Mainstream "Journalism" Is Not Journalism
The easiest way to understand why mainstream media is so awful is easy: it's the profit motive, stupid
Last night President Joe Biden gave a speech defending the very notion of democracy, and he highlighted how Republicans clearly are the most anti-democratic force in American politics. It was a good speech filled with unassailable facts, and the “journalists” in our mainstream media reacted to it in virtually the same manner as the Republican Party did. It’s not a coincidence that the Beltway lapdogs treat the GOP like their assignment editor, and the reason why they prefer to push talking points delivered to them by people in power in lieu of doing journalism lies in their profit motive. Their primary goal is to convince readers and viewers that they are neutral arbiters of truth, not to do actual journalism, and because of this dynamic the GOP knows that they can be as extreme as they want and the mainstream press will still uncritically repeat their talking points in order to maintain the facade of neutrality in a world where one party is objectively at the root of most of our political problems.
The mainstream press is as widely distrusted as it has been in my lifetime, and it’s not hard to see why so few people give these hairpieces any credibility. The 2021 digital news report from Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford surveyed 92,000 news consumers across 46 countries and found that the United States ranks dead last in media trust. Gallup’s 2021 survey revealed similar distrust amongst Americans towards major media, measuring the second-lowest result on record, with the lowest occuring in 2016.
Before getting into the particulars of the issue here, let’s first define “major media” because so many use it interchangeably with “things I don’t like.” There is a very simple definition we can stick to here, and this infographic put together by Frugal Dad in 2011 does a great job outlining the central issue where 90% of media is owned by 6 companies. The tl;dr of this column is that capitalism is incompatible with journalism.
Absent from this list are The New York Times and The Washington Post who are owned by the Ochs-Sulzberger family and Amazon despot Jeff Bezos respectively, but they clearly deserve to be placed into the “mainstream media” bucket because those are America’s two national newspapers in an age where most newspapers are going extinct. Politico pioneered the gossipy political coverage that forms the base of so much mainstream scoop-based “journalism” these days, and they have also earned their way into this prestigious club of cynical and/or clueless dolts who are aiding and abetting the ongoing collapse of America.
It is difficult to fully wrap your head around America’s current political malaise without understanding the media’s complicity in it. Our civic religion hails journalists as the Fourth Estate, asserting that they are a central part of our supposed democracy even though that notion falls apart after listening to Wolf Blitzer speak for just a few seconds. Thing is, this is an accurate description of what should be the case. Democracy depends on all of us operating with the same information in order to come to an agreement about where we need to go, and without a neutral arbiter of truth to help create a shared reality, democracy simply cannot exist. Journalism is a requirement for a healthy society, and the absence of it in the mainstream press is a big reason why we’re in this mess.
Please Stop Watching Cable News
Which brings me to easily the worst of all our sources. You can read the Times or WaPo every day and find both mind-numbing inanity and valuable journalism. However, on TV, the former is the primary product and the latter is almost nowhere to be found, especially in primetime. All you need to know about the vapidity of TV news is that studies show that old people are worse than young people at telling fact from opinion, but when you control for TV news consumption, that age gap shrinks dramatically.
Cable news is quite literally brain poison.
Neutrality and truth are simply just marketing buzzwords the executives at CNN like to throw around, and their coverage reflects their true priorities. Sensationalism and servileness to power is the name of the game for TV news, which is why they flocked to Trump like a moth to a light. Trump is obsessed with cable news because both he and the CNN’s of the world speak the same language, as evidenced by former CNN President Jeff Zucker keeping a framed Trump tweet proudly displayed in his office.
This chart from The Upshot is irrefutable to the notion that Trump is like oxygen for TV news. It compares bought media (air time that candidates paid for) versus earned media (air time candidates were given for free by TV) in the 2016 election, and this juxtaposition proves that TV news needs Trump far more than Trump needs them.
The truest thing Donald Trump has ever said was in 2017 when he claimed that “newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there…because without me, their ratings are going down the tubes.” He represents everything the media stands for. Sensationalism. Vapidity. Bullshit. Slavish devotion to power. Every miserable aspect of Trump that makes most Americans recoil is embodied by his vacuous high-profile teammates in the mainstream press. Their conflicts during his term were far closer to the kayfabe of professional wrestling than actual journalistic antagonism of Trump’s anti-democratic nature.
In November 2020, CNN’s viewership set a 40-year record. By March of 2021, just two months into the Biden Administration, CNN had lost 36% of its primetime viewers, and its ambitious digital offering CNN+ generated less traffic than Paste politics did while I was there (thinking about the time Jake Tapper’s producer tried to intimidate us into taking a story down about his bad Medicare for All coverage in light of that fact can’t help but make me chuckle). MSNBC is estimated to have lost a little over half its viewers since their cash cow left office, as #TheResistance was still left with families being separated at the border and kids in camps but no cartoonish supervillain to blame it on and they quickly lost interest.
The New York Times saw subscriptions drop to 2019 levels a year after Trump left office. The Washington Post wrote that their traffic “plummeted” in February 2021. Everywhere you look, outlets which were bathing in cash while enabling the rise of Trump faced steep deficits as soon as their golden goose left office. Anyone who even tangentially paid attention to major media during the Trump era (**waves**) can tell you that the media clearly loved this newfound attention and their self-serving coverage reflected it. One of the aspects of Trump they enjoyed most was how he focused his ire on them and enabled the CNN’s of the world to make themselves the main protagonists in this manufactured daily drama.
CBS’s former CEO Les Moonves famously said in 2016 that Trump “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” As if that cynical admission wasn’t enough, he literally cheerlead Trump’s despotism in this interview, saying “I’ve never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.”
That quote is the ethos of mainstream TV “journalism.” Donald Trump revealed it for all to see this past decade. Detailing accurate stories is of secondary importance (at best) to telling incendiary ones—quadruply more so if there is an interesting character the media can focus on instead of the core issues in the report. TV media exists primarily to be profitable, not to provide useful information.
This is not just a supply-side issue, and this dynamic exists throughout all forms of political media. When I was Paste’s Media Editor from 2016-2020, I was acutely aware of how incendiary headlines and low-hanging fruit like “X dumbest things Trump said” were critical to our bottom line. The stories I wrote and edited about less trafficked topics were paid for by the sensationalist ones, and that’s generally how all media works everywhere, no matter the size. There is something to be said about American news consumers’ desire to traffic in vapidity.
But that is for a different column, as this one is focused on the central issue here: the supply-side. Trump proved the mainstream media’s obsession with creating an over-supply of sensationalism and bullshit, but there is an even more cynical and pernicious practice that is far more widespread throughout all forms of political media.
Bothsides “Journalism”
Bothsides journalism is nothing more than a marketing scheme, which is why it is so infuriating that after devoting a Watergate-esque amount of attention to Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and far less so to Donald Trump’s extensive corruption, The New York Times capitalized on the emerging business opportunity in Trump’s America and marketed its product as The Truth™. The Washington Post adding the tagline “Democracy Dies in Darkness” to their paper is another example of how media’s dedication to journalism is far more of a marketing ploy than a sincerly-held belief. If both newspapers truly adhered to these declarations written by their PR departments, they would not traffic in the bothsides bullshit that is the hallmark of their political coverage, and hacks like Peter Baker would be ripped off the front page and fired into the sun.
There may be no better example from the past 24 hours of how bothsides “journalism” is nothing more than a personal marketing scheme for the braindead dolts in Beltway media than CNN’s Brianna Keilar performatively clutching her pearls in the wake of Joe Biden’s “democracy is good and Republicans have literally said they want to overthrow democracy” speech last night.
The key to understanding this cynical game played by hacks like this throughout media are the last two lines: “it’s wrong when Democrats do it. It’s wrong when Republicans do it.” No matter the story, the default bothsides stance of major media leads to the same conclusion: “everyone we are covering is not rational, but we are, so keep consuming our coverage and you will be rational like us. Both sides are bad, but you and I dear reader/viewer, are not.”
These hairpieces masquerading as journalists eschew objective reality in favor of inventing one where they are the chief protagonists of their own reports. They’re more actor than journalist, as their goal is to act Very Serious in order to try to convince consumers that they are also Very Serious people because they consume mainstream media. The substance of their coverage is not what proves their supposed sincerity, but their tone and mannerisms. It’s a lot easier to furrow your brow and pretend to be concerned than to actually unpack factual information that is concerning—especially when that factual information is harmful to the powerful interests (AKA: “sources”) the Beltway press is so dedicated to protecting.
A lot of people have wondered what it will take to get the Beltway folks to do journalism, and while I find that flicker of hope admirable, it misunderstands the problem. There are plenty of capital-J journalists working in mainstream media, but journalism isn’t very profitable in a world where Facebook and Google are commanding most content ad dollars and the rise of cable cutting is an existential threat to the 24-hour TV news model. Capital-J journalism takes a while to properly complete, and the revenue which comes from it is difficult to quantify. It also pisses powerful people off which reduces the amount of scoops they publish, and so quite often, Capital-J journalism is a hindrance to the profit motive of mainstream media.
The way to get ahead in mainstream media is to uncritically launder the powerful’s talking points (see: Miller, Judith) to maximize the number of scoops you can publish, and the most cynical and/or clueless operatives in media are the ones most rewarded by its perverse incentive structure. People who report stories that are damaging to the existing power structure in America lose out on scoops because those in power know that they can stop talking to actual journalists and just focus on the high-profile lapdogs who will dutifully repeat their talking points without scrutiny. Because scoops are the main currency needed to climb the media career ladder (we can primarily thank Politico for this development), those who get the most scoops are elevated in the business. This creates a dynamic where the coverage of practically every high-profile “journalist” in media is bereft of credibility, while a litany of actual journalists underneath them do very good work. This allows the lapdogs to point to their employer and say “See? We’re journalists,” despite the fact that the Capital-J journalism emanating from these instutitions rarely comes from their most well-known mouthpieces.
There is no fixing the mainstream media because it is operating exactly as designed. It’s a marketing scheme that attempts to trick the viewer into believing that they are the rational ones while everyone the political media covers is irrational. Plenty of good journalists work in mainstream media, but the industry’s incentive structure is tilted against them. So much of our ongoing breakdown in society is driven by the capitalist incentive for perpetual growth, and major media is no different. So long as gossipy scoops, clicks, and eyeballs are the most valued currency by editors, producers and major decision-makers in mainstream media, it will be a haven for the Peter Baker’s and Donald Trump’s of the world and hell for actual journalists.