UPDATE: For the record, I’ve made the point below dozens or hundreds of times. Hardly anyone ever agrees, and often no one disagrees either. Apparently the idea is just unthinkable, probably because of the Chomsky cooties. (Have I ever mentioned that I hate liberals?)
At the moment we’re having another episode of the same old grumbling about the media, and as always, I think people are missing the point. Below is an edited and enlarged version of a comment I made to the linked post:
I’m really becoming a nag on this question, but “journalistic incompetence, laziness, and the knowing distribution of unadulterated bullshit” are management problems. The journalists whose names and faces we see are doing exactly the jobs they were hired to do. When Jonah Goldberg or William Kristol gets hired by a major newspaper, it’s not because the person who hired him has made a mistake.
The reason why there’s a journalism groupthink problem is that there’s a management groupthink problem. For a long time now, up-and-coming people in the business have been seeing dishonest, frivolous journalists hired and promoted while better journalists are deadended or fired, and they have learned to conform their work to what their bosses want.
The interests and ideologies of the owners and publishers of the various media have overwhelmed whatever journalistic standards they ever had, and their primary interest is low taxes.
The Republicans’ extraordinary emphasis on the inheritance tax, which affects only 0.5% of the population can be explained in large part by the fact that the owners of the old privately-owned newspapers (the Washington Post, the New York Times,the Seattle Times, and others) are in that 0.5%.
The publicly-owned media are controlled by enormous financial organizations whose primary political interests are, again, low taxes (and favorable regulations). And like all media, they have to be responsive to advertisers, whose interests are similar. (And many institutional advertisers aren’t selling an actual product, but just getting their company’s name out there. If an oil company buys an ad, it’s not selling gasoline, it’s buying favorable coverage and trying to flimflam the electorate.)
The media need subscribers, viewers and readers, but they don’t get their money from them — they get their money from advertisers. Readers and viewers are not the customer, but the product: advertisers pay good money for access to your mind. (When a TV talking head says “The American people think such and such”, they’re not telling you what the American people think. They’re telling you what you should think.)
I’ve been reading this kind of media criticism for five years now, and while it’s valuable and good, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone except maybe Billmon try to understand why the media are so bad. I’ve tried to tell people dozens or hundreds of times (DeLong, Somerby, everybody), but no one picks up on it. It must be pure Chomskyphobia, because this isn’t a new or a difficult idea.
The media we have now like themselves the way they are. They’ll accommodate themselves to Obama and the Democrats as much as they have to, but they’ll also do what they can to bend him and break him. What we need is new media. The internet and Air American help, but they’re not nearly enough.
We need new media. Maybe Soros will cough up a half a billion, or maybe a couple million people will buy hundred dollar subscriptions. Without something like that, things will be as bad ten years from now as they are today. Neither I nor anyone reading these words will be able to get new media started by ourselves, but it’s not something that’s impossible. Neuharth did it with USA Today, and Murdoch did it with Fox. It wouldn’t even have to be a for-profit company. But I’ve never heard anyone but me even speculate about doing this.
Anyway, don’t sit around waiting for the media to get better. Not going to happen.
UPDATE:
If you look at the organizational charts of the Post and the Times, you’ll see that while both of them have separate boards for operations (the actual publication) and for business and finance, in each case the same man heads both boards: Donald Graham in the case of the Post, and Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. in the case of the Times. (And each of them also represents the private ownership families). What I suspect this means is that there’s no advocate specifically for journalism, and that journalistic concerns are usually overridden by finance concerns.
Considering how badly these enterprises are doing financially, you might argue the opposite — that professionalism is dominant, and that for this reason finances are bad — but this doesn’t ring true at all. It seems more likely, given the perilous fiscal state of print journalism, that these two newspapers are in emergency lockdown, and that finance always rules.
The significance of these two publication is that if you were to find journalistic independence and integrity anywhere in big media, it would be at the Post or the Times. For most of the rest of them, the dominance of finance is unmistakable. (Anecdotally, I’ve been told that radio stations are almost always run by former ad salesmen, and almost never by former on-the-air talent. You can just extrapolate from there.)
January 28, 2009 at 10:56 pm
Fox News is cable’s number 1 news network. Sure, you need rich folks to bankroll stuff like this, and rich folks have their own priorities. But people need to watch, too.
The entrepeneurial aspect of this is often overlooked (though not by you). Rich folks can afford to keep trying stuff until something works. But something has to work. People have to watch.
Show me a country whose citizenry is less receptive to racism (for example), and I’ll show you a country whose media is less fucked up.
There’s certainly a chicken-and-egg aspect to this. Are Americans so crappy because their media is crappy, or vice versa? And there are feedback loops involved. But in America, people have more of a say in their institutions than you suppose.
Liberals are starting to catch on. An infrastructure is being built around the idea of mobilizing Americans.
Kos clearly gets it. Every time I see mainstream media figures bitching about liberal bloggers, I think about how they used to bitch about right-wing nutcases, and I smile.
January 31, 2009 at 10:18 pm
The grisly truth is that a bad media produces a bad public. Someone who listens to Rush Limbaugh for ten years is seriously at risk of becoming a worse person, even if they listen passively at work without really wanting to. Unless they have alternate sources and for that reason deliberately resist, for them Limbaugh comes to define acceptable opinion. Even if they disagree, they still might come to believe that Limbaugh’s opinion is everyone’s opinion. (Telling The American People what The American People think, as though they didn’t already know, is one of the media’s main jobs.) Even though media are almost all private businesses, their dominance of the airwaves gives them semiofficial status. The ambient, passive political opinion for people who depend on free media and aren’t very interested has become extremely right wing.
Liberals often have a condescending, prissy, fussy, genteel self-presentation which makes it impossible for them to play an entertaining Rush Limbaugh-type role. Even when someone is partly successful (Air American or Michael Moore) liberals often sniff at them.
February 2, 2009 at 4:47 pm
The grisly truth is that a bad media produces a bad public.
Certainly you ought to take nothing I said to dispute the importance of having media that don’t suck.
And I agree that the liberal gripe about Michael Moore is based on his presentation rather than his content, and is therefore absurdly misguided – not merely because content is what matters and his content is sound; but also because his presentation is excellent.
In your original post, you correctly anticipate my real objection: Chomsky cooties. Chomsky’s modus operandi is to take a sensible proposition and overreach to get conclusions that aren’t justified, and that aren’t borne out by experience in the real world. That’s what I think you’ve done here.
Sure, big financial interests control the media, and those interests are, generally, hostile to liberal interests. So that certainly accounts for some of the slant. There are, however, other important forces at work.
Big financial interests have always controlled the media, and yet I think you’d agree that something important about the media has changed for the worse in our lifetimes – you and I both seem to place the timing of that change in the Reagan administration.
Until you can offer a persuasive explanation of what changed – an explanation that relies primarily on the corporateness of the media – I’m going to be skeptical of your uni-causal contention that media suckiness is primarily a result of a conscious conspiracy by the ownership, and that the ownership is largely uninfluenced by outside factors.
Conservatives, liberals and other human beings have a tendency to oversimplify the operation of markets. I would argue, for instance, that killing the Phil Donahue show was, from a purely capitalist point of view, a sensible move for MSNBC, and we don’t need to invoke any other type of conspiracy to explain why that network canceled its top-rated show.
On the other hand, I agree that:
1 – there’s a tendency for sensible decisions like this one to fall harder on liberals like Donahue
2 – that fact is an important determinant of media bias and
3 – the causes are likely to be along the lines of what you propose: capitalists are less likely to stick their necks out for products that promote liberalism.
February 4, 2009 at 12:11 am
The grisly truth is that a bad media produces a bad public.
That’s why Chomsky calls it “manufacturing consent.” He’s right, and so are you.
Chomsky’s modus operandi is to take a sensible proposition and overreach to get conclusions that aren’t justified, and that aren’t borne out by experience in the real world.
No, Chomsky’s m.o. is to say the obvious truth, regardless of whether that truth happens to be inconvenient, out of style, or distasteful to mention in the presence of sensible moderates.
February 4, 2009 at 12:22 am
Conservatives, liberals and other human beings have a tendency to oversimplify the operation of markets. I would argue, for instance, that killing the Phil Donahue show was, from a purely capitalist point of view, a sensible move for MSNBC, and we don’t need to invoke any other type of conspiracy to explain why that network canceled its top-rated show
PF, go and actually read Manufacturing Consent some time. Chomsky and Herman specifically deny any conspiracy theory model of media bias; rather, they describe it as a “guided-market model,” in which the profit motive pushes corporate media to favor certain narratives over others.
February 4, 2009 at 2:15 am
As I said, the problem I have with Chomsky and Herman is that, when they are discussing theory, they are often sensible, but when they apply their theories, they often say things that are absurd.
Here’s Herman in 2003 reflecting on Manufacturing Consent. Note the sensible assertion followed by the ludicrous application of it:
In Herman’s world, the crackdowns by Turkey and the communist authorities were, by objective standards, similarly newsworthy in the United States. To Herman, this is obvious to the point where it requires no defense.
But this is plainly nonsense. A more intellectually honest person would ask himself: How is it that the media generally grasped the international significance of the events in Poland, compared to the events in Turkey? And how is it that I failed to do so?
The question has never even occurred to Herman who, remember, was writing this in 2003 about a book that was published in 1988.
February 4, 2009 at 10:07 am
Hmm, but how is it “plainly nonsense”?
I mean, what is the cause and what’s the effect here: is it, as you believe, that the media grasped the international significance of the event, or is it that the event had become internationally significant because of the media campaign?
Imagine that no one outside Gdansk has ever heard about Solidarity (the way almost no one has ever heard about those events in Turkey) – would Solidarity still manage to become an internationally significant phenomenon anyway? I don’t think so. In fact, it seems obvious to the point where it requires no defense. In which case Herman is right and you’re wrong.
February 4, 2009 at 8:05 pm
But this is plainly nonsense.
No, it’s not. Why are atrocities committed by the Polish government objectively and obviously more significant than similar atrocities committed by the Turkish government? Could it be that they’re not, and that this says nothing about Turkey or about Poland, but plenty about the political and economic agenda of the for-profit media organizations that determine which news events get to be “significant”?
If I remarked to you that American media pays a disproportionate amount of attention to isolated incidents of recently abducted young white women, you wouldn’t find this crazy or paranoid. And if I further remarked that the media places a much greater emphasis on lurid missing-person cases than it does on, say, atrocities committed in the Palestinian territories, I doubt you’d disagree, either. And if I suggested to you that this is not the result of some sober journalistic evaluation of the merits of the individual issues, but rather reflected the network’s profit motive, I don’t think you’d disagree with that either. So what makes you think that corporate news outfits, from Fox to CNN to the New York Times, don’t make this same calculation all the time, whether the subject is Natalee Holloway or Lech Walesa? These are businesses, and they exist to make money, not to idealistically inform the public.
February 4, 2009 at 9:04 pm
stras, thanks for the substantive response to my comment – likewise abb1.
If, as Herman does (and as I do, for that matter), we’re going to say that the media systematically deviates from some standard of objective newsworthiness, then we have to define some standard of objective newsworthiness.
The standard that Herman cites above is “brutality.” stras, likewise, suggests that the only relevant standard is the degree to which something is an atrocity. If two events are comparable atrocities, or are similarly brutal, then they are comparably signficant or newsworthy.
I disagree. I think that the relevance to Americans of the events in Gdansk was much greater than the events in Turkey, for reasons that were obvious at the time. For example: There were a lot more ethnic Poles than ethnic Turks in the U.S.; the USSR possessed nuclear weapons pointed at the U.S., and challenges to its authority an stability in its sphere had much more significant ramifications than for non-nuclear Turkey; it could be reasonably assumed a priori, because of the history of the U.S., Poland, and the USSR, that Americans themselves were much more interested in events in Gdansk. I could go on.
In these conversations, someone with my views is at risk of begging the question – of saying that, well, this thing is newsworthy because the professionals in the media decided it was newsworthy. I think Herman’s example saves me from that – I think Herman’s proposes an alternative type of news judgment has no basis in the interests of readers – and therefore no basis in reality.
If – as abb1 suggests but Herman does not – the American media caused the events in Gdansk to be significant, then of course the whole thing goes out the window. I’m not one to minimize the influence of the media, but to suggest that the media caused the uprising in Poland seems grandiose to me.
February 4, 2009 at 10:49 pm
But Turkey is not Zanzibar, it’s a European country, a NATO member.
Chomsky’s usual accusation is exactly the fact that the media ignore or whitewash the atrocities committed by the official friends while immediately going into a frenzy whenever an atrocity is committed by the official enemies. This is the whole point.
And of course the publicity, media attention is a very important factor in the fate of a small local movement like Solidarity. Easy to stop, to suppress before it gets out of hand if no one is paying attention.
February 5, 2009 at 2:11 am
We’re making progress, abb1. If you can acknowledge that there is a relevant distinction between, say, Turkey and Zanzibar, I think we’re pretty close to getting you to acknowledge that there is a difference between Turkey and Soviet-era Poland. Do you feel you need me to make that case?
February 5, 2009 at 9:01 am
Sure, there is a relevant distinction, but not necessarily in the sense you think is relevant.
Had Turkey (or Zanzibar) been in the Chinese or Iranian sphere of influence, you would’ve heard a lot about Turkey’s atrocities and the coverage would’ve been sympathetic to the rebels. And it wouldn’t have helped Zanzibar that nobody knows where it is.
But since Turkey is an US ally, there was little coverage, and what coverage there was, the angle (I’m sure) was supplied by Turkey’s government sources.
Just think of the other side at the time, the USSR. I assume their two major newspapers, Pravda (The Truth) and Izvestia (The News), did report a lot about atrocities in Turkey and little or nothing about Poland. The reasons you listed would work for them as well: Turkey is a part of NATO, organization that was aiming a bunch of nuclear missiles at them. There were a lot of ethnic Turks in the USSR (all of the Azeris and many others, I’m sure). Same thing exactly, just looking from the opposite side.