The Sovietization of the American Press
The transformation from phony "objectivity" to open one-party orthodoxy
hasn't been an improvement
Matt Taibbi
Mar 12
I collect Soviet newspapers. Years ago, I used to travel to Moscow's
Iszailovsky flea market every few weeks, hooking up with a dealer who
crisscrossed the country digging up front pages from the Cold War era. I
have Izvestia's celebration of Gagarin's flight, a Pravda account of a 1938
show trial, even an ancient copy of Ogonyek with Trotsky on the cover that
someone must have taken a risk to keep.
These relics, with dramatic block fonts and red highlights, are cool pieces
of history. Not so cool: the writing! Soviet newspapers were wrought with
such anvil shamelessness that it's difficult to imagine anyone ever read
them without laughing. A good Soviet could write almost any Pravda headline
in advance. What else but "A Mighty Demonstration of the Union of the Party
and the People" fit the day after Supreme Soviet elections? What news could
come from the Spanish civil war but "Success of the Republican Fleet?" Who
could earn an obit headline but a "Faithful Son of the Party"?
Reality in Soviet news was 100% binary, with all people either heroes or
villains, and the villains all in league with one another (an SR was no
better than a fascist or a "Right-Trotskyite Bandit," a kind of
proto-horseshoe theory). Other ideas were not represented, except to be
attacked and deconstructed. Also, since anything good was all good,
politicians were not described as people at all but paragons of limitless
virtue - 95% of most issues of Pravda or Izvestia were just names of party
leaders surrounded by lists of applause-words, like "glittering,"
"full-hearted," "wise," "mighty," "courageous," "in complete moral-political
union with the people," etc.
Some of the headlines in the U.S. press lately sound suspiciously like this
kind of work:
- Biden stimulus showers money on Americans, sharply cutting poverty
- Champion of the middle class comes to the aid of the poor
- Biden's historic victory for America
The most Soviet of the recent efforts didn't have a classically Soviet
headline. "Comedians are struggling to parody Biden. Let's hope this doesn't
last," read the Washington Post opinion piece by Richard Zoglin, arguing
that Biden is the first president in generations who might be "impervious to
impressionists." Zoglin contended Biden is "impregnable" to parody, his
voice being too "devoid of obvious quirks," his manner too "muted and
self-effacing" to offer comedians much to work with. He was talking about
this person:
Forget that the "impregnable to parody" pol spent the last campaign year
jamming fingers in the sternums of voters, challenging them to pushup
contests, calling them "lying dog-faced pony soldiers," and forgetting what
state he was in. Biden, on the day Zoglin ran his piece, couldn't remember
the name of his Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and referred to the
Department of Defense as "that outfit over there":
It doesn't take much looking to find comedians like James Adomian and
Anthony Atamaniuk ab-libbing riffs on Biden with ease. He checks almost
every box as a comic subject, saying inappropriate things, engaging in wacky
Inspector Clouseau-style physical stunts (like biting his wife's finger),
and switching back and forth between outbursts of splenetic certainty and
total cluelessness. The parody doesn't even have to be mean - you could make
it endearing cluelessness. But to say nothing's there to work with is
bananas.
The first 50 days of Biden's administration have been a surprise on multiple
fronts. The breadth of his stimulus suggests a real change from the Obama
years, while hints that this administration wants to pick a unionization
fight with Amazon go against every tendency of Clintonian politics. But it's
hard to know what much of it means, because coverage of Biden increasingly
resembles official press releases, often featuring embarrassing,
Soviet-style contortions.
When Biden decided not to punish Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the
murder of Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi on the grounds that the
"cost" of "breaching the relationship with one of America's key Arab allies"
was too high, the New York Times headline read: "Biden Won't Penalize Saudi
Crown Prince Over Khashoggi's Killing, Fearing Relations Breach." When
Donald Trump made the same calculation, saying he couldn't cut ties because
"the world is a very dangerous place" and "our relationship is with the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia," the paper joined most of the rest of the press
corps in howling in outrage.
"In Extraordinary Statement, Trump Stands With Saudis Despite Khashoggi
Killing." was the Times headline, in a piece that said Trump's decision was
"a stark distillation of the Trump worldview: remorselessly transactional,
heedless of the facts, determined to put America's interests first, and
founded on a theory of moral equivalence." The paper noted, "Even Mr.
Trump's staunchest allies on Capitol Hill expressed revulsion."
This week, in its "Crusader for the Poor" piece, the Times described Biden's
identical bin Salman decision as mere evidence that he remains "in the
cautious middle" in his foreign policy. The paper previously had David
Sanger dig up a quote from former Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross, who
"applauded Mr. Biden for 'trying to thread the needle here. This is the
classic example of where you have to balance your values and your
interests.'" It's two opposite takes on exactly the same thing.
The old con of the Manufacturing Consent era of media was a phony show of
bipartisanship. Legitimate opinion was depicted as a spectrum stretching all
the way from "moderate" Democrats (often depicted as more correct on social
issues) to "moderate" Republicans (whose views on the economy or war were
often depicted as more realistic). That propaganda trick involved constantly
narrowing the debate to a little slice of the Venn diagram between two
established parties. Did we need to invade Iraq right away to stay safe, as
Republicans contended, or should we wait until inspectors finished their
work and then invade, as Democrats insisted?
The new, cleaved media landscape advances the same tiny intersection of
elite opinion, except in the post-Trump era, that strip fits inside one
party. Instead of appearing as props in a phony rendering of objectivity,
Republicans in basically all non-Fox media have been moved off the
legitimacy spectrum, and appear as foils only. Allowable opinion is now
depicted stretching all the way from one brand of "moderate" Democrat to
another.
An example is the Thursday New York Times story, "As Economy Is Poised to
Soar, Some Fear a Surge in Inflation." It's essentially an interview with JP
Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who's worried about the inflationary impact of
the latest Covid-19 rescue ("The question is: Does [it] overheat
everything?"), followed by quotes from Fed chair Jerome Powell insisting
that no, everything is cool. This is the same Larry Summers vs. Janet Yellen
debate that's been going on for weeks, and it represents the sum total of
allowable economic opinions about the current rescue, stretching all the way
from "it's awesome" to "it's admirable but risky."
This format isn't all that different from the one we had before, except in
one respect: without the superficial requirement to tend to a two-party
balance, the hagiography in big media organizations flies out of control.
These companies already tend to wash out people who are too contentious or
anti-establishment in their leanings. Promoted instead, as even Noam Chomsky
described a generation ago, are people with the digestive systems of jackals
or monitor lizards, who can swallow even the most toxic piles of official
nonsense without blinking. Still, those reporters once had to at least
pretend to be something other than courtiers, as it was considered unseemly
to openly gush about a party or a politician.
Now? Look at the Times feature story on Biden's pandemic relief bill:
On Friday, "Scranton Joe" Biden, whose five-decade political identity has
been largely shaped by his appeal to union workers and blue-collar tradesmen
like those from his Pennsylvania hometown, will sign into law a $1.9
trillion spending plan that includes the biggest antipoverty effort in a
generation.
The new role as a crusader for the poor represents an evolution for Mr.
Biden, who spent much of his 36 years in Congress concentrating on foreign
policy, judicial fights, gun control, and criminal justice issues. Aides say
he has embraced his new role. [and] has also been moved by the inequities in
pain and suffering that the pandemic has inflicted on the poorest Americans.
You'd never know from reading this that Biden's actual rep on criminal
justice issues involved boasting about authoring an infamous crime bill
(that did "everything but hang people for jaywalking"), or that he's long
been a voracious devourer of corporate and especially financial services
industry cash, that his "Scranton Joe" rep has been belied by a decidedly
mixed history on unions, and so on. Can he legitimately claim to be more
pro-union than his predecessor? Sure, but a news story that paints the Biden
experience as stretching from "hero to the middle class" to "hero to the
poor," is a Pravda-level stroke job.
We now know in advance that every Biden address will be reviewed as historic
and exceptional. It was a mild shock to see Chris Wallace say Biden's was
the "the best inaugural address I have ever heard." More predictable was
Politico saying of Thursday night's address that "it is hard to imagine any
other contemporary politician making the speech Biden did. channeling our
collective sorrow and reminding us that there is life after grief." (Really?
Hard to imagine any contemporary politician doing that?).
This stuff is relatively harmless. Where it gets weird is that the move to
turn the bulk of the corporate press in the "moral clarity" era into a
single party organ has come accompanied by purges of the politically unfit.
In the seemingly endless parade of in-house investigations of journalists,
paper after paper has borrowed from the Soviet style of printing judgments
and self-denunciations, without explaining the actual crimes.
The New York Times coverage of the recent staff revolt at Teen Vogue against
editor Alexi McCammond noted "Staff Members Condemn Editor's Decade-Old,
Racist Tweets," but declined to actually publish the offending texts, so
readers might judge for themselves. The Daily Beast expose on Times reporter
Donald McNeil did much the same thing. Even the ongoing (and in my mind,
ridiculous) moral panic over Substack ties in. Aimed at people already
banished from mainstream media, the obvious message is that anyone with even
mildly heterodox opinions shouldn't be publishing anywhere.
Those still clinging to mainstream jobs in a business that continues to lay
people off at an extraordinary rate read the gist of all of these stories
clearly: if you want to keep picking up a check, you'd better talk the right
talk.
Thus you see bizarre transformations like that of David Brooks, who spent
his career penning paeans to "personal responsibility" and the "culture of
thrift," but is now writing stories about how "Joe Biden is a
transformational president" for casting aside fiscal restraints in the
massive Covid-19 bill. When explaining that "both parties are adjusting to
the new paradigm," he's really explaining his own transformation, in a piece
that reads like a political confession. "I'm worried about a world in which
we spend borrowed money with abandon," he says, but "income inequality,
widespread child poverty, and economic precarity are the problems of our
time."
Maybe Brooks is experiencing the same "evolution" Biden is being credited
with of late. Or, he's like a lot of people in the press who are searching
out the safest places on the op-ed page, the middle of the newsroom middle,
in desperate efforts to stay on the masthead. It's been made clear that
there's no such thing as overdoing it in one direction, e.g. if you write as
the Times did that Biden "has become a steady hand who chooses words with
extraordinary restraint" (which even those who like and admire Biden must
grasp is not remotely true of the legendary loose cannon). Meanwhile, how
many open critics of the Party on either the left, the right, or anywhere in
between still have traditional media jobs?
All of this has created an atmosphere where even obvious observations that
once would have interested blue-state voters, like that Biden's pandemic
relief bill "does not establish a single significant new social program,"
can only be found in publications like the World Socialist Web Site. The
bulk of the rest of the landscape has become homogenous and as predictably
sycophantic as Fox in the "Mission Accomplished" years, maybe even worse.
What is this all going to look like in four years?
Miriam's comment: This is perhaps, the first time, Matt Taibi has sounded
pessimistic.
