“THEY DON’T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT GOVERNING”: Conservative Media's Influence on the Republican Party

This article is a scholarly work from a researcher at Harvard. It is very long and well documented. 
Some quotes from her work:

Holland Cooke, an industry consultant and former broadcaster, said in an interview, “The big national, topical talk hosts – Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin – their ratings are all terrible in the big markets.”
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Even before the Fluke storm, some syndicated radio hosts were taking sponsorship dollars from Tea Party-affiliated groups, including FreedomWorks, Heritage Action, Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, Tea Party Patriots and the Senate Conservatives Fund. That cemented the collaboration of media and advocacy groups in opposing the Republican leadership, and in demanding an ideologically pure agenda and discouraging compromise. Politico reported in April 2014 that, based on its review of federal tax filings and other information, several of the well-known groups had spent almost $22 million between 2008 and 2012 to sponsor programs including those of Limbaugh, Levin, Ingraham, Hannity and Beck, as well as lesser-known hosts. FreedomWorks, Politico reported, had given $6 million in that time to Beck, while Heritage sponsored Hannity for several years and spent $9.5 million over five years to back Limbaugh’s program.[60] The talkers in turn promote the groups, their positions on issues and their favored candidates – candidates who often have been Tea Party challengers to Republican incumbents or, in open-seat races, to the establishment’s preferred candidates. 

Such financial deals apparently continue, to the chagrin of establishment Republicans. Levin, for one, “was at the forefront of the effort to make demands of Republican leaders that are unaccomplish-able, and he works in concert with Heritage Action and the Club for Growth,” said a congressional leadership aide who would not be named. “And they like to put down markers – that House Republican leaders should demand ‘X’ and they should stand firm, they should demand repeal of Obamacare. And if you notice, every time they do that, they send out an email to their list and they’ve got a big ‘donate’ button. They have found that they can stir up the grassroots and, most importantly, raise money off the idea that if only Republican leaders stood firm and chose to fight, they could win.” The aide added, “That’s all well and good, but when you’re setting down a marker and you know that your ask is un-accomplishable, that it’s not a goal that’s achievable, then it’s just about ratings and money.”[61]
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So much for the impact on rank-and-file lawmakers – what about the effect of conservative media on the decision-making of the leaders who try to set the agenda? Arceneaux, a professor at Temple University, said in an interview, “I think it’s made it very difficult for them to make the compromises that are necessary in the American system of government, where you’ve got institutions that have a lot of veto players.”[64] Feehery, the longtime Republican strategist, put it simply: “They intimidate members of Congress.”[65]
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And, Latham and other Republicans complain, many in that media – in their zeal for audience share – willfully ignore the realities of a legislative process designed by the Founders to require deliberation, checks and balances, and compromise. “They will not take 80 percent – it’s got to be 100 percent or you’re not pure,” Latham said. “They don’t give a damn about governing, or about anything than being pure themselves. And it’s causing more people to be concerned about primaries than ever before. I just don’t see – with continual pounding of the drums in the media and these outside groups – I don’t know how you function, I really don’t. I don’t know how you pass appropriation bills this year.”
Does he sometimes feel like Republicans helped create a monster?
“Oh, yeah. Are you kidding?”[95]
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In 2010, libertarian scholar Julian Sanchez at the Cato Institute provoked a lively debate among conservative intellectuals when he wrote that the expansion and success of conservative media had created a closed information circle harmful to conservatism. Conservatives, he said, could pick from so many sources to buttress their biases that they could dismiss as false any contrary information from outside that circle. He called this “epistemic closure,” borrowing from a term in philosophy (and perhaps ensuring that the highfalutin phrase did not catch on beyond the intelligentsia). For many conservatives, “Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross-promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines and of course, Fox News,” Sanchez wrote in the first of several online essays. “Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted.”[126]

The result, Sanchez said in another piece, was that conservative media’s logic had become “worryingly untethered from reality as the impetus to satisfy the demand for red meat overtakes any motivation to report accurately.”[127] His theory first got attention as the Tea Party was ascendant, and nonpartisan surveys provided evidence of many conservative voters’ mistaken beliefs in Obama’s foreign birth and Muslim faith, death panels, and climate change as a hoax, among others. But the debate revived after the 2012 election to explain how Republicans could have been so surprised by Romney’s defeat when mainstream media had widely reported on nonpartisan polls showing him behind.
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http://shorensteincenter.org/conservative-media-influence-on-republican-party-jackie-calmes/