The problem with media mudfights

Has anyone noticed how much time and effort cable news pundits and bloggers put into ridiculing, fact-checking, and demonizing the pundits and bloggers on the other side of the political spectrum? Rather than act as watchdogs of the power elite, Fox News and MSNBC personalities, for example, often seem more interested in engaging in the following kind of shtick: “You won’t believe what [FILL IN TALK-SHOW PERSONALITY’S NAME HERE] said today!” And off they go with a ten minute segment about how crazy that person is. I don’t think I need to provide any examples because this is a well-known phenomenon. If you’ve watched Glenn Beck, The O’Reilly Factor, Hannity, Hardball, The Ed Show, Countdown, Rachel Maddow, or the Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, you know exactly what I’m talking about. This is not to say that some of these shows don’t present new and insightful information and perspectives on the important issues in politics, but Left/Right mudslinging matches have become a significant part of all these media programs.

In 1987 Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman put forth their “propaganda model” to paint a picture of how the American media operates in their classic book, Manufacturing Consent. In it, they argued that although the US technically has a free press that is not officially constrained by the government, it is nonetheless self-censoring and serves to protect and reinforce the status quo. Their propaganda model has five key features, or “filters” as they call them, through which information must pass before being published or put on the airwaves, lest news that is damaging to the Establishment be consumed by the masses. Anyone interested in a full explication of the model can read about it here, but in this post I would like to concentrate on their fourth filter, which is “flak.”

Chomsky and Herman note,

“Flak” refers to negative responses to a media statement or program. It may take the form of letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits, speeches and bills before Congress, and other modes of complaint, threat, and punitive action. It may be organized centrally or locally, or it may consist of the entirely independent actions of individuals.

The authors here are discussing flak that it is heaped upon the media by non-media types, such as the government, media watchdogs such as the Media Institute, Center for Media and Public Affairs, and Accuracy in Media, and other groups or individuals who write or telephone their complaints. When Chomsky and Herman were writing, the media news landscape was quite different, with no internet, no Fox News, and no MSNBC. In the late 1980s, the primary sources of news were print media and the half-hour nightly network newscasts (ABC, CBS, and NBC) and one twenty-four cable news channel (CNN).

Among conservatives, there has always a feeling that these news organizations have a liberal bias (despite the fact that they are all giant corporations that rely on other giant corporations for funding through advertisements). As an endnote (pg. 28, no. 110) in Manufacturing Consent observes,

George Skelton, White House correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, noted that in reference to [President Ronald] Reagan’s errors of fact, “You write the stories once, twice, and you get a lot of mail saying, ‘You’re picking on the guy, you guys in the press make mistakes too.’ And editors respond to that so after a while the stories don’t run anymore. We’re intimidated.”

This sort of flak continues to this day, obviously, and I imagine there is way more of it coming these days because of the ease of email correspondence.

But since the arrival of Fox News, MSNBC, and the internet, another form of flak has taken shape, one that has seemingly surpassed the older form in importance if not volume. And that’s the media-on-media flak I alluded to in the opening. Watch one of the big opinion shows on cable news and see how long it takes the host to discuss the latest dimwitted remarks from one of their ideological adversaries. I think in the last two years, Glenn Beck has been the target of more media-originated flak than anyone. I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve it, but at some point the MSNBC crowd and the liberal blogs have to give it a rest. “Oh my god! Glenn Beck said the craziest thing today!”

No shit. That’s his job—to be an insane, ranting, schmuck who exploits conservatives’ absurd sense of victimhood by pulling back the curtain on a gallery of phantom socialist menaces: Barack Obama, Van Jones, Paul Krugman, and paradoxically, billionaire hedge fund manager George Soros. Though Beck is a nut (or at least plays one on television), he is a symptom, not a cause of 21^st century (mis)information overload. The ideological lines have been drawn for a while and very few will ever think beyond this narrow paradigm—a completely natural consequence of a media culture that has trained the rabble to think of its problems as being caused by “the other side.” Meanwhile, the elites who run the country go largely unscathed and continue to exploit and pillage the bickering serfs below.

- Max

max.canning@gmail.com