Wednesday, August 03, 2005
(8:06 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Non-Spineless Press
I know how rhetorically effective and satisfying it is to say that the mainstream media is spineless. I have said it myself, and I love Harper's articles that periodically point out the fact that the press is "spineless," "docile," or what-have-you. Yet maybe there is something going on in the mainstream media other than a sheer lack of "balls."Let's look at some structural issues. For instance, what is the point of the "mainstream media"? Why do they exist? I think we can tell just by looking at what they in fact do -- they exist to address themselves to the concern of those who run things in our country, namely, the political class and the business class. We can tell that they only concern themselves with the mainstream political class because every story is set up to have two artificial "sides," based on the real or imagined position of each party. We can tell that they only concern themselves with the business class because, as Slacktivist often points out, there's a whole "Business" section, but no equivalent section about labor issues. The closest we get to "populist" concerns is entertainment coverage, but that is predominately a corporate-dominated enterprise -- the movies that appear on the cover of the mainstream magazines are basically the biggest corporate movies.
Speaking for the interests of the political class and of business is what the mainstream media does; I don't think that it has ever claimed to do otherwise, at least not during my lifetime. And in the case of the Iraq War, they did an admirable job, because -- as some of us seem to willfully forget -- the Democratic Party endorsed the majority of Bush's post-9/11 agenda, including the Patriot Act and the Iraq War. They did it in that trademark "nuanced" way, but the effect was pretty simple: there was no real other "side" when it came to Iraq. "Everyone" agreed that the Iraq War was going to happen and basically should happen.
The mainstream media is often quite happy to side with an opposition party that seems to have some political momentum behind it -- look at the Clinton scandal-mongering or, for a more positive example, the fact that Social Security reform/destruction has basically been called off for now. But from 9/11 until quite recently, there effectively wasn't an opposition party on the issues that mattered the most. Due to the structure of our political class, this screwed the Democrats in two ways: first, they were unable to credibly pose themselves as in principled opposition to the war in Iraq, since they themselves were implicated in it; second, they still had to suffer from Republicans attacking them for having the opposite of Republican views, even when they didn't in fact hold such views, simply because it is assumed that the "other party" will automatically oppose whatever the party in power is doing.
The coverage of the Iraq War protests is of a piece with everything that is not on the agenda of the dominant political culture or business culture: it was dismissed as marginal. Again, this is just what the mainstream media does, and I don't think we can blame them for simply doing their jobs as we knew they understood that job. If "we" wanted to put pressure on the media to be somehow responsible to the broader public rather than to the political class and -- since we're dreaming -- to labor rather than to business, then "we" would have to travel back in time and start raising hackles before the stakes were so huge. But it would be an uphill battle in any case, because the mainstream media as presently constituted is so radically different from what one expects from a "free press" -- that is, it is not and does not claim to be devoted to putting out the "truth," no matter what the consequences, or whatever else we think the press should do. The free press is demonstrably a creature of the political/business class that runs things in this country, and fixing that would require a lot of really huge changes in the broader society as well -- and if we're going to try to bring those changes about, we can't reasonably expect the mainstream media to be "on our side" until after that process reaches a critical mass such as to seem inevitable. As it stands, however, the only recent example of effective media critique has been the conservative media, which has worked to make the press even more pro-business.
(Of course, vulgar Marxist that I am, I think we could ultimately collapse both "sides" of the political culture into the business culture, since the areas on which the two major parties agree are largely matters of pro-corporate orthodoxy.)
