Watching the Daily Show, an old chestnut was trotted out that made me want to scream. I love Jon Stewart, but he gives the right far too much of a benefit of a doubt. He had Kissinger on last week. KISSINGER! And he didn't even ask how many countries he couldn't travel to for fear of being arrested on war crimes charges.
In any event, he was talking to Steven Colbert, and made the assertion that the media isn't biased conservative or liberal, but merely biased towards sensationalism. Whatever makes the most money, if it bleeds it leads type thing. It's an argument that gets made a lot, and it is based on completely faulty reasoning.
The reasoning goes something like this. "Newspaper A, Radio Station B, and Television Station C will not be biased towards a viewpoint that is out of line with their consumers, because in doing so, they are not as competitive, and therefore will lose money. They print, or broadcast what their audience wishes to see or hear." This type of statement displays a horrific misunderstanding of media in general.
The reason for this being the case in television and radio is so obvious, that I'll put off dealing with them for a few moments, and deal exclusively with newspapers first.
Leaving aside the consolidation of mass media, winding up in the hands of very few mega-corporations, even prior to that, there was no percentage for newspapers to print things inconsistent with what other business interests wanted them to print. The reason for this? Simple supply and demand. But the product and the consumer in this case are pretty much turned on their heads. Newspapers are not really attempting to sell newspapers to people. In fact, very often a journal that's in financial trouble will try to cut down its circulation, and what they'll try to do is upscale their readership, or in other words, sell to a more elite crowd of readers. Think WSJ. The fact of the matter is, newspapers LOSE money with newspaper subscriptions. They make their money with advertising.
So the economic structure of a newspaper is that it sells readers to other businesses, or advertisers in its paper. Now, if you add in the consolidation of media ownership, you get a picture that increasingly looks like this: Large newspapers are the only papers that can afford to get real news stories from abroad and around the world. Your local paper certainly can't have a correspondent in Iraq right now, for instance. So several ponderously large entities are entirely representative of news in general. The NYT, the WSJ, the Washington Post. They are, in fact, selling very privileged elite audiences to other businesses. Their readers are members of the political class, and other movers and shakers who make decisions in society.
So you might ask, what picture of the world might you expect to see emerging in this arrangement, and coming out of these papers? The first expectation you would have is that of a worldview that that puts forward points of view and political perspectives which satisfy the needs and the perspectives of the buyers, the sellers, and the market. This is the way institutionalized power works. The downside is it leaves we, the NEWS consumers, out of the picture. Our interests are not represented in this model.
So the pattern that emerges is that of a non-inclusive, echo chamber of news that is dominated by largely corporate view points. It goes without saying that by and large, corporate view points tend to be at loggerheads with that of the average citizen.
This phenomenon is by no means limited to newspapers, and in fact is magnified when you move to a broadcast medium. We don't have to pay anything at all for these, assuming we are not dealing with cable, and even at that point the fee structure is not conducive to a market incentive coming from the end consumer. The model begins to become ingrained from an institutionalized standpoint. This is where you see the power of boycotting of advertisers get turned on its ear, as the two groups of consumers come directly into conflict with one another.
It is easy to ascertain in what way this will affect the news we see and hear. The media will attempt to present a picture of the world which defends and insulates the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate the domestic economy, and therefore that largely control the government, because it is in the economic interests of their real end-consumers, other large corporate powers.
So the simple answer is, yes, Media and its viewpoint is all about the bottom line. The problem is, it is not we who hold the check book. We are just numbers to be moved back and forth into various corporate columns as corporations vie for the attentions of other corporations.
