Yesterday saw the posting of this wonderful diary by Dartagnan, an incendiary takedown of the media as culpable for the rise to prominence of Donald Trump. I find no fault with any of it, especially not its pointedly accurate skewering of Jeff Zucker, whose unselfconscious chasing of eyeballs — both in terms of NBC’s entertainment programming and its news programming — is a major contributor to this mess. (Of course, that news/entertainment distinction is itself a vestige of an earlier era, which I will get to in due course.)
But I did want to add one additional piece to the mix. In my view, the corporate media itself should not be the only site of our condemnation, because after all, the corporate media is itself simply one set of institutions among others attempting to navigate the turbulent waters of the contemporary economy in the age of financialization. It is perhaps just as accurate here to place the accent on the corporate in “corporate media,” even though I’m still quite happy to direct our ire at the specific likes of Wolf Blitzer, Chuck Todd, or Jeff Zucker himself.
The specific personalities involved at MSNBC (and CNN and FoxNews) constitute only part of the story. The real issue is the sense in which the firewall between the news and entertainment divisions of the media multinationals has long since been breached.
The film Network, from the late 1970s, is one of the most prescient movies of its era, precisely because it predicted exactly this state of affairs. The titular network in question was tanking in the ratings, and so upper management (beautifully played by Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall) began maneuvering for control of the news division, which had thus far maintained its autonomy. They’re assisted by an anchor become madman, who quickly showed everyone how they might turn the sober nightly news into the world’s first reality TV show, some twenty years before the idea occurred to anyone else in reality.
The impulse driving all of this is that media firms, like all multinational corporations, are no longer accountable to their stakeholders; they have a lone fiduciary duty to their shareholders. That means that if a London bureau or investigative reporting division, or several reporters on a given beat, have to be axed to make way for more talking-heads shouty “analysis,” or if an atmosphere of controversy or drama has to be ginned up to maximize page clicks and eyeballs, then that’s what will happen. It also means that we’ve long since abandoned any conception of reporters as scrappy independent mavericks, going after the news without fear or favor.
Now it’s about access: a willingness to become an uncritical stenographer if the personality in question will grant air time or interviews. This is the currency that Trump expertly manipulated, the recognition that the spectacle the media had made of him was in turn a scarce and valuable commodity, to be doled out only to those who were willing to take his bullshit. After that, it meant that only those news organizations that had effectively lost Trump’s favor permanently — say, the Washington Post — had enough autonomy to go after him with the degree of critical scrutiny that his candidacy really required.
It wasn’t always thus. At newsrooms across the country, in the print media and at the networks, there was a concerted, zealous effort to preserve the autonomy of the news division — whether out of a sense of duty to the charge put to them by the FCC (to serve the public trust), or whether simply out of a recognition that the privately owned print media company was serving a boss who was largely indifferent to profitability (he had other sources of revenue; the ownership of the Tribune or the Times was just a kind of capitalist peacock feather). This was the news desk in the era of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, where a degree of fearlessness and moral clarity was built into the job.
This all changed when the news desk, alongside the other programming elements on the same network, all became subject to the logic of “portfolio management,” the sense that each unit under a corporate umbrella was a potential source of revenue, and thus accountable to shareholders. Add to all this the sense that many media firms, in the era of mergers and acquisitions, had become leveraged to the hilt, and thus profitability of all corporate units had to become an overarching concern of the firm. We can take issue with the amoral glee with which CBS CEO Les Moonves declared Trump to be “not [. . .] good for America, but [. . .] damn good for CBS,” but we must recognize that this wasn’t done just for the heck of it — it is a product of a very specific set of market pressures.
The issue here is not simply the decisionmaking process of a handful of bad apples at the top. It’s not even some general, vague and timeless idea about “corporate greed,” because that “greed,” in its present form, is historically specific to our own moment. No, the problem here is a structural transformation in the business that has made it impossible for the networks not to facilitate Trump’s rise to prominence.