Christy Hardin Smith
asks the right question today.
Why is it that, given the continuing proofs that our current government is Clueless, and is leading us over the cliff, the media narrative remains supportive?
How is it that the response of CNN to our failure in Iraq and Israel's continuing failure in Lebanon is to wonder if Revelations is coming true? I'm not picking on Kyra Phillips here (much). Chris Matthews's Hardball is doing pretty much the same thing.
I won't even get into Fox, whose “Middle East analysis” team the other day was being done by Wayne Rogers and Ben Stein. But part of the answer does lie there.
We're talking here about three main factors:
- Business Models
- Generational Assumptions
- Occupational conditioning
Let me take them one at a time.
Business Models
Publishers like The New York Times and broadcasters like CBS emerged as giant companies in an age of giant corporatism. Their “myth” of journalism's “professionalism,” reflected in institutions like Columbia's Pulitzer School (named for tabloid publisher Joseph Pulitzer) and Northwestern's Medill School (named for political crank Joseph Medill) was a short-lived phenomenon, a product of an era that ended nearly 40 years ago.
The business models of media start-ups in our time are political. Sun Myung Moon launched The Washington Times, and bought UPI, for political reasons. CNN was really founded for political reasons – Ted Turner didn't think the truth of international relations was getting out. Rupert Murdoch is a political publisher.
Publishers determine the politics of media, and publishers have, historically, been very conservative. Medill was a right-winger. The Chandler family (which controlled the LA Times) was, until its last generation, notoriously right-wing.
The business model of political journalism is that the “profession” is nothing more (or less) than an instrument of their political control. They define what is inside the dialog, and what is not. Liberals have, by and large, ignored this because they were (until recently) naive, stupid, losers.
Generational Assumptions
Journalists are products of their time, and the assumptions they are taught – by their bosses. Those who don't go along generally get out. There are very, very few exceptions, columnists whose prose wins them enough of their own credibility with an audience that they can live outside the mainstream.
The assumptions of our time are Nixonian assumptions. Among these assumptions are that journalists are leftists, and as such suspect. People like Ben Domenech, the ass who briefly had a Washington Post gig only because he was a right-wing toady, are the rule and not the exception. Domenech, remember, was born in the early 1980s. He knows nothing else but what he was taught – and he was home-schooled by right-wing (I'll say it) assholes.
Domenech got his gig because the assumption remains, 40 years after Vietnam, that journalists are liberals and must be balanced. This despite the fact that Bob Woodward was always a Republican, and worked as a stenographer for the worst right-wing cranks in our political history for most of his career. He broke Watergate, thus he was a liberal, thus he was suspect, thus he needed to be balanced. When the right is considered the left, the only balance is the ultra-right.
I should add that most people accept generational assumptions unconsciously. They are like Indians before Columbus, with no vocabulary to handle different belief structures. This has become more pronounced in our time.
Occupational Conditioning
Young, ambitious journalists know – every one of them – that the way to the top, the way to the anchor chair, is by parroting the corporate line. Whatever it is. And that line has been unrelentingly conservative for a generation, as I noted.
You can't go through 40 years of conservative conditioning, then rise through the ranks to the top of that pyramid, without being compliant. And complicit in whatever the bosses demand.
I speak here from real experience. I have been working as a professional journalist since 1978. I guarantee you my career would have gone further, farther, faster if I were a reliable right-wing crank. The editors I worked for never wanted to hear what business was doing wrong. They wanted hagiography. And I gave this to them. But my own politics also made me very easy to dump, and I've been fired from nearly every job I ever had.
What about Keith Olbermann? What about him? MSNBC was desperate, he was a superior writer, and he immediately delivered something they'd never had before – ratings. Phil Donahue had the top-rated show on that network in 2001, and he was canned for being “too liberal.”
Conclusion
It's not enough to identify right-wing bias in the media. It's not enough for those who don't share today's assumptions to do their own reporting.
What we need in this country, desperately, are people with money, who want Americans to think, who will put their money where their hearts are, and either launch start-ups doing real journalism or buy organizations which already exist.
That's going to happen. There's money to be made, now that people's beliefs have been unhinged by events, now that the market is looking for something other than the same-old same-old.
But until it becomes common, we have to live with the media we have.
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