When I hear people griping about the media, I hang my head and sigh. The complaint makes no sense, particularly because those most loud about media faults are those who don’t question the capitalist marketplace in which media exist.
Media outlets, while they may have elaborate mission statements and high-minded slogans, are, at base, companies. They compete with each other to make sure the stories are there, are timely, and, in many cases, are presented in a manner so spectacular that people can’t look away. As such, media—social, newspapers, television, documentaries, and even those weekly shoppers that make the trace between the mailbox and recycling bin in no time flat—must stay relevant. They are aware of their competition and do what it takes to get eyes on the material they produce. Eyes mean money to advertisers, and advertiser revenue matters to the bottom line. Advertisers in the worse-case scenarios determine for publications what’s to be covered and how.
It’s impossible to remove media from the marketplace. The option would be to make all media nonprofit, which would mean a shift to another marketplace, that of donors whose donations would depend on what’s covered and how. Another option would be to put media in the hands of government or third-party, government-funded entities. Such is the case with probably the most reliable large. national media outlets, National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
What’s lost in the various media bubbles that companies created and maintain among their audiences is the critique of news coverage and information dissemination that stems from the distrust of corporate entities.
I worked as a journalist for a local alternative-media company. We were small and had to provide the kind of coverage people couldn’t get from the television, newspaper, and magazine corporations. The coverage was intensely local and pursued by mostly well-meaning and tough-minded writers, many of whom had come to our newspaper from other media outlets or through activism that led them to believe that hard-balling power and money would go farther than their advocacy.
As it is, in our office, the editorial division had to advocate for itself against a salesforce that wanted to influence what we covered and the ways we dissected the problems of the day. Weekly, it seemed, the salespeople would complain about a writer or set of writers, or story or set of stories that criticized the businesses they sold our advertising to.
Fortunately, we had a tough and penetrating editor in Bruce Rodgers, an old-timey, cigarette-smoking, coffee-at-the-ready kind of guy. He would field ideas for stories and read them with his sharpened eye. He’d call bullshit on stories where the companies or advocacy agencies or groups were gaslighting the writer, trying to get him or her to see the story their way, or spin the story at the interview and research level to shine a good light on their efforts.
I remember coming to Bruce one time with a story about a corporation. He read my idea, a bit of the story, and some of my notes. “This is such horseshit,” he said to his computer when I was standing by his desk in the slender and over-crowded office where we worked. “You need to get some courage and ask them the hard questions. If nothing else, follow the money. See who benefits. You find who benefits, you will find the people this company is taking advantage of. Don’t come back to me with more of this drivel. Get out there and do you job.”
It was a good scolding from a guy who wasted no words in conversation or on the page. Chastened, I wound up writing an award-winning feature article that changed the direction of corporate policy and forced the company to be more honest with the people it was trying to hoodwink. Moreover, many of our stories, ignored at first by the corporate media, became ongoing stories in that media when they chafed at being scooped by what they believed was a bunch of amateurs.
I learned a lot from Bruce, and one of the most important lessons was how to pick apart the news. Find the people who know the story from inside, not the publicity people. If I couldn’t get inside, I learned to go around, find the weaknesses in the PR, and find alternative sources for the story I believed was there. When I became the news editor, I pressed and coached my writers too do the same.
At the paper, there might be pressure from time to time to cover restaurants or businesses that wanted free PR. We had a place for such stuff, restaurant, movie, and music critics. But even then, they kept an independent mind on what they were experiencing, seeing, consuming. Often was the time when a restaurant owner wound up on the phone with the publisher, who might try to come in and influence future coverage. Fortunately, the owner of the paper allowed these fights between advertising and editorial to play out among the departments, rather than put his foot down either way. Always, the interests of the editorial department won over the more acquisitive aspects of the money-making end of the business. The owner understood he had a product that would move people if crafted and insightful, regardless of how the advertisers might howl.
But that’s not the way corporate media works. Shareholders and hedge funds dictate the way things are covered. If the media seems to have a bias, it is toward corporate interests. In this sense, the critics of “the media” have a good point. The corporate media leans toward the interests of power and against its dissenters. Savvy media consumers see this. People with axes to grind don’t find their disgruntlement is being addressed. They throw their hands up and clap each other on the back by calling “the media” their enemy.
Thus, people on the left and right can complain about corporate media. But they haven’t yet come up with a solution to the problem of money in media. Their critique, whether they know it or not, is of capitalism itself, and many of the critics aren’t willing or able to formulate alternatives to the marketplace.
In the marketplace of ideas, which overlaps the interests of money, a historical view is necessary. When someone gets to own the press themselves, they get to spin or report stories the way they want. This had been true before Bejamin Franklin. During the years leading up to the Civil War, there were pro- and anti-slavery papers, and many in between. William Randolph Hearst effectively ignited a war with the way he spun stories, even dissembled and connived to get what he wanted.
To think our media landscape is any different today is delusion. It may be different with new media, social media, and multi-media innovations since the dawn of the internet. But at bottom, the business of media is money.
If you don’t like it, find those alternative and nonprofit organizations that report fairly, honestly, and comprehensively. It’s easy to find what you like. That’s no trick and something that media corporations have figured out when looking out at their potential audiences. The tougher part for the media consumer is finding the truth among the interests of the stockholder.
In the end, the media is you. How you access the news or information is tracked, algorithm-atized, and tailored to what sells the most product. Only your active participation rather than passive absorption can make a difference. You choose.
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