I should add to this that I heard a former member and current contributor to
MSNBC, explaining on Citations Needed, that in order to compete with CNN,
MSNBC must carry the same stories. He said that these channels were
businesses, first and foremost, and they made their money by having large
audiences. Therefore, they were guided in choosing news coverage, by what
they thought the viewers would like, not what would be informative. Keep
this in mind while reading what Tom Hartmann is saying.
Miriam
4 Reasons Corporate Media Refuse to Talk About What Matters
Jake Tapper, chief Washington correspondent for CNN. (YouTube screen grab)
The media recently was all over Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib for calling
Donald Trump a m@therf*cker in the context of wanting to impeach him. It
got lots and lots of coverage, over a period of several days, while the
really big work the Democrats were doing in the House is largely ignored,
along with most other consequential issues of the day.
Ever since the media began, in a big way in the 1980s, to ignore actual news
and go for highly dumbed-down or even salacious stories, many of us who work
in the media have been astonished by this behavior by the network and cable
news organizations and the major newspapers.
They used to report the details of policy proposals in great detail (see
this report from the 1970s about Richard Nixons proposal for universal
health care, comparing his with Ted Kennedys, for example). But since the
Reagan era, the networks have largely kept their coverage exclusively to
personality, scandal, and horse race.
Why would that be? Why, since the late 1980s, has the news lost any
semblance of actual news and detail, and degenerated into a cleaned-up
version of the National Enquirer?
For example, on January 3, the House of Representatives passed one of the
most sweeping political reform bills since the Nixon era, including
automatic voter registration, 15 days of nationwide early voting, and an end
to gerrymandering. Not to mention a totally revolutionary code of ethics for
the Supreme Court.
But was there any coverage of these detailsor even of the bill itselfin
the media? Even though theres no way it would pass the Senate, its worthy
of discussion and debate.
This is just one example of dozens of events that happen every day and are
completely ignored by the media in favor of whos up and whos down
horse-race reporting, and gotcha or scandal coverage.
Watch a few hours of national cable TV media, andoutside of a very few
showsodds are you wont hear any detail of actual policy whatsoever. Every
issue is instead framed in the horse-race format of whos going to win this
fightleaving Americans uninformed about the consequences to themselves of
the issues being fought over.
But the networks love scandal and conflict. So, to get issues on TV, maybe
its time to make them obscene.
Imagine if the Democratic Party were to enlist a dozen or so members of
Congress to go on national TV and say things like:
Were going to stop that m@therf*cker Brian Kemp from blocking any more
black people from registering to vote in Georgia!
Those Republicans who are blocking early voting in Indiana are in for an
ass-kicking!
No more gerrymandering by those ratf*ckers!
Alas, its just a dream.
Even if the Democrats did this, the only dimension of it that would get
covered would be how much political damage (or benefit) the profanity may be
doing to the politicians who are the source or butt of it, as happened with
Representative Tlaib. In other words, theyd turn the issues aside and focus
on the personalities and the horse race.
Which brings us back to the media refusing to actually discuss or inform the
American public about actual issues.
Why would it be this way in 2019, when theres such a demonstrable thirst
for issues-based discussions, as we can see with the ratings of the few top
cable network shows that actually do discuss issues and dont spend half
their hour with a panel?
Trying to figure out why this is, Ive come up with four possible reasons
(none of which are mutually exclusive; it may be all or a combination of
them). Let me know on Twitter or call into my show if you have additions to
the list.
1. The End of the Fairness Doctrine
In 1987, Ronald Reagan ordered his FCC to cease enforcing the Fairness
Doctrine. This much-misunderstood regulation required radio and TV stations,
in order to keep their licenses, to pay for their use of the public
airwaves (the property of We the People) with actual news. It was called
broadcasting in the public interest.
Because of the Fairness Doctrine, every one of the networks actually lost
money on their news divisions, and those divisions operated entirely
separately from the entertainment programming divisions of the networks.
CBS, ABC, and NBC had bureaus all around the world and employed an army of
reporters. At the little radio station where I worked in Lansing, Michigan,
in the 1970s (WITL), we had, as I recall, five people staffing the newsroom,
and it was a firing offense if we were caught hanging out with the sales
staff. While stations lost money on news, the payoff was the much larger
sums they could earn with entertainment during the rest of the hour or day.
The Fairness Doctrine also encouraged a discussion of the issues of the day
with the balanced commentary (probably not the official name; its what we
called it in the 70s) requirement. This did not say that if a station
carried an hour of Limbaugh, theyd have to balance it with an hour of
Hartmann. Entertainment programming (see Joe Pyne, William F. Buckley,
etc., etc.) could have any tilt it wanted.
But when a station ran an editorial on the air that conveyed the opinion of
the stations owners, they then had to allow a member of the community to
come on the air and present a balancing and different perspective. If this
provision was still in the regulations, every time Sinclair Broadcast Group
requires their local stations to air their must-carry right-wing
editorials, theyd have to follow them with a left-wing perspective
rebutting their points.
2. The Rise of Reality TV
Reality TV grew out of the twin writers strikes of 1988 and 2001. In each
case, the networks had to figure out a way to offer compelling programming
with shows that didnt require union writers. In 1988, they mostly did
documentaries on policing like Cops and Americas Most Wanted; in 2001
they rolled out the full-blown reality programming we know today, starting
with Survivor.
The networks learned two big lessons from this. The first was that reality
programming actually pulled an audience, and thus was profitable. Extremely
profitable, in that it didnt require union writers and generally didnt
even require union actors.
The second was that it was incredibly cheap to produce.
If you tuned into TV prior to the Reaganification of the news, you may still
have heard experts discussing things, but there were several differences.
First, they were usually actual experts on actual issues that were before
Congress. Second, they were a very, very small part of the overall program.
In the years since the rise of reality TV, the news networks have discovered
that its a hell of a lot cheaper to have four or five or six pundits join
a host for an hour and discuss the issues of the day than it is to pay for
actual salaried reporters and news bureaus around the nation and the world.
So every hour, at least on the low-budget or weak-talent shows (notice what
a contrast the Maddow show is to this truism), plan on hearing a half-dozen
very, very familiar talking heads discussing ad nauseam the same four or
five stories all day long. (One wonders why the networks dont encourage
their talent to do more of the kind of in-depth reporting and analysis found
on Rachels show, particularly since its profitable and draws killer
ratings. Perhaps the answer is found in reasons three and four.)
Guests like you see on the panels that fill daytime news programming start
out working for free, and if they become an analyst, contributor or some
other title for the network are paid between $500 and $2,500 an appearance.
In a world where on-air personalities often start with seven-figure
salaries, this is incredibly cheap programming.
Even cheaper for the networks is to have politicians on as gueststhey show
up for free!which may be why theyre almost never held to account in any
serious way. After all, if you piss off a politician on your network and
they refuse to ever come back on the air, youve lost another bit of free
talent. And if you piss off an entire political party, and your programming
model doesnt work without balance, youre really screwed.
Theres a reason people all over America are screaming at their TVs every
Sunday morning: the majority of guests are conservatives or Republicans, and
much of what they offer as fact or opinion is merely lies and
propaganda. Which leads us to number three.
3. Media Corporations Are Corporations, Too
Its easy to postulate that the absolute lack of coverage of the death, at
GOP hands, of net neutrality is because two of the big three cable TV
networks are (or soon will be) owned by internet service providers
(NBC/MSNBC is owned by Comcast, AT&T is trying to buy CNN), and other big
corporations see all sorts of financial advantage if they can use their
financial and programming muscle to dominate a newly sliced-and-diced
corporatized internet.
Consider: When was the last time you heard an intelligent discussion on TV
about taxing the rich? Or holding corporations accountable when they break
the law? Or how destructive oligopolies and monopolies are to workers? Or
how big pharma scams us about their R&D expenses and price fixing, buying up
generic companies, etc.? The list could go on for pages.
Back in the day, the big joke in corporate America was, You know its going
to be a bad day when you get to work in the morning and theres a 60
Minutes news truck outside the building. The last time this was seriously
considered was in the late 1980s, as in this article about 60 Minutes
doing an exposé of the meat industry. Now, not so much.
The simple fact is that TV news organizations are now for-profit
operations, and, lacking regulation like the Fairness Doctrine, thus have
the same natural and inherent biases toward protecting corporate power and
privilege, and the wealth and privilege of their management and largest
shareholders.
They also derive the bulk of their money from two sourcesbillionaire-funded
political campaigns (have you noticed how theres no in-depth coverage of
the political spending of the Kochs, Adelsons, and Mercers of the world?),
and giant transnational corporate advertisers.
All those campaign ads represent hundreds of millions of dollars going right
into the pockets of the networks and their affiliates, along with other
corporate advertising revenue. Lacking a regulation like the Fairness
Doctrine to require actual programming in the true public interest news,
whod bite those hands that feed them?
4. Corporations Like Republicans
The final possibility that occurs to me (and others in media with whom Ive
discussed this over the years) is that the large TV and radio news
operations simply like what the GOP stands for. They also know that if GOP
policies were widely understood, the Republican Party would fade into the
kind of powerless obscurity it enjoyed for most of the FDR-to-Reagan era,
when working peoples salaries were growing faster than management and the
middle class was solid and stable.
TV networks dont like unions or uppity workers or regulation any more than
any other billion-dollar corporation. Theyd prefer the salaries of their
senior corporate management werent debated (or even known). They prefer to
live in todays semi-monopolistic system where theyre only minimally held
accountable, and want to keep it that way.
This is the core of GOP ideology that media shares: Cut taxes on rich
people, kill off the unions, cut welfare so more of that money can go to
rich peoples tax cuts, deregulate big corporations so they can act without
regard to the public good, and subsidize big corporations with government
funds whenever and wherever possible.
But if any of these issues were ever explicitly discussed on TV, all hell
would break loose. Can you imagine if Bill Kristol or Rick Santorum or any
of the other dozens of right-wing trolls who inhabit cable TV were ever
asked about their actual positions on policy?
Should we sell off (privatize) Social Security to the big New York banks as
the GOP has wanted to do since the 1930s? Should we end Medicare and
Medicaid and turn everybody over to the tender mercies of the insurance
industry? Should we stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry? What should
we do about the audit that found $21 trillion (yes, with a T) missing from
the Pentagon? How do we break the stranglehold monopolistic drug
corporations have on the pricing of our pharmaceuticals?
Similarly, the networks are equally terrified of having actual progressives
on to discuss actual progressive issuesbecause the majority of American
voters largely supports these issues and, if well informed, will start to
vote out Republicans and vote in progressive Democrats.
Imagine how things would go down if the networks started having actual
discussions and debates about free college education, free national health
care, the environmental impact of big oil, how well publicly owned utilities
and internet services (like Chattanooga) work?
The simple reality is that the media oligopoly and the GOP work
hand-in-glove, and the Democrats (and particularly the progressives) have
been locked out since the Reagan era.
Solutions
The solutions to these problems are not particularly complex, although the
GOP will fight them tooth-and-nail.
Reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, put back into place ownership rules, and
break up the big media monopolies so theres a diversity of voices across
America. Overrule the Supreme Courts (by legislation or constitutional
amendment) Citizens United (and similar) ruling to regulate money in
politics, diminishing the power of big corporations and billionaires (and
foreign governments).
In other words, restore to America a rational media landscape.
Today, you can drive from coast to coast and never miss a moment of Hannity
or Limbaugh on the radio, so complete and widespread is the nations network
of corporate-owned radio stations that will only carry right-wing talk.
Youll be hard-pressed, outside of a few major cities, to find any
progressive or even moderate talk programming.
This has corrupted Americas politics and led to a nation divided.
We can do better.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute
Thom Hartmann / Independent Media Institute
