Here's something from NPR about it from 2002 with audio. About 48 minutes.
http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2002/03/20020321_b_main.asp"David Brock has a confession to make. Almost everything the best-selling onetime rightwing hero journalist wrote in the 1990's was a lie. And not little white lies that don't matter. But big lies with huge consequences. Lies that discredited Anita Hill in her battle with Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Lies that almost brought down President Clinton.
In his new book, "Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative," David Brock takes it all back. He says he was fanned and funded by hardcore rightwing zealots hell-bent on bringing down an enormously popular Democratic President. They would stop at nothing, using rumor and smear campaigns to get their revenge on Bill Clinton.
This hour, David Brock -- an admitted liar -- says he spilling the truth on the rightwing conspiracy of the 1990's."
David was part of the Noise Machine then.
And read about the Republican Noise Machine here.
http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/04/06/int04029.html"BuzzFlash: You’ve moved beyond what was a combination of insight through your personal experience of what the inner workings of the right wing media sausage machine is into analysis in your book, The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How it Corrupts Democracy. In it you concentrate almost entirely on an analysis of the right-wing media echo chamber, if we can call it that, and the relationship to think tanks, along with the role of Rush Limbaugh and so forth.
As we know, there’s an ongoing debate within the Democratic Party between the DLC and the progressive wing. Let’s characterize it as the DLC looks at polls and says, well, this is where the country is, so we need to adapt our language to that, while the progressives say, the country is where it is because we’re not leading them to a different spot. Now the Republicans took a country that was kind of centrist-to-left on social welfare issues, New Deal issues, Social Security, Medicare, and so forth, and moved the debate way to the right, although a lot of the polling still supports this sort of center, moderate, liberal, New Deal concept of America. Hasn’t the Republican media machine shown that you can do this successfully?
David Brock: Let me describe what happened on the right-wing side. Yes, I think it is correct in the sense that they took ideas that if you go back to the Goldwater era and then forward into the early 1970s when they really started funding these think tanks, they took ideas that were considered fringe and extreme. The conservatives were a minority within their own party. And through this strategy that I lay out in the book – a specific strategy that was specifically funded – they took what were considered some of the planks for Goldwater: the hostility to civil rights, hostility to the United Nations, the privatizing of Social Security – things like that. That is still, to a large extent, the Republican agenda today.
What they were able to do is to mainstream these ideas first within the Republican Party, and then through the whole political culture. The only thing I think is significant is that they did not rely on elected politicians to do this for them, so that when Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981, the Heritage Foundation had been working for six or seven years on what would become the policy blueprint for the Reagan administration, and they handed it to them.
But the people who led this conservative movement in the early 1970s were ideological people who were passionate, who had the financial resources to do this. And they were unelected people, such as the person who’s still the head of the Heritage Foundation today, Ed Fulmer. So that was where the leadership came from. I would argue that it was not actually Ronald Reagan or either Bush who really moved the ball. The ball was moved through effective communication and strategic philanthropy that was organized by the right, and not primarily through their elected politicians. The only one who really understood this, I think, was Newt Gingrich. But the others are the beneficiary of all this work that was done by non-elected leaders."
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