Corporate Delicti
When reality catches up to the nightmare.
For the corporate media, the real issues facing the American people— poverty, the decline of the middle class, income and wealth inequality, trade, healthcare, climate change, etc.—are fairly irrelevant. For them, politics is largely presented as entertainment. With some notable exceptions, reporters are trained to see a campaign as if it were a game show, a baseball game, a soap opera, or a series of conflicts.
– U.S. Rep. Bernie Sanders, 2017
Bernie Sanders was not the first to raise alarms. In the late 20th century, journalists-turned-scholars Ben Bagdikian and Robert McChesney were tireless in warning about the consequences of consolidation of hitherto independent media properties into corporate juggernauts, answerable not to their communities but to Wall Street. The argument is that they were too deferential to capitalist institutions and together formed a blockade on political opinion that strayed too far, left or right, from the conventional wisdom. As such, said the academic critics, the Gannetts, Hearsts, Times-Mirrors, Knight-Ridders, and CBSs of the world were so submissive to the status quo that they actually stymied, not protected, a robust democracy.
In the 21st century, the internet and social media have laid bare the fatuousness of those arguments. The ultra-democratization of online political speech did not open up the society to fresh, hitherto marginalized voices. It simply allowed extremists to coalesce into tribes, leading to our current apocalypse. As legacy media gasp for oxygen, their historical gatekeeping to exclude irresponsible and hateful content has been rendered obsolete.
But the language to describe them is doing just fine. “Corporate media,” a term dripping with sneering contempt, is everywhere on the lips of the political left. It’s a sort of truism, accepted blindly, however unspecific and meaningless it has always been.
Most often it is used as if it were a synonym for cowardice, arrogance and even moral weakness, but if you were to ask how that assumption was arrived at, you’d hear only a reiteration of vaguely paranoid suspicions: that media corporations and their output is controlled by The Man, whose only interest is the political and economic status quo. Versus, you know, conscientiously reporting, analyzing and contextualizing the news at great haste according to strict protocols, with all the errors, overzealousness and overcautiousness that inevitably follow. What the label really means, though, is “my grievances are not fully flogged by, say, CBS News, and instead soft pedaled and laundered through the mouths of politicians.”
The right’s boogeyman is “mainstream media” (which for them means not explicitly ideological, propaganda-spewing outlets like Fox News), who supposedly inculcate the audience with a liberal perspective and consciously trade in “Fake News.” Which is absolute bullshit, too. I’m waiting to see a spreadsheet of all the hundreds of news items Trump and his GOP cultists have denounced as fake, and the eventual outcomes in documented reality. It would be a very, very lopsided document.
But I digress. The fact is, “corporate media” — like “fake news” — is a slur that has taken hold as conventional wisdom among those seemingly endowed with the superpower of divining the motives of total strangers laboring in a field about which these clairvoyants are almost comically ill-informed. For instance, there is seldom a cigar-chomping, fat-cat publisher dictating editorial coverage to the newsroom. Or even top editors, for that matter. News generally percolates up, from beat producers and reporters, not down from the executive suite. Stories live or die based on their news value, not some sinister business agenda. While local, independently owned papers (what few remain) may be gun shy about stories that affect their major automotive, real-estate and supermarket advertisers, ethical canons are almost universally respected at national news organizations. Not so Fox, Breitbart, Daily Caller, et al., which perform not journalism but opposition research, selling outrage to their Republican audience. That, unlike the news, is an enormously valuable rare-earth commodity.
Nonetheless, Google “corporate media” and prepare to spend the day scrolling. It’s such a facile bit of virtue signaling. It reminds me of people who drop the adjective “erstwhile” in a sentence, apparently as a synonym for “eminent” or “esteemed.” It sounds so evocative and erudite, even though all it means is “former.” (“The erstwhile matinee idol …”) It’s a safely ignorant affectation, though, because the audience doesn’t know what it means, either. Likewise, when somebody sneers about “the corporate media,” it seems to spill over with righteous contempt for corruption we all understand — even if the “we all” don’t know shit about how news is made.
Mind you, for 25 years I’ve made a living finding fault with the news media for various particular and general failings. Some of it is credulous reporting (Iraq WMD), some of it the wall-to-wall coverage of missing blondes while neglecting the destruction of our planet, some of it is careless and hyperventilating spot-news coverage (dude, there is never a second shooter), some of it is the cult of “objectivity,” which is idiotic. Fairness, honesty and diligence are not served by arbitrarily assigned equal weight to all voices for any given event or issue. On the contrary; that is craven, driven out of fear that the mainstream media will be seen as biased. Obviously, the decades of tiptoeing and appeasement have done zero to reassure conservative readers, so where is the benefit of pusillanimity?
Rhetorical question. Anyway, I’m nobody’s apologist. As a media critic, my trophy case is full.
I might add that the most egregious shortcoming of the corporate media has come with the steady collapse 25 years ago of its business model. What used to be its ad revenue and profit engine now goes primarily to Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon and advertisers’ own portals. The consequence has been the decimation of print journalism around the country, catastrophic cutbacks in coverage and the nearly sole fixation on politics — which is inexpensive to cover because talk is cheap. Sadly, in my lifetime, the media have been very bad at covering politics, because they obsess over who’s winning and losing instead of the stakes of election outcomes to society. It is a repulsive constant. An election is not a game. It’s not a race. It’s a determinant of who will be in power and what they will do with it.
But the constitutionally protected watchdog of governments is too busy following trending topics on social media to patrol the compound. The actual work of governments, apart from the rhetoric, occurs unilluminated and unguarded. That problem is unfixable. And, apart from the famine of worthwhile journalistic output, it does create an environment in which scoundrels can apply leverage.
A corrupt, authoritarian, racist, fascist regime is in power, daily ignoring what the press calls “norms” (but which is actually honor and decency) and eroding our erstwhile Constitutional and societal pillars. Along the way, Don Trumpleone has mimicked Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels’s strategy of denouncing the press as sleazes, scum, liars and enemies of the people. Now he is filing bullying slap suits against news organizations, actions completely indefensible under the 1st Amendment, to extort multimillion-dollar payouts from corporate owners fearing retribution in their other affairs of business subject to government scrutiny. In short, shakedowns.
It is almost impossible under our law to defame a prominent politician, so sacrosanct is political speech, no matter how hideous. Yet ABC, which holds many broadcast licenses and other interests subject to government regulation, paid Trump $15 million after anchor George Stephanopoulos said on the air that Trump had been found “liable for rape” in the notorious E. Jean Carroll case. In fact, Trump had been found liable for sexual assault. Though the judge in the case had himself declared the episode tantamount to rape, and though the statement met none of the legal standard of “actual malice” (knowingly or without any investigation uttering a false statement), ABC forked over the money.
That was last December. A month later, Meta — owner of Facebook and Instagram — paid $25 million to settle a suit for blocking Trump on its platforms after Trump instigated the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Meta, of course, is in the crosshairs of the Republican Congress for its own supposed anti-conservative bias. Then, a week ago, CBS owner Paramount paid $16 million to settle a Trump suit about a 60 Minutes interview with his 2024 presidential-race opponent Kamala Harris. He claimed edits in the conversation — as occur in 100% of all recorded broadcast interviews — were designed to harm his candidacy. Even if that paranoiac allegation were true, there is no aspect of US law that can penalize media for purely editorial decisions. If there were, Rupert Murdoch would be penniless. But again, CBS’s corporate owner Paramount depends on the Trump justice department and Federal Trade Commission to permit a pending $18 billion merger.
Next to $18 billion, $16 million is Trump change.
It is also a bribe. Paid to an extortionist. Only a matter of smart business? I dunno, is it smart to sacrifice the most basic journalistic, legal and democratic principles to buy peace with the mafia? “Gosh, Paramount. That’s a nice media conglomerate you have there. It would be a shame if something were to happen to it.”
All of which is to say, Bagdikian and McChesney, you are now finally, albeit posthumously, correct. Bernie and all the rando lefties out there, your hobby horse has come to life.
Cowardice and moral weakness — not to mention the threat to democracy — have become in these darkest of times a real and present and unforgivable understatement.
"Don Trumpleone"
Nailed it.
This is excellent writing. Thanks Bob.