The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How it Corrupts Democracy » (Abridged, 4 cassettes, 6 hrs.)

David Brock is the author of four books, including Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative, a New York Times bestselling political memoir. He is the president and CEO of Media Matters for America (www.mediamatters.org), a nonprofit media watchdog organization in Washington, D.C.

Bestselling author David Brock documents the most important political development of the last thirty years: How the Republican Right has won political power and hijacked public discourse in the United States.

Over the last several decades, the GOP has built a powerful media machine—newspapers and magazines, think tanks, talk radio networks, op-ed columnists, the FOX News Channel, Christian Right broadcasting, book publishers, and high-traffic Internet sites—to sell conservatism to the public and discredit its opponents. David Brock’s penetrating analysis of news stories, from the disputed 2000 presidential election to the war in Iraq to the political battles of 2004, reveals that this booming right-wing media market is largely based on bigotry, ignorance, and emotional manipulation closely tied to America’s long-standing cultural divisions and the buying power of anti-intellectual traditionalists. Writing with verve and deep insight, Brock reaches far beyond typical bromides about media bias to produce an invaluable account of the rise of right-wing media and its political consequences.