Dollarocracy (33 page)

That's because the journalists who got the jobs, and the journalism that was rewarded, bent over backward to avoid taking a side not just in the political debate between the two parties but also in the great debates of the era. This approach fostered the illusion of professional impartiality. But it also had the important business benefit of making journalism less expensive: just plant reporters near people in power and have them report.

There were major problems with this style of professional journalism, problems that surround us to this day, especially when it comes to the coverage of politics. It tended to make off-limits and unquestioned those areas that people in power agreed upon, and that not coincidentally tended to be near and dear to press owners. Specifically, when it comes to covering politics, professional journalism has a strong inclination to simply publicize the positions of the leadership of the two parties and regard them invariably as the two legitimate poles of debate—with the rational center between them, the place journalists tend to see themselves and the best people inhabiting. To maintain neutrality, journalists are loath to call out one side for lying. They also do not want to antagonize their sources, upon whom they are dependent. Instead, journalists prefer to report that one side is calling the other side liars and leave it at that. We report; you decide. The problem is that the liars can dismiss the criticism as being driven by their opponents and ignore it, so this becomes a liar's paradise.

This obsession of professional journalism to play it strictly down the middle between the two legitimate parties, to avoid at all costs the charge of favoritism—the “cult of balance” as Paul Krugman termed it—compromises the rigor and integrity of where political analysis would go if it simply followed the evidence “without fear or favor.” Krugman defined the cult of balance as “the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts.” “If one party declared that the earth was flat,” Krugman stated jokingly, “the headlines would read ‘Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'”
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Ari Melber wrote, “For years, Americans' political press has been stuck in a fact-free model of neutrality, often covering even the most obvious lies as ‘one side' of a dispute.”
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The grave damage of the cult of balance is that it allows dubious players to pollute the political culture and get away with it. After all, if the news media attack them, the media are accused of being partisan and unprofessional. And when the political culture moves sharply in one direction, journalism comfortably and uncritically goes along with it, sticking resolutely to the “center.” The center, more than anything in the United States, is determined by where Big Money is located. So-called objectivity on paper can come across as cowardice in the real world. “If a calculus of power determines truth,” scholar Lance Bennett observed, “the press has become the handmaiden of power.
There would seem to be little that would hasten the demise of democracy faster than this.”
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An example of this cult of balance came when in November 2011 Mitt Romney's campaign released its first TV ad attacking President Obama. The ad lifted a quote by Obama from a speech—“If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose”—and ridiculed it. But in that speech Obama was directly and unambiguously quoting Republican John McCain. So did the news media report this flat out as a fraudulent ad based on a lie? Not generally. The tenor of the coverage was captured in the
New York Times
headline: “Democrats Crying Foul over a New Romney Ad.”
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When White House press secretary Jay Carney complained on national television that the ad was intended to “deliberately distort what the President said,” Romney senior adviser Tom Rath responded with the impossibly lame defense: “[Obama] did say the words. That's his voice.”
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Yet major media continued trying to split the difference with lines like “New Mitt Romney Attack Ad Called ‘Deceitful' by Obama Campaign.”
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It is true: the ad had been called deceitful by the Obama campaign. But the broader, more compelling truth was that the ad
was
deceitful. This was the truth that media outlets dared not speak. In so doing, they fostered a fantasy that the fact of the Romney camp's lie was a debatable proposition. That suited the eventual Republican nominee's aides just fine. Indeed, Rath told CBS, the ad and the muted controversy surrounding it were “exactly what we want.”
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Media outlets do not merely stand down when it comes to calling out political lies. They police the process, identifying debates about critical issues as somehow off topic. As American journalism became “professionalized,” two areas of discussion in particular became off-limits, areas that would have almost certainly been more in play under a partisan system. First, the propriety of corporate capitalism itself is not questioned or discussed. As award-winning journalist Ben H. Bagdikian put it, capitalism is almost as off-limits to structural criticism in American journalism as communism was in the Soviet media. It is fitting that when Adolph Ochs purchased the
New York Times
in 1896, he published his oft-cited pronouncement that the
Times
would “give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved.” In the next (rarely quoted) paragraph, Ochs gave a taste of his so-called impartiality, stating that his “non-partisan newspaper” would attempt,
“if possible, to intensify its devotion to the cause of sound money and tariff reform, opposition to wastefulness and speculation in administering public affairs, and in its advocacy of the lowest tax consistent with good government, and no more government than is absolutely necessary to protect society.”
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Second, the U.S. role in the world as a military superpower, with the right to intervene in other nations' affairs like no other nation, is beyond debate. The record of the U.S. news media has been dismal with regard to covering U.S. war making for much of the professional era. As the elites in both parties tend to agree on basics, America time and time again has been led into wars by the news media under dubious and mostly unexamined pretenses.
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The range of debate in America's partisan media for the nation's nineteenth-century wars was considerably more heated and vociferous by comparison.
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Indeed, the greatest debates over the U.S. role in the world did not play out during the Vietnam or Iraq wars but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the three-time Democratic nominee for president, William Jennings Bryan, declared, “The mission of the [American] flag is to float—not over a conglomeration of commonwealths and colonies—but over ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave,' and to that mission it must remain forever true—forever true.”
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The structure of the economy and the state of militarism are, along with the protection of individual liberties and civil rights, certainly among the most important areas for governance. In stable and prosperous times, the fact that our news media are unquestioning of the status quo is noticed only on the margins; in times of crisis, it converts our professional news media into what appears more like blatant propagandists.

There is spectacular irony in what has become of major media coverage of the issues on which elections should turn. Walter Lippmann, the acclaimed writer generally regarded as the “father of modern journalism” because of his call in the 1920s for trained professionals to be nonpartisan reporters, was adamant about the single most important task of professional journalism: it must not take the pronouncements of government or public officials at face value, especially in matters of foreign affairs where the track record is one of extraordinary lying with disastrous consequences.
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So it is that the greatest weakness of professional journalism as it evolved was to commit precisely the journalism failure that most concerned Lippmann
in 1920. Lippmann's concern was, more broadly, that propaganda and public relations generated by the powerful—what we today call “spin”—would dominate the news unless skilled and talented journalists prevented them from doing so. In his view, the fate of democracy hung in the balance. Here, too, irony abounds, as the emergence of professional journalism has been accompanied by the rise of the PR industry, which is expert in using professional news standards to plant or influence seemingly independent and credible news stories for their clients. Even at the high point of professional journalism, perhaps as much as 40 or 50 percent of the news came primarily from some sort of PR intervention or from regurgitation of an official source.

When commercial television came along, it adopted the professional code and, if anything, accentuated some of its weaknesses, creating the absurd circumstance of partisan “talking head” guests on “news” shows arguing over who is telling the truth while a highly paid host refuses to make the call as to which side is lying. There has for decades now been a continued de-emphasis on the meat of public policy and a turn toward personalizing politics. On television the commercial basis of journalism was more explicit, and the turn to an entertainment format more transparent. Although the lion's share of original reporting was done by newspaper journalists, TV became the leading source of information for most Americans by the 1970s and remains so to this day. The academic research does not suggest that TV news, or professional news in general, tells us exactly what to think, as in some dystopian novel. Instead, what the news does is tell us what to think about—it sets the agenda—and by omission what not to think about. Professional news then sets the terms for how to think about that agenda.
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This is a point that merits elaboration. If, for example, “the news” does not cover the effects of poverty because, for whatever reason, this is not seen as an important issue, it is not going to make the tens of millions of impoverished Americans think they are doing just fine, thank you. As
The Nation
's Greg Kaufmann illustrated with his groundbreaking “This Week in Poverty” reports, the news media work their effects not on a blank slate but on people who bring their own experiences to the table.
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But that being said, journalism has considerable influence, even more so in areas where people do not have personal experience to draw from. If it did not, dictators and revolutionaries would not rush to control the press immediately upon taking power. Political
communication scholarship demonstrates that when people are exposed to an issue in the news on a regular basis, they will tend to regard it as an important issue—and, conversely, an issue that is downplayed will not be seen as especially pressing.

Lame journalism can therefore have very real effects. Thomas Patterson wrote of how crime news exploded in the early 1990s—for reasons owing mostly to the commercial basis of journalism—and became far more prominent than political news. Polling showed that by 1994, 39 percent of Americans regarded crime as the nation's most pressing problem, compared to only 8 percent of Americans a decade earlier. This fed the frenzy of tough-talking politicians, prison construction, and onerous sentencing that has produced the massive prison-industrial complex. Yet the crime rate throughout this period was actually in decline.
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The genius of the system has been that journalists are largely oblivious to the compromises with authority they make by following the professional code. “Journalistic norms and reporting practices,” Bennett concluded in 1983, “operate together to create a strong status quo bias in the news—a bias that is well hidden behind a façade of independent journalism.” Bennett was one of the first to comprehend and demonstrate that the nature of professional news made “apathy” a rational response to the news environment; professional news therefore encouraged as much as it combated political depoliticization.
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In general, it not only took fundamental issues off the table and had an establishment cast, but it also avoided contextualizing political stories, as the process of contextualization was fraught with the ideological linkages that professional journalism wished to avoid. Political news tended to be either boring or semi-incoherent. The significance of what was at stake was often unclear or inaccurate, and people understandably tuned the news out as irrelevant. Scholars Joseph N. Capella and Kathleen Hall Jamieson demonstrated persuasively that the manner in which news media covered politics—emphasizing the manipulation involved in the “game of politics,” rather than its substance—fed a growing public cynicism toward politics.
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In short, the news media complemented other aspects of American society that reduced public participation in elections and civic life.

We have used very broad brushstrokes to make our points and have emphasized political journalism. Obviously, professional journalism in practice
has produced plenty of quality coverage, done by thousands of reporters committed to their craft. Our news media have been responsible for countless major investigative pieces that have saved lives and stopped corruption and injustice. Even political journalism has been valuable, especially in the examination of scandals and explicit political corruption, despite the limitations built into the professional code. And there is a great deal to be said for news media that strive to be responsible for covering public life by maintaining a strident commitment to factual accuracy and hard evidence.

The professional code is also somewhat malleable, shaped by shifting political winds and the commercial imperatives of media owners. In the 1960s and 1970s, popular movements—civil rights, antiwar, and consumer followed by the feminist and environmental movements—grew large enough that they could force their way into the news even when elites or political leaders were uncomfortable with them.
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But the playing field was never level, and when popular movements lost their power, they lost their legitimacy as sources. When American politics—Republican and Democratic—made a turn toward the right in the 1980s, journalism followed along, continually replanting the flag of “centrism” until it ended up near what had been the right field foul line.
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Here the politics dovetailed nicely with the commercial interests of news media owners. American news media all but dropped the labor coverage that had been standard at midcentury, when the labor movement was relatively strong, and replaced it with an exponential increase in business reporting.
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The shift also provided a lucrative affluent market much desired by advertisers.