A.J. Bauer, “Beyond Bias”

Lunch provided. Please register. 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. While the idea of “liberal media” bias has played a central role in modern conservative movement strategy and identity formation, progressive and journalistic attempts to respond have too often failed by accepting the claim’s core premise. What would it look like to reject bias discourse outright? Instead of endlessly debating the ideological and normative slants of various media, what if we saw bias for what it is—an acknowledgment of ideological disagreement, and an invitation into a distinct practice of worldbuilding. A.J. Bauer is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Alabama. He holds a PhD in American Studies from New York University. He is co-editor of News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures (Oxford, 2019) and the author of Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against the Press (Columbia, 2026).