The Why of Media WTF

Christy Hardin Smith
asks the right question today.

Why is it that, given the continuing
proofs that our current government is Clueless, and is leading us
over the cliff, the media narrative remains supportive?

How is it that the response of CNN to
our failure in Iraq and Israel’s continuing failure in Lebanon is to
wonder if Revelations is coming true?
I’m not picking on Kyra Phillips here (much). Chris Matthews’s Hardball is doing pretty much the same
thing.  

I won’t even get into Fox, whose
“Middle East analysis” team the other day was being done by Wayne Rogers
and Ben Stein. But part of the answer does lie there.

We’re talking here about three main
factors:

• Business Models
• Generational Assumptions
• Occupational conditioning

Let me take them one at a time.

Business Models

Publishers like The New York Times and
broadcasters like CBS emerged as giant companies in an age of giant
corporatism. Their “myth” of journalism’s “professionalism,”
reflected in institutions like Columbia’s Pulitzer School (named for
tabloid publisher Joseph Pulitzer) and Northwestern’s Medill School
(named for political crank Joseph Medill) was a short-lived
phenomenon, a product of an era that ended nearly 40 years ago.

The business models of media start-ups
in our time are political. Sun Myung Moon launched The Washington
Times, and bought UPI, for political reasons. CNN was really founded
for political reasons – Ted Turner didn’t think the truth of
international relations was getting out. Rupert Murdoch is a
political publisher.

Publishers determine the politics of
media, and publishers have, historically, been very conservative.
Medill was a right-winger. The Chandler family (which controlled the
LA Times) was, until its last generation, notoriously right-wing.

The business model of political
journalism is that the “profession” is nothing more (or less)
than an instrument of their political control. They define what is
inside the dialog, and what is not. Liberals have, by and large,
ignored this because they were (until recently) naive, stupid,
losers.

Generational Assumptions

Journalists are products of their time,
and the assumptions they are taught – by their bosses. Those who
don’t go along generally get out. There are very, very few
exceptions, columnists whose prose wins them enough of their own
credibility with an audience that they can live outside the
mainstream.

The assumptions of our time are
Nixonian assumptions. Among these assumptions are that journalists
are leftists, and as such suspect. People like Ben Domenech, the ass
who briefly had a Washington Post gig only because he was a
right-wing toady, are the rule and not the exception. Domenech,
remember, was born in the early 1980s. He knows nothing else but what
he was taught – and he was home-schooled by right-wing (I’ll say
it) assholes.

Domenech got his gig because the
assumption remains, 40 years after Vietnam, that journalists are
liberals and must be balanced. This despite the fact that Bob
Woodward was always a Republican, and worked as a stenographer for
the worst right-wing cranks in our political history for most of his
career. He broke Watergate, thus he was a liberal, thus he was
suspect, thus he needed to be balanced. When the right is considered
the left, the only balance is the ultra-right.

I should add that most people accept generational assumptions unconsciously. They are like Indians before Columbus, with no vocabulary to handle different belief structures. This has become more pronounced in our time.

Occupational Conditioning

Young, ambitious journalists know –
every one of them – that the way to the top, the way to the anchor
chair, is by parroting the corporate line. Whatever it is. And that
line has been unrelentingly conservative for a generation, as I
noted.

You can’t go through 40 years of
conservative conditioning, then rise through the ranks to the top of
that pyramid, without being compliant. And complicit in whatever the
bosses demand.

I speak here from real experience. I have been working as a professional journalist since 1978. I guarantee you my career would have gone further, farther, faster if I were a reliable right-wing crank. The editors I worked for never wanted to hear what business was doing wrong. They wanted hagiography. And I gave this to them. But my own politics also made me very easy to dump, and I’ve been fired from nearly every job I ever had.

What about Keith Olbermann? What about
him? MSNBC was desperate, he was a superior writer, and he
immediately delivered something they’d never had before – ratings.
Phil Donahue had the top-rated show on that network in 2001, and he
was canned for being “too liberal.”

Conclusion

It’s not enough to identify right-wing
bias in the media. It’s not enough for those who don’t share today’s assumptions to do
their own reporting.

What we need in this country,
desperately, are people with money, who want Americans to think, who
will put their money where their hearts are, and either launch
start-ups doing real journalism or buy organizations which already
exist.

That’s going to happen. There’s money
to be made, now that people’s beliefs have been unhinged by events,
now that the market is looking for something other than the same-old
same-old.

But until it becomes common, we have to
live with the media we have.