The Corporate Media Crisis

From CounterPunch, University of Texas professor of journalism, and my go-to guy on diversity issues, Robert Jensen, discusses the corporate news media in an excerpt from a new book he's edited:

He rejected that, reasserting his independence from any force outside his newsroom. I countered:

“Let’s say, for the purposes of discussion, that you and I were equally capable journalists in terms of professional skills, and we were both reasonable candidates for the job of editor-in-chief that you hold. If we had both applied for the job, do you think your corporate bosses would have ever considered me for the position given my politics? Would I, for even a second, have been seen by them to be a viable candidate for the job?”

Joe’s politics are pretty conventional, well within the range of mainstream Republicans and Democrats – he supports big business and U.S. supremacy in global politics and economics. In other words, he’s a capitalist and imperialist. I am on the political left, anti-capitalist and critical of the U.S. empire. On some political issues, Joe and I would agree, but we diverge sharply on the core questions of the nature of the economy and foreign policy.

Joe pondered my question and conceded that I was right, that his bosses would never hire someone with my politics, no matter how qualified, to run one of their newspapers. The conversation trailed off, and we parted without resolving our differences.

And

So, we sit at a strange time: Professional journalism is inadequate because of its ideological narrowness and subordination to power, but the attacks on professional journalism typically are ideologically even narrower and are rooted in a misguided analysis of power. Some of us are tempted to applaud the erosion of the model of professional journalism we find inadequate for democracy, but a more politicized model for journalism likely will follow the right-wing propaganda that has dominated in the United States in recent decades.

More here.

It's rather difficult for most Americans, liberal, conservative, and moderate alike, to develop a good critique of the the US news media. A big huge part of the problem, apart from the fact that we don't teach media analysis in the schools, is that, for most people, the news and politics are pretty much the same thing. That is, the news defines the boundaries of the public discourse, what will be talked about and what will be ignored, but in order to get a handle on it all and start really evaluating the media, you have to get outside those boundaries in order to look at the big picture.

But how can you see the big picture when you depend on the news for your information? You can't, actually, unless you're weird like me and have a fascination for the issue that compels you to search this shit out.

At any rate, here's an answer for the longstanding question as to whether the media are liberal or conservative: the corporate news media are definitely conservative, and always have been. But not in the way you think I mean. Okay, maybe in the way you think I mean, but not if you imagine I'm talking about some sort of score card tallying "liberal" stories versus "conservative" stories, or language bias or some such. The point is that the corporate media are, well, corporate, and necessarily reflect a corporate point of view, pro big business, pro establishment, pro government as long as the government is treating corporations with the kid gloves they usually get. Virtually everyone in the business comes from this point of view because if they don't, they don't last long, either getting fired from multiple jobs, or just giving up when they realize that the news isn't about Jimmy Olson and Woodward and Bernstein. Much more on this here.

And I'm even talking about Rachel Maddow, who I love. Sure, she's liberal and her show reports on topics and issues that are near and dear to the liberal heart, but she's pro-corporation, as a concept, pro-military, albeit sometimes anti-war, pro-government, and pro-establishment. She may attack a corporation here, or a particular politician there, but she will never, never, never attack the overall notion of corporations, or the American style of government itself. Never.

Really, to understand all this, you've just got to completely pull out of the media framing of what it means to be liberal or conservative and sort of rewrite the ideas for yourself. Maddow is a liberal on the one hand, but she's very much a part of the establishment on the other. And that makes her conservative. Get it?

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