 1970s through a series of highly publicized attacks on The New York Times, Washington Post, and all three major broadcasters, but especially CBS.
In 1972, AIM accused CBS of favoritism toward Democratic presidential nominee, Senator George McGovern. Building on Edith Efron’s The News Twisters—a 1971 book that accused CBS of bias against Nixon during the 1968 presidential campaign—AIM conducted a study that it claimed corroborated her findings.
“While all networks devoted more time to stories favorable to McGovern and unfavorable to President Nixon and the Administration, ABC and NBC were relatively well balanced,” AIM reported in its bi-monthly newsletter. “But CBS showed an imbalance of roughly three to one.”
This perception of bias informed AIM’s own shareholder activism in the 1970s. It proposed the establishment of ombudspersons for all three major networks and, in the case of CBS, the creation of an additional committee on “corporate responsibility” to investigate allegations that the network was biased in its coverage of defense issues, including most notably its critical coverage of the war in Vietnam.
While these efforts failed, they nevertheless shaped public perceptions (especially among conservatives) that CBS was untrustworthy.
When conservative activists in the 20th century sought to buy or influence CBS, they were making a play for the most influential one of only three truly national news outlets in the country.
But we live in a high-choice media environment now.
CBS remains a major player in U.S. media, of course, but conservatives no longer suffer for ideologically affirming news options. Fox News has been at or near the top of cable news ratings for two decades or more, so much so that its even further right competitor, Newsmax, recently filed an (unsuccessful) anti-trust lawsuit against it.
While there is surely some strategic value in the right-wing capture of CBS, the deep history of conservative animosity against the network suggests to many another possible motive: revenge.
A.J. Bauer is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Alabama and author of the forthcoming book Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against the Press.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
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