Auld Lang Syne
Dear Atrios: I’m about twelve years older than you. When I was a teen and you were a toddler, and for a time after that, the media was very liberal. How do I know? I remember! Also, there used to be no ATMs. We had things called “traveler’s checks” that you bought at the bank before going on vacation instead of taking cash. In fact, an important part of vacation planning was deciding how many traveler’s checks to buy.
Now, I don’t think “the media” as such is liberal any more. I think the transformation completed itself early this century. In fact, I think the media is now as out of touch with popular sentiment from the right as the earlier media used to be out of touch with popular sentiment from the left – I’m thinking of the period from Ronald Reagan’s first campaign in 1980 to the Republican congressional takeover of 1994. I’d go so far as to say that the period in question convinced the honchos of newsrooms that “We’re out of touch with America and we have to change.”
The problem is that they thought simply outsourcing their biases to a bunch of right wing hacks made them more in touch with America. But the right wing hacks weren’t “in touch with America” either. Are you kidding? A bunch of magazine editors and lawyers from New York and Washington? They just happened to be conservatives standing around where media bosses could see them during a period when the country was in a conservative mood. Inertia being inertia, the media-wingnut complex still believes that they’re in touch with America and that America is in a conservative mood. In fact, they have no idea how America really feels and the country has been trending leftward since at least the 2000 election – only the 9/11 security-mom blip obscured the movement.
Call it “The TNRing of the American media.” Also, demographics mean that media operations will always lag the popular mood. The people with the jobs in newsrooms now are the Alex P. Keaton generation. Careerism means that now is their day. But it’s not Alex P. Keaton’s country any more. During Alex P. Keaton’s time, in fact, the Lou Grant Generation ran America’s papers. It wasn’t Lou Grant’s America by then either.
Comment by Thoreau —
September 12, 2007 @ 8:37 am
Here’s another way to look at it: The media isn’t so much conservative as it is unwilling to call bullshit on the ruling clique that happens to be conservative (or at least some form of conservative). Once upon a time, when the media was more liberal, the Democrats (admittedly not quite the same as liberals) had a lock on Congress, and so a liberal bias would be pleasing to a group in power.
I’m not sure whether this is a useful explanation, but I toss it out there.
Comment by BruceB —
September 12, 2007 @ 11:48 am
I believe I have an insight into the matter of changing media bias that actually has been consistently overlooked:
Changes in management practice have changed media relations with political authority.
As at the beginning of the 20th century with the rise of ergonomics and the like, we’re in an era in which managers are encouraged and often empowered to exercise a much greater degree of direct and detailed control over their offices than was usual in, say, the ’70s. Nor is this just nostalgia speaking; I spent some time in the library a few years back looking at advice for managers from different eras, and the trend was pretty clear. What replaced the classic IBM/GM philosophy of control starting at the externals (like dress code) was, after a little dabbling with this and that, a philosophy of manager as master knowledge worker, who tills the field that is his office, whose intelligence and wisdom are to his employees’ as theirs is to the beasts that perish. (Okay, I have been re-reading War of the Worlds, but honestly, I’m not exaggerating much here.)
Media corporations haven’t been exempt from that.
It was always the case that news management was more conservative than the rank-and-file reporting folks. What’s changed is management’s view of what it’s doing, from assembling its product around the results of employees’ labor to crafting a master vision at the managerial level into which the results of employees’ labor must fit, with whatever degree of reshaping that may involve. Even if they weren’t subject to special attention from the conservative machine, news managers would be on average more likely to believe now both that they are entitled to intervene more directly in more details of reporting and that they are competent to do so in ways that will improve the product. Employees, meanwhile, have had lots of opportunities to learn how opportunities for advancement go along with serving the managerial vision rather than pursuing a story in the old-fashioned way.
So much of what we’re seeing is just the way many sectors of American business work these days, plus the machine’s efforts. A study of what benefits the top tiers of media corporate management are reaping from their buddies in the machine and when would probably account for a lot of what looks like otherwise uncaused drifts and shifts, but the broad picture would be the same without them, I think.
Comment by Tom B. —
September 12, 2007 @ 11:53 am
These days, when most newspapers are owned by a handful of big chains, many of the publishers come from the advertising or financial side of the business. Decades ago, most publishers had some newsroom experience, and thus had internalized a sense of First Amendment values (i.e., speaking truth to power). To today’s publishers, news = marketing. Rocking the boat hurts the bottom line; celebrating the perceived status quo helps it, they think.
Comment by LittlePig —
September 12, 2007 @ 11:54 am
I think that’s a good point, but I think the conglomeration of media into a few big players has a big part (more corporate groupthink/ass kissing), as well as the news-as-moneymaker vs. news-as-obligation basis shift. News as moneymaker makes for tabloid media, and tabloids play to the gut, the home field of conservatives. Couple that with corporate dont-rock-the-boat, as you get idiot talking point news.
Back in the day (and I’m of Jim’s generation), newspeople were thought to be wise, or at least respected the opinions of wise people. Now that idiots present the pablum called news (e.g. Katie Couric), wisdom is not respected, and you get “angry drunk in a bar” foreign policy. Those folks that think that nuking Iran may feel good in the short term but be very bad long term are pooh-poohed by the gut media that doesn’t want to hear how bad the hangover will be.
Comment by BruceB —
September 12, 2007 @ 12:00 pm
LittlePig, I see that as part of what I was writing about, actually. I didn’t specifically mention it, but consolidation goes along with the whole top-down-vision thing. So I say “and” rather than “but”.
Comment by the talking dog —
September 12, 2007 @ 12:52 pm
“Careerism” sums it up beautifully: the Japanese axiom of “the nail out of place gets the hammer” has been pretty much imbibed by not just American media workers, but pretty damned well near most American workers in general… all part of the Neo-Victorianism since “downsizing” became A GOOD THING (as opposed to a surrogate for failing) somewhere in the Reagan-Poppy years.
The other way to put it is Junior’s “Ownership Society”… as in, management now often owns your ass.
Comment by jlw —
September 12, 2007 @ 12:59 pm
Ding ding ding! Everybody’s a winner! It is a generational shift, though I don’t think our host gets it exactly right, since part of it too is a demographic shift. Those guys from the Lou Grant era were from working class backgrounds, and many of them didn’t have college degrees or had them only thanks to the GI Bill. Every journalist today has at least a B.A. and many come from very comfortable backgrounds. (I was a T.A. at a J-school in the early 1990s and most of the American-born students were from tony suburbs.) In addition, journalists are marrying into power–Mrs. Greenspan was a forerunner of this trend–and picking up the inclinations of spouses and their colleagues.
Bruce is right that there’s a management component. I work for a mid-size non-profit under the thrall of consultants, and now every person in every department must justify their existance against a handful of goals set from the top, whether they are meaningful to one’s job or not. A similar push at GE or Disney would affect the way weapons systems or intellectual property issues (respectively) get represented. Couple that with Tom’s observation of bottom-line oriented management with no feel for why editorial and advertising ought to be kept separate, and it’s a wonder that every news source doesn’t sound like Entertainment Weekly or Access Hollywood.
Also, I think it’s important to note that the rightward dive in journalism is largely a Washington/New York phenomenon. Where I grew up, the metropolitan daily newspaper was famously hard-right, and the local paper from my Mom’s hometown ran this headline over Brezhnev’s obit: “Hell’s Population Up By One” One can also make the case that the tenor of local TV news for the past generation–”if it bleeds, it leads”–is objectively pro-conservative, though I don’t know of any intent for this.
Comment by Avram —
September 12, 2007 @ 2:03 pm
Jim, what do “liberal” and “conservative” mean in this context?
Comment by Jose Padilla —
September 12, 2007 @ 2:20 pm
The peak of the liberal media was in the late 60’s and the 70’s. It’s been trending right for 25 years.
Comment by kid bitzer —
September 12, 2007 @ 2:57 pm
“I think the media is now as out of touch with popular sentiment from the right as the earlier media used to be out of touch with popular sentiment from the left”
man, it took me a long time to parse that correctly.
at first it looked like you were saying that there was something called “popular sentiment from the right”, and that the current media is out of touch with it.
only later did i realize you meant that the media is out of touch with popular sentiment because the media, not the sentiment, is way off to the right.
okay–hard work being an esl drop-out.
Comment by NYT —
September 12, 2007 @ 8:33 pm
In 2006 the Washington Post generated revenues of $572M in print advertinsing, $102M from online advertising.
Paying readers are paying just 35 cents for the daily (free if online) or 1.50 for the Sunday (unchanged in price since 1992). That means revenues from paying readers are about $100 per year per reader for the daily (about $68M) and $73M for the Sunday.
Its clear that their customers are the advertisers, not the readers.
And thats if you don’t think they have done what Murdoch did, which is to just slant the coverage in the newspapers to benefit their other businesses.
The main business of the company overall is selling educational materials and services. And who is the biggest customer for that business?
If I owned the Washington Post company then filling the pages with pro-government hacks would probably make perfectly good business sense.
Comment by CaseyL —
September 13, 2007 @ 12:24 am
Generational shift + management are a huge part of it, and in non-obvious as well as obvious ways.
The generational shift means, among other things, that journalists today no longer come from the local, beat-pounding street reporters because technology has overtaken street reporting. It’s no longer necessary to get to know cops, city councilpersons, sanitation workers, teachers, etc., in order to get stories about those areas. You just google this org-chart or upload the minutes of that meeting, or get the presskit from the Public Affairs Office. So reporters no longer get the hard training-by-experience in basic reporting: i.e., cultivating multiple sources, weighing what each of them tells you, learning how to put a story together from carefully sifted multiple points of view.
Public Affairs Offices, BTW, exist for the pure purpose of keeping the press away from direct sources. Most public and private sector organizations actually have explicit policies forbidding direct contact between press and non-PAO personnel.
Also, management no longer comes from the ranks of reporters, but from the professional class of MBAs, marketing, and other non-reporting sources. That means the managers know little (and care less) about the nuts and bolts of reporting, so they resort to management fads and formulas: dashboards, stretch goals, Total Quality, “leveraging” and “synergy” – all the buzzword gobblygook that protects them from having to know anything about actual reporting or journalism.
Another factor is the shift from family-owned newspapers to corporate-ownership and, again, not only for the obvious reasons. When families owned and ran the newspapers, they didn’t need to worry about things like “shareholder value” (a buzzword meaning, “Keep the stock price rising or the stockholders will enable a hostile takeover”). Once ownership shifted to a corporation, the highest priority was no longer the news, but the stock price.
Comment by Dave Woycechowsky —
September 13, 2007 @ 8:12 am
BruceB nails it.
Comment by BruceB —
September 13, 2007 @ 10:01 am
CaseyL, that’s a fascinating insight, and brings together a lot of loose observations I’ve had into a coherent whole. Much thanks!
Also, thanks, Dave @ 12.