The purpose of the media in any functioning democracy is to be a check on the government. They should hold them to account. An informed electorate will make informed decisions, and the media is designed to the chief source for that information. The vast majority of the electorate does not have the time to read the scores of articles published every day, and so they rely on the media to, in the words of Keith Olbermann ‘analyse, unscramble, assess’ the myriad of details that compose the political narrative.
The media is by no means perfect: run by fallible humans, it has its biases. That said, it should never have gotten to the point where, as the title of this piece suggests, what was previously the fourth estate has now become the fourth branch of government. I want to run down the problems with the media and use these to explain how we got to this point. This piece will mainly focus on America, and we will take the networks in turn.
Fox so-called News, as Thom Hartmann likes to call them, is the propaganda wing of the Republican party. For eight solid years they mindlessly bashed former President Obama, for everything from wearing a tanned suit (true) to having mustard on a cheese burger. On the rare occasions when policy was discussed at all, it was the usual ‘socialist’ (code for he’s black) and other strawmen that the right often make of the left. But the propaganda was also more subtle. This network is owned by Australia’s Rupert Murdoch, who also owns the Sun newspaper in Britain. Comedian Bel Elton once remarked of the Sun ‘here’s a pair of t*ts, unions bad’ and this certainly applies to Fox so-called News. Indeed, female employees are banned from wearing pants and must wear skirts, the closer to their waistline the better. To borrow from Mr. Olbermann again, referring to male viewers of Fox so-called News, ‘it’s the closest their old lady will allow them to get to porn‘; and he has a point. Soft-faced news actresses telling old, white men what they want to hear about the ‘loss’ of ‘their’ country, best understood as women, blacks and gays exist and have the same rights as straight, white men. Such an echo-chamber is not conducive to the electorate being given the facts.
This network, then, has a pro-conservative-establishment bias. Since Fox so-called News is corporate owned, it also has a corporate bias well and so is unlikely to challenge the narrative of ongoing war, deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy. This bias, too, is not conducive to the creation of an informed electorate. And why not? Oligarchs don’t need informed voters.
Turning now to CNN, it too has a corporate and establishment bias, but it also has the more insidious neutrality bias. As I said in the last post, neutrality is not objectivity. CNN’s approach is to have Republicans and Democrats on at the same time, let them duke it out and let the viewer decide. A classic case of reporting what is true (each side presumably represents its own viewpoint accurately) rather than what is factual (comparing the spiel given by each side to the facts and forming a judgement). The great fear on CNN (and other mainstream outlets) is that to form an opinion will be construed as bias. To insert a little opinion here, this conservative tactic is a tacit admission that they are simply wrong on the issues. If they could successfully defend their positions they would not need to attack the media. This comes across as so much theatre, since both this network and the conservative politicians serve the same corporate power structure. On that topic, CNN provides the example par excellence of the corporate bias.
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) was on with human robot Wolf Blitzer and he attacked the passive involvement of the US in the war in Yemen being waged by Saudi Arabia. The US arms the Saudis to the tune of millions of dollars. Blitzer’s response was to say ‘What about the jobs? What about the profits of the defence contractors?’ So, according to Blitzer, the wars can never stop because profit (which doesn’t even necessarily lead to jobs). General Butler would like a word with you, Wolf.
Finally, we turn to MSNBC. In the past, this network was the home of effective news coverage (the aforementioned Mr. Olbermann, the early days of Dr. Rachel Maddow), particularly in opposition to President Bush (43). Once Mr. Obama was elected, Keith was fired for, among other things, not towing the company line and going after Democrats. MSNBC has evolved over the last few years, but particularly since talk of the 2016 Presidential campaign arose, into the propaganda wing of the (Corporate) Democrats. The network is not on the left; it is as corporate as the others, and thus supports the so-called resistance to President Trump, based mostly on tone policing interspersed with the occasional policy critique (maybe). Rachel’s coverage of the voter suppression efforts by Republicans leading up to the 2018 midterms has been admirable, but does not cancel out her obsession (and that is the correct term) with the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. This story was covered to the exclusion of everything else, including the real issues of the day such as campaign finance reform (the network is owned by GE and so has no interest in that), health care (other than to praise the ACA because it was from their side of the aisle) and others, which again does not lead to an informed electorate.
It would be a false equivalence to say that MSNBC and Fox so-called News are the same, even though I called both propaganda channels (which they are). Fox stokes more outrage and just outright makes things up more than MSNBC does. The so-called ‘war on christmas’, which is essentially pseudo-intellectual cannon fodder for persecuted christians complaining about how they no longer have a social and religious monopoly in a pluralistic society, is a regular series of manufactured segments on Fox ever year. There is no equivalent on MSNBC. For all the outrage, tone policing and pearl clutching, MSNBC deals in a lot more facts in a given day that Fox so-called news does in a year.
Regardless of the minor differences between them, the networks all share the establishment, corporate bias which prevents them from doing objective reporting. This forces them to go aesthetic in their approach; look at the shiny thing. Russia, the military, the war on christmas. The networks are prevented, by biases and corporate influence, from doing their jobs and so their ‘reporting’ is superficial at best, outright propaganda at worst.
It is for this reason that what was the Fourth Estate is now the Fourth Branch of Government
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