Reviews in American History 45 (2017) 511–517 © 2017 by Johns Hopkins University Press BUILDING MOVEMENTS THROUGH MEDIA Brittany Bounds Nicole Hemmer. Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transforma- tion of American Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. xvi + 336 pp. Notes and Index. $34.95. Kevin M. Schultz. Buckley and Mailer: The Diicult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties. New York: W.W. Norton, 2015. 387 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $28.95. The publication of these books was well timed: Nielsen research recently declared Fox News the most-watched network in 2016; Breitbart made its own news in the media with the appointment of Steve Bannon as President Trump’s chief strategist; and the declaration of Milo Yiannopoulos as the latest provocateur of the new Alt-Right movement is reminiscent of the scandals Norman Mailer generated in his day. New accusations resemble the old allega- tions of liberal media bias; except this time, it is being touted by a president who disseminates his own “alternative facts” and bans certain news outlets from the White House press room. A division used to exist between news and commentary, and the ive main actors in these two books clearly fall into the latter category. We nearly always think of liberals when the word “activist” is used, but these books turn that paradigm upside down in their use of media activists, particularly those on the right. Other recent reviewers have covered the developing conservative historiography well, leaving little for this review to add, but these two works also it nicely into the conversation about literary activism and movements. Both Nicole Hemmer and Kevin Schultz ofer a glimpse into the history behind the growth of the movements that overtook the Sixties, and their two books complement one another. Hemmer’s book sets the stage by explaining journalism’s development toward objectivity in the twentieth century, mir- rored in the centrist-liberal establishment that her three protagonists (William Rusher, Clarence Manion, and Henry Regnery) criticize through diferent types of media propagation in order to build a conservative movement through articles intentionally biased by selection (but not by content). Conservatives believed that liberals were the gatekeepers to power, thus in control of main-