People used to say that the media weren’t really right wing, but were just sucking up to Bush because they worship power and success. But if that were true, we should be seeing them sucking up to Obama and the Democrats now. They aren’t. Instead, what we’re seeing on TV these days is more of the same: President McCain, and President Boehner, and President Lindsey Graham, and President Snowe, and President Gingrich, and a couple of dozen other Republican Presidents. The slant has scarcely changed at all.
One of the reasons I gave up on America is the feebleness of the Democratic and liberal response to the increasingly conservative slant of the media. We’re long past the time when it made sense to be surprised by anything they do, and we should understand by now that they know what they’re doing and are going to keep on doing it. Squeals of rage about their egregious dishonesty, incompetence, and nastiness just make them laugh.
CNN just hired the loathsome Erick Erickson and Steve Benen dutifully went through the drill, but that isn’t news. It’s a dog-bites-man story. Seven or eight years ago I hoped that media criticism on the web would lead to improvements, but it didn’t happen. Instead, things are getting worse.
Liberals love “shit happens” / “quagmire” / “shades of grey” explanations of events, and they call people like me conspiracy theorists, but liberals are jellified morons. Corporations are run top down, management manages, and right now management likes what it sees. The media have chosen sides, and it’s not our side.
At this point we should either be thinking about how to create new media, or else we should be asking ourselves what we’ll have to do to win in the face of a determinedly hostile media. We shouldn’t waste any more time expressing surprise and indignation whenever a media organization does the same thing one more time.
As for the things that we should be doing, I don’t really see much energy going into developing progressive major media, and since I seriously doubt that we can win against the media we now have, I think that we should be considering the possibility that we’ve just plain lost.
I don’t know why I bother. Charlie Brown will always be Charlie Brown. For me politics is apparently an incurable disease, highly debilitating but not actually fatal.
Trollblog 
March 16, 2010 at 8:47 pm
I’m a big fan of Kos and and Moveon, and I’m a big fan of Media Matters, but the two functions – political action and media criticism – need to be combined.
March 16, 2010 at 8:56 pm
We really need a major outlet, a national newspaper or a national network. I am seriously doubt that we even have a chance with the present media. Most American believe that is Obama is a flaming liberal and also believe that liberals are socialists.
March 16, 2010 at 9:27 pm
This is one of the places where I disagree with you, John. Well, I agree that media are consistently bad because that’s how management runs them. I disagree that it’s a good idea for progressives to be putting energy into trying to develop major media. If by “major media” you mean something like a large newspaper or a TV channel or a chain of radio stations, they’re far too expensive in comparison with the relatively small amount of specifically progressive money available, and the people who control media now are clearly going to be gunning for progressive-owned ones. And they’re declining, not growing in power. Progressives are probably best off going heavily for Web media, which they’ve done.
Do we have a chance with present media? Maybe not. But it’s characteristic of a declining empire that nobody really wins. Well, maybe a few highly placed political looters win. But no tendency or political philosophy or group ends up winning. Everybody loses, because the whole thing collides with reality and then falls apart. That’s really where we are now, I think.
March 16, 2010 at 9:44 pm
I think you’re pretty spot-on, John, and I also agree with Rich on the mass media tip. It’s game-over time for newspapers, and tv news will soon follow. It may well be nigh game-over time for journalism in general in the US, but only time will tell. All the media consolidation over the last 20 years or so has dealt a serious blow to news-gathering, so what we have left is scant reporting buried under layers upon layers of editorializing until nobody is really sure what the actual reporting was. News reporting and delivery is due for a major overhaul, and that’s good news for the left because it should be possible to get in on the ground floor.
But on another note, I have one question: when you refer to ‘liberals’, just who, exactly, are you talking about? People regarded as liberals by those on the right, or people who self-apply the term? Both? Neither? I’m curious because I’d identify few actual politicians as being liberals, and among that exclusive group, I’d be hard-pressed to find a ‘jellified moron’. So what liberals are you talking about?
March 16, 2010 at 9:45 pm
“Progressives are probably best off going heavily for Web media, which they’ve done.”
Me and Rich agree on something! (actually, we agree on many things and this is one of them). There’s no real upside in purchasing major media properties – they’re rapidly falling apart before our eyes, anyway. Major media as constructed in the US between 1890 and 1950 was ALWAYS going to be against progressives – a media funded by business advertising is inherently going to be biased against those things the upper tiers of the business community dislike.
Web media is far superior to mass media for progressives, and is more like the publishing world of the early nineteenth century. Web media runs on who has the most creative / prolific / amusing writing, and progressives have by far the edge on that. Mass media runs on how many eyeballs or listeners you can aggregate for Kraft at 6pm (or in the sports section, etc).
March 16, 2010 at 9:45 pm
I don’t think that the TV — cable — radio complex is losing influence. A little bit among the most informed, I guess, but not with most people. Newspapers hare having many problems, but nonetheless, the Post, Times, and WS Journal are gatekeepers of informed opinion.
I talk about ambient political opinion a lot. The low information whim voter opinion, but also the opinion of the average semi-engaged voter. It’s based on person to person scuttlebutt and broadcast / cable media, and scuttlebutt is often predominantly regurgitated broadcast media.
Ambient opinion is center to far right. Conservatives complain about liberal groupthink in major cities and college towns, but groupthink in rural Texas or in Cincinnati or Wichita doesn’t bother them. They’re really whining about non-conformist groupthink.
So Republicans start off with 30% fanatic wingers, and they have to get 21 out of the remaining 70%. And since many of the 70% are disengaged and ambient and rely mostly on free media, it’s really an uphill struggle.
But my present political strategy is “Kiss Your Ass Goodbye”.
March 16, 2010 at 10:16 pm
“Newspapers hare having many problems, but nonetheless, the Post, Times, and WS Journal are gatekeepers of informed opinion.”
As recently as 10 years ago, you would have said something like the Post, NYTimes, WS Journal, LA Times, and Chicago Tribune were the gatekeepers of informed opinion. Forty years ago, things like the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Detroit Free Press, Minneapolis Star-Tribune and so on were enormous, enormous deals. Politicians would kill (occasionally literally) to get endorsements from papers like those.
If you had been running around in the mid-Sixties, you would have said that getting control of such newspapers would be the ultimate key to political success. And, in the near term, it might have been true. But, if you wanted to be politically successful from 1980-2000, you actually would have been better off buying up cheap AM radio stations or setting up an early cable network.
Obviously, it’s really hard to make future predictions – if you asked around, politicians in 1980 would probably have told you how important the Detroit Free Press was and that you setting up a cable news network was totally idiotic.
March 16, 2010 at 10:17 pm
The alternative I see to the present media will be a situation when all news is gathered in-house by large military, diplomatic, and financial institutions and not shared.
I also don’t see TV and cable disappearing, just putting out less and less news and more and more fluff.
the jellified morons are people I run into at e.g. Brad DeLong, or at Crooked Timber when I went there, or hear on NPR, or meet at the wine and cheese type liberal event. They’re liberal on almost all issues and really wish that things were nicer, but they’re not combative and can always been conned into supporting centrists.
Or you could say, the people who find Alan Grayson offensive. it’s association with managerial elitism and anti-populism.
March 16, 2010 at 10:21 pm
Web media reaches the engages 20-40% of the population, left and right. Maybe sometime it will reach people effortlessly, which is the whole point with ambient media and ambient opinion — the opinion someone has when they make no effort at all.
I can’t celebrate a general decline. What remains will be Foxlike.
One possible outcome of the decline of present media is the absence of any publicly available information at all.
March 16, 2010 at 10:30 pm
“I also don’t see TV and cable disappearing, just putting out less and less news and more and more fluff.” — that’s exactly what I meant when I said I expect tv news soon to follow newspapers to the grave. When it’s all bluster and opinion and fluff, it’s not really news.
Thanks for clarifying on that ‘liberals’ point. That’s exactly why I was confused: I would never consider somebody offended by Alan Grayson to be an actual liberal, regardless what he likes to call himself. An awful lot of people seem to like to call themselves “Conservative” who seem to have little grasp of what the word means.
March 16, 2010 at 10:46 pm
It’s part of a larger argument. Liberalism since the 1950s has been defined in considerable part by a commitment to technocratic administration and the vigorous rejection of populist appeals and of progressivism (the progressivism of 1920-1940). It’s very anti-popular, and I didn’t know that until a few years ago, when I was astonished by the things I was hearing people saying. I blame Hofstadter, Schlesinger Jr., Daniel Bell, and the early Galbraith. Since 1968 this has crippled the Democrats; they refuse to make a populist appeal, in part because they’re too corrupt to do so plausibly, but beyond that too.
March 17, 2010 at 1:37 am
“Liberalism since the 1950s has been defined in considerable part by a commitment to technocratic administration and the vigorous rejection of populist appeals and of progressivism (the progressivism of 1920-1940).”
I don’t agree. I would argue that liberalism has always been defined by an inherent commitment to technocratic administration. In fact, Locke himself was a technocrat – he was Secretary of the Board of Trade and Plantations (the economic planning board of England). Leibniz was Privy Counselor of Justice to the Duchy of Brunswick-Luneburg (quite reasonably so, since he was one of the greatest legal minds of the time).
March 17, 2010 at 2:04 am
You’re framing pretty widely, especially Leibniz. Liberalism has a number of meanings and if you use one of them like a sledgehammer you’re going to miss some things.
In the Democratic Party ca. 1900-1920 there was a mix of populists, progressives, machine Democrats, Southern Democrats, and liberals. They were already distinguishable, and cohabited uneasily up until ~1938, after which point the populists and progressives (and leftists) gradually left voluntarily or otherwise. So in the 50s it was liberal technocrats, machine Democrats, and Southern Democrats.
The contrast is between liberals and machine Democrats vs. populists and progressives. To you they would probably all be liberals.
I should have expressed it differently, but the technocratic domination of the Democratic party at the expense of the other factions began during WWII when everything but the war was but on the back burner.
March 17, 2010 at 2:05 am
Editorial policy in the print media is strongly slanted towards the viewpoint of its major advertisers, where the money comes from. Advertisers on the potitical netroots gravitate toward blogs which promote their interests. What will happen to the bloggers when the big corporations scale down support for the newspapers and try to influence the bloggers instead?
March 17, 2010 at 2:32 am
We will be as happy as pigs in shit.
March 17, 2010 at 3:01 am
I have one or two friends from US client states who can testify to just how fatal our politics are–in fact, probably the most fatal known, from the Native-American genocide to helicopter gunships raids on the West Bank.
March 17, 2010 at 3:37 am
I’m not celebrating a general decline either, I just don’t see how it makes sense to try to paddle against the deluge. Buying a major media center like a newspaper or a TV channel would be a very, very large project for progressives, and could easily be a wasted project within the next decade. “Buying” a Daily Kos has already been done, is nowhere near as expensive by many orders of magnitude, and doesn’t have the obvious downside risk.
I was actually kind of amused to hear that CNN hired Erickson. First, it shows how weak the conservative blogosphere is that Erickson was the best person they could find. Second, every time they pull up a right-wing blogger, they discover that those people are too weak even for corporate media. Remember Ben Domenech, the other Red State wonder? It’s not that either conservatives or corporate media are capable of being embarrassed, of course, but it ends up showing how their farm team isn’t even capable of producing people up to their corrupt standards.
March 17, 2010 at 1:57 pm
They’re liberal on almost all issues and really wish that things were nicer, but they’re not combative and can always been conned into supporting centrists.
Or you could say, the people who find Alan Grayson offensive. it’s association with managerial elitism and anti-populism.
This is exactly right, but I’m not sure you’re ready to follow this to its logical conclusion as regards the media.
The media have pretty much abandoned all but the most superficial pretense of professionalism, and respond to nothing but brute force. Advertiser pressure. Government pressure. Pressure from sources. Bad publicity. Angry phone calls. Canceled subscriptions.
To put it as crudely as I think it needs to be put: When Sulzberger goes out in public, I’ll bet you anything that it’s in the back of his head that he might be assassinated. By a conservative nut. Physical fear is part of the right-wing arsenal, and the left isn’t going to make any headway in the media until it comes up with an answer for that.
So what’s the answer? Well, we’re liberals in 2010 USA; we’re not going to shoot anybody. But CNN, for instance, should be reviled everywhere it’s mentioned. The President of the United States might consider boycotting them – as he did, to his credit, with Fox.
Liberals are such wimps that the concept of fascist-baiting seems almost self-contradictory. But what if Obama came out and said: “I can’t talk to this network any more – they’re hiring people who call my wife a Marxist harpy!” Are people really going to side with CNN on that one?
March 17, 2010 at 2:48 pm
I’ve often wondered whether some of the Democrats’ little surrenders weren’t the result of fear, and whether some of them haven’t received veiled threats from plausible source. I thought that during Kerry’s incredibly weak campaign, with the August vacation. Here in Minnesota there are still plnty of people with questions about the Wellstone crash.
I’ll revise, I guess, and say that rather than buy major media, Democrats should have tried to anticipate the media landscape of the future and position themselves in that. But they’re not doing that either, and it’s notable that liberal and left bloggers do not get financial support. A few dozen make insecure and mediocre livings, whereas their conservative counterparts are well funded.
The blogosphere also is susceptible to central control, as the net neutrality debate and some of the debates about various domestic intelligence programs have showed us.
March 17, 2010 at 3:23 pm
“But they’re not doing that either, and it’s notable that liberal and left bloggers do not get financial support.”
That’s true enough, but that’s so much incredibly easier to fix than attempting to buy a major mass media property that we’re not even talking the same galaxy. A few million will take very good care of that, while to buy the Post or the Times will require north of a billion.
March 17, 2010 at 4:23 pm
I’m actually supposing that the diabolical George Soros is serious. There’s more money out there than people think, but it gets funneled into causes and one-time campaigns and content free feelgood movements and so on. I don’t really think Soros is willing to accept Cheney World, which is where we’re headed, but his approaches are not very effective. I think that this is because he shares his teacher Popper’s dogmatic and absolute rejection of populism,partisanship, ideology, etc.
By talking to Democrats and liberal I effectively renounce my past radical politics. I decided on lesser-evil politics in 2002. At this point I can’t really say that being an ineffectual mobilizer of weenie liberals has been less frustrating than being an ineffectual radical, though.
So bohemian nihilism here I come.
March 17, 2010 at 4:57 pm
“I decided on lesser-evil politics in 2002. At this point I can’t really say that being an ineffectual mobilizer of weenie liberals has been less frustrating than being an ineffectual radical, though.”
Politics is the land of the insane most of the time. Socrates tries to convince the people of Athens that they’re going straight to hell and gets executed. Plato tries to guide Dion and finds out that Dion’s character is completely debased. Cicero tries to prevent the Roman Republic from collapsing and gets killed for his pains. Rousseau’s advice to Poland goes nowhere. Machiavelli gets tortured for his republicanism. And on and on.
March 17, 2010 at 5:08 pm
Cleaning up loose ends: Bob Neuwert’s USA Today is doing fine. Fox is doing fine. Generalizations about the traditional media going into a death spiral mostly only mean the Times and the Post, and maybe broadcast TV.
But we need a national outlet of some kind, and it should be one which reaches the disengaged voter. Radio appealing to the under-40 crowd would be the best bet.
But the problem is that no one seems even to be thinking about this stuff at all, except when they claim that the internet will do the job by itself.
Probably this is partly because the DLC ideal is for Evan Bayh to noegotiate with Olympia Snowe, and their second choice is for Bayh to be negotiating with Jim Demint. perhaps Bayh resigned because he was worried that at some point he’d be on the same side as Allen Grayson.
March 17, 2010 at 6:04 pm
When you say that “no one seems to be thinking about this stuff”, what you mean is that no one with the ability to buy major media is thinking about it. Plenty of other people are. But what good does that do? It’s like saying that no one seemed to be thinking that Democrats were going to need to push all legislation via reconciliation, if they weren’t willing to get rid of the filibuster. Plenty of progressives thought that. But since their elected leadership wasn’t thinking that, then so what?
Part of the whole declining-empire thing is that those in power no longer respond to political signals of any kind, really. It’s not like rank-and-file conservatives are going to get any of the things they want, either. There will be only those things that benefit the people capable of and interested in presenting large, ready bribes — the Supreme Court case allowing corporations to spend unlimited political money, for instance — and nothing else.
March 17, 2010 at 6:24 pm
Even among the advanced thinkers of the political mainstream, people seem to be waiting for Sulzberger and Graham to see the error of their ways. And nobody seems to be aware of the pervasiveness of the ambient flood of rightwing misinformation. It’s true that we have carved ourself a little refuge, and that whenever TV says something dumb we can immediately find a refutation, but it isn’t getting out.
Bush got <52% in 2004, and McCain got <46% in 2008. that means that 8 years of Bush changed the minds of 6% of the population.
March 17, 2010 at 9:35 pm
“what you mean is that no one with the ability to buy major media is thinking about it. Plenty of other people are. But what good does that do?”
For me, I could easily see where the returns from investing tiny amounts in new media outweigh spending 1,000 times more to buy a mass media outlet. We would need to spend 100+ million to even buy one failing paper in one mid-sized market. And obviously, the paper comes with all sorts of expenses that have no solid relationship with your political goals. A lot of people read the paper to get stock market numbers, read local restaurant reviews, look at the comics, read reporting on local high school and college sports and so on. You’ll still need to pay the sports columnists even though their value add politically is very small. Many people listen to the radio to hear Motown favorites or the Beatles. You’ll need to pay the disk jockey who plays the records even though the value add politically is very small.
March 17, 2010 at 10:46 pm
My conclusion is that we’re doomed. But we do need some national outlet of a type that reaches disengaged voters. A substantial proportion of the population never hears a liberal voice, ever, whereas conservative voices are pretty much everywhere.
As far as the budget considerations B-B gives, they seem inconsequential. On the one hand, presumably the media wouldn’t be run at a dead loss. On the other, to get the any listeners / readersat all you need the sports and the pop and the gossip.
And again, the actual demise of those few print newspapers which are the only media that originate stories of any substance really does sound like a return to ignorance, to an authoritarian administered world where there really can be no public opinion. Which of course is a desideratum for many.
March 18, 2010 at 2:32 pm
[…] John Emerson says: […]
March 18, 2010 at 5:03 pm
“My conclusion is that we’re doomed. But we do need some national outlet of a type that reaches disengaged voters. A substantial proportion of the population never hears a liberal voice, ever, whereas conservative voices are pretty much everywhere.”
Why doomed? Pretty clearly mass media will move to web media primarily (internet radio versus radio, streaming video versus TV, etc). As Rich has mentioned, progressives seem to be significantly better at web media than conservatives are. So, there’s no fundamental reason for despair – as I’m arguing, web media is structurally much more friendly to progressives than mass media is (you can’t sell advertising to businesses if they don’t like your political message). Remember that Matt Taibbi started his career at the eXile, and got noticed because of the eXile’s web presence.
March 18, 2010 at 5:58 pm
I thought web triumphalism had come and gone.
Problems:
1. Potential for capture. We won the recent net neutrality fight, but it won’t be the last.
2. Potential for censorship and spying. Various government programs already exist for doing this. Apparently email communications have been bunched into a few channels for easier management, overseas at least.
3. Who pays for newsgathering? Monetizing the internet has been a tough problem. The internet does some original newsgathering, contrary to big media claims, but even Marcy Wheeler and Josh Micah Marshall are pretty dependent on existing print media.
4. The disengaged voter. It seems to me that, internet or no, he’ll always be at the mercy of commercial media. The same problem will arise. (Only a moderate percent of voters actively keep themselves informed, maybe 20-30%, and many of those are wingers.
And I don’t expect free, advertising-funded broadcast media to disappear.
Out of the whole mess, the disengaged (passive, low-information, whim) voter and the funding of news-gathering seem most critical. Before some fairly recent date between 1800 or 1900, “informed public opinion” beyond a tiny minority couldn’t and didn’t exist.
March 18, 2010 at 7:04 pm
“Who pays for newsgathering?”
Well, if you’re already willing to spend a billion dollars as you’ve declared yourself to be……just dump the billion into a non-profit news operation. A lot better than spending the billion on sports columnists and paperboys.
“The disengaged voter.”
You’re the lover of the demos. Remember that Plato warns us directly that if the demos does not have leisure, they must by necessity be disengaged.
“Out of the whole mess, the disengaged (passive, low-information, whim) voter and the funding of news-gathering seem most critical.” And because it’s a mess is precisely the best reason for optimism. The mass media in 1980, let’s pick a year, was a very orderly place. Not messy at all (in the main). And that mass media in 1980, because of it’s inherent need to woo business advertisers, became more and more conservative as the 1980s progressed (and it was never progressive to begin with).
March 18, 2010 at 8:18 pm
Seriously, my suggestion of buying a news outlet was pretty offhand. My original post said nothing about it. There are a nunber of responses that might or might not be good, but my point is that the present situation is intolerable. That’s still what I’d probably do if I were Soros (that, or start a serious think tank) but that idea is at the far end of imaginary.
Media are not pure money-losing operations. They’re not big moneymakers (actually TV still is, I think, but not newspapers) but they bring in revenue, and sports is one of the profitable parts. Sports bring in viewers / reader and also revenue.
Your most recent argument seems to assume that if the present system is disintegrating, what follows it will be better. That kind of Bakuninist assumption rarely works out. Furthermore, two of the kinds of disintegration we’re seeing are the Foxification of TV and cable and the dwindling of international news.
Anyone who has positive ideas better than mine is welcome to bring them forward. don’t have much to offer except for what I’d do if I were Soros, and as a result I’m pessimistic. But hope is not a plan, as they say.
March 18, 2010 at 10:47 pm
“Your most recent argument seems to assume that if the present system is disintegrating, what follows it will be better. That kind of Bakuninist assumption rarely works out.”
Certainly, but the reality always was that mass media was never especially progressive and it used to be impossible to displace the incumbents by challenging them directly. (And, in fact, the conservatives absolutely did not attack the incumbents directly. Instead, they bought cheap radio stations and went into cable.)
If the conservatives can do this, there’s no particular reason why you yourself can’t.
March 19, 2010 at 4:08 am
This is maybe only tangentially related to the media discussion, but… how are left-wing authoritarian movements, or even smaller-ish groups, built and sustained?
Because I feel like the event of further economic collapse (which I’d say is likely and necessary) will mean violence of some kind. And if political violence is highly correlated with authoritarianism (I’m working off of Altemeyer and The Psychology of Genocide, which was a mediocre book but a good bibliography), then it can only help leftists to peel off at least some of that ~20-30%, and turn them against the rest. (Or, even, forget the leftist requirement: the longer the SS fights the SA, etc., the better. Maybe fomenting divisions between American mercenary paramilitary and true military?)
I don’t know. But I like the blog, keep it up.
March 19, 2010 at 6:58 am
Ah, I wasn’t thinking. The violence stuff is black swan/fanciful trolling, but the question about left authoritarianism seems already answered: for starters, DLC and co, plus its favorable old media and web presence.
March 19, 2010 at 1:39 pm
“And if political violence is highly correlated with authoritarianism, then it can only help leftists to peel off at least some of that ~20-30%, and turn them against the rest.”
You are asserting that you know the truth of governance, that is, that you know the road to the good city (the good city in reality, not just the good city in speech). It is hard to see how the politics of the good city can by dominated by the very cruelest and worst passions of man. If the good city is anything, it is where the best of things is promoted, not the worst of things. We cannot obtain justice by committing the greatest injustices. And to intentionally make the passions worse of those whose souls are already disturbed is committing the greatest of injustices.
(using “city” here to mean polis or state)
March 19, 2010 at 6:03 pm
{During my lucid moments I am an intelligent, interesting, well-informed guy, but I am slowly beginning to understand that I have been permanently banned here because I am unendurably stupid and abusive during my bad times. Anyone who allows me to post regrets it, and sooner rather than later.}
April 30, 2010 at 5:34 am
“Bush got <52% in 2004, and McCain got <46% in 2008. that means that 8 years of Bush changed the minds of 6% of the population."
Hate to say it, but it's worse than that: since Bush got <48% in 2000, 8 years of Bush changed the minds of 2% of the population. I think I need a couple of stiff drinks and a bottle of sleeping pills now. …Kidding! 🙂
More constructively, a scattershot counterproposal/bullet point hypothesis: Shakespeare. The Globe. David Simon. The Wire. HBO. Dickens. Uncle Tom's Cabin. This American Life. Tell great stories that are true and ring true and they will come and they will listen to your politics without even caring that they do. There's your ambient, low/no effort opinion and news gathering. Use those to support true story gathering aka journalism; encourage your journalists and screenwriters to switch places every so often. Build a True network to match the Fox one; Fox is mainly entertainment too, it certainly started that way.