John Kerry......elected Jury foreman!

In providing a template for what would become a well-organized and well-funded campaign by the political Right to bring the media under its ideological domination, The News Twisters was notable not only for the transparent flaws of its central arguments, but also for its imperviousness to documentation of those flaws. Efron was not the first conservative author to show that a combination of polemical skills, good timing, and a flair for publicity could carry the day, though she was a pioneer of the technique. A political ideologue, writing for an audience of true believers, could impute to his (or her) critics a political motive and survive, the facts notwithstanding. This was especially the case on the subject of media bias, where criticism by the press could be made to look like further proof of the original indictment.

Unbowed and unbound, Efron managed to take her one-woman show before a Senate subcommittee hearing on government regulation of the broadcast industry arranged by President Nixon. She then published a second book, a detailed rebuttal of the CBS report on The News Twisters, under the self-dramatizing title How CBS Tried to Kill a Book. Had that been the intention of CBS executives, who did not publish their study until six months after Efron's book had become a best-seller, they failed. The News Twisters validated abeyant right-wing frustration with the media that dated back to the era when the anti-Communist witch-hunter Joseph McCarthy, whose meteoric rise to power in the Senate was due in part to his talents as a demagogic media manipulator, was exposed as a smear artist by Edward R. Murrow in his CBS documentary series See It Now. McCarthy fought back with attacks on Murrow's patriotism, and CBS gave the senator time to air a rebuttal, written by conservative columnist George Sokolsky of the William Randolph Hearst newspaper chain. McCarthy's career, however, did not recover. Twenty years later, sustained by funds from a McCarthy sympathizer, Efron's pseudoscientific claims, and their like, spread like a virus.

The publication of The News Twisters in 1971 dovetailed with a political strategy of assaulting and discrediting the journalism profession that had been employed by President Nixon's administration two years before, when White House speechwriter and former TV Guide writer Patrick J. Buchanan approached Nixon with the idea of blunting media reports on Nixon's Vietnam War policy by attacking the TV networks as biased in favor of the North Vietnamese and the antiwar movement. When he left the White House and published his 1973 book, The New Majority, Buchanan revealed that his recondite concern was more with media power than with bias. Buchanan flatly stated that the power of the TV networks was an obstacle to conservative Republican governance. "The growth of network power, and its adversary posture towards the national government," he wrote, is "beyond the tradition."

source: David Brock's "Right Wing Noise Machine" as quoted at 2.1 BOOK: "The News Twisters" by Edith Efron (1971)