If you have been around Daily Kos for while, you may have noticed a recurring theme — how badly the mainstream media does its job when it comes to covering politics (and other issues). Chauncey DeVega at Salon has an explainer that shows why it happens.
From Axios to the New York Times, Republicans make their presence felt in newsrooms
Here’s the intro:
There is no such thing as the so-called liberal news media. In reality, there is a corporate news media that polices the limits of approved public discourse and privileges the voices and agenda of the powerful over those of everyday Americans. And in a time of ascendant neofascism, that is a great betrayal of the American people and the sacred responsibility that the Fourth Estate has in a democracy.
"The liberal media" (and its conjoined twin "liberal media bias") is language that was invented by the American right-wing in the 1980s and 1990s as a way of training and bullying the American news media into serving its agenda – or at a minimum a much more friendly and uncritical space through which to distribute right-wing talking points, dogma, and misinformation.
The myth of the liberal news media is disproved by other evidence as well.
The media in the "news media" means business and profit – this is especially true of the few large corporations that dominate the market. Those corporations are inherently conservative. The so-called liberal news media also values access to the powerful – because they are members of the same social class – above all else.
emphasis added
DeVega goes on to layout the history of how this came about, and examples of how it works in practice. Here’s just one:
A recent story in the New York Times, "House G.O.P. Prepares to Slash Federal Programs in Coming Budget Showdown," offers a powerful example of how even in the midst of an escalating crisis where Republicans are naked and unapologetic in their attempt to end multiracial pluralistic democracy, the myth of the liberal media still endures and is doing great harm to how the American people make sense of the forces that are pummeling them. The Times begins with:
Hard-right House Republicans are readying a plan to gut the nation's foreign aid budget and make deep cuts to health care, food assistance and housing programs for poor Americans in their drive to balance the federal budget, as the party toils to coalesce around a blueprint that will deliver on their promise to slash spending.
The first word is "hard-right". Immediately the Times positions the Republicans as being on a reasonable continuum of political ideology (opposite of "liberals" and the non-existent "hard left" in Congress) instead of as being neofascists, insurrectionists, and supporters of Trump's coup plot.
The media’s efforts to achieve objectivity, balance, etc. are constrained by boundary conditions that distort the results. DeVega quotes media watchdog FAIR from a related article on ‘Liberal Media Bias” — (quick quip: there isn’t any) — that observes:
The traditional model of "objectivity" followed by corporate media uses the two major parties as the two poles that journalists are expected to drive their stories straight between. This "both sides" approach often leaves out several other sides — either to the left or right of the two big parties, or looking at politics from a different angle entirely.
One of the biggest biases we find in political coverage is toward seeing politics as a spectator sport.
emphasis added
Read the whole thing. DeVega does a good job showing how this happens.
I posted about this the other day, with a critique of a NY Times opinion piece ostensibly about getting ready for the next pandemic. It effectively pitted health authorities against each other as though they were competing teams. Masking, school closings, travel bans, vaccine mandates — all of them were reduced to Yes-No choices as though someone had to win and someone had to lose.
All of these policies became highly politicized and the Times write-up presents them in a way that tries to avoid the politicization entirely. Instead of explaining that either choice can be correct depending on the changing knowledge about a developing pandemic, and that choosing which one to go with should be based on the best science available, they framed it in a way that seemed to suggest that there were no correct answers — only experts who can’t agree on anything.
If The NY Times is afraid of upsetting science deniers who fought all the mandates on purely political grounds, mission accomplished. The way the article is written gives them license to say “Even experts can’t agree.”
DeVega cites how Republicans deliberately attack the media to intimidate them into giving them cover and not calling them out. He mentions the case of Axios reporter, Ben Montgomery, who sent a private message to the Press Office of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis complaining about a press release supposedly about education policy on DEI and CRT.
Talking Points Memo has an article by Hunter Walker on the incident and the way DeSantis has chosen to attack the media: Reporter Describes Being Fired By Axios After Being Targeted By Ron DeSantis’ Media ‘Machine’
Montgomery had sent a private email to complain about the nature of the press release.
Montgomery found himself in the crosshairs of DeSantis’ team after he sent an email responding to a press release the governor’s office sent out on Monday. The press release was an over 800-word attack “on divisive concepts such as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, Critical Race Theory (CRT).” The bulletin from the governor’s office was branded as part of a series called “Exposing The DEI Scam” and contained a series of quotes from DeSantis and his allies framing diversity efforts as “political indoctrination” promoted by the “woke mob.”
Montgomery, who said he feels “obligated” to read official press releases since they could contain information “that might be useful for my readers,” did not feel this press release from DeSantis fit that category.
“There was no, like, event to cover. It might have been a roundtable at some point, but there was no event that I had been alerted to. … This press release was just a series of quotes about DEI programs, and the ‘scam’ they are, and nothing else,” Montgomery said. “I was frustrated by this. I read the whole thing and my day is very busy.”
What happened next is illustrative:
Montgomery responded to the release by emailing DeSantis’ press office a message that said, “This is propaganda, not a press release.”
Alex Lanfranconi, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Education, publicized the exchange less than an hour later by tweeting a screengrab of Montgomery’s message.
As expected, the tweet unleashed a shit-storm of poo-flingers. What Montgomery did not expect was what happened five hours later. He was contacted by higher-ups at Axios, confirmed that the private email shown in the tweet had been sent by him, and was summarily fired. Access to his laptop and company email was immediately shut down.
This kind of action is standard operating procedure for DeSantis. As Walker reports:
DeSantis, who is widely expected to run for president next year, has a press shop that is known for being combative with the media. Members of his team have highlighted individual reporters on Twitter while demanding corrections. They have also shared screenshots of emails and requests for comment sent by journalists in an effort to paint those reporters as biased.
These posts from DeSantis’ press team have led to the reporters who are targeted being bombarded with angry messages and threats from the governor’s fans. In one 2021 instance, the Associated Press publicly accused a former DeSantis spokesperson of engaging in “harassment.” In addition to DeSantis’ official press operation, far-right Florida activists have set up their own publications focused on positive coverage of the governor that have been rewarded with exclusive coverage opportunities.
The inimitable Charles P. Pierce had a scathing reaction to the news of Montgomery’s termination:
The Media Better Be Smart and Get Wise to DeSantis' Bad-Faith Press Operation
If a reporter can't recognize propaganda and call it out when he sees it, then what's even the point?
...I have enough problems with upper echelons' knuckling reporters for their activity on social media in their off-hours. (I have a long-standing hatred for the rules of “objectivity” when they are used as an excuse for timidity and professional ass-covering by said echelons.) But this was a private communication between a reporter and a government official that the official shared in a public forum. Even the most hidebound traditional journalism ethics don't touch this. It's the apparatchik who should be fired for sharing a private communication for, yes, propaganda purposes.
But the official did so in the hope that Axios would prove to behave like the thoroughgoing chickenshits they've proven themselves to be. Presto! A Pulitzer finalist is out of work. The manipulative desk jockey probably will get a raise…
It’s not like this behavior from DeSantis and his crew is either secret or a surprise, so why not more pushback from the press?
...In The Atlantic, David Frum furrows his brow over this possibility. [That the press is going easy on DeSantis because he might block Trump.]
DeSantis is a machine engineered to win the Republican presidential nomination. The hardware is a lightly updated version of donor-pleasing mechanics from the Paul Ryan era. The software is newer. DeSantis operates on the latest culture-war code: against vaccinations, against the diversity industry, against gay-themed books in school libraries. The packaging is even more up-to-the-minute. Older models—Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush—made some effort to appeal to moderates and independents. None of that from DeSantis. He refuses to even speak to media platforms not owned by Rupert Murdoch. His message to the rest of America is more of the finger-pointing disdain he showed last year for high-school students who wore masks when he visited a college.
Despite the fact that Frum makes the critical mistakes of believing a) that there is any such thing as a Republican moderate, and b) that there are enough true "independents" to field a baseball team, his trepidations are well-founded. DeSantis was a friendless meathead in Congress, and he may very well prove to be punching far above his weight class in running for president, especially against the former president*. Which is probably why his press people are such duplicitous pond scum.
Trading Ben Montgomery for them isn't a deal that augurs anything good.
TPM has another article that’s a must-read on this topic, by David Kurtz:
A Case Study On The Epidemic Of Bothsidesism In Journalism
I started this WaPo story – headlined “Much of the 2024 GOP field focuses on dark, apocalyptic themes” – with hope and optimism. Awesome, the bigs are treating this as not normal, which is good, just what democracy needs!
It starts off strong, citing Trump’s “I am your retribution” speech and building up to a compelling nut ‘graph:
The trio of comments from 2024 Republican presidential hopefuls — either declared or expected — underscore the dark undertones and apocalyptic rhetoric that have pervaded much of the Republican Party in the era of Trump.
But in the very next ‘graph, immediately undercutting the story’s own premise, comes the first sign that the story is infected with the insidious journalistic trope of bothsidesism:
President Biden and Democrats often engage in their own existential messaging, warning that some Republicans — whom they deride as “extremists” — are out of step with most Americans, eager, for example, to cut programs like Medicare and Social Security.”
Wait, what? Equating the defense of Medicare and Social Security with “I am your retribution”? Putting extremists in quotes was a nice touch, too.
From there, the story’s structure deteriorates into a both-sides dipsy doo of apocalyptic things Republicans have said followed by “to be sure”-style tut-tutting over Democrats just to even things out, culminating in: “Of course, Democrats also deploy hyperbolic and dark language against their Republican foes.” Of course?!?
So now what?
Maybe the real myth was that we could ever trust the media to be truly objective? Maybe Sturgeon’s Law applies here as well?
Or maybe what we are seeing is yet one more piece of evidence that Conservatives have succeeded in one more long-term effort: systematically neutralizing the Fourth Estate in a way that squares with their embrace of authoritarian cult behavior. All would-be dictators attempt to control information. It’s how they control minds.
We get what we are willing to pay for. Atrios used to observe that “Information wants to be free, but the rent wants to be paid.” The internet was supposed to make us all informed, but it’s been turned into a machine to monetize us instead. If we want real truth, we have to make it a paying proposition. It’s a tough sell when comforting lies are so tasty. — and billionaires have so much money to market what they want us to buy.
I still subscribe to The NY Times because sometimes they still get things right — and the rest of the time I want to know what kind of shit sandwich they’re serving up. I subscribe to TPM, Pierce at Esquire, Mother Jones, and several writers like David Corn, Timothy Snyder who have moved to Substack. I follow (still) several people on Twitter. I get regular emails from Robert Reich. I throw donations towards Digby when it’s that time of year. Rule of Claw gets my bucks, just because.
And of course, Daily Kos.
Share where you get news you trust in comments.
Here’s Joe Jackson on the “Sunday Papers” (Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry” also comes to mind.)
Poll
24
votes
Show Results
Do you think "the media" is getting better or worse?
24
votes
Vote Now!
Do you think "the media" is getting better or worse?
Worse - and I think the internet has a lot to do with it.
When it's good, it can be really good. When it's bad...
Depends on which media you're following.
I'm ready to cut the soles off my shoes, sit in a tree, and learn to play the flute.
It's still Sturgeon's Law.
It's always been problematic - but we keep exchanging old shortcomings for new ones so it's a wash.
Comments are closed on this story.