Pew has an interesting new study out on the tone of media coverage in the campaign since the Republican convention. According to the study, Obama has received far more favorable coverage:
This report could be conceptualized as a demonstration that the national media has been pro-Obama in this campaign. There can be little doubt that conservatives and Republicans will use this study to make that claim. However, accusing the national media of "bias" is only relevant if one conceptualizes the national media as a public sphere, modernist institution designed to serve all members of the public equally and charged with describing reality objectively. Such a conception is, I would argue, completely irrelevant from a political perspective.
More in the extended entry. |
A more relevant and appropriate conceptualization of the national media from a political perspective is to understand it as a large institution within which different ideological and political forces are struggling for control. Securing greater control over that institution, as conservatives had been accomplishing continually up until about 2003 or 2004, is key to advancing your political and ideological ends.
Over the last five or six years, there has been a massive progressive effort to improve the presence of progressives in established media, to counter anti-progressive narratives in established media, and to develop new progressive media such as the blogosphere. Those efforts have been critical to the media coverage results Pew reports above. There can be little doubt that without the intense progressive effort in the realm of media, the tone of media coverage gap between McCain and Obama would be very different.
Second, decades of conservative complaints about "liberal media bias," combined with extensive development of conservative alternative media, has gone a long way to draining conservatives from the audience of many, if not most, major national news outlets. Why would rank and file conservatives consume "mainstream media" anymore, if they believe it is biased, and with so many conservative outlets to choose from as alternatives? The answer is they aren't consuming it anymore. A recent poll by Rasmussen reports indicated that, for example, viewers of CNN and MSNBC favored Obama by more than two-to-one margins, while viewers of Fox News favored McCain by nearly a ten-to-one margin. The rise of conservative news outlets, coupled with repeated conservative attacks on the media, have drained conservatives from "mainstream media" audiences.
In such an environment, why on earth wouldn't "mainstream media" outlets like CNN and MSNBC provide more favorable coverage to Obama than to McCain? These news organizations are operated as for profit enterprises, and their audiences are overwhelmingly Democratic. If they were to repeatedly provide less favorable coverage to Obama than to McCain, it would seriously hurt their bottom lines. It is in this way that it is entirely possible the free market, which conservatives repeatedly laud, has come to bit them in their ass. Setting up news reporting as a for-profit enterprise has actually turned news outlets in favor of Democrats.
I am sure there are other factors too, such as:
- The Obama campaign managing the media better than the McCain campaign;
- Sucking up to the new guy in power;
- The McCain campaign engaging in some ridiculous behavior and repeated identity attacks with little substance.
No doubt, these factors played a role as well. However, I think the two main reasons are that the progressive movement has done an excellent job of improving the progressive presence in our national media, and that conservatives have simply abandoned news organizations that are, at heart, for-profit enterprises. It is a welcome development, and the result of work that should make us proud. |
