By Adam Johnson
Second only to glib
equivalencies between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, 2016’s most popular lazy
media trope is the idea that rabid Sanders fans have unleashed dark populist
forces that threaten our republic. Both are fairly common, and more or less
write themselves if the author tosses coherence and intellectual honesty out
the window. But it’s rare that both are on such stark display as with New
York Observer‘s editor-at-large Ryan Holiday’s recent op-ed (2/17/16).
The diatribe, “The Cause of
This Nightmare Election? Media Greed and Shameless Traffic Worship,” poses as
media criticism but is little more than petulant establishment gatekeeping.
Let’s begin with the thesis, or what passes for one, which is that the
democratization of media has created a “sub-prime market” for the media. A
superficially catchy hook but one that, upon further examination, make little
sense:
“I am talking, of course,
about our media system. A system in which tens of thousands of reporters—bloggers—chasing
online traffic bonuses produce
sensational, inflammatory
and outright
dangerous “news” at the expense of the public they are supposed to be
serving. A system in which speculative, high-valence news—whether it starts as
a tweet or a rumor—is packaged, dissected, repacked and passed along from
outlet to outlet until a thinking person can hardly follow what is real and
what is fake.”
Those damned “bloggers”
(gasp!) are “chasing online traffic.” This is opposed to sometime in the past
when ratings, newspaper sales and the ad revenue they generated didn’t matter.
But never mind that; this new breed of vague “media system” has created a
monster:
“Atypical candidates like
Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are effectively subsidized by the media in
order to provide the storylines those outlets require to create the compelling
spectacles they need to keep the cycle going and audiences hooked.”
Here Holiday—formerly the marketing
director for American Apparel and, according to his bio, a “media
strategist and prominent writer on strategy and business”—has hatched a
somewhat goofy conspiracy theory: that “the media” are intentionally propping
up “atypical” candidates to keep “audiences hooked.” He begins by saying the
“the media” (now morphed from bottom-feeding bloggers to major corporate media)
disproportionately covered Trump and help feed his rise, which is empirically
true. Trump, as the the Tyndall Report documented (Washington Post, 12/7/15),
was the focus of 234 minutes of nightly network news coverage in the first 11
months of 2015—more than twice as much airtime as the next-most-covered
candidate, Hillary Clinton, at 113 minutes.
But he lumps Sanders in with
Trump in a misreading of media coverage so off-base as to be hallucinatory.
Over the same time period, Sanders got just ten minutes of coverage—less than 5
person of Trump’s coverage, 10 percent of Clinton’s coverage and even a fifth
as much as the 56 minutes given to Joe Biden and his protracted decision not to
run for president.
To justify his complaint that
even this minimal coverage was too much, he puts forth one of the more risibly
elitist nuggets of political commentary of the 2016 campaign:
“On the other end of the
spectrum, the rise of Bernie Sanders simply doesn’t pass the smell test. This
is a candidate who Nate Silver shows is extremely
unlikely to win, who would be 75 years old on Inauguration Day, who
embraces, quite openly, the word “socialist” in a country that considers the
word more dangerous politically than “atheist,” and who is drowning in
headlines.”
Of course, Sanders has not
been “drowning
in headlines” (emphasis in the original). His coverage did tick up after
his poll numbers began to catch up to Clinton’s—but even in 2016, as Sanders
virtually tied in Iowa and beat Clinton by a wide margin in New Hampshire, he
still got only 83 percent as many mentions as Clinton in the New York Times
(and 75 percent as many as Trump).
What, exactly, would Holiday
have the “the media” do? Should they ignore Sanders because Nate Silver—one of
those dreaded bloggers—ran a model and said the voters didn’t matter? Since
when does 538.com determine who the media should and shouldn’t cover? It’s hard
to overstate how contemptuous of the democratic process this line of argument
is.
Holiday’s piece is written by
media elites for media elites, the type of thing that gets passed around in
journalistic circles because it angrily expresses what so many of them truly
believe: Candidates must win the Washington Post and New York Times primaries
to be taken seriously by voters in actual primaries. The whole premise—that
some scruple-free, vaguely defined gutter “media” helped propelled Sanders in a
supra-democratic fraud—ignores the fact that nearly every major media outlet,
from the Times
and the Post
to NBC
and CNN,
has either marginalized or openly warned against Sanders.
The post goes downhill from
there, with pseudo-important generalities like this:
“Pause for a second to tally
the millions upon millions of pageviews outlets from Salon to Breitbart, Gawker
to Huffington Post have raked in writing about Sanders and Trump and Rubio and
Cruz and Clinton’s emails and all of the rest of it.”
What does this even mean?
Politically oriented sites get clicks reporting on…politics. So does CNN, the New
York Times and virtually every news website, including the Observer. Indeed,
the Observer, which is owned by Trump’s billionaire
son-in-law, ran a number
of pieces
highlighting Clinton’s
emails, most of which were by former NSA spook and current mudslinger John
Schindler (who also called for “potential jihadists” to be put into
internment camps in the Observer’s high-minded pages).
And yes, the Observer also
writes, repeatedly, about Sanders,
Trump,
Rubio and Cruz.
By Holiday’s own standard, not only is his publication guilty, but so is every
publication on earth that dares write about things of political relevance.
Holiday, for some strange reason, has walked into a barbeque restaurant and
self-righteously condemned them for serving meat. He laments further:
“Instead of being a force of
reason and accountability in 2015 and 2016, the pageview-hungry media has
become an enabler of chaos and divisiveness.”
This is the rub: This article
is not a serious piece of media criticism and the reason we know that is
because it has no clearly defined target. First it’s the “bloggers,” then the
cable news outlets, then any publication that reports on major candidates not
preordained by Nate Silver, then any media outlet that wants ad revenue—including,
by definition, his own. It’s not media criticism, it’s lazy centrist
navel-gazing. It’s a way for Holiday to signal to other establishment media
types that he’s above the fray like them, while lamenting their—and by
extension his—increasing irrelevance.
Adam Johnson is an associate
editor at AlterNet and writes frequently for FAIR.org. Follow him on Twitter
at @adamjohnsonnyc.
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