Michael Schudson, in Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press, takes as his starting point the observations of that great observer of 1830s American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville thought that the press was crucial to the functioning of American democracy but that the characteristics which made it so – its nosiness and noisiness, its pursuit of self-interest, its search for petty sensation – were not intellectually uplifting or noble.

Schudson brings to his analysis an equanimity often missing among media critics. Uniquely among scholars of contemporary media, he is well steeped in American history and the history of ideas. His most famous book, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (1978), is an account of how reporting, rather than editorialising and commentary, became the centrepiece of American journalism. Schudson’s key argument in his eloquent new book is that it is the everyday reporting by the press, often pedestrian, often of trivial occurrences, that holds the powerful to account and limits their power to control what the public knows. The book dissects many contemporary issues about the political role of the news media, but does not devote itself to cataloguing their egregious behaviour.

In contrast, examples of unloveliness abound in the second book under review, Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Cappella’s Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the conservative media establishment. This book’s subject is the emergence and growth of an ideologically driven and politically motivated conservative ‘echo chamber’ in the American media.

The authors concentrate on three outlets in different media. Talk radio emerged as an important part of American public life in the late 1980s, aided by the commercial position of AM radio stations and the abolition by the Reagan régime of the so-called Fairness doctrine. As in Australia, programmes and audiences for commercial political talk radio are skewed to the right of the political spectrum. The most famous presenter is Rush Limbaugh, whose audience in 2007 was around 13.5 million. The second is Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, which began in late 1996, sixteen years after the first dedicated cable news channel, CNN. During George W. Bush’s first term as president, it had a larger audience than CNN. The third is the opinion pages of the Wall St Journal, America’s financial newspaper, taken over by Murdoch in 2007. The paper has a circulation of 2.1 million, almost double that of the New York Times. The Journal’s news priorities and presentation were reputed to be impartial, accurate and penetrating, while its opinion pages and editorials were ‘the Bible of American conservatism’, invariably arguing for smaller government, deregulation, balanced budgets and hawkish foreign policies. It is less socially conservative, catering less to the religious right, than the other two.

The three constitute an echo chamber in that they often repeat and amplify what the others are saying. Apart from their ideological adherence to conservative outlooks, and their eagerness to take up whatever themes the Republican Party is pushing and their resistance to Democratic Party arguments, what distinguishes them is their polarising style, the ferocity of their invective.

The great strength of Echo Chamber is the combination of several research methods – experimental data, large surveys, content analysis of how different media covered particular episodes. The general reader will be less interested in the chapters reporting the experimental and survey evidence, especially since much of this dates back to a major study the authors carried out in 1996, when they undertook their first studies of Limbaugh and his audience. The authors are – in contrast to their subject matter – scrupulously impartial, reviewing evidence that suggests, for example, that the audiences for Limbaugh are relatively well informed about politics.

More interesting for all readers than the careful studies of audiences and effects is the material on content. In particular, the outrages of Limbaugh carry their own sordid fascination: ‘Normally people go for communion. Liberals go to the abortion clinic’; ‘Bill Clinton may be the most effective practitioner of class warfare since Lenin’; ‘They [Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry’s base] hate God; they hate people of religion. They’re afraid of them.’ Limbaugh likened the tortures at Abu Ghraib to an initiation into the Skull and Bones Club at Yale. He made up nicknames for Democrats, such as ‘Swimmer’ for Senator Edward Kennedy, referring to Mary Jo Kopechne drowning at Chappaquiddick in 1969. North Carolina Democrat Erskine Bowles became ‘Irksome Bowels’. Limbaugh referred to ‘long-haired, maggot-infested, FM-type environmental wackos’ and to ‘femi-nazis’ as well as ‘broads’ and ‘lesbians’.

The most obvious consequence of this type of programming is that it contributes to the decline in civility and tolerance in American public life. It is part of the Republicans’ rhetorical arsenal – ‘Democrats are the enemy’ – one that puts more progressive voices at a disadvantage in public debates. Their aggressive rhetoric and their readiness to label all dissenters as traitors and cowards made it hard for voices of caution in the leadup to the Iraq war, for example.

Less apparent is their influence within the right. It makes it much harder for non-conformers to succeed. Limbaugh is on the look-out for RINOs (Republicans in Name Only). Of course, this is often politically counterproductive, just as the right-wing dabblers in the media here helped Labor’s Morris Iemma win the last New South Wales election by their urging the replacement of John Brogden with the conservatives’ favoured Peter Debnam.

Interestingly, part of their standard fare (presumably this is part of their appeal) is the denunciation of the mainstream media as biased, the ‘partisan media’, as Limbaugh called them. This inspired Fox’s infamous slogans – ‘fair and balanced’, ‘we report; you decide’ – as if it were the only organisation that was not biased. When a poll in April 2004 showed that a majority of Americans still believed that Saddan Hussein had weapons of mass destruction when the war started, Limbaugh ‘used the survey to remind listeners that they should not listen to the “liberal” media’.

An idea not pursued by Schudson is that unlovability is also in the eye of the beholder, that likes and dislikes are related to the subject as well as the object. While opinionated, the media in Jamieson and Cappella’s echo chamber have been commercially successful, though less so in recent years with the turning of the political tide in America. Nevertheless it is important to probe their appeal, one that relates directly to the media’s capacity to play its democratic role.

When Sarah Palin was nominated as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, she and the party claimed that she had said ‘thanks, but no thanks’ to Congress regarding what had come to be called ‘the bridge to nowhere’. Immediately, many news media probed this and found that in fact she had supported the bridge until it was clear the bid for it would fail. However, even after this was reported, the Republicans just kept repeating Palin’s claim. One Republican official said: ‘There’s a bigger truth out there … She’s new, she’s popular in Alaska, and she is an insurgent. … As long as those are out there, these little facts don’t really matter.’

In the phrase of Jamieson and Cappella, the media outlets in their echo chamber help to inoculate their audiences against these complicating little facts. By constantly reiterating what they see as essential truths, they free their audiences from the complexities and uncertainties of the contemporary world. They are the price of democracy. It is Schudson’s media, insisting on the little facts, that keep governments accountable and that, one hopes, stop bigger lies from being promulgated. But in the relationship between media performance and democratic health, there are few guarantees.