Media Matters did some research recently that revealed corporate media reported on the Obama democratic embarrassments of Ayers and Rezko more often than the McCain democratic embarrassments of G. Gordon Liddy and questionable land deals for donors. We could nitpick on whether these are the best choices. For example, Reverend Wright might be considered an embarrassment for Obama, the Keating Five an embarrassment for McCain. Let’s take a quick poll. Did you hear about the Reverend Wright or the Keating Five more often during this campaign season? I’m quite sure the results of this poll would correlate with the Media Matters finding.
The point of the research was not that corporate media reported on Obama embarassments more often, but that corporate media reported uncritically on accusations from the McCain camp that corporate media had a liberal bias. In other words, corporate media was castigating itself for something it did not do without even bothering to find out if it was true. What humble, self-deprecating servants of the public corporate media must be! Either that, or perhaps there is an agenda to corporate media condemning its own self as liberal in contradiction to empirical evidence.
Here is a pertinent excerpt from “Essay 12 – Centralized Corporate Media” in Systems out of Balance:
“A Google Search provided 751,000 hits for “conservative blog” and 659,000 hits for liberal blog;” 274,000 hits for “conservative think tank” and 70,100 hits for “liberal think tank;” 130,000 hits for “conservative pundit” and 23,100 hits for “liberal pundit;” and, of course, 192,000 hits for “conservative talk show” and 45,000 hits for “liberal talk show.”"
Since the advent of twenty-four hour news (brought to us by corporate media) there has been a proliferation of opinions. The potential providers of opinions are overwhelmingly conservative; corporations tend to be conservative; corporate media claims the country to be conservative; foundations and scholarships have been set up by corporations to fund the education of conservative journalism (for some reason corporations do not do the same to encourage liberal journalism). If corporate media turns out to be liberal media, what a bunch of bumbling, incompetent idiots those corporations must be! They have not the business sense to make natural supply and demand work for them and are forced to be victims to liberal journalism.
I don’t think so. But being a literal, empirical type of guy I don’t think corporate media has a conservative bias either, strictly speaking. They have a corporate bias. I’ve said it often, you can find virtually any information anywhere these days, enough to provide anecdotal evidence of anything you want to claim. But the echo chambers of corporate media are not going to echo anything that is too incriminating of corporations. There is nothing sinister about that folks, it’s just plain common sense.
Yet there is something sinister about corporate media faulting itself for having liberal bias when, on the balance, that clearly cannot be the case. Bias is not good, of course. If corporate media allegedly has liberal bias then the “truth” must be more conservative, which is precisely how corporations and many a “libertarian” think tank want to persuade you to think. Then you can turn to “balanced” corporate media, such as Fox News, to get the real information.
There is also something sinister in how centralized corporate media entertains us with the news. To whatever extent Obama attempts to foster a spirit of humility, faith and courage in our commitment to democracy, corporate media will be counterbalancing this with vain, cynical and apprehensive howls of outrage from entertaining news talk hosts. To whatever extent Obama attempts to focus the country on information that is incriminating to corporations, corporate media will focus our attention on incriminating information about Obama, while at the same time howling about liberal bias. That is just the way the game is played in this age of centralized corporate media. It’s a barrier to democracy that any president, Democrat or Republican, has to overcome at their own peril.
The only fix within the system I can think of is to reverse the media consolidation trend that escalated particularly during the Clinton administration. If news becomes more decentralized each particular provider becomes less influential and the content provided to the country more diversified. Outside of that, I don’t see how change comes from within the system. It’s up to the middle class public to separate the entertainment from the news and the corporate bias from the truth.
Tags: Corporate Media, Middle Class Politics, Misinformation
