There is so much that is wrong with the US corporate media system that it is easy to limit an analysis of the political ills we face to a laundry list of press/media/journalistic sins. Those are enormous and important to always keep on the table. But they are only a piece of the puzzle and any progressive (or even just plain Democrat) who is concerned and disturbed about the direction of our nation misses something by simply equating the problems we face with the problems of the US corporate media system and its journalistic failings.
Caution: This entry is a little long.
Chris Bowers had a recent
diary that talked about a lot of these issues and the discussion that followed his entry is really rich and certainly worth taking a look at if you missed it. A lot of what is here was fueled by following that discussion, and I'm going to simplify one important point from it as a starting point. It is accepted dogma that public opinion follows the media; this is the orthodoxy of those who travel in the arts of public messaging. This principle is both true and demonstrable. It's also comforting and profitable for those who make a living both measuring and attempting to manipulate public opinion. However, like any empirical (and most especially quantitatively-derived) scientific representation of a phenomenon it is a reduction and a simplification of the actual phenomenon, a "shorthand" regular people talk.
Public opinion is actually a little sliver of a much bigger phenomenon that has to do with what people know, what they believe, what they value and what, through their own experience resonates as "truth" for them. That process is far more amorphous, far more varied and far less capture-able than the process of public opinion formation. But it is anchored in certain very real sets of institutional and cultural clusters. That is, it has a structure, though a decidedly flexible one. It is that very malleable structure, anchored in real world institutions, events and experiences I've been thinking about as the infrastructure of belief.
This infrastructure is the real key to the public opinion and political messaging kingdom, not simply control and manipulation of the media. The radical right has long understood this. It is time for the opposition to do so as well.
What the right has managed to do, over the course of 30+ years (this is no short term project they are engaged in) is recast people's own experiences in a framework of "truth" that resonates with their political agenda. And they've done that through NOT SIMPLY the media (the media is more of the beginning point and the finishing touch in this project). They do it through the church, through popular culture, through the telling of history, through the dominance of instrumental/marketing and business logic, and through the reformulation of education and educational systems at all levels. THIS is the reason people can hold political and cultural beliefs and values that are, to the minds of pragmatic Democrats "contrary to their own interests". It is not simply that people are dupes being fooled by the media (though that is the finishing touch of the project that helps to ensure its success). It is the resonance and the reinforcement through and across their lives that makes the right wing's presentation and explanation of their own interests (and their own identities) resonate as truth. That dominance that the right wing holds is then maintained by closing off access to the infrastructure of belief for any alternative viewpoints or mechanisms to change and challenging any and all alternatives (see the unending attack on science by both the corporate sector and now the Bush Administration).
"Persuasion" is thus inadequate, because the problem is far larger than where the political orientation of the US electorate is. Once the public sphere became the property (or better analogized) the "administrative territory" of the right wing, the Democrats decline was inevitable. They have been fighting their decline on the wrong battlefronts, because they have not paid ample attention to where it is actually coming from, they have been too overwhelmed by the short terms struggles to keep up in the electoral and legislative fronts.