Thinking about the Mainstream Media
Posted on November 5th, 2009
by Oskar Chomicki |
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Whenever someone uses the term “mainstream media,” you can almost be certain it will be meant derisively. For folks on the right, “MSM” is convenient shorthand for talking about a nefarious elite bent on imposing radical leftism, both of the economic and cultural variety, on America. Indeed, despite the journalism profession’s protestations of objectivity, the truth remains that it is composed overwhelming of people on the left. Treatments of leftist “media bias” like we have seen from Bernard Goldberg or Brent Bozell may be polemical and somewhat overwrought, but they are also rooted in a sound factual basis. Unbalanced media coverage of Obama during the campaign and early stages of the presidency was not just a figment of the conservative imagination. Here are two studies bearing this out: one from the Center for Media and Public Affairs and the other from the Pew Research Center.
At the same time, “media bias” has been a handy excuse for Republican failures. During the darkest days of the Iraq insurgency, many conservatives consoled themselves with the belief that the reality on the ground was far brighter than it was being reported by the MSM. “Fact finding” trips to Iraq involving conservative media figures and politicians were transparent charades and denials of basic reality. It was only when the evidence became overwhelming that the course was unsustainable that a reconsideration of Iraq policy became acceptable in conservative circles. (The long-term wisdom of the resulting surge strategy is a matter for another day).
It is interesting to note that many leftists talk about the mainstream media with the same disdain characteristic of right-wingers. They charge the media with carrying water for corporate interests and with dereliction of duty when the Bush administration was spinning the Iraq war. Is it possible for both right and left wing to be correct about the MSM? Some on the anti-war right (and left) would argue that indeed that is possible. In their minds, the media is a handmaiden of the bipartisan “Warfare State.”
What then should we take away from our consideration of the mainstream media? One salient fact to remember is that the journalism landscape is becoming more and more fractured every day. The rise of cable news, talk radio, and the Internet has undermined the hegemony of the Big Three networks and the major daily newspapers. We have all heard about the downward spiral of the newspaper industry, with venerable institutions filing bankruptcy or undergoing sizable layoffs. Soon enough, talking about the mainstream media as a recognizable entity will be anachronistic.
While conservatives might cheer this trend as liberal bias getting its just deserts, what will emerge to replace the reporting of the major newspaper bureaus is unsettling at best. The idea that bloggers working from home or taking the occasional trip will replace professionals on an assigned beat is laughable. God bless Joe the Plumber but casting him as a reporter on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict enters the realm of absurdity. The truth is that, even with the prejudices of most journalists, the conscientious citizen can, particularly with the help of the Internet and a healthy dose of variety, stay relatively well-informed. But the dark days that lie ahead for the whole profession may end not just with the welcome demise of MSM bias but with the rise of obscurantism emanating from our nation’s elite, whether they have a “D” or a “R” before their names.
Filed under: Conservatism, Politics, media
I’m not sure how the fracturing of the media is going to affect people’s ability to stay informed. I might suggest, however, that the “MSM” has served us pretty poorly for a long while.
I agree that the media generally can be described as “the handmaiden of the bipartisan ‘Warfare State’.”
But anyone who argues “liberal bias” in the media really needs to address how the MSM treated the Clintons in the 1990s and, especially, Al Gore in the 2000 election. Bob Somerby at The Daily Howler exhaustively demonstrates how unscrupulous, biased and ignorant the MSM behaved toward Gore, ultimately leading to Bush’s election in 2000.
Oskar, I think your assessment that media coverage of the McCain campaign was “unbalanced” is flawed. Here’s what Pew reported, in the link you provide: “For McCain, coverage began positively, but turned sharply negative with McCain’s reaction to the crisis in the financial markets. . . .Attempts to turn the dialogue away from the economy through attacks on Obama’s character did hurt Obama’s media coverage, but McCain’s was even more negative.” Can you honestly say that negative reactions to McCain’s actions during the crisis were unwarranted, when even Republicans were privately shaking their heads over what he said and did? And was the press’s negative reaction to Palin (after widespread initial positive coverage, as I remember quite well), as the Center reported, really media bias, when it is clear to everyone except her most partisan supporters - including McCain operatives - that she was a major drain on the ticket?
If you want justification for left-wing contempt for the MSM, here are two giant issues not well reported on television: the health care crisis as actually confronted by ordinary Americans, and how in fact we compare in cost and outcomes to other developed countries - when in fact all you hear from talking heads is “ours is the best health-care system in the world”; and the realities of the Bush administration’s torture regime - now resulting in overseas indictments of CIA agents - which is a historic national embarrassment and hasn’t been covered on television at all.
It is common for conservatives to say the MSM is biased because most reporters vote for Democrats. In fact, of course, one increasingly sees Republicans and even conservatives on television, while the number of bona-fide liberals that appear can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and real leftists are nowhere to be seen; Republicans during both the Bush and Obama administrations are far more numberous as talk show guests than Democrats, with John McCain setting some kind of record for appearances; and Obama is being criticized nightly by liberals like Ed Schultz. What is never acknowledged is that most anchors are multimillionaires, with gold-plated medical insurance besides, whose connection to ordinary Americans is for all practical purposes non-existent; and networks are increasingly owned by multinational corporations - like GE, in NBC’s case - and if you think at senior levels these firms have a liberal agenda there’s a bridge I would like to sell you.
I think the liberal bias that really counts is the one in academia. That’s where a small group of upper-class northeasterners which words the rest of us use and what meanings we ascribe to them.
The media elite are merely looking for stories, but they can only find the stories that their words can reach, and as such, they’re limited to the center-left portion of our nation’s political spectrum that the academics have carved out.
It is in fact true that Joe the plumber can’t cast as a reporter for Israel Palestinian conflict. But if the clear bias of the “MSM” towards this conflict continues, people in search of truth will look for other means, which can even be a report by Joe the plumber.
Well, I for one am deeply unhappy that Guy on Fox News has stated that our President is not a REAL President.
Before we charge him with high-treason, we need to make sure we have given him a fair chance.
Jeebus Christ, Oskar. Are you contracted to play the “You know I’m Conservative, but wouldn’t you agree this might be an issue” role here? I mean, Joe the Not-Plumber? Really? You had to sink - that - low on the conservative food chain to get a non-aggressive spark out of your potential audience? Doesn’t that sting?
Truth to tell, the American Media lost any pretence of being ‘Liberal’ back in the 1980s, and are now at a stage where the “No, really, I can spin this monumental fuck-up as actually good for the GOP and bad news for Democrats, just watch me!” conventional wisdom they pump out has driven away the majority of people who - want - actual fact-based news, while acting as a gateway drug for the minority who need to hear how right they are all the time, and so are losing them to Fox News, where the crazy is uncut and has no nasty reality to spoil the taste.
Very sad, but instructive. And they’d still be getting away with it, if it wasn’t for those pesky bloggers and their addiction to things they can prove by the simple expedient of pointing at a headline.
Question: They are primarily comprised of liberal, secular-extremist, smug, cosmopolitan metro-sexuals and pushy careerists. They generally despise rural folk, white Christian males, and carry around a lot of latent hatred for Muslims (even though most won’t admit it due to the imperatives of political correctness), which is one reason the Mideast wars were so easy for them to embrace in reluctant partnership with the Bushcons and their ex-friend Neocons. Anything that smacks of conservatism and Big Religion, they fear and loathe with a passion. They want the “secular” State to rule all, and want to pull the strings to direct it. They fancy themselves “enlightened” even though they are among the most bitter, vindictive, grudge-bearing demographics on earth, and generally hate with a passion those they seek to control (which is one reason America is today in the toilet). They are a truly hostile “elite.”
Answer: Who are mainstream media?
Some Jewish people say that every single word in the Torah can be taken 6 ways. (7, if you count the MSM coverage).
The Christians expect MSM bias, when they say that you can’t judge a Book by how it’s covered.
Keep your friends close. A nice stimulus package will reward them, with enough left over to buy the MSM to deal with your enemies.
I can look at any person, and any editorial or article, and see who is on the right or the left of whom. Except for myself, of course, because I am an independent thinker, and am therefore harder to categorize.
The death of journalism has been greatly exaggerated… regardless of the number of wooden stakes we have used up.
Save us from “open-minded” judges!
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/004139.html
Can not the same thing be said about journalists who manage only to thinly veil their bias, in the name of “open mindedness”?
Standing on the shrinking iceberg of leftwing journalism, the only people mourning it’s death are chanting, “Most Americans agree with us!”
Rush, Palin, and Fox will continue to show a “larger than expected” profit.
Tony J approves of Oskar, and says, “American Media lost any pretence of being ‘Liberal’ back in the 1980s”.
Think about it.
Barney,
Sorry, but can you run that by me again? I’ve read it half a dozen times, the last three while huffing a bag of out-of-date glue in a vain attempt to get into the state of mind you appear to have been inhabiting while writing it, and it - still - doesn’t make any sense.
I could have sworn I was mocking Oskar’s oh-so-delicate attempt to smuggle in the notion, under cover of dollops of ‘Liberal Media’ BS, that maybe, just maybe, conservatives relying solely on ideologically approved sources for their facts and figures might, just might, lead to them making the wrong decisions on important issues, because they - started - with crappy information in the first place.
Not because this isn’t true. It is. It’s true on a scale so vast that would require a set of scales built out of experimental composite fibres in a floating space-station to weight blue whales and the egos of MSM talking-heads in order to give an idea of its colossal truthfulness.
But that wasn’t what I was mocking. The whole’Liberal MSM’ lead in, now - that’s - what I was mocking. The scales you’d need to meaningfully weight the awe-inspiring untruthfulness of - that - particular concept can currently be built only in the imaginations of mathematicians, and even then it’s a theoretical problem most ambitious theorists won’t touch, because in order to build a set of scales that would take the weight, you’d need to create a material so dense it would mess with the cosmic forces behind galactic drift, and they don’t think that’s possible for us to achieve right now.
Or, to boil it down a bit, the fact that Oskar feels that he needs to wrap his unpalatable nugget of truth inside a shell of comforting wingnut mythology in order to even try and reach out to the modern conservative base makes me laugh.
But, y’know, since you think my original post came across as approving, YMMV.
Anyone who did press relations in the Northeast knows that the MSM is biased. If you don’t believe this just help out a local GOP campaign and they will prove it to you. Unfortunately, we now have biased clowns “on our side,” adopting all the same tactics. True impartiality is perhaps impossible in journalism. What we need is a rational, sophisticated and independent journalism of the Right to compete with FOX.
Matt Swartz is 100% right in his comment. The Academe is the source of so much of what we must contend with in keeping our freedom. In an age when every American believes that he must be sheep dipped through college to attain a decent living, the people who control what goes into that dip have tremendous power.
Understanding the mainstream media to be broadly liberal is not exactly wing-nuttery, as far as I can tell. I don’t think too many people within the profession would dispute that a plurality, if not a majority, of journalists are in fact Democrats. But — and this is a big “but” — this does not mean the MSM is somehow a fifth column of progressivism. It would be fatuous to deny these organizations’ corporate connections. After all, we know NBC is owned by General Electric, Fox is part of Murdoch’s media empire, etc. The broader point of my post wasn’t to trump up the sometimes legitimate gripe of conservatives with media coverage but to take them to task over obsessing about it while ignoring their own failures (i.e. Iraq) and foolishly celebrating the death spiral of conventional media. Furthermore, the rise of newer outlets like talk radio, Fox News, and the Internet suggests that the hegemony of the MSM is also illusory. Still, I’m not sure its demise is altogether a good thing.
In many European countries, newspapers and television more or less openly identify as partisan. Here in America, we are still wed to the mid-century ideal of objective journalism, perhaps a worthy ideal but also an unrealistic and unfulfilled one. If the future points towards a return of the late 19th century model of “yellow dog” journalism, then perhaps it isn’t so bad. Certainly, that kind of reporting was blatantly slanted, but at least you had several competing outlets available. Yet the media landscape as it is shaping up in our day seems to be destroying not only objectivity but professionalism itself. Foreign news bureaus are shutting down and being replaced by what exactly?
Using Joe the Plumber is obviously a straw man argument of sorts, but his rise last year was still instructive about the uncertain future of journalism itself. Blogs have obviously fulfilled an important function in “speaking truth to power,” but they are, by their very nature, narrow and tailored to a limited audience. Whatever its faults, 20th century media was directed at a broad audience. What will replace it should be of concern to conservatives, liberals, and moderates alike. If putting forth that concern is simply a devious tactic of “couching” my real agenda, then my apologies for seeming so. The point is that, even if the mainstream media is liberal, then blaming it for Republicans’ woes and celebrating its oblivion is problematic.
Oskar, I heartily agree with your comment. It’s time to release ourselves from the fantasy of objective journalism. It seems to be happening in any event but as you say, professional standards are also in decline. Perhaps if we generate a truly professional right of center press people will come to understand FOX as the electronic tabloid it is.
Oskar,
“The point is that, even if the mainstream media is liberal, then blaming it for Republicans’ woes and celebrating its oblivion is problematic.”
Which is fair enough, as far as it goes, except for the “even if the mainstream media is liberal” part, because the US MSM really - isn’t - liberal. Not at all. In fact it’s firmly on the conservative side of any debate, and has been for decades. Whether you put this down to ideological bias, pressure from corporate owners, or just plain laziness, the truth is that the modern MSM operates under the rule that everything is always good news for Republicans, and the facts of any story will be twisted and mis-reported until they fit that frame.
Should you need immediate proof of this claim, just look at the coverage given to the recent elections and what they meant for American politics. The Democrats picked up two seats in the House, without which the Health Care Reform bill would not have passed in its current form. One of them in a region where Democrats haven’t won since the Civil-War, and where Republican voters had a genuine representative of the Stop Health Care Reform At Any Cost wing of the GOP to vote for. They lost two Gubernatorial elections in states that, historically, always vote against the dominant party, and where both of the Democratic candidates were unpopular - long - before Health Care Reform became an issue.
Are the MSM portraying this as a victory for Democrats? Are they making a big deal of the schism in the Republican electorate exposed by the fiasco in NY-23, which pushed lifelong moderate Republicans to vote for a Democrat? Or are they instead pushing the meme that Virginia and New Jersey are troubling defeats for the Democrats, and making a big deal of how this might force ‘moderate’ Democrats to vote against Health Care Reform?
A ‘Liberal Media’ would be doing the former, but that’s not what’s happening, is it?
You refer to Fox News as being ‘outside’ of the MSM, but how can you say that with a straight face when the last few weeks have seen the MSM falling over itself to hug it’s ’sister network’ to its bosom and present the White House’s simple acknowledgement of Fox’s real-world status as nothing more than the propaganda wing of the GOP as somehow ‘Nixonian’, and proof of censorship? The Washington Village certainly doesn’t see Fox News as outside the mainstream media, quite the opposite.
My point, simple as I can make it, is that you’re trying to gently educate a bunch of people who - know - that Fox News is telling them the unvarnished truth about everything. When they see someone on another channel pushing the same stories, except with “souces claim” instead of “everyone knows” before the Republican talking-point of the day, that’s just proof for them that the MSM is totally Liberal. They haven’t come to this addled state of mind by accident, they’ve been told this over and over and over again for years.
Even simpler, it doesn’t matter how politely you try to lead movement conservatives away from the cliff of electoral failure and anti-democratic violence, Beck, Palin and Limburgh say you’re wrong, and that’s good enough for them.
Even simpler, it doesn’t matter how politely you try to lead movement conservatives away from the cliff of electoral failure and anti-democratic violence, Beck, Palin and Limburgh say you’re wrong, and that’s good enough for them
The problem with this thesis is that there simply has not been any of this “anti-democratic violence” coming out of any movement conservative circles. Those people have problems, and they advocate violent, idiotic foreign policy, but their body count is far lower than that of the American Left just lately, it seems.
Mattswartz,
“The problem with this thesis is that there simply has not been any of this “anti-democratic violence” coming out of any movement conservative circles.”
Uh huh, sure. Try telling that to George Tiller, oops. Or maybe those guards at the DC Holocaust Museum, double oops! Well, maybe you could ask the Secret Service, they’re alive, and they could tell you an interesting story about the 400% rise in death threats since the President stopped being a Republican. Or maybe you could just pay attention to the Bush Administration’s report on growing right-wing extremism, huh? That’s not even to mention the gun-toting, anti-democratic Birthers who recently tried to close down debate at Town halls across the country. Shall I go on?
In short, I call bullshit.
“Those people have problems, and they advocate violent, idiotic foreign policy, but their body count is far lower than that of the American Left just lately, it seems.”
You care to grace that stunningly untrue statement with anything as conventional as a single factual reference? Because if you’re trying to use the Fort Hood Massacre as an example of ‘left wing’ violence, you, my friend, have just put the World’s Biggest Wanker hat firmly on your pointy head, and it fits very snuggly indeed.