How Right-Wing Media Hinders Feminist Critique of “Gender Identity”
Feminists lament the censorship of mainstream media on gender identity issues - but is right-wing media a deeper, more significant, hindrance to the movement in the US?
In her latest article about her new book, The Abolition of Sex, Kara Dansky, board president of the US chapter of the Women’s Human Rights Campaign (WHRC USA) 1, offers some ideas about why US feminist opposition to gender identity policy is not as developed as in the UK. Although my list of reasons is somewhat different from hers, I agree with her that media bias in the US has played a major role in hindering the creation of a strong movement to challenge the infringement of women’s rights and privacy by gender identity policy and law. Dansky writes:
U.K. feminists have been very frustrated with the BBC and The Guardian for many years, and I understand why. However, as biased as U.K. media has been on the topic of gender, the U.S. media is much, much worse. The New York Times, Washington Post, and all major television networks have steadfastly refused to platform feminists and gay rights activists who present leftist critiques of “gender identity.”
While it is true that feminist critique of the trans agenda is largely censored by legacy media, (a testament to the power of the trans lobby), that’s only half - or maybe less than half - the story. The scope and influence of right-wing media, and the consequent extreme polarization of the American electorate, is also significant, and has no parallel in the UK.
As Dansky notes, the US is a huge country, especially compared to Britain. The infrastructure of right wing media developed in the large swaths of rural America. Legacy media - the major newspapers, magazines, radio, and television stations - originated on the East coast. In rural areas and small towns and cities, local newspapers and radio stations proliferated, publishing news, human interest stories, and other programming rooted in those communities. In the post World War II era, and especially following the social upheavals of the 1960s and 70s, radio programming gradually began to move to religious broadcasting.
The transition to religious content provided an opportunity for the men creating the Council for National Policy (CNP), the network of organizations, media, think tanks, and other activist groups to advance corporate interests and theocratic goals - what author Anne Nelson (Shadow Network (2019) calls a “pluto-theocracy.” Founded in 1981, architects of the secretive group strategized their way out of a losing conservative movement that Richard Viguerie described as resting on a “two-legged stool” in the 1950s and 60s.2
The two-legged stool, [said Viguerie], was national defense, which really meant anticommunism, and economic issues. We’d win forty, forty-five, sometimes forty-seven percent of the vote. Very seldom would we ever get fifty-one percent.
One solution was to tap into the evangelical vote and use social issues as a third leg of the stool. (Another is voter suppression: Paul Weyrich famously stated, “I don’t want everybody to vote… As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.”3) At the time, around 1980, “only 55 percent of evangelicals were registered to vote, compared to a national average of 72 percent.”4
Evangelicals were flattered to be courted. “No one had ever given so much attention to, or paid respect for the evangelicals,” Mike Huckabee (Baptist minister and later governor of Arkansas) said at the time. “It was magic, and [the evangelicals were] a major force in [President Ronald] Reagan winning.”5 Thus, the unholy alliance between Christian conservatives and plutocrats was born - hence, “pluto-theocracy.”
Richard Viguerie pioneered direct mail to bypass mainstream media and get his conservative message to voters, thus helping to elect President Reagan. Now the CNP sought to cement their gains through the development of their own media networks. It began with the Salem radio network, founded by two brothers-in-law in 1977.6
Salem found a new way to monetize religion. Other radio outlets depended on advertising for 95 percent of their revenue… Less than half of Salem’s revenue came from traditional advertising; most of it came from selling blocks of time to scores of religious organizations that solicited contributions from the listenership. Over time, the definition of “religious” customers evolved to encompass partisan organizations tied to the Council for National Policy.
“Salem became a linchpin of the CNP’s media outreach,”7 with the founders eventually occupying key posts in the CNP.
Another significant development for the CNP media project was the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1981. Introduced in 1949, the Fairness Doctrine was a policy that required broadcasters to allow time for opposing views of controversial issues. They were also required to notify individuals attacked on their programs and allow them a chance to respond. If they endorsed a political candidate, they had to allow other candidates airtime to respond. “The advent of cable television - combined with the demise of the Fairness Doctrine - represented a bonanza for the radical right.”8 Broadcasters could expound on controversial issues from a single perspective with no requirement for opposing views.
Unfettered by regulation, or conventions like fact-checking and civility, that had previously governed broadcasting, right-wing media allowed the basest demagoguery free rein. Steve Rendell, senior writer for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), describes the content:9
I couldn’t believe what I heard. I’d hear overt, gutter racism. I’d hear black people referred to as “savages.” The allure of the [Rush] Limbaughs and the [Bob] Grants is that they tap into a kind of resentment, a kind of insecurity on the part of mostly… white guys on the right railing against the women’s movement, the civil rights movement…
The reach of right-wing radio spread beyond small town and rural communities due, in part, to commuting and other road travel necessitated by so many jobs. In the documentary, The Brainwashing of My Dad (2016), filmmaker Jen Senko explores the origins and influence of right-wing media following changes she observed in her father. After a move that required him to make long commutes to work, during which he entertained himself listening to right-wing radio, her formerly apolitical, Democrat-leaning, mild-mannered father became a hard right-winger, obsessed with every new media outrage, and very, very angry. At one point, he threatened to throw her out of the car when she agreed with “feminazis” protesting the sexualization of Hooters’ restaurant waitresses. Through crowd-funding the project, supporters began telling her their own stories of relatives and friends whose politics and personalities were changed through prolonged exposure to right-wing media.
Jason Bivins, scholar of religion and US culture, describes right-wing media as “dangerous” because:
it authorizes a particular, often conspiratorial way of viewing the world. It denounces neutrality or accountability to multiple constituencies as burdensome or even hostile to Christian faith.
Right-wing media is also notorious for misleading and factually incorrect stories, spawning an industry of fact-checking organizations, such as FAIR cited above, that are devoted to sorting out the truth of claims in many types of media. “The cumulative effect [of right wing media],” Nelson writes:10
is the creation of a parallel universe of information. The results have been devastating to American democracy, as two parts of our country constantly talk past each other.”
This “parallel universe of information” contributes to the extreme polarization of the US electorate, (as it is intended to do), such that citizens are suspicious of, and discount, ideas and issues that emanate from, or appear associated with, “the other side.” Consider that the trans lobby has effectively connected two different issues, sexual orientation and gender identity, through the LGBT movement, and that the right-wing consistently opposes civil rights for lesbians and gays. Progressives and liberals are reluctant to entertain concerns about gender identity policy when most of those raising objections have a history of homophobia.
The racism of right-wing media presents a similar problem. Progressives, liberals, Democrats and other fellow travelers who might be willing to critically look into the gender identity issue, see it bundled with, for example, banning books like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in “critical race theory” curriculum, and second-guess themselves, thinking concerns about both issues arise from “right wing bigotry.”
I agree with Dansky that Americans on what is our political “left” are beginning to question the wisdom of allowing boys who identify as girls to compete in girls’ sport and to use girls’ restrooms, of allowing men who claim female identity to be housed in women’s prisons, and of promoting experimental chemical and surgical treatments for minors. I suspect that is why right-wing operatives are now “force teaming” the gender identity issue with “critical race theory” in their current school board strategy. They hope to retain “gender identity” as a right-wing issue to leverage votes in the midterm elections.
Certainly legacy media have contributed to the problem by deplatforming feminist critique of “gender identity,” as Dansky describes, and by using biased language such as “anti-trans,” in news stories about, for example, keeping girls’ sport single sex. While similar problems exist in the UK, as does conservative media, the extremism of American right-wing media, and the degree of political polarization it has fostered in the US, is quite different. I believe this is a major reason why a US feminist movement to counter “gender identity” policy has been slower to develop than in the UK.
Feminists and others who wish to motivate Democrats and progressives to look more critically at the gender identity issue have the difficult task of finding ways to clearly draw boundaries between that issue, and others packaged with it, such as CRT, that will be leveraged to further a right wing agenda. They will also need to consider distancing themselves from right-wing media and brainstorm other ways to reach the public.
In December 2021, WHRC changed its name to Women’s Declaration International. WHRC USA is now WDI USA.
Nelson, Anne. Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. 2019. Bloomsbury Publishing, PLC.
Nelson, Shadow Network, 14.
Nelson, Shadow Network, 15.
Nelson, Shadow Network, 13.
Nelson, Shadow Network, 40.
Nelson, Shadow Network, 38.
Nelson, Shadow Network, 44.
Senko, Jen. Documentary film. The Brainwashing of My Dad. 2016.
Nelson, Shadow Network, xv.