Going way back in time, we had only a mainstream media—the Times and the Post and the Associated Press and the major networks. In the 1970s, after the famous Powell Memo, wealthy conservatives began funding their own media. For most of the last 50 years, even as the right-wing media grew, it remained clear that the mainstream media set the agenda—that is, it determined what we all talked about every day.
But recently, that flipped. This transformation has been in process for several years, but I date it to January 6 for two reasons. First, before that, the right-wing media didn’t have all-consuming power when it came to crunch time. They could not, for example, elect Donald Trump. There was still enough of a shred of news-gathering honesty at Fox News that it called Arizona for Joe Biden. Second, January 6 was a moment of choosing for the American right. Conservative politicians and the right-wing media could have woken up on January 7 and decided that enough was enough and they were captaining their MAGA-ized spaceship back down to planet Earth.
But we’ve seen how both of those matters sorted themselves out. Fox forced out the two people who made that Arizona call. . . . And on the second matter, with a few notable exceptions, virtually the whole party now embraces the January 6 “uprising” (or is too cowardly to say otherwise).
This is exactly the goal of gish gallop.
This is exactly the goal of conservative ideology. They don’t want to reason with you; they want to force you. The world they intend for us, for your children, is one of suffering. Make no mistake; once they take that power for themselves there is no amount of bloodshed that will pry it free.
I look forward to dieing next to my brothers and sisters who chose to live free.
where has this guy been?
it’s been that way since fox news went on air. every media outlet was terrified that the fear of missing out on a story because if one major outlet is reporting a story the others aren’t and it blows up, those other places lose credibility.
right wing media thrives on OUTRAGE and that outrage brings the revenue. the only reason why other media doesn’t do it is that either the market won’t tolerate that kind of thing and would turn it off or there are still a few (a very few) people still in the works who have the journalistic ethics to not cover news in that fashion.
That’s his point? Though?
It wasn’t like fox news went on-air and you could immediately call Mexicans rapists and it would be a headline. There was a long struggle. And respectable journalism (imagine!) lost.
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I see that he does use Jan 6 as some sort of demarcation, like an offical death knell of “mainstream news objectivity”. So you’re right there.
But how we got there is not an overnight thing; it’s been a decades-long fight. Maybe a lot of people don’t remember it.
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I was going to say the same thing … media had always been affected by right wing ideologies for the past hundred years.
If left wing or moderate centralists heavily influenced the media, we wouldn’t be having a discussion about far right elements trying to take over the US government right now.
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I’ll pitch that this is just the natural result of repealing the fairness doctrine by Reagan in 1985.
The fairness doctrine started out in 1949 as a policy to avoid having the top broadcaster’s of the time (NBC, ABC, and CBS) create a biased public agenda by leveraging their audience monopoly. They were required to provide multiple contrasting view points on issues of public importance.
When Reagan repealed the fairness doctrine, the influence on media outlets to pitch left or right leaning view points only, took off.
There’s a certain irony behind the source info being from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum website.
Soooooo, let’s get that back? Maybe?
“we’re $orry it$ too hard”
It only applied to broadcast media. We would have better luck just waiting for the dinosaurs that watch local news and listen to am radio to die.
Couldn’t we just jam am radio bands? Or is it too late?
We have always lived in a world where news outlets owned by the wealthy elite are allowed to set policy and agenda at their editorial whims
Seriously. Rich media barons have literally started wars to sell newspapers.
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/yellow-journalism
Very true. But the vast proliferation of eyewitness account voices (everyone can publish worldwide now) should counter that and it has-and-hasn’t. The difference isn’t just in the wealth of the owners.
The fundamental premise of an objective truth is gone. (Let’s just take the existence of an objective truth for granted for now so we can talk about media, but yes that’s an interesting philosophical discussion too.)
Yes, and no. When there’s only a fews news sources it can be more difficult to define the narrative. Because the wealthy power has to use “respectable journalism” to do it. You know the whole source-based who, what, when, etc. That wasn’t as easy as it is today.
Think of it like this: russia started the lie that AIDS was created by the US and spread in Africa by the WHO. Today, they’d just use a troll army to tweet it, and it’d be in the headlines tomorrow.
Back then they had to buy printed papers in India to run it, have those used as “sources” and then convince the NYT to run the story. Which they couldn’t really do because the NYT said “well, what’s your source for this?” And when they couldn’t get a satisfactory answer, the story died.
It’s different now. Very different.
Are the wealthy still behind it? Yeah, but “it” is very different to what it was. News wasn’t worth billions back then. People who ran it weren’t usually MBAs who had never chased a lead in their lives.
Going way back in time, news outlets have always been owned and controlled by the rich. William Randolph Hearst basically invented tabloids and loved steeping his garbage with his politics. His papers helped launch the Spanish American War with headlines constantly blaring “Remember the Maine!” The Maine blew up from an engine failure but it sold more papers to point to Spanish forces as the culprit.
Are things worse than 50 years ago? Probably. But it has been roughly the same amount of crap for the past 20 years at least.
Are things worse than 50 years ago? Probably.
Well, that’s the point of the article, that, yes it’s worse now. A lot worse because we don’t publish objective truth anymore. Jan 6 as the example.
Same for last 20 years? 2004 was Iraq War II and a war crime bonanza. There was still pushback on the right-wing narrative, but yeah it was winning even back then.
30 years? Less so. 40 years? Even less so. And so on.
“Same as it ever was” is not the right takeaway from this article. It’s missing the point by over-generalizing.
Now?!? It’s been like this for about a decade.
Almost 30 years.
When was Fox News started?
“Now”?
All I know is that the majority of mainstream media in Canada is Conservative. It’s a hellscape.
Conservatism is a vile plague of oppression and death. It must be dealt with or we will all suffer dire consequences.
I think some of the thinking is ignoring the huge shift away from obvious plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face truths.
Yes, media has often been leveraged by wealthy and powerful to force a narrative. That is not new. What is new is the creation of narratives out of whole cloth.
If you don’t remember Nixon (if you’re under, 45 say) there was a years-long drama around “did the President lie” and “if he lied, was it illegal” that resulted in him leaving office early to avoid continued litigation. The only thing on any video outlet for a few days straight was congressional committee meetings. That’s a different world.
Imagine all your scrolling, 9am-5pm, was committee hearings, the same committee hearings, talking heads about the committee hearings, and more committee hearings. For days. It’s hard to imagine there could be a media environment like that.
And it was one in which journalism, unthinkably now, had some respect. News was serious. Written and presented by smart people. It was common for a reporter to make an effort to use plain language, but it wasn’t dumbed-down. That, believe it or not, started in the 80’s. With USA Today. It was a whole thing.
“The news” was where everyone - not just your demographic but all demographics started their conversations.
Was it pure objective truth? No. Was it used to start wars and destroy the environment for money? Yes. Well then what’s different between then and now?
Well, think of Qanon. If you’ve ever looked into any Qanon “thinking”, it becomes clear that it’s utterly without foundation in the real world. It’s fanfiction. And it gets “reported” as news.
That’s what is qualitatively different from news in the 70’s. That would never happen, because an editor would say “what the fuck is this” and throw it out for being completely made-up garbage. Not today. Today they run it. All of it, over and over until a gunman walks in to the pizza shop to find the basement where the kids are held. (There’s no basement, of course. The whole thing is right-wing made up garbage.)
So while I absolutely understand and even appreciate the cynical view that “so what, nothings changed” that is just not true. It has changed in a truly fundamental way that is more than dangerous. He’s right about that.
The worst part is, the most powerful voices to save truthful reporting are the corporate news industries, who are run by accountants, not journalists.
You are absolutely correct and this was very well stated. Television networks used to view news programs as a public service. They weren’t intended to generate revenue, but rather as part of the payback to the public in order to use the public airwaves.
Newspapers were always generally profit driven, but you had the distinction between the yellow journalism approach and the Grey Lady approach. There’s less of a distinction today, and you now have a phenomenon where the bad drives out the good via the Darwinian process that essentially boils down to being able to monetize clickbait.
The mainstream media has been the right wing media since before Fox News existed.
I love the analogy of Hummers overrunning Priuses, because while Hummers are more dangerous that Priuses, they both kill pedestrians, burn gasoline, and dump microplastics everywhere.
So - both sides?
It’s an inevitable consequence of sensationalism-driven “journalism”.
And sensationalism-driven “journalism” is an inevitable consequence of short-term-bottom-line-driven “journalism”.
No capitalist correction exists: capitalism doesn’t find its highjacking of civilization to be “a problem”.
Systems produce their own kind of results, and the nature of the system causes the nature of the end-state/result.
Same in engineering, law, language+culture, all domains.
