Before Cable There Was Human Events, and Before That Almost Nothing

Here is a number you can win a bar bet with: how many conservative television networks existed in 1950? Zero. How many conservative talk radio stations were broadcasting a national program? Zero. How many conservative websites? Please. The internet was a gleam in a few engineers' eyes, and the word "podcast" would have sounded like a medical condition.

And yet the ideas survived. That is the story I want to tell, and it is a better story than the one you usually hear, which starts with cable news and talk radio as if conservatives arrived one morning with a microphone and a grievance. They did not. They arrived with a mimeograph machine, a few thousand subscribers, a stack of unpaid bills and an unshakable conviction that ideas matter. The big outlets did not take them seriously. The big outlets were wrong, and the small ones outlasted a good many of them.

So settle in. This is a history, told in order, of how a movement that had almost no megaphone built one, a piece at a time, and what that history means for anyone who thinks the next generation of media will be built by somebody else.

The setting: a field with almost no fences and almost no farmers

Begin with the world of the early 1940s. The great metropolitan dailies, the wire services, the weekly newsmagazines and the three radio networks dominated what Americans read and heard. The prevailing intellectual weather in those institutions, and in the universities that supplied them with editors, was friendly to an expanded role for government. The New Deal had made large, centralized programs the default assumption of serious people, and the war was making them larger.

There were conservative and libertarian voices in public life, but they were scattered. Some wrote for a handful of newspapers. Some gave speeches. Some wrote books that sold slowly and found their readers over decades. One of those books, Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, appeared in 1944. A condensed version appeared in Reader's Digest in 1945 and reached a vast audience. The episode proved two things at once: the appetite for these ideas was real, and the established channels for reaching that appetite were thin.

It is worth recalling that this is not a new predicament for American dissent. In January 1776 Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense appeared and, by the standards of its day, spread with astonishing speed. The American Revolution was argued, in large part, in pamphlets and small papers printed by people with a press and a cause. The lesson is old: when the large institutions do not carry an idea, a small press can. The conservatives of the 1940s were walking a path the Founders had walked.

1944: Human Events

In 1944 a small weekly newsletter called Human Events began publication in Washington. It was founded by a few writers who were uneasy about the direction of American government and, in particular, about the idea that wartime centralization might become permanent. Among the founders were Felix Morley, a former editor of the Washington Post and a college president, and Frank Hanighen, a journalist. Henry Regnery, a Chicago businessman, was involved in the early enterprise and went on to found the publishing house that bears his name in 1947.

Think about the scale. A newsletter. Not a network, not a chain, not a studio. A few pages, mailed to subscribers, written by people who thought the country was drifting and wanted to say so in print. The circulation, in the early years, was a fraction of what a single big-city daily printed in an afternoon.

But that was the point. Human Events did not try to be a mass medium. It tried to be a place where ideas that the large papers were not printing could be argued seriously and read by the people who would act on them. It served the readers who mattered most to a young movement: those who would carry the argument into a congressional office, a pulpit, a classroom or a business. The newsletter model, small, specific and relentless, was a way to reach thousands of persuadable influencers without buying a printing plant.

And it lasted. Through changing decades, changing owners and changing formats, the title survived into the era when the movement it helped to feed had a very different set of tools. A publication that began as a bet that ideas could outrun institutions kept running long enough to be vindicated.

1947 and the books

A word about books, because the early movement did not live by newsletters alone. Regnery's publishing house, founded in 1947, brought out titles that larger houses were reluctant to touch. A publisher willing to take a book that the big houses declined became, in effect, a second press for the movement. A book has a longer life than an article. It can sit on a shelf for twenty years, wait for the moment when a young reader needs it, and then change a life. Much of the intellectual history of the postwar right was carried in unglamorous hardbacks that moved slowly and persisted.

1950: The Freeman

In 1950 a new magazine called The Freeman launched in New York. It was founded by, among others, the economic journalist Henry Hazlitt and the critic and editor John Chamberlain. Its program was to argue for individual liberty, limited government and free markets at a time when those positions were unfashionable in most editorial offices.

The Freeman mattered for a reason that is easy to miss: it modeled a certain kind of seriousness. It did not scream. It published essays, explained economic reasoning to general readers and treated its audience as intelligent adults who could follow an argument. Over the years it passed through different institutional homes, and in the mid-1950s it was taken over and continued under the Foundation for Economic Education, which kept the title going for decades. Whatever one thinks of any particular essay, the effect was to keep a body of arguments in circulation, and to give a generation of writers and teachers a place to cut their teeth.

Mark the pattern. Each of these ventures, the newsletter, the publishing house, the magazine, was small. Each depended on a handful of committed people. Each could have disappeared in a year. They survived because their audiences were devoted and because the work was good enough to be worth passing along. This is the opposite of the modern assumption that influence requires scale. In the early postwar decades, influence required seriousness, and seriousness required very little money.

The few big-city papers that kept the lamp lit

The small presses were not alone. A handful of large newspapers had editorial pages that were skeptical of the era's consensus. I will not claim more than I know, so I will name two in general terms: the Chicago Tribune, long associated with a robustly independent and often conservative editorial line under its longtime publisher, and the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page developed a reputation for arguing for free markets and limited government. These were not movement organs. They were commercial newspapers with a point of view in the opinion columns, and they reached readers that no newsletter could.

The relationship mattered. A small magazine could develop an argument, a big paper's editorial page could popularize it, a syndicated columnist could carry it to hundreds of local papers, and a congressman could quote it on the floor. The ecosystem was thin but it was connected, and connection was the multiplier. A single idea could move from a newsletter to a pulpit to a statehouse in a few years, which is slow by the standards of the internet and fast by the standards of political change.

Columnists were an especially important channel. Syndicated columns appeared in hundreds of local papers, which meant that a writer with a clear voice could reach readers in towns where no conservative magazine had ever been delivered. For a movement short of institutions, the column was a kind of rural free delivery for ideas. If you want to understand why the opinion page still matters, start there; see Will Rogers Mocked Congress for Thirty Years and Never Lost the Room for another example of a public voice that lasted by being plainly good at the work.

The Fairness Doctrine and the long silence on the air

Meanwhile, the radio dial told a different story. Broadcasting was licensed by the federal government, and from 1949 the Federal Communications Commission applied a policy known as the Fairness Doctrine, which expected broadcasters to cover controversial issues of public importance and to give contrasting viewpoints a chance to be heard. The justification was that spectrum was scarce and licensees were public trustees.

I will tell you what the doctrine looked like from a broadcaster's chair, and I will do it in the manner of a man following a bad idea one step further than its authors did. You are a station owner. You can air a vigorous, one-sided opinion program, in which case you must find the time and money to present the other side, and you might be hauled before a federal agency to explain your balance. Or you can air a bland program, with no opinions at all, and nobody sends you a letter. Which do you choose? The rational owner chose the bland program. The doctrine, intended to promote debate, made lively opinion on the air a regulatory liability. The government's attempt to guarantee balance helped produce a very beige dial.

The Supreme Court upheld the doctrine as applied to broadcasting in Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC in 1969. For the history of how the Court has treated broadcast speech differently from print, see FCC v. Pacifica and the Seven Dirty Words That Still Shape Broadcast Rules. And in 1987 the FCC stopped enforcing the Fairness Doctrine, finding that it chilled speech and was unnecessary given the growth of media outlets.

1987 and after: talk radio

The FCC's 1987 decision removed the regulatory weight that had made opinion radio risky. In the years that followed, talk radio on the AM band grew into a national format. A national program went into syndication in 1988, and stations across the country found that listeners would tune in for hours of conversation and argument. AM stations that had been losing audiences to FM music found a format that worked.

I want to make one point about this and then leave it. Talk radio did not create the audience for conservative ideas. The audience already existed, and had been reading Human Events and The Freeman and the columns for forty years. Talk radio found the audience that the earlier press had cultivated and gave it something it had not had: a daily voice, on the air, free, in the car. Without the decades of small presses, the groundwork would not have been there. The seed had been planted in the newsletter. The harvest came on the dial.

For a look at what happened when the idea of an underserved audience met television, see Why Fox News in 1996 Proved There Was an Audience Nobody Was Serving. The pattern repeats: the audience is there first, and the medium follows.

From the press to the internet

The line from those small presses to the internet era is straighter than it looks. The newsletter's logic was: a small, committed readership, a narrow subject, direct delivery and low overhead. That is the logic of a modern blog, a newsletter on a subscription platform or a podcast. The costs of printing and postage that once limited small publications dropped almost to zero, and the barriers that kept dissenting voices small came down.

What the early postwar editors would recognize is the economics of conviction. They launched with little capital and a belief. A writer today can do the same with a laptop. What they would not recognize is the volume. Where they had a few thousand readers and a few dozen contributors, the modern ecosystem has millions of readers and countless voices, and the problem has flipped: not too little conservative media but too much noise, and too little care.

That is the part of the history that should make us humble. The early movement's great advantage was that its small press had to be serious. A newsletter that wasted its readers' time would lose them. Scarcity enforced quality. Abundance does not. A movement with a million megaphones needs, more than ever, the habits of the little magazines: argue carefully, source your claims, correct your errors, treat the reader as an adult.

The best objection, answered

Here is the strongest objection to the story as I have told it. It says: you are romanticizing. The early conservative press was often wrong, sometimes cranky and occasionally attracted unsavory elements. And the later media, talk radio and cable, rewarded outrage over argument. Perhaps the small presses were a golden age and what followed is a decline.

There is truth in it. Any movement's press includes cranks and errors, and a fair history says so. Some of the early publications held views that the movement later had to disown or outgrow, and the movement's own best thinkers spent a great deal of effort policing its boundaries. That is a sign of seriousness, not a refutation of it.

But the objection does not undo the main point. The small presses did what a free society needs: they kept alternative arguments in circulation when the dominant institutions would not. Whatever you think of what came later, the dependable remedy for an unbalanced media was more media, not a regulator's thumb on the scale. The market for ideas, to use the old phrase, did work, slowly and imperfectly, and it worked without a government balance referee. Compare the outcome of the Fairness Doctrine, which was supposed to deliver balance and delivered blandness, with the outcome of letting a hundred small presses bloom, which delivered the argument.

If you want to see the same free-market logic applied to a very different corner of media, read Late Night Comedy Stopped Punching at Power and Started Lecturing, and for what happens when an industry that was once pushed into one corner is pushed back, see The Hollywood Blacklist Was Wrong, and Conservatives Should Say So Plainly.

The timeline at a glance

• 1776: Paine's Common Sense shows what a pamphlet can do.
• 1944: Human Events begins as a small Washington weekly; Hayek's The Road to Serfdom appears.
• 1945: A condensed Road to Serfdom reaches a vast readership through Reader's Digest.
• 1947: Regnery founds a publishing house for books the larger houses would not take.
• 1949: The FCC's Fairness Doctrine takes shape.
• 1950: The Freeman launches in New York.
• 1969: Red Lion upholds the doctrine.
• 1987: The FCC stops enforcing the Fairness Doctrine.
• 1988 onward: National talk radio grows on AM stations.

The case in brief

1. Conservative media did not begin with cable or talk radio. It began with small newsletters, magazines and book publishers, from Human Events in 1944 to The Freeman in 1950.
2. These ventures survived on seriousness and devoted readers, not scale, and a few big-city editorial pages and syndicated columns carried their arguments further.
3. The Fairness Doctrine made opinion on the air a regulatory risk, and its end in 1987 opened the way for talk radio, which found an audience the small presses had already built.
4. The internet restored the economics of the small press, with the added danger that abundance does not enforce quality the way scarcity once did.
5. The remedy for a media that ignores you has always been to build your own, and to build it well.

What you can do: subscribe, with your own money, to one serious small publication or newsletter whose work you value, and read it for a month before you judge it.