| 1) It's corporate and right leaning/biased at least partly as a result
Ever loosening the ownership limits have amalgamated so many outlets into so few ever wealthier and more elite hands. Even if this weren't so, having less voices controlling the news may be great economic sense, but it's not good democratic sense. I don't just want Warren Buffet or George Soros to buy Newscorp and call it a day (though that would be some kind of improvement).
The amagalamations have also meant the public faces of these organizations are an ever wealthier set of pundits who increasingly live in a surreal bubble. Much the same factors that ruin many good people who go to Washington as elected politicians also ruin journalists who "make it." Sure, CNN and MSNBC may compete, but in the end I can either watch millionaire white male Lou Dobbs or millionaire white male Chris Matthews.
2) Even aside from the explicit right wing bias, it's generally not that good
The increasing corporatization of the media (newspapers particularly) has gutted their newsgathering and investigative functions as these are not generally profitable, especially compared to following celebrities around while stenographing government press releases.
I posit that a news media which fails to inform the public at all is not politically neutral, but favours conservative outcomes. As modern aristocrats, they would rather operate in the dark. Knowing what it really going on is going to favour progress for all, and here I will resist the temptation to quote Stephen Colbert because the line is pretty cliché (though true). A government acting in the general public interest has no fear of widespread media attention to their behaviour, while a government acting to benefit the few at cost to the many would probably rather no one knew about it, since the few benefitting will know anyway. They'd rather that everyone else was watching American Idol or worrying if Britney will clean up her act. The media broadly function as arbiters of our shared reality and if they fail to help define that reality, than it doesn't help very much to live in Ron Suskind's reality based community since neo-conservative "reality" can then compete with ours at its advantage.
3) Any improvement over 2004 or 2000 is incremental at best, and in some respects things are even worse
So the biggest improvement from 2000 is that we have this chaotic system of progressive blogs. Our strength has grown even from 2004, though my inkling is that our influence growth levelled off a bit since 2006. Nonetheless we're potent but hardly omnipotent. The media is still McCain's base and Tim Russert still grants government officials default off-the-record status. Proven liars like Bill Kristol and Karl Rove still get tall platforms to lie from.
We learn that the media happily hired a pile of interest-conflict ridden and Pentagon approved retired Generals to provide "objective" analysis in the run up to the war and the result is crickets chirping.
Obama once knew a guy linked to the Weather Underground and we're deluged with it, McCain lies repeatedly linking Al Qaeda and Iran and is immediately forgiven.
We do have Stewart, Colbert and Olberman. MSNBC itself is generally better than it was - Tucker and Imus gone, Dan Abrams' isn't too bad, an actual liberal Rachel Maddow gets to violate Atrios' law and appear on "Teevee" regularly (ironically I just got to see her reference Atrios' "Friedman unit" while writing this post!). For the network that fired Phil Donahue and considering that CNN continues to employ Glenn Beck who has less viewers than C-Span during a vote to rename a post office, this is considerable improvement.
On the Fox front, they're still who they are, but the main difference is no one argues the point anymore. In 2004, I remember it was still popular for conservatives to try and claim Fox wasn't biased. Now that's just laughable. This growing awareness almost certainly contributed to the decision by most Democratic presidential candidates to boycott Fox sponsored debates.
My question: What next?
Glenn Greenwald made an appearance on DailyKos this week about his book. I decided to ask him what he thought the way forward was in fixing the media:
Glenn,
Do you have any thoughts on any kind of policy or other legislative solution to the ails of the media? [...] (snip my rambling question)
GG:
I tend to be a First Amendment absolutist, so I am very wary of any "solutions" designed to regulate media content directly or indirectly.
I think the solution is two-fold - (1) modifying media behavior through a combination of activism, shame, backlash and criticism, and (2) creating alternatives to media (such as blogs) to fulfill the functions they fail to fulfill and to undermine the false and destructive narratives they propagate.
I opted not to distract from Glenn promoting his book by debating further, but his answer really doesn't satisfy me, though I think it does represent pretty much the gist of all the progressive blogosphere is trying to accomplish already. Before my ascent to the front page, I wrote a piece here called Applying Game Theory to Media Failures where I said:
We have excellent media critics like Digby, Glenn Greenwald and of course Media Matters who are able to incisively tear apart flawed journalism and note the broader storylines the media are adhering to without evidence. But we're not thinking enough at the systemic level of how the media is organized, and how that system itself is contributing to the negative results we see. After all, if we replace the current occupants of Versailles on the Potomac, how will we prevent their replacements from being just as bad eventually? Joe Klein must have been a sincere and well meaning liberal at some point.
This is my issue. I'm a systemist, and while we can boot out a bunch of bad actors, I think the incentives in play will result (after a respite) in a fresh set of similarly bad actors absent some systemic reforms that change the reward mechanisms (see the Game theory piece for some examples of how this works). To me, what Glenn (and others) propose is a system of constant hyper-vigilance akin to reducing crime in your neighbourhood by organizing a system of vigilante patrols by the residents. It will be effective (probably) but it's better to attack the causes of crime in the neighbourhood rather than engaging in a never ending battle with the symptom. Even if blogs can achieve a critical mass to regularly impact traditional news coverage, that's an opportunity cost over other things we could be doing. We just lost the Rockridge institute, but imagine if Media Matters could fill that void.
It's also worth raising the point that the media is not like just any other business. It is a quasi branch of government as it (like, say universities or political parties) plays a vital democratic role. McDonalds decision to close restaurants doesn't impact core democratic health but the NY Times laying off a bunch of investigative journalists does. It is nowhere written in human blood that the media must stand or fall according solely to free market conditions. That was (in America at least) a choice by the founders who feared what a government run media would do. This is a false dichotomy though, our choices are not Pravda or Fox with nothing in between. The news media has proven to be a market failure as the interests of profit are sufficiently non-identical to the interests of democracy and the former is winning too often. We either need to find ways to realign those interests or simply accept that the media will have to run more according to democratic principles not capitalistic ones.
So this is rather long enough and I'll close off here. This is my case for why we must unstack this deck in a more permanent way than those we are doing so far. With enough hands, you can pile lots of sand, but it's a constant struggle. Also, if another 9/11 like event were to happen, I want a stronger bulwark in place not subject to the vagarities of hundreds of thousands of motivated bloggers keeping the media on its toes. When Bush is at 80% approval, the netroots is likely going to be ineffectual in chastising the media to behave better. If our influence is at all tied to the historic low approval of Republicans and conservative policies generally, we may be at a kind of high water mark now anyway. If we can't keep the New York Times from hiring Bill fucking Krisol now, what are we going to do when Republicans are popular again? |
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