SEP 03, 2019
Criticizing the media has
become a sensitive issue for many on the left in the age of Trump. With an
authoritarian president in office who seeks to discredit the media at every
turn and regularly calls the press the “enemy of the people,” being too critical
of the journalism business in 2019 can feel a bit like kicking someone when
they’re down. Journalists in and beyond the U.S. not only must deal with a
hostile president who attacks reporters and publications that don’t offer a
steady stream of fawning coverage, but they are also grappling with the fact
that their industry is in rapid decline.
At a time when journalism has
never been a more essential public good, the journalism business is dying.
Monthly layoffs plague
the industry and newsroom employment has dropped
by a quarter since 2008. More than 2,000 American newspapers have
closed since 2004, and now half the counties in the country
can claim only one local newspaper (while 171 counties have none at all).
Meanwhile, full-time journalism jobs are increasingly difficult
to come by, and for many reporters and writers today, the only certainty is
the precarity of the gig economy.
With this gloomy prognosis,
coupled with growing hostility
toward the press, it might seem like the last thing the country needs right
now is leftists railing against the media. This is apparently the attitude
among many prominent beltway journalists, who have been quick to equate
progressive critiques of the corporate media with Trumpian attacks on the “fake
news” media. When the country’s most famous democratic socialist, Bernie
Sanders, made a critical comment about coverage from The Washington Post a few
weeks ago, for example, pointing out that Jeff Bezos owned the paper (which
does seem to have a pretty
clear agenda against the
Vermont senator), he was labeled a conspiracy
theorist and slammed on CNN for his “Trump-like attack” of
the press.
This beltway backlash
continued last week in an
article published in the Guardian’s U.S. edition, in which author Joan
Greve, formerly of The Washington Post, pondered whether Sanders’ criticism of
the Post was “Trumpian” in nature. Sanders’ comments, wrote Greve,
“come amid an increasing willingness among the broader Democratic presidential
field to harshly criticize the press—even as violence against US journalists
has escalated and the president’s hostile rhetoric of ‘fake news’ continues
unabated.” To some observers, Greve reported, “it now seems the anti-media
accusations of the right are being mirrored on the left, albeit not at the
dangerous levels of the president.”
While it is perfectly
reasonable to question whether rhetoric goes too far in certain instances, the
idea that leftist critiques of the corporate media bear even the slightest
resemblance to right-wing attacks on the press is laughable. Indeed, to liken
media criticisms from the left to Trump’s incoherent ravings against the press
betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the left’s critique, which is
grounded in a structural and institutional analysis, not paranoid conspiracy
theories and authoritarian politics.
The subtitle of Edward S.
Herman and Noam Chomsky’s classic study of the media, “Manufacturing
Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,” is pretty
self-explanatory. The authors lay out how the progressive critique of the media
is part of a larger critique of free market capitalism and of the corporate structure
of our economy. According to this analysis, the fact that around 90% of the
media in America is controlled
by six corporations (down from 50 companies in the early 1980s) tells
us a lot more about media bias than whether a majority of journalists
personally vote Democrat or Republican.
From the left-wing
perspective, it is impossible to completely separate media companies from the
economic forces that drive their business. Then there’s the question of
ownership; of course, there’s a big difference between activist owners like
Rupert Murdoch and someone like Bezos, who
avoids direct editorial interference. Sanders made just this point
during the Democratic debate on CNN in late July. In response to moderator Jake
Tapper’s misleading question about tax increases under Sanders’ health care
plan (Tapper ignored that health care savings would offset any tax increases
for the vast majority), the Vermont senator accurately
predicted that “the health care industry will be advertising tonight
on this program.”
It is also worth noting that
this could happen only in America or New Zealand, the two countries where
direct-to-consumer drug advertising is
legal. Market forces and the profit motive drive most media companies
today, and to say this has absolutely no impact on programming or coverage is
either naive or disingenuous.
Not long after making his
comment about The Washington Post and Jeff Bezos, Sanders qualified his
remarks: “Do I think Jeff Bezos is on the phone, telling the editor of The
Washington Post what to do? Absolutely not. It doesn’t work that way.”
With an “authoritarian-type”
president “trying to intimidate the media,” Sanders explained, progressives
have to be careful with their critiques, and must defend the free press at all
costs.
But defending a free and
independent press from authoritarian demagogues and right-wing
terrorists isn’t good enough today, and sadly, the free market has
proven to be an even greater long-term threat to the press than the Tweeter in
Chief. The market hasn’t just put countless newspapers out of business and
myriad journalists out of work; it has led to a precipitous decline in the
quality of journalism, as the daily struggle for survival has forced outlets to
chase ratings and clicks, sacrificing quality for quantity.
Twenty years ago, Nieman
Reports published a
report on how network television news had changed over the previous
two decades. Up until the last decades of the 20th century, there had been no
profitable news business on broadcast television. “The Big Three broadcast
television networks—ABC, CBS and NBC—all covered news, but none generally made
money doing so,” explained the report’s authors. “Nor did they expect to turn a
profit from news programming.” “I have Jack Benny to make money,” the owner of
CBS, William Paley, told news reporters in the early 1960s, who were instructed
not to worry about costs.
The demand for profit from
news programming arose as profits from entertainment programming began to
dwindle. Suddenly, news was expected to make money, and the results were
entirely predictable. One way to make the news profitable was to “make the
product more entertaining,” according to Neiman Reports. This would generate
higher ratings and thus higher revenues. Another part of the formula was to
control spending: “The networks have, among other things, closed foreign and
domestic bureaus, laid off staff, eliminated some money-losing documentary
units, and curbed convention and election coverage.”
In the two decades since then,
the news business has continued to transform. A kind of creative destruction
has forced many traditional media companies out of business while the market
has cultivated clickbait journalism. It has become harder and harder for small
and independent outlets to survive, while media conglomerates have grown even
more massive since the 1996 Telecommunications Act deregulated the media
industry a quarter-century ago.
Last month, CBS and
Viacom announced that
they would be reuniting in a merger (after splitting in 2005) to form
ViacomCBS. Meanwhile, AT&T acquired Time Warner last year after
overcoming an antitrust lawsuit from the Justice Department, making
AT&T the largest
media company in the world based on revenue.
None of these trends bode well
for the future of journalism, and in an
editorial published last week in The Guardian, Sanders further
addressed the current state of media. “One reason we do not have enough real
journalism in America right now is because many outlets are being gutted by the
same forces of greed that are pillaging our economy,” wrote the senator,
denouncing the “corporate conglomerates and hedge fund vultures” who buy
struggling companies only to slash their newsrooms, along with the television
pundits who earn “tens of millions of dollars to pontificate about frivolous
political gossip” as thousands of journalists are laid off.
“Today, after decades of
consolidation and deregulation, just a small handful of companies control
almost everything you watch, read and download,” continued Sanders. “Given that
reality, we should not want even more of the free press to be put under the
control of a handful of corporations and ‘benevolent’ billionaires who can use
their media empires to punish their critics and shield themselves from
scrutiny.”
This take, it should be clear,
is not tantamount to an authoritarian or “Trumpian” critique of the media
directed at journalists. Rather, it’s a democratic critique aimed at corporate
executives and billionaire tycoons. Part of Sanders’ plan to fix journalism is
to “boost media workers’ laudable efforts to form unions and collectively
bargain with their employers.”
If elected, he wrote, he would
also “reinstate and strengthen media ownership rules,” limiting the number of
stations that broadcasting companies can own, and direct federal agencies to
“study the impact of consolidation in print, television and digital media to
determine whether further antitrust action is necessary.” The senator also
called out big tech companies like Google and Facebook, which have played an
outsize role in disrupting the traditional revenue model for publications.
Ultimately, Sanders and other
progressives understand that capitalism is a greater long-term threat to
American journalism than Donald Trump. There is no simple solution to the
multitude of problems facing the journalism business today, but the fact that
journalism is treated as a “business” rather than a public good seems to be at
the root of all its problems.
As dangerous as Trump’s
rhetoric is, journalists aren’t going to be unemployed (or underemployed)
because of his threatening tweets—although this is not to say Trump hasn’t
pushed for policies that would damage journalism even further.
Yet some possible solutions
remain. One of the many ways to address the market’s steady erosion of
journalism would be to support public funding of the media. Predictably, the
Trump administration has tried to eliminate
all funding for public broadcasting, even though the entire annual
budget is less than what it costs
the military to purchase a few aircraft.
The U.S. already has a dismal
record when it comes to public funding of journalism: The average per capita
spending on public broadcasting in countries from Europe to Australia was
$86 in 2014, compared to $3 per capita in the United States. In Norway it
is a whopping $180, and the second lowest on the list, New Zealand, still spent
five times more per capita than America.
If Trump had his way and was
unencumbered by constitutional restraints, he wouldn’t just eliminate the
public broadcasting budget. He would crush the free press and perhaps even take
control of the major news companies, just as Vladimir Putin did in Russia. Not
surprisingly, Trump appears
to admire Putin’s handling of pesky journalists. If Bernie Sanders had
his way, he would safeguard journalism from the whims of the free market and
empower actual journalists over “benevolent billionaires” and corporate executives.
If anyone still cannot tell
the night-and-day difference between these two critiques, it’s quite possible
he or she might be one of the lucky few pundits who earn six- or seven-figure
checks as their fellow journalists fall victim to the market’s invisible hand.
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