Cover Image

Shadow network media, money, and the secret hub of the radical right

In 1981, emboldened by Ronald Reagan's election, a group of some fifty Republican operatives, evangelicals, oil barons, and gun lobbyists met in a Washington suburb to coordinate their attack on civil liberties and the social safety net. These men and women called their coalition the Council fo...

Full description

Main Author: Nelson, Anne, 1954- (Author)
Format: Books Print Book
Language: English
Published: New York : Bloomsbury Publishing, [2019]
Subjects:
Conservatism > United States.
Right and left (Political science) > United States.
Political culture > United States.
United States > Politics and government > 21st century.
Summary: In 1981, emboldened by Ronald Reagan's election, a group of some fifty Republican operatives, evangelicals, oil barons, and gun lobbyists met in a Washington suburb to coordinate their attack on civil liberties and the social safety net. These men and women called their coalition the Council for National Policy. Over four decades, this elite club has become a strategic nerve center for channeling money and mobilizing votes behind the scenes. Its secretive membership rolls represent a high-powered roster of fundamentalists, oligarchs, and their allies, from Oliver North, Ed Meese, and Tim LaHaye in the Council's early days to Mike Pence, Tony Perkins, and the DeVos family today. In Shadow Network, award-winning author and media analyst Anne Nelson chronicles this astonishing history and illuminates the coalition's key figures and their tactics. She traces how the collapse of American local journalism laid the foundation for the Council for National Policy's information war and listens in on the hardline broadcasting its members control. And she reveals how the group has collaborated with the Koch brothers to outfit Radical Right organizations with state-of-the-art apps and a shared pool of captured voter data -- outmaneuvering the Democratic Party in a digital arms race whose result has yet to be decided.
Physical Description: xix, 394 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (chiefly color), color maps ; 25 cm
Bibliography: Includes bibliographical references (pages [273]-375) and index.
ISBN: 9781635573190
163557319X
Author Notes: Anne Nelson has received a Livingston Award for her journalism, a Guggenheim Fellowship for her historical research, and a Bellagio Fellowship for her research on the social impact of digital media. A graduate of Yale University, she began her career as a journalist in the U.S and abroad. She won an Associated Church Press Award for her writing on the conflict in Central America, which she covered for the Los Angeles Times , NPR, and the BBC. She has taught at Columbia University for over two decades, first at the School of Journalism and then at the School of International and Public Affairs. Her previous books include Red Orchestra: The Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler , a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice; and Suzanne's Children: A Daring Rescue in Nazi Paris , a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. A native of Oklahoma, she lives in New York City.

Similar Items