I’ve posted a couple of diaries recently on the topic of the media, but I – like most of us – had my attention largely consumed with other current events this week. Today, however, I’m filled with a renewed sense of urgency about the media problem, fueled by recurring discrepancies between actual events and the way the dialogue about those events are being shaped by the reporting and presenting choices of the corporate media. And I suppose my current sense of alarm was also triggered by BarbinMD’s front page story revealing MSNBC’s justification for repeatedly giving Liz Cheney a platform for her fallacious rhetoric without disqualifying her on the basis of, well, flat-out lying: "She’s a great guest."
So... that's it? The only requirement you have of your "guests" is that they be "interesting and engaging," without regard for how inaccurate their statements are? It really is only about entertainment and not information? You're admitting it?
Here we have a major news network effectively admitting that truth is irrelevant and that drama (read: ratings) are all that matter in presenting current events "discussion." I mean, it’s not like I didn’t already know that, but when they brazenly say it, they're crossing the line just a bit more egregiously.
However, I also think this presents us with a great opportunity for raising public awareness about the threat posed by the corporate-owned media. Kos’s story about the polling results on Sotomayor suggests that the public is increasingly making up its own mind on issues rather than waiting to be told what to think by the Republicans and the media. The reason for that is likely, in part, because the GOP’s credibility is in the crapper right now, but that can change, and the media can play a huge role in that.
I say we crawl through this window of opportunity and start working on a grassroots media campaign while the public seems to be in a skeptical frame of mind.
Because there is so much to be discussed, I’m going to use do a bit of a redux of my second diary in an effort to generate some deep discussion of the obstacles we face in trying to combat the corporate stranglehold on our media. I just don’t think there’s a single issue that is more urgent in this country, because of the insidiously pervasive nature of the damage that can be wrought by a disingenuous, profit-oriented press.
I’ll start by summarizing the points I tried to make in my original diary on the topic.
- The content and framing of news reporting in the traditional, mainstream media is governed by two main goals: 1) supporting the corporate structure itself by skewing the perspective of news reporting to manipulate the public opinion, and 2) packaging the news to maximize apparent drama or sensationalism in order to generate higher ratings for greater profit. Whenever a story doesn’t seem to make sense, either because of what is included or what is left out of it, chances are excellent that one or both of those goals is the reason.
- The general population of the United States is either unaware of the problem posed by the corporate-owned media or is convinced that nothing can be done about it. Many people have become resigned to the idea that they will never be able to tell spin from truth, and a lot of people have bought into – either consciously or by osmosis – the long-term meme that the media has a "liberal bias." The vast majority of Americans have either forgotten or never fully understood the valuable role a free press plays in a democracy. A great many of them have never seen the Fourth Estate actually playing that role.
- Making the public aware of the media problem is the necessary first step toward generating a grassroots movement to deal with it. This will be best accomplished by a non-partisan approach not affiliated with any existing groups that have been linked with a particular ideology. The particular approach I proposed, as a preliminary step in the process, involved individuals selecting articles or news stories from national media and writing letters to the editors of local newspapers examining the falsehoods and misleading information in each story. If enough people were to engage in this movement, public awareness would slowly start to rise as people gradually became more and more aware that there is a serious problem with the information they are being fed by the corporate-owned media all around them.
- This movement would need to be conducted absolutely non-ideologically in order to avoid knee-jerk alienation of people who may not share that ideology or are simply turned off by partisan sniping. This is also why this movement cannot be initiated by established groups like Media Matters that already address the media problem but are connected with progressive ideology, either overtly or by mental association. The goal here is to persuade people to listen and get them to begin to critically examine media content, not to recruit new progressives.
Several commenters made some excellent points, both in support and in rebuttal of my assertions. Jim P weighed in on the lack of public will to address the media issue and on the benefits of the non-ideological approach:
I've been going on for years about the mass-reach media cartel as the number one priority in any possible progressive victory. But so far people seem to imagine that things as they are is simply the way it will always be, or that the internet will magically replace a media that can reach every single person in America with a meme in 24 hours. Someday.
I like that you point out the non-ideological, grassroots, possibilities. It often goes unnoticed that not just liberals, but really the entire spectrum of adults involved in politics, teaching, community, or church life--any form of social activism--revile the Corporate Media. Not just disapprove, but actually look at it as an enemy of the Public Good.
We've really let ourselves be placed in our little boxes (conservative/progressive, Republican/Democrat) and not done nearly enough to kick out of that. We should be leading the drive to form broad-based American people coalitions. Based on the recognition that there is a widespread desire to end the corporatized, centralized media stranglehold on public presentations.
I added the emphasis to Jim P's last couple of paragraphs because I really want to drive home my reasons for insisting that a successful "take back our media" movement truly must be non-partisan. Like it or not, not every person in America is a progressive, and many will never, ever be progressive. That doesn't mean that there is nothing on which we can agree, and I support Jim P's assertion that people on all points of the American ideological spectrum are questioning the trustworthiness of our media or can be educated to do so. The biggest obstacle to our banding together to deal with it will be our differences on politics, religion, personal values, and other philosophical matters. But the problem is, we're all citizens of the same country, and if we can agree that the media has strayed from its intended path, we can and should be willing to put aside the differences to work on corralling it.
Many who commented in the previous diary also supported the idea of starting a non-partisan media campaign. Others contended that it would be a bad idea or even impossible.
KingOneEye took some issue with my contention that this movement should not be a "Republicans are evil" or "corporations are evil" campaign:
How can you advocate for truth without acknowledging the truth about Republicans?
To quickly answer this question, I think it's very dangerous to automatically equate the media with Republicans. While the GOP has certainly used the corporate media as a highly effective tool, we must not lose sight of the fact that it's ultimately the corporate world that has used the Republican party to pave the way to unfettered profit and control. We need to stop thinking just in terms of Republicans and Democrats, as Jim P earlier suggested.
KingOneEye continues:
But telling the truth... will, by its nature, turn them (Republicans) off. To Paraphrase Jack Nicholson: "They don't want to know the truth!" And they can't handle it either.
Tell them there were no WMDs.
Tell them that torture is a war crime.
Tell them that suspending habeas corpus is unconstitutional.
Tell them there is a Climate Crisis.
Tell them that gay soldiers are every bit as good as straight ones.
Tell them that the media is NOT liberal.
And watch what happens. Every single one of those items are true, but that won't stop conservatives from turning it into partisan sniping.
I sympathize with your viewpoint. I just think that the path to the conclusion we both want will be adversarial, whether we like it or not.
FreePress.net was founded for the very purpose you propose. They started out soliciting support from every ideological angle. But the right just waved them off and refused to cooperate. They accused them of being a bunch of liberals - just like they always do.
So I say: Screw 'em. We can win the fight for an independent and diverse and honest media without them. In fact, we'll have to, because those goals are antithetical to their belief system
First of all, I disagree with KingOneEye's apparent contention that all Republicans disbelieve all the points he lists above. I think it's pretty clear that the vast majority of the country knows now that there were no WMDs, that we went to war for no good reason, etc. The fact that the Republican party is officially saying one thing or another is not necessarily reflective of the opinions of the ordinary citizens who have traditionally self-identified as Republican. Not anymore.
More important, though, is this: the corporate-monopolized media isn't just hurting progressive America. It's not even helping conservative America. It's only benefiting corporate America, and while one might say that tends to benefit the Republican party, it certainly doesn't do much good for the individual American, regardless of his or her politics. Everyone - Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, independent, or political apathetic - needs to understand the menace posed by a mass media completely owned by a tiny corporate monopoly. And I contend that it is possible to reach people of almost any ideology on this issue. Even people who self-identify as Republicans are often not terribly married to the ideology. How else could Obama have peeled off so many Republican voters?
But what we want to accomplish can't be done by framing the conflict as "Republicans/conservatives/corporations/any particular group(s) are evil." All that will do is provoke defensiveness, right off the bat. And you can argue from dawn to dusk that it shouldn't make people defensive because "it's the truth," but in the end, you won't have accomplished a damn thing. We need to build a coalition of the citizens, and that will necessarily mean a coalition that draws from as broad a cross-section of the country as we can possibly achieve.
That's why the attack on the media has to be conducted strictly on the basis of fact vs. falsehood, and those facts must be hard and not debatable or philosophical in nature. We should be choosing as our fact-checking examples stories that do not involve hot-button progressive issues - torture, marriage equality, single-payer health care - because the reader, the non-political or conservative or independent reader, will assume that we have a progressive axe to grind on stories on such topics.
Instead, we should be looking for stories that seem relatively banal, I think. Finding major holes in stories that don't appear to be very controversial would be more likely to make that non-political or conservative or independent reader sit up and say, "Wha...? Hey, what's going on here?" And once we start getting people to do that, we'll find them more and more open to looking at all kinds of stories. Even the touchy ones that would have turned them off earlier.
While all the commenters in that diary seemed to agree that the corporate media was a major problem for our country, there were a few who disagreed that "taking back the traditional media" with a grassroots campaign is the answer. There was oceanstar, who believes that:
What we need to do is make our own [liberal] TV network. That's the solution; but, for years and years, I've heard a multitude of excuses as to why it would never work.
Fox News is never going to be "laughed out of the mainstream entirely as the public demands and receives actual news reporting from a media that re-embraces journalism and stops being absolutely controlled by a single ideology or the profit motive". Fox News is here to stay. Conservative media is here to stay. Media reporting opinion with the news is here to stay. And as these are all business profit motive is going to stay.
We need to have a liberal answer to Fox News. Too many on the left aspire for a world that just is never going to exist. The right fights battle in the world as it is, not in some idealistic fantasy world that they imagine. We need to do the same.
I would personally not support the creation of a "liberal answer to Fox News," because I don't think the answer to an obvious ideologically biased "news" service is to create a counterpart biased news service for the opposing ideology. The biggest accomplishment of such a creation would be the legitimization of ideological bias in "news reporting." That is the very thing I want to fight against, not something I intend to tacitly or overtly support.
I also take issue with oceanstar's notion that "the right fights battle[s] in the world as it is." I submit that the right wing tends to project its fantasy - or rather, create a false reality, much like stage designers building a set for a play - which they then treat as real and say is real. In this way, they stack the deck and create for themselves a tremendously unfair advantage as they take on the opposition, who wind up not defending their actual views but the falsely constructed rumors about those views that have been planted in the minds of the public by the right.
In short, I don't think this issue calls for beating them at their own game. Instead, we need to show the public exactly how the game is being played and - more importantly - who is actually controlling that game; namely, a few huge corporations with interests in guiding public opinion that have nothing to do with the public good.
Another commenter, Ralphdog, asserts that
The answer is called the Internet...
...The mainstream corporate media empires are imploding. They have committed slow-motion suicide by amputating most of their actual journalism resources, becoming tabloid-mills and regurgitators of government oatmeal. Each successive generation trusts them less and less; in ten years no one under the age of 60 will waste time watching the network meat-puppets.
And (at least for now), on the Internet, content is king. Truth and reality are out there, at sites like this one. A new paradigm is slowly forming. Josh Marshall and TPM are the new WaPo and Woodward/Bernstein. Which is helpful, considering Woodward became a grotesque self-parody sucking up to power.
Traditional mass media are indeed controlled solely by a few colossal media corporations looking only to squeeze the greatest amount of profit out of the lowest possible investment. This was to some extent offset fifty or sixty years ago by the integrity and influence of folks like Edward R. Murrow, and by the prevailing sense that the networks owed the American people competent and aggressive journalism as compensation for use of publically owned airwaves.
It's precisely analgous to Adam Smith's beknighted assumption that Christian charity and sense of justice would naturally temper the predatory tendencies of capitalism. And it's been proven just as worthless over time.
There's a lot to think about in this view, but a lot to refute, too, IMO. For one thing, I'm intensely skeptical of claims that any blatantly partisan website is the place to go for "truth." Acknowledging that it's the place to go for opinions you don't see in the mainstream media is more accurate, as is admitting that you go there to see opinions which which you tend to agree. The belief that progressives have a claim on "truth" is dangerous, and not just because it is inherently alienating to those who aren't - or aren't yet - of like minds with us. Certainty of one's own rightness is always going to carry serious risks, even for progressives.
Further, I don't believe the internet is ever going to replace what the mainstream mass media is capable of producing, and I don't even think that it should try. Commenter Urizen took Ralphdog's line of thinking a little further:
There is no reason on earth anymore for information to be a one way flow. On the issues that effect all of our lives, we all should have a voice if we wish to speak. Fr'instance, two of the most pressing issues facing our government at the moment are global warming and healthcare. The "problem" in solving these is the interests of the corporations. If we get our "news" from them (when they don't actuall own the media they pay its bills through ads) we'll always be lied to.
I don't disagree at all that everyone should have a voice, and I think that the internet is a perfect vehicle for giving everyone that voice. I simply think that a) the internet is never going to provide a substitute for true journalism, where opinion is labeled as such and is not commingled with documented fact, where legitimate sources are used (and properly attributed) to support everything stated in the story as fact; and where standards of journalistic decorum are applied; and b) the fact that literally anyone can say literally anything, about anyone or anything, is both the internet's strength and its weakness as a vehicle for reliable information.
I sort of see the internet as a safety valve for democracy; if there's some viewpoint that's being suppressed, some fallacy being shopped around traditional media as actual truth, the internet is the place where people can go to get the word out and see the word being gotten out. It's a great place to find that video that shows Congressman So-And-So outlining his position on Issue A two years ago, in direct conflict with his assertion yesterday that his current (diametrically opposed) position has always been his position on Issue A.
It's also a great place to find a lot of opinion trumpeted as fact, only it tends to come from individuals convinced that their opinion is absolutely the truth. There's no more burden to back up statements made on the internet than there currently is among the corporate media. How is being misled or lied to by some guy on a blog any better than getting the same treatment from an international conglomerate? The intent might be more pure, but the end result is still a lack of objective reporting and fact-checking.
However, I do want to acknowledge my agreement with Ralphdog's earlierpoint, which I placed in boldface, about the (now defunct) integrity of the media from decades ago that caused media outlets to act out of a sense of public obligation despite the lack of profitability. S/he is absolutely right that the public benefited from that voluntary integrity and that we can never again rely on that from our media. Where Ralphdog and I differ, however, is on whether the mainstream media is a full-on lost cause or whether we can, in fact, grab the reins and steer it to a path that serves the public good. I tend to think that we definitely could rescue our mainstream media and create a system in which they would have official, mandatory obligations to the public.
What we desperately need is a media that holds itself to very high standards, actually investigating and verifying facts. We need reporters to follow stories wherever they go, to ask questions that yield illuminating answers instead of answers that produce flash and higher ratings. And we need a media that presents the news in as objective a manner as possible, with proper journalistic decorum - meaning, among other things, no f-bombs, no snide nicknames, proper attribution. And while its true that the mainstream media no longer lives up to these standards, the internet certainly never has. I'm not sure it could or that it even should.
Another commenter, Stuart Heady, introduced a viewpoint that brings with it even more thorny issues:
A pervasive issue that is as overlooked as the landscape we stand on, is that
writing serious journalism requires talking to people who may not want to be sources about subjects that may be difficult to get comment on the record about.
This is one of many reasons that newspapers are dying and that long ago, TV news became as limited as it is today.
Public Relations is also taught in Journalism/Communications curricula in college, along with basics of reporting news and writing. A lot of writers find that they have to keep in some sort of good graces with those who might hire PR people because it is a way to put the J school coursework into a paying status.
Reporters, in order to have a story to report, have to be able to quote sources and get past PR departments where there might be some problem with going public on something.
The existence of the internet doesn't change this, although presently bloggers are getting away with being unconventional and disregarding such issues. This will change if the balance shifts and the blogosphere becomes more likely to be a source of serious news and controversy. Lawsuits follow seriousness and this will ultimately create the same chilling effect that lawsuits have on news coverage.
Boldface is mine.
Stuart raises an excellent point here, reinforcing why the internet is unlikely to be our solution to the media problem. As he asserts, any news reporting medium that attempts to cover stories in a thorough manner, attributing sources and confirming the statements of interview subjects, is necessarily going to run into the roadblocks that have been erected to protect organizations (and to some extent, individuals) from litigation or even the threat of it. Bloggers who attempt to cross the threshold into this sort reporting will find themselves encountering these obstacles more and more often.
Stuart Heady continues:
The reason that newspapers, and you can look to alternative weeklies as an example, limit what they do by judging the prospect for attracting a lawsuit they cannot afford to fight. It doesn't matter if the case is 100% winnable. The purpose of corporate lawsuits is largely to cause the opposition to have to spend so much money that they give up and settle. When corporates sue other corporations, this can run into tens of millions of dollars. Local weeklies and other newspapers, even if they are funded by a holding company, would rather be waterboarded.
...There has to be a way through this logjam, but we shouldn't hope for some dramatic and genius action that no one has thought of. Rather, the energy everyone puts into anguishing over the damage that is being done to our beloved Republic ought to motivate a sustained evolution along a great many small fronts.
I think this underscores, yet again, the urgency of forming a coalition across a broad cross-section of our society. The first step to finding a way out of this logjam, as Stuart puts it, has to be getting the public first aware of the media problems and then willing to take action. What actions need to be taken are fodder for further study and discussion, but we certainly don’t have to wait to start working on creating public awareness and urgency.
On the other hand, some people see the media problem as being rooted in something far more fundamental, as Gooserock indicates in these comments:
This is a Flaw of the Constitution and the failure of men who only knew quill pens and family micro-microbusinesses to design a system of government for the internet age.
It's probably the single greatest threat facing humanity today, because it prevents the people of the global superpower from sanely governing their nation and its vast impact on the planet.
...It's the Constitution and the 1st Amendment, totally clueless, dangerously clueless about the world they now rule.
We've got to start with focusing attention on the structural relationship of our system of government to information and communication.
--A relationship that is completely insane. The biggest 4-5 information corporations, all of them global not American, are Constitutionally protected to promote their agenda around the clock and calendar and shut out all others.
...We need to start from scratch thinking of how the world of global warming and nuclear annihilation and genetic engineering needs a superpower to behave, and what the people of a superpower with a democratic system of government need in information and communication to run that superpower sanely, healthily and justly.
Whatever it is, it's a billion miles from the 1st Amendment we've got, written by men who travelled the world in sailing ships that were built backwards 10,000 years after they had the technology to discover the blunder.
The framers charged us with the imperative of keeping their system current.
With information and communication, we're a full century late.
I tend to agree more with Jim P's view, however:
...clearly [the Framers] never foresaw that only a select few would be able to control the public discussion, that everyone (landholder or not) would be effectively barred from having their voice heard. They certainly never intended that consequence, having gone to great lengths to make sure speech and the press were protected.
Breaking up the cartels, putting the splinters under local ownership and/or influence is within a just arrangement, and could be done under existing law.
Commenter cotterperson adds:
Five corporations own most of the media. Corporations have one thing in common. They exist to make as much money as possible without the burden of a conscience. They require a higher rate of return than in olden times when papers were family-owned and only had to support that family.
The founders put freedom of the press in the First Amendment because they had first-hand experience in a controlled press from before the Revolution, and because an informed electorate is required for a democracy.
The corporatocracy doesn't want an informed electorate. Thus we have corporate media.
My point is not to declare Gooserock totally wrong. I agree that the corporate-owned media is not something the Framers of the Constitution were specifically equipped to predict and prevent. However, I believe it is entirely possible to correct what’s wrong with the media without overhauling the First Amendment or completely re-imagining the Constitutional framework for ensuring freedom of the press.
The first step would undoubtedly be to break up the corporate monopolies running most of our mainstream media outlets. The second would be regulating ownership of such outlets, deciding how big such owning companies could be and strictly defining disqualifying conflicts of interest and obligations owed to the public. I know that this sounds like an oversimplification of what needs to be done – and it is! – but I don’t think it’s by any stretch an impossibility. Jim P gave a much better action plan outline here:
...I think we need to fix the media problem using ALL the tools we have. That would be pressure on Congress for radical dismantling of the corps and insistence on genuine public service. Which really can't be done without the public being involved in programming decisions in some real way. There's no reason the tax code can't be written so that 95% of their profit be taken in tax. Encourage the current hands out of the business. So that's Congress.
Outside legislative pressure, there's direct challenges to their licenses, based on the "public good" criteria. Boycotts. You get 1% of the 40 million cabled-up that's costing them hundreds of millions a month. More pressure to break up when they lose 2, 4% of their customers.
There's the eminent domain route, once we've decided it's necessary for the Public Good. So that's the People acting directly.
Then there are activists like Mike Stark (who writes here) who know how to play the media call-in shows, and are able to provoke a moment of reality. If there were another thousand like that... Add in Sibel Edmonds and her attempts to crack the media silence. I think your idea about letters (and real paper carries so much more... weight.. than electronic letters or phone calls) is spot on.
There's a lot of meat there. Jim also adds:
I'd get the letters going laterally (from people to people) and direct to, not just to the "name" Journalists and pundits, but also to the people who work in their building, in the accounting department, the mailroom, the secretaries... Let the big cheese walk around knowing that everyone they see knows they've be failing at their job.
The key to getting all of this done will be to start with getting as many ordinary Americans worried about the job their media isn’t doing. That means making "the corporate-owned media is failing us" a wall-to-wall meme. The best way to get that started is on a person-to-person level, and therefore I suggest that letters to the editor are a logical point of entry. One person can reach tens or hundreds at a time with letters like this, and enough of us doing this could create a degree of saturation that would likely surprise us all.
After this last couple of quotes were posted in my second media diary, VClib weighed in with some concerns:
I must take exception with Jim P. There are some things government can do, but many that he suggests would not be constitutional. You can regulate companies owning broadcast licenses such as AM & FM radio and broadcast television. You can have concentration rules when the owners have both broadcast licenses and other media, particularly in cross-ownership situations. You can use other anti-trust tools, but given the competition and the variety of media I think it will be difficult to break apart, on legal grounds, the large media companies (not including the broadcast portions). There is no legal basis for government oversight or regulation of any print media, or cable or satellite TV. Trying to impose regulation in these media would run into major constitutional issues and I believe would be rejected by the courts. And its important to recall that in the past when concentration rules were modified the existing companies were either grandfathered so they could keep their properties indefinitely or given up to five years to divest so as not to create any financial hardship.
You only have two ways to break up concentration of the media. One is using concentration rules for public airways. That can be done, but as I mentioned the FCC has historically worked hard to make sure no economic harm comes from changing the rules. The other media can only be attacked through anti-trust. The problem is that when you have five big players the case will be made that you need to be big to compete plus you have the internet which provides many voices and adds to the competition. I am not a lawyer, or an expert in anti-trust, but these are powerful arguments. The more difficult hurdle is that media companies have broad protection under the First Amendment which can be very effectively used to thwart any government actions. The big point is that there is no constitutionally required robust, truthful, accurate and honest media. The Constitution protections are very specifically to keep government OUT of the media, or any attempts to control it. Attempts to use the FCC for something broader than its charter will be challenged in court.
I would be very interested to hear from other commenters on these important practical issues raised by VClib.
Regardless of the ultimate solutions that will be necessary, we need to be thinking in terms of getting the public looking at the problem and seriously questioning the reliability and validity of our media.