Dollarocracy (39 page)

Perhaps the only surprise was how much the doubling of spending on the campaigns compared to 2008 reduced the already low standards beneath what Greenwald anticipated in 2011. Someone watching the twenty-four-hour cable news channels might think presidential races have never been so thoroughly exhumed by reporters. But the coverage was as nutritionless as the cardboard box that packages a fast-food hamburger. After a diet of “experts” discussing whether Joe Biden was a windbag or if Mitt Romney needed to make himself seem more likeable, and another group of experts assessing the meaning of the latest poll numbers, political ads didn't look that bad.

The other factor that has altered campaign coverage comes from the corporate right in the form of “conservative” media. If there has been a vacuum created by the downsizing of newsrooms, conservative media have filled it with an insistent partisanship unseen in commercial news media for nearly a century. As we discussed in
Chapter 3
, the conservative media program has been a cornerstone of the Dollarocracy's political program since at least Lewis Powell's 1971 memo. Initially, the work was largely about criticizing the news media for being unfair to conservative Republicans and having a liberal Democratic bias. Although the actual research to support these claims was, to be generous, thin—one major book edited by Brent Bozell actually claimed corporations such as General Electric were “liberal” companies with an interest in anti-business journalism because they had made small donations to groups like the NAACP and the Audubon Society—the point was not to win academic arguments.
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The point of bashing the “liberal media,” as Republican National Committee chairman Rich Bond conceded in 1992, was to “work the refs” like a basketball coach does so that “maybe the ref will cut you a little slack” on the next play.
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The ultimate aim of Dollarocracy was, as James Brian McPherson put it, “to destroy the professionalism that has defined journalism since the mid-twentieth century.”
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The core problem was that professional journalism, to the extent it allowed editors and reporters some autonomy from the political and commercial values of owners, opened space for the legitimate presentation of news and perspectives beyond the range preferred by conservatives. That professional journalism basically conveyed the debates and consensus of official sources and remained steadfastly within the ideological range of the leadership of the two main political parties—it never was sympathetic to the political left—was of no concern. It still gave coverage to policy positions on issues such as unions, public education, civil rights, progressive taxation, social security, and the environment that were thoroughly mainstream but anathema to the right. Key to moving the political center of gravity to the right was getting the news media on the train, and that meant getting them to have a worldview more decidedly sympathetic to the needs of society's owners. Newt Gingrich was blunt when he told media owners in 1995 that they
needed to crack the whip on their newsrooms and have the news support the corporation's politics. “Get your children to behave,” he demanded in a private meeting with media CEOs.
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In the late 1980s, conservatives moved from criticism to participation with the aggressive creation of right-wing partisan media. The first decisive move came with AM talk radio. The elimination of the Fairness Doctrine (which required that a broadcaster provide two sides to controversial political issues) and the relaxation of ownership rules such that a handful of companies established vast empires opened the door to a tidal wave of hard-core right-wing talk-show hosts. By the first decade of the century, the 257 talk stations owned by the five largest companies were airing over 2,500 hours of political talk weekly and well over 90 percent was decidedly right wing.
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This isn't your grandfather's conservatism either. Although some conservative hosts, such as Michael Medved, can be quite thoughtful, just as conservative writers such as William Kristol will sometimes acknowledge when the movement has gone off the rails, the realists are in the minority. For a huge portion of contemporary conservative media, the broadcast begins and ends with the fear card, and it is often played in extraordinarily incendiary ways. Sure, some of the radio ranting comes from lightweights who are only trying to fill the three hours on the all-talk affiliate in St. Louis or Minneapolis. But the most effective purveyors of the venom are gifted and charismatic figures, such as Glenn Beck and Michael Levin, whose fire-and-brimstone moralizing is matched only by their willingness to bend the truth to support whatever argument they've decided to make that day.
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Across large swatches of America, and most rural areas where little journalism remains, right-wing talk radio is arguably the leading source of political information.

The undisputed heavyweight champion was and is Rush Limbaugh, who emerged as a national radio force by 1990 and who by 1993 was already recognized by the bible of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr.'s
National Review
magazine, as an unmatched political power in Republican circles; the
Review
dubbed him the “Leader of the Opposition.”
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Limbaugh and his cohorts have the power to make or break Republican politicians, and all who wish successful national careers have to pray at his far-right altar or suffer the consequences. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph Cappella put it, in many respects Limbaugh came to play the role party leaders had played in earlier times.
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In the late 1990s, Rupert Murdoch launched the Fox News cable channel, and because television is such a ubiquitous and powerful medium, that put right-wing news media in the center of the mainstream.
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Michael Wolff characterized Fox News as “the ultimate Murdoch product,” because it brought tabloid journalism to American television.
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What has been missed in the analysis of Fox News is the business model of tabloid journalism: dispense with actual reporting, which costs a lot of money to do well, and replace it with far less expensive pontificating that will attract audiences. For a tabloid news channel, that means the value added is a colorful partisan take on the news; otherwise the channel has no reason to attract viewers. Former CNN head Rick Kaplan told the story of how he was confronted by Time Warner executives in 1999 or 2000 who were dissatisfied with CNN's profits despite what had been record revenues and a solid return. “But Fox News made just as much profit,” Kaplan was informed, “and did so with just half the revenues of CNN, because it does not carry so many reporters on its staff.” The message to Kaplan was clear: close bureaus and fire reporters, lots of them.
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In short, Fox News is the logical business product for an era where corporations deem journalism an unprofitable undertaking.

Fox News and the conservative media sector (including the conservative blogosphere) provide a “self-protective enclave” for conservatives to cocoon themselves. Research demonstrates that the more a person consumes conservative media, the more likely she is to dismiss any news or arguments that contradict the conservative position as liberal propaganda and lies.
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Tom Frank argued that the point of conservative media is to facilitate a “deliberate cognitive withdrawal from the shared world” by their adherents.
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Conservative media also, to a remarkable extent, stay on message, and the message is largely that of the Republican Party; these media, at least Fox News and Limbaugh, seem to march in lockstep with the same talking points, the same issues, and even the same terminology deployed across the board. They apply the core principles of advertising and propaganda.

Although Fox News and today's conservative media might look at first glance like descendants of the partisan media of the nineteenth century, there are crucial differences. The old partisan media were far smaller in scale, and they operated in very competitive markets where it was not difficult for newcomers to effectively enter the field, hence giving readers/voters/citizens
considerable leverage and a greater diversity of views. A partisan newspaper had difficulty avoiding periodic serious engagement with contrary policy positions in its pages if it wished to remain credible. Chains and corporate empires did not exist. In partisan systems, everyone is partisan and behavior is thus understood.

Moreover, nineteenth-century newspapers, while often aligned with parties, tended also to be ideologically driven, which meant that they frequently fought inside parties and in the broader political landscape for a set of ideals. In the twenty-first century, ideals are invariably sacrificed by corporate right-wing media outlets that are, first and foremost, profit machines owned by some of the largest multinational conglomerates on the planet. They make their profits by selling advertising to other large corporations. They have considerable monopoly power and receive valuable licenses and privileges from the government, which they are adamant to protect. They are at the pinnacle of the corporate establishment as much as the political establishment.

The single most important difference, however, is the shell-game premise of the entire conservative media shtick: that the mainstream news media have a distinct liberal bias that is deeply hostile to the right and big business and therefore that conservatives are simply offering either straight unbiased news by contrast or, more to the point, are justifiably bending the stick in the conservative direction to balance the liberal propaganda.
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In the current system, mainstream journalism works formally to not favor either major party and to prove at every turn its lack of bias toward either party. Reporters have to answer for such a bias if it is exposed. Conservative media do not have to play by those rules. The irony, of course, is that Fox News insists that it is “Fair and Balanced” and that “We Report, You Decide,” so it assumes the mantle and prerogatives of professional journalism while going about its partisan business.

Being a partisan player in the world of professional journalism has provided the right with considerable power to set the news agenda. Traditional journalists get their cues about what to cover from official sources and can dismiss some as ludicrous if they fail to meet an evidentiary standard and are opposed by other official sources. Fox and the conservative media, on the other hand, can reduce complex issues to one-word battle cries—“ACORN!” “Solyndra!” “Benghazi!”—which Republican politicians gleefully echo. Then those same politicians and right-wing media “watchdogs” badger traditional
media for having a “liberal bias” if they do not cover the stories as well. By the time a hyperpartisan congressman like House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa, a Republican from California, is gaveling hearings into session, the Washington press corps is not about to say, “Hold it! This is ridiculous.”
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So it is that the nonstories that come to dominate news cycles invariably benefit the right.

But the right is never satisfied. Because they believe they are in an uphill battle with liberal propagandists, conservative media can have an unabashed and breathtaking double standard: they have very different evidentiary standards for stories that support, rather than damage, their politics. If facts prove inconvenient for the preferred narrative, ignore them. Republican officials are treated entirely differently from Democrats, even when the facts of a story are virtually identical. It is this opportunistic and unprincipled nature of conservative “journalism” that draws widespread analysis and consternation from outside the political right and from those remaining thoughtful conservatives willing to brave the wrath of Limbaugh.
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Between the cocoon effect and the shameless disregard for consistency and intellectual honesty, it is not surprising that professional surveys tend to find regular viewers of Fox News to be more ignorant about what is actually happening in the world compared to those who watch other networks. In November 2011, Fairleigh Dickinson University's PublicMind Poll examined how New Jerseyans watched television news, and the poll concluded that “some outlets, especially Fox News, lead people to be even less informed than those who say they don't watch any news at all.”
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In some surveys, to be accurate, Fox News does not rank at rock bottom in terms of audience knowledge.
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But on balance, it is the clown dunce of TV news. No other network ever comes close to getting the sort of assessment Fox News received from World Public Opinion, a project managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland, in 2010. As one reporter summarized it, PIPA conducted a “survey of American voters that shows that Fox News viewers are significantly more misinformed than consumers of news from other sources. What's more, the study shows that greater exposure to Fox News increases misinformation. So the more you watch, the less you know. Or to be precise, the more you think you know that is actually false.”
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As Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson concluded in their study
of the Tea Party, “Fox News makes viewers both more conservative and less informed.”
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What may be most revealing is that there is no evidence that this finding bothers the management of Fox News in the least.

In private moments, conservatives concede they have won the battle to control the news, though to justify their modus operandi, they have to maintain and ceaselessly hype the shtick of being the abused outsiders battling entrenched liberal dominance. The mainstream of journalism has indeed moved to the right, in part because it has followed official sources to the right. Also the corporate news media owners, as Newt Gingrich understood, were certainly open to the idea of more probusiness journalism. The news media have made concerted efforts to appear welcoming to the right, unlike any similar welcome to the left. As Jeff Cohen, who has spent time in all the major cable TV newsrooms, observed, the greatest fear of working journalists is to be accused of being a liberal. “Nearly all of the Clinton scandals,” McPherson noted, “were set in motion by right-wing groups, floated through conservative media organs.”
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Rick Kaplan acknowledged as much and said he sometimes covered stories at CNN for fear of right-wing attack, not because they were legitimate stories.
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If professional journalism was resolute in splitting the difference between the two parties, there has been a greater price to pay for antagonizing Republicans in recent years.
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