How bad is the state of American journalism? It’s pretty dire.
How did we get to a point where the news is no longer trustworthy? How did we get to a point where the mainstream media is just a mouthpiece for the interests of the elite? What happened to the very necessary fourth estate of government? You have Fox News for Republicans on one side and you have MSNBC on the other, which is basically Fox News for Democrats. There is so much deliberate bias (not to mention censorship) everywhere you look.
Media companies have become intrinsically linked with the powerful corporations that they are supposed to hold to account.
The New York Times used to subsist on advertising revenue but now that that’s gone, it’s beholden to the people who pay for a subscription, most of whom are wealthy and white. The Washington Post is owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world. The three largest broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) in the country are owned by Comcast, Disney and Viacom, respectively. MSNBC is also owned by Comcast. Rupert Murdoch owns Fox News and the NY Post. AOL-Time Warner owns CNN.
So why aren’t more people outraged about this?!
People aren’t THAT stupid. We are smart enough to know that when someone owns something, they will have a large influence on their product. That is just how business works. People also know the dangers of too much social media or too much internet. But for some reason, they don’t apply that same logic to the news. Why don’t people think that consuming mainstream news can be bad for you? It is because of the deception that you are getting information, rather than consuming a product.
“How is any media company supposed to fairly cover the issues that affect the American oligarchy when they are directly beholden to it? This applies more so to issues of the coverage for the working class of America for whom attention and assistance are mostly likely to come at the very expense of these oligarchs. Aside from Bezos’ ownership of the The Washington Post, however, no oligarch has been more brazen in his control of a media company than Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg is the ninth richest man in the United States depending on the day and the fate of the stock market. When he decided to run for president, he flat out ordered his company Bloomberg News not to investigate him during the race, and then his newsroom decided to extend that privilege to all of his Democratic compatriots.” (Saajar Enjeti, The Populist’s Guide to 2020)
Meanwhile when Jeff Bezos paid $250 million for The Washington Post, what he really purchased was the right to stop the second-most powerful newspaper in the US from investigating Amazon (it’s basically a digital surveillance company moonlighting as a bookstore). And even better, he could use The Washington Post to hire people who share his ideology, which benefits his bottom line. It shouldn’t be hard —practically every journalist wants to work there. (Saagar Enjeti, The Populist’s Guide to 2020)
When Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders point out the very obvious fact that the coverage of a particular news organization is beholden to its corporate ownership and its shareholder interests, they are branded as crackhead conspiracy theorists who are putting the institution of journalism in some sort of danger. It’s almost funny.
All the President’s Men (1976).
In the late 2000s, the British Cabinet Office issued a report called “Unleashing Aspirations.” It found that journalism was one of “the most socially exclusive professions in the country,” noting:
98% of journalists born since 1970 were college educated.
Less than 10% came from working class backgrounds.
On average, a journalist grew up in a family in the upper 25th percentile by wealth.
Here in the states, the change came in stages. In 1976, the movie All The President’s Men was a blockbuster hit. It was also a critical success. Suddenly, journalists were the new rock stars and all the rich kids wanted in. Previously, a rich American kid would never want to be a lowly reporter. Ironically, All the President’s Men was about anti-establishment journalism — it was about the Watergate scandal and the takedown of the Nixon administration. But once all the rich kids wanted to become journalists and entered the profession en masse, the next generations of political reporters viewed people in power as cultural soulmates because, socially and economically, they were. Political reporters became professional apologists for the ruling class. Now, journalism is told from the institutional point of view instead of challenging it. Modern day journalists are little more than palace courtiers.
The internet accelerated the class divide. Big regional newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post increasingly became national and even global in mind-set. In the internet age it made more sense for their coverage to appeal to a small portion of upper class readers across the country who could afford the subscriptions and respond to ads. (Matt Taibbi, Hate, Inc.)
“Journalism has evolved into a career with significant entry barriers, one of which is the unpaid internship. This makes the profession whiter, wealthier…and less concerned with public policy issues that affect the poor and the middle class.” (Dana Goldstein, The American Prospect)
The mainstream news is nothing more than a manufactured product meant as entertainment to be consumed by the masses. Telling the unbiased truth is not one of its goals but it should be.
The mainstream media isn’t meant for the working class. To understand the stories it chooses to report on, one needs to understand that all of it is targeted by the advertisers that fund them. This is why advertising revenue and ratings are so important. The target market that the mainstream media aims to satisfy is white, upper middle class people and all of its coverage is tailored to their specific interests, needs and political leanings. In politics, they are referred to as “the donor class.”
This entire culture of the national news media is made even worse by the fact that newsrooms are populated by people who are part of that target market — they have the same privileged backgrounds, attend the same elite schools, live in the same metro regions (New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, etc.). If the media is made up of mostly white, upper middle class people and targeted towards white, upper middle class people, what ends up happening? The concerns and lives of the working class and poor are ignored and demeaned completely.
The news doesn’t like bipartisanship. There are only two sides allowed in mainstream media: Republican vs. Democrat. Left vs. Right. Liberal vs. Conservative. Blue vs. Red. The spectrum of ideas is very narrow and it’s all meant to keep you angry, to keep watching and addicted to conflict and self-righteousness.
“The news today is a reality TV show where you’re part of the cast: it’s America vs. America on every channel. The trick is to get all audiences to believe that they’re punching up, rather than punching sideways, at other media consumers like themselves.” (Matt Taibbi, Hate, Inc.)
The news media operates by making you believe that one group thinks a certain way while the other side thinks the opposite and you have to pick a side. This makes audiences hate people rather than institutions. If there is a story that audiences can either all agree on or be neutral on, newsrooms will ignore it or spin it so that one side will get furious.
In the past, they used to profit off various moral panics. Think of the Red Scare in the 1950s. Think of the Satanic Panic in the 1980s. Or the panic over gangster rap in the early 1990s. Or the moral panic over teen pregnancies.
Why do they do this? It boils down to money and audience. Social media, particularly Facebook, played a huge part in accelerating the demise of journalism. In today’s digital sweatshop environment where a billion pieces of content are created everyday, the main goal is being first in breaking a story and garnering the most amount of clicks.
“Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent Revisited”
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. Published in 1988, it is an amazing and comprehensive exploration of the origin, development and operation of the modern media. The authors come at this material from the standpoint that the media functions primarily as a powerful tool for social control. The world view presented in the media is essentially that of the ruling classes and the rest of us plebes are locked out of it all. We are passive consumers of the bullshit being fed to us by large corporations and other powerful interests.
The entire news landscape today is a giant rooting section. Pick your team. Anyone who has ever watched pro-wrestling can see the similarities here: there needs to be a clear villain (the heel) versus a hero.
Donald Trump is an example of the perfect product for every newsroom. He can easily be framed as the heel or he can be the hero.
In 2016, the more the liberal news attacked Trump, the more attractive he looked to the average Republican. The liberal news media practically handed Trump the election by making him seem like the ultimate underdog. The deeper into campaign season it got though, it became very apparent that Trump wasn’t going anywhere. His political opponents and journalists covering the campaign had no idea how to handle him. Clearly, they didn’t watch Wrestlemania. Audiences love a good heel. They love the preening and the goading. The more Trump instigated his opponents and the press, the more audiences cheered him on. And the more audiences cheered him on, the more the ratings soared. No other candidate could compete. By the time journalists realized they were watching Wrestlemania in the form of a presidential race, it was too late.
According to Matt Taibbi, reporters on the 2016 campaign trail started carrying copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and The Paranoid Style in American Politics. They were studying them and trying to find political parallels in the past. But what they should have been studying was Eric Bischoff’s Controversy Creates Cash. Bischoff was a former pro-wrestler heel act and his book is a field guide on how to use provocation and theatrical drama to drum up fan interest. Reporters had no idea things were sliding into a well-known business model. It was unheard of in American politics until then. But the fact that the political establishment and the liberal media were so out of touch with a known cultural phenomenon had very real consequences.
This applies to all other news too, not just elections. Watch any news piece and ask yourself, is there a villain in this story? Right now if you watch the news, China is the villain that is responsible for giving the world the coronavirus. Their communist ways are evil and they have oppressed their citizens, covered up their true death rates, and allowed the entire’s world’s economy to collapse, not to mention they have actual blood on their hands because of the global death toll. Very few news organizations except for independent news outlets will accurately report that the actual cause is climate change caused by capitalism.
Today after recovering from the coronavirus, Chris Cuomo went on his SiriusXM show to vent about his job as an anchorman. He said his battle with the coronavirus made him rethink his values and question his position as a public figure. Speaking about his job as the host of CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time, he said he doesn’t want to spend his life “trafficking in things that I think are ridiculous,” like “talking to Democrats about things that I don’t really believe they mean,” and “talking to Republicans about them parroting things they feel they have to say.” Cuomo concluded: “I’m basically being perceived as successful in a system that I don’t value.” It was refreshing to hear this from him. I wish more reporters could be as honest as him.
*It should still be noted that Chris Cuomo is representative of the problem of rich kids taking over the journalism industry.
So who should we trust?
I would be lost if it weren’t for Twitter. Twitter is the frontline for real, breaking news and any real time critical analysis. If it’s on Facebook, that means it was already trending on Twitter days or even weeks before.
Also, pay attention to local news. They are pretty much the only ones doing real investigative journalism anymore.
Part of the predicament is that we now have the tools to organize and solidarize — but in exchange for unprecedented surveillance in a way never seen before. The truth will have to be pieced together by disparate reports from a variety of news outlets. It’s almost impossible to find unbiased journalism in an age where news stories are fluffed-up opinion pieces and mainstream news outlets are openly endorsing political candidates. In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman offer hope in the form of nonprofit and public TV and radio programs, and the dissident press.
“Mainstream news organizations want you to accept a binary world and pick a side. Embrace the reality of being surrounded by evil stupidity. The other side is literally Hitler. The more you watch and get angry, the more you will feel indignant, righteous and intelligent. You should hate losers and love winners. You’re never wrong, you’re just punching up. Don’t challenge yourself. And during the commercials, do some shopping. Congratulations, you’re the perfect news consumer.” (Matt Taibbi, Hate, Inc.)
Make no mistake. We are the dangerous ones. Not Iran, not Venezuela, not Russia, not China, not Syria, not Cuba, and not North Korea — all the countries that the U.S. mainstream media tells us are the world’s enemies. Notice that all those countries are also independent of American economic and military interests. And we have intervened in the democratic processes in foreign countries at least 81 times since World War II in order to secure access for our corporate interests. Our media tells us everyday that we are the good guys. That we hold moral and political superiority over everyone else, especially those who oppose us. Our media — and especially our national news — is lying to us and unfortunately, too many people believe all the lies.
Hate, Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another. By Matt Taibbi. This book is an updated version of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s seminal book Manufacturing Consent. He talks at length about how Russiagate is this generation’s WMDs and how MSNBC and Rachel Maddow in particular, are the exact mirror images of Fox News and Sean Hannity’s sensationalism and fear-mongering-for-ad-revenue-and-ratings model.
Recent Posts
I usually do a write up of the events I’ve organized or hosted and my most-read articles at the end of the year. This was an unusual year (obviously, there is no need to go into it here) so I didn’t bother. Instead I want to highlight a project of mine that I am particularly proud of — it’s my new podcast show, Unverified Accounts, that I cohost with my frequent collaborators, Chris Jesu Lee and Filip Guo. If you're a big movie/TV/book buff, have leftist sympathies, but can't stand 'wokeness' dumbing down our culture, then we're the podcast for you. So far in our 25 episodes, we’ve covered a range of contentious topics.