“Beyond Bias” talk with A.J. Bauer

Drawing from his book Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against the Press (Columbia, 2026), A.J. Bauer tracks the rightward shift of structural media criticism in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He contends that bias discourse—attempts to theoretically or empirically prove or disprove media bias—relies on an unwarranted faith in exposure. Bias claims assert that political disagreement is fundamentally an epistemological problem—that if only people had “the facts” they would see the world, and share the political interests, of the claimant.