If the New York Times really
were what the New York Times pretends to be, when it or its industry was
criticized, it would bend over backwards to make sure it was being fair to the
critics. That’s the true test of “objectivity,” isn’t it—how you act when it’s your own ox
being gored?
Instead, the Times typically
reacts to criticism the way a cat typically reacts to being given a bath.
Take, for example, a piece in
the New York Times (2/23/16) that addresses presidential candidate Bernie
Sanders’ criticism of corporate media—or “the ‘corporate media,’ as he refers
to it,” as the Times’ Jason Horowitz refers to it.
The first thing the Times
wants you to know about Sanders’ media criticism is that it’s wrong: “As News
Media Changes, Bernie Sanders’ Critique Remains Constant,” is the headline.
Horowitz’s piece elaborates on this theme of Sanders’ failure to appreciate the
brave new media world:
Despite the advent of the
Internet, the diminishing of traditional news media companies and the emergence
of new media Goliaths like Facebook that have helped fuel his rise, Mr. Sanders
remains orthodox in his mass media doctrine….
As Mr. Sanders sees it, the
profit-hungry billionaire owners of news media companies serve up
lowest-common-denominator coverage, purposefully avoid the income-inequality
issues he prioritizes and mute alternative voices as they take over more and
more outlets.
Is that wrong? For example,
aren’t news media owners mostly billionaires with a keen interest in profit?
The largest stockholder of the New York Times is Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim, who’s a billionaire 77 times over; he didn’t
get to be the second-richest
person in the world without a healthy appetite for return on investment.
Horowitz attempts to set
Sanders straight by asserting that there has been a proliferation of new media
offering alternative voices, and traditional news sources have shrunk in an
Internet age of diminishing advertising revenue.
Source: Pew
Here’s a chart of the top 10
online news sources, courtesy of Pew Research Center. One thing you should notice is that
most of them are traditional news sources, now dominating online news. Of the
ones that aren’t, Yahoo is partnered with ABC News (which is why they share a slot on
the chart); Huffington Post is owned by AOL, which in turn is owned by Verizon;
and Buzzfeed sold a $200 million equity stake to NBCUniversal, which is to say Comcast.
When people think of “alternative voices,” they’re not generally thinking of
giant cable and telecom companies. (Where’s Facebook? Facebook and other social
media are not content producers; they direct content generated elsewhere, and
if those were largely “alternative voices,” they’d be showing up on this
chart.)
Far from shrinking the reach
of traditional media, the internet has allowed them to reach vast new
audiences. The Times is getting 57 million unique visitors a month—compare that
to its peak daily print circulation of 1.2 million. So maybe
warnings about the power of corporate media aren’t so out of date after all?
And does corporate media, as
Sanders says, avoid issues of income inequality? FAIR has studied this
repeatedly, and while a content analysis can’t discern whether it’s on purpose
or not, corporate media outlets do show a persistent lack of interest in
inequality and poverty. One FAIR study (Extra!, 9-10/07)
found that over a 38-month period, the three major nightly newscasts did fewer
stories on poverty than on Michael Jackson’s legal travails (58 vs. 69).
Another study (Extra!, 5/12)
found a short, sharp increase in interest in inequality in 2011, coinciding
with Occupy Wall Street, that quickly subsided to the prior level of neglect.
According to our analysis of 2012 campaign coverage (Extra!, 9/12), “just 17 of
the 10,489 campaign stories studied (0.2 percent) addressed poverty in a
substantive way.” Our most recent study of the issue (Extra!, 6/14)
noted that four times as many network news stories mentioned billionaires (of
whom there were 482 in the US at the time) as addressed the 50 million
Americans living in poverty.
But the real point of the Times
article is to respond to Sanders’ complaints about his own coverage, and his
relationship with the journalists who follow his campaign—his “antagonism”
toward the press, which goes beyond “the standard posture for politicians” and
is actually “a pillar of his anti-establishment, socialist worldview.”
So what are his
anti-establishment, socialist complaints?
In December, his campaign
demanded that the “corporate network news” grant him as much coverage as it
does Mrs. Clinton (the “Bernie blackout,” they called it).
Sanders was referring to the study by the Tyndall Report (cited in Washington
Post, 12/7/15), the standard resource on how much time the
networks spend covering what. Tyndall found that in the first 11 months of
2015, Sanders had gotten roughly one-twentieth the coverage of Donald Trump,
one-tenth the coverage of Hillary Clinton and one-fifth the campaign coverage
of Joe Biden, who wasn’t even running. (FAIR noted
this phenomenon as well—and documented it in print publications like the Times
as well as on TV.)
But rather than mentioning the
rather persuasive data that Sanders was pointing at, Horowitz ran a dismissive
quote from Sanders’ primary opposition:
The Clinton campaign, however,
argues that Mr. Sanders has benefited from the superficial horse-race
journalism he scorns, and that coverage has largely focused on his avuncular
style and cross-generational appeal rather than thorough inspections of his
proposals or record.
It’s not clear where Clinton’s
spokesperson saw evidence of this focus on Sanders’ avuncular appeal. Was it
the New York Times news story (5/31/15)
that reported that Sanders’ platform “may eventually persuade Democrats that he
is unelectable in a general election”? Or the one (1/31/16)
that lumped Sanders in with Donald Trump and Ted Cruz as
“candidates on the ideological fringes” and “idol-smashing outsiders.” Or maybe
it was the news article (2/15/16)
that quoted economists associated with the Democratic establishment—misidentified
as “liberal-leaning economists who share his goals”—comparing Sanders’ agenda
to “magic flying puppies with winning Lotto tickets tied to their collars.”
Here’s a thought: Maybe
Sanders’ media critique remains constant because media like the New York Times
constantly need criticism?
Jim Naureckas is the editor of
FAIR.org. Follow him on Twitter at @JNaureckas.
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