View this email in your browser

A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

Why Journalism Isn't Really Covering the Threat of Fascism
Objectivity has no bias in favor of the truth

A (not bad) New York Times headline informs us that "'A Perpetual
Motion Machine': How Disinformation Drives Voting Laws
."
But a better summary of what the story tells us would be: "Our
democracy is being destroyed and the groundwork for fascism is being
laid by our political system's tolerance-nay, embrace-of the
Republican Party's unending avalanche of lies." You are never going
to see or hear those words from a mainstream news source, but if nothing
changes, it will be the thesis of many a history book.

Two phenomena are occurring at once that make it difficult to see
what's actually happening in real time. The first is that the
Republican Party has committed itself to an orthodoxy made up of
bald-faced lies, racism, the encouragement of political violence, and
the purposeful undermining of democracy. The second is that the ongoing
existential crisis of journalism is making it impossible to report the
above clearly.

Journalism's crisis has many, almost impossibly entangled roots. The
collapse of the print business model is the most obvious one. Back in
2007, 85 percent of U.S. newspapers reported making cuts in their
editorial staffs, eliminating a total of 3,000 jobs and continuing a
steady trend that had begun years earlier. Digital behemoths Facebook
and Google gobbled up almost all of the advertisements that newspapers
had historically relied upon to support the costs of reporting.
Craigslist, meanwhile, pirated away what had been the financially
crucial business of classified advertising in local newspapers. Then
came the 2008 financial crisis that robbed those newspapers of what
advertisers had remained. Since then, U.S. newspapers have lost half
their editorial employees
.

But the news is actually far worse than the numbers let on. Many of the
"newsroom" jobs today have nothing to do with gathering "news."
They are in graphics, podcasting, newslettering, video-making, and other
things that leave little time for doing the job of journalism. Second,
there has actually been a lot of hiring on the coasts in media. The
Washington Post and The New York Times are incredibly well stocked these
days. This masks the fact that almost all of the newspapers in the
middle of the country have been hollowed out.

Among the most prominent villains in this process is the New
York-based hedge fund Alden Global Capital, which buys up newspapers,
pays its own executives exorbitantly for implementing policies that load
the new properties with debt, slashes jobs, and sells off anything
anyone will buy for a short-term profit that goes right to those
executives. These "vulture capitalists" just succeeded in buying up
the Tribune Company
,
which includes the Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, New York Daily
News, and major metro papers from Hartford, Connecticut, to Fort
Lauderdale, Florida. That likely spells "30" (old newspaper-ese for
the end of the story) for those papers. Politicians in those places will
henceforth have a much easier task when it comes to fooling most of the
people most of time.

Economics, though, is hardly the only problem. I hate using the word
"obviously," but obviously, the rise of right-wing media is also a
fundamental problem that the rest of the media do not know how to
handle. The big mistake occurred back in 1996 when journalists and
politicians decided to treat Fox News as a legitimate news source.
Everybody knew that the clowns on talk radio weren't doing journalism.
They were rabble-rousers and carnival barkers who riled up the yahoos to
complain to journalists (and politicians)-but no intelligent,
well-informed person took them seriously. Then Roger Ailes dressed these
clowns up in nice clothes and Rupert Murdoch handed out checks, and
suddenly their lies, racism, and ethnocentrism were setting the agenda
for our politics. (For details, see Brian Rosenwald's Talk Radio's
America: How an Industry Took Over a Political Party That Took Over the
United States.)

The right had been "working the refs" for decades, but once Fox was
launched, the danger came from inside the room. Ailes smartly hired a
few real journalists for window dressing, just so the rest of the
profession could not write Fox off entirely. Plus, the company made
billions of dollars, and so the moguls who ran its competitors lusted
after its viewers and did what they could to attract them, farming out
part of their broadcast time to faux Foxes. (This explains why literally
every cable company and even PBS has felt it necessary to employ Tucker
Carlson at some time or another.)

Other fundamental threats to journalism also abounded, the most obvious
being the fact that more and more people get their news not from the
"legacy" media but from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, places that
don't even pretend to have any standards of truth and where profits
are often determined by the ability to incite extreme reactions among
those doing the clicking (as is happening today vis-à-vis
Israel-Palestine
).

Then there is the age-old problem of journalistic objectivity. The idea
has a lot to recommend it, and it worked reasonably well in the past,
but again, there's a fundamental problem: Objectivity has no bias in
favor of truth. If one side pays attention to facts and tries to do a
reasonable job of respecting all people regardless of race, creed,
color, etc., and the other lies all the time, promotes racist lies, and
incites its followers to violence, then journalistic objectivity has a
lot of trouble telling one from the other. Joe McCarthy knew this and
used it to his advantage. But he was something of a lone wolf, and his
drunken, ultimately ridiculous antics discredited his tactics, at least
until the same paranoid right-wing conservative movement that so adored
him began to take over the Republican Party. Beginning with Ronald
Reagan and Newt Gingrich, then going into overdrive with Donald Trump,
Republicans realized that, owing to the unwillingness of mainstream
reporters to tell their readers, listeners, and viewers when they are
passing along a politician's lies, they could game the system to their
advantage by creating a imaginary version of reality to which sensible
politicians and pundits would have no choice but to respond.

This time, the neo-McCarthyites were supported by an intellectual
superstructure, funded by the Koch network, among others, that mimicked
academic research but whose "senior fellows" and the like were
actually just making shit up. These investments helped to create what a
team of scholars at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at
Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media
Lab termed

"an internally coherent, relatively insulated knowledge community,
reinforcing the shared worldview of readers and shielding them from
journalism that challenged it." The Berkman Klein Center researchers
named this phenomenon a "propaganda feedback loop," defined
as a "network dynamic
in which media outlets, political elites, activists, and publics form
and break connections based on the contents of statements, and that
progressively lowers the costs of telling lies that are consistent with
a shared political narrative and increases the costs of resisting that
shared narrative in the name of truth."

Alas, the people left in the mainstream media had, and still have, no
idea how to handle all this. How can you show you are being "fair"
to "both sides" if you consistently point out that just one of them
is lying to you and doing so to destroy your country's democracy? It
may be true, but it sure doesn't sound as if you are reporting the
news in unbiased, "bipartisan" fashion. There is also the
problem-again I have to say, "obviously"-of sourcing. How many
times can you expect to get the quotes you need from Mitch McConnell or
Kevin McCarthy when you've mentioned how full of crap they are the
last time you quoted them? The net result, as the political scientists
Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson observed in their book The Tea
Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism

(back when the problem was not nearly as bad as it is now), is that
"America has right now a thousand-pound-gorilla media juggernaut on
the right, operating nineteenth-century style, coexisting with other
news outlets trying to keep up while making fitful efforts,
twentieth-century style, to check facts and cover 'both sides of the
story.'"

One reporter, by the way, who has outshined all others while covering
Trump, and put not only every White House reporter but also every
professional fact-checker to shame, is Daniel Dale, originally of the
Toronto Star, who (a) tells you when a politician, usually Trump, is
lying, and (b) most unusually but also most usefully, puts that lie in
context, both for how often it is being told and why it matters. Here

is a great recent example of his reporting, and one can only wish that
CNN President Jeff Zucker would have the guts to turn Dale loose on the
nonsense CNN regularly broadcasts.

Odds and Ends

I was thrilled recently to go back to the movies to see the 1969 film La
Piscine at the Film Forum . It turned out to be
the original version of 2016's A Bigger Splash. I recommend both.

It's Bob's 80th birthday this week: Here
is 16-year-old Stevie
Wonder singing "Blowin' in the Wind," and here
is Stevie again, this time singing it
with the late, great Glen Campbell in 1969. Here
is a luminous Joan Baez in
1972, making fun of her former protégé. Finally, here
's the great man himself, at Newport in
1965, blowing people away with Mike Bloomfield, Al Kooper, and "Like a
Rolling Stone."

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

Prospect LIVE May 26: Organizing for Social and Political Empowerment
Save the date for this virtual half-day conference, Wednesday, May 26,
1-5 pm eastern.
Click here to see the program details

[link removed]

To receive this newsletter directly in your inbox, click here to
subscribe. 

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

YOUR TAX DEDUCTIBLE DONATION SUPPORTS INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM

Copyright (C) 2021 The American Prospect. All rights reserved.
_________________

Sent to [email protected]

Unsubscribe:
[link removed]

The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States