Not surprisingly, quite a number of Diaries and comments have been devoted since Tuesday to “getting” the Big Media. In addition to figuring out how and whether to deal with the “moral values” question and with ensuring that a vote for the Democrat does not (via a hackable or preprogrammed touch-screen) become a vote for the Republican, we have prodigious work ahead of us in developing trustworthy, truthful, courageous media in place of those that are wholly owned or unintentional accomplices in the rightwing juggernaut that threatens liberty and justice here and abroad.
While delights like
Sean Hannity is a moron dot com and similar sites provide a welcome takedown of some of the mainstays of rightwing talk television, focusing on media personalities and their latest lying complicity with the Powers That Be distracts us from dealing with the politico-structural arrangements that are the foundation of today’s ever more rightwing Big Media. When
Ben Bagdikian first pointed out in
The Media Monopoly in 1983 that cartels were a threat to independent journalism, he caught a lot of flak from people who should have known better. Since then, all that he predicted and more has come to pass. His book, now called
The New Media Monopoly, is in its 7th edition.
In the 1930s, Antonio Gramsci – a communist, but don’t let that stop you from considering his analysis – argued in his dense, some would say, turgid
Prison Notebooks that the power of those who control a society is founded not merely on the force of the state but on beliefs and ideas having broad appeal. Ideology becomes most powerful when it is accepted as common sense, that is, when it is not seen as an ideology. Out of this comes hegemony. Ideas are seemingly contested, but because so much of the debate is coded in the language of the hidden ideology, the rulers gain hegemony. People
consent to being ruled even if deeper analysis shows it is not in their best interests. Intellectuals – including elite media – contribute to this hegemony, both wittingly and unwittingly. What’s needed to defeat it, Gramsci argues, are counter-hegemonic cultural institutions, including media. As many Kossacks know, George Lakoff provides a more accessible version of similar arguments plus practical advice in in his wonderful
Don’t Think of an Elephant reframe-the-debate book.
One matter requiring careful consideration is the divide between the PR/propaganda/advocacy wing of journalism and truly fair and balanced reporting – a divide blurred practically into oblivion by the rightwing machine.The left clearly needs to work in both realms. And do what the right has not done, keep the two separate.
Robert Parry, who wrote
Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, has a media lament worth reading over at Consortiumnews.com. The issues are ones that many of us here have been harping on since … well, since before political blogs were even a gleam in the eye of their progenitors. But within his complaint are the seeds of some answers:
Too Little, Too Late
The outcome of Election 2004 also highlights perhaps the greatest failure of the Democratic/liberal side in American politics: a refusal to invest in the development of a comparable system for distributing information that can counter the Right’s potent media infrastructure. Democrats and liberals have refused to learn from the lessons of the Republican/conservative success.
The history is this: For the past quarter century, the Right has spent billions of dollars to build a vertically integrated media apparatus – reaching from the powerhouse Fox News cable network through hard-line conservative newspapers and magazines to talk radio networks to book publishing to well-funded Internet operations and right-wing bloggers.
Using this infrastructure, the conservatives can put any number of “themes” into play that will instantaneously reach tens of millions of Americans through a variety of outlets, whose messages then reinforce each other in the public’s mind.
Beyond putting opposing politicians on the defensive, this Right-Wing Machine intimidates mainstream journalists and news executives who will bend over backwards and cater to the conservative side, do almost anything to avoid being tagged with the career-threatening tag of “liberal.”
Liberal Resistance
In contrast to the Right’s media juggernaut, the Left relies largely on a scattered network of cash-strapped Web sites, a few struggling magazines and a couple of hand-to-mouth satellite TV networks.
Plus, the evidence is that wealthy progressives still don't "get it." Even with Election 2004 looming, Air America, a promising AM radio network to challenge Rush Limbaugh and the right-wing talk radio monopoly, was hobbled by the refusal of rich liberals to invest in the venture. In a new book,
Road to Air America, Sheldon Drobny, one of the network’s founders, describes his frustrating appeals to East and West Coast “limousine liberals” who didn’t want to engage in the project.
The Right also made clear that its plan was to wage what it called the “war of ideas,” which conservatives did not mean in a metaphorical sense. The Right’s goal has been to destroy or at least marginalize its enemies through various kinds of information warfare. To reverse Karl von Clausewitz’s famous dictum, one might say that conservatives view the “war of ideas” as an extension of violent conflict by other means, including the use of propaganda and disinformation.
Yet, instead of joining this ideological battle, the liberal/Democratic side largely divided up its money between do-good projects, such as buying up threatened wetlands, and spending on activism, such as voter registration and get-out-the vote drives. While there’s nothing wrong with these activities, the outcome of Election 2004 has demonstrated again that in an age of media saturation, street-level activism isn’t enough.
Even when liberal money is earmarked for media, the funds are usually controlled and spent by political activists. For instance, Campaign 2004’s “Media Fund,” which was run by former Clinton administration official Harold Ickes, spent millions of dollars from liberal donors on TV ads placed with mainstream media outlets. Little, if anything, was spent on building year-in-year-out media, like the conservatives have done.
Jay Rosen at Pressthink also has some analysis:
Are We Headed for an Opposition Press?
Back before the 2004 campaign began, before the emergence of Howard Dean, Democrats shocked at the weakness of their party in Congress would commonly say that the only one "taking on" Bush and putting up a real fight was Paul Krugman, the columnist for The New York Times.
John Kerry's defeat is only hours old. One of the first questions to occur to me is: will we see the fuller emergence of an opposition press, given that George W. Bush and the Republicans are to remain in office another four years? Will we find instead that an intimidation factor, already apparent before the election, will intensify as a result of Bush's victory?
I believe Big Journalism cannot respond as it would in previous years: with bland vows to cover the Adminstration fairly and a firm intention to make no changes whatsoever in its basic approach to politics and news. The situation is too unstable, the world is changing too rapidly, and political journalism has been pretending for too long that an old operating system will last forever. It won't. It can't. Particularly in the face of an innovative Bush team and its bold thesis about the fading powers of the press.
I could garner an understatement of the year award for saying that building an independent mass media presents us with daunting challenges and years of intensive work. All the more reason to renew this discussion both interrupted and sharpened by the election.