Party Specific Press

For those of you who don't live in a part of the world where journalism is a reflection of political affiliation, let me woefully inform you of the case in point of the United States joining the ranks of places where what you believe politically is reflected in the news organs available. In some nations, such as Germany or the United Kingdom, the press is indeed free to publish whatever it wants. Yet there is an additional consideration when media organs produce their product, namely what political party or political faction they have selected to serve. This goes far beyond the considerations of segment publishers of books or periodicals as has always been the case in the United States. For example you can pretty much guess who the target market is for Utne Reader or Democracy Now. The consumers of such materials represent a fractional point of view that feels outside of the mainstream media outlets. There is nothing wrong with this because although they collectively represent a very small minority viewpoint as to what they would like as media consumers, they are a commercially viable market that exists for the most part outside of mainstream media considerations.

And it is this consideration which is of current issue. While it is perfectly expected that a fringe publication or media outlet caters to the unique points of view of its consumers, it has never been the case that the mainstream media has also gone to the equivalent extremes in catering to the generalized public consumer of media. One would expect that a media outlet like EWTN exists to provide media that most Catholics would find concurrent opinions about. One would also expect most other faiths to pretty much ignore the "Catholic Network" because its focus is centralized on people who happen to be Catholic. The same types of points can be made across the media spectrum. Somewhere around fifteen million people listen to Rush Limbaugh every day representing a fraction of the United States population. Even though he has a huge market penetration on the radio, he still only can garner a tiny minority of listeners of radio in general and an even smaller comparative share of all people who don not ever even turn on a radio in the first place.

The point is that while the United States has always had such media providers and segmented markets that make such providers economically viable as a business model, the overall media market has largely been apolitical. The reason why this has been the case is tied directly to the emergence of wire services and the additional broadcast technologies that developed in the early 1900's. News and information needed to be of a generalized importance to all consumers. This meant radio networks would tailor their news and information content to reflect a genuine utility for the consumer. News events, social commentary, and even entertainment offerings reflected the idea that if people could generally use the media served to them, they would in turn pay more attention to the media outlet providing the service. With more attention, the media outlet could charge more for the advertisements that provided the funding for the outlet as a business.

Because of this media outlets that wanted to expand or dominate markets on a regional scale, and later a national scale, had a vested interest in being neutral in their presentations of content so as to appeal to the broadest market segment possible. A listener might not always agree with a news story or an entertainment show, but the theory was that if he found news or content he agreed with socially or politically at least half the time, then he would continue to listen or read or watch the media outlet in question.

Unfortunately the neutrality became threatened by several factors. The explosion of cable accessible and satellite channels made it possible to create upstart news outlets very cheaply. One need look no further than CNN or Fox News Channel for an example. Another example would be ESPN, started with a single satellite uplink and a couple thousand dollars. Another thing that has lead to neutrality being effected is the consolidation of media outlets into conglomerate media outlets that centralized almost all media content decisions into a handful of companies based out of New York City. You may read a paper from Boston, but 95% of its content comes from its parent company in New York City now. Even CNN which once operated out of Atlanta and was once known for having a crack pot news staff willing to hop on a jet to broadcast from anywhere around the globe, now tends to have an all New York based staff that gets most of its international feed supplied from Reuters or Associated Press pool agents.

The most impact to neutrality in media outlet production has come from the internet. It takes literally no effort to produce a site like the Drudge Report or Democratic Underground. It really all comes down to who staked out the claim first and was able to get Google to notice what was being created. Suddenly we have millions of sites that reflect the ultimate in market segmentation. Whatever your political stripe is, there is indeed a web based media outlet that agrees with your personal point of view 100% of the time. People can access information in an almost self censored manner. If you don't like Obama, you can be sure that you can get your news from a source that will never tell you Obama did anything good.

Bringing us back to the mainstream media outlets. They still have a business model that reflects the earlier neutrality. But thanks to the ease of segmenting people via cable broadcast networks or the web based internet media outlets, if they manage to piss off their consumer a few times-they can go get their media content from somewhere else besides the mainstream media. Politically the people of the United States have indeed shifted their political viewpoints to the left. How hard a transition is hard to quantify. But JFK today would be classified as an staunch right wing Republican as would most of the Scoop Jackson Democrats of the 1970's and 1980's. The media has also reflected this shift. The Pew Research Center points out that in terms of political bias the major outlets not only get their facts wrong 71% of the time but also show strong media bias 82% of the time when reporting political news. To make matters worse- as if that isn't already bad enough- the places where most people get their news from, namely network broadcast news and the New York Times affiliated newspapers are the most biased of all.

What this means is that partly due to segmenting of the market, the generalized leftward shift of all Americans, and the pronounced decline in reporting accuracy and increased leftward bias, the news media outlets have become particularly vulnerable to loss of consumers for their products if they choose to be neutral.

The consequences of this state of affairs is not prohibitively bad even if you happen to be an ultra right wing Republican. As the market place and the subsystems that work to create media streams mature, there will indeed be a case where bias or utter inaccuracies will become impossible to maintain if a business wants to be anything other than a controller of a fractional minority share of the media market as a whole. As technologies converge making it possible for people to get all their content on a single device like an iPhone, the most successful media outlets will need to return to a neutrality of content or risk becoming a modern equivalent of the print version of Mother Jones.

The only thing that might threaten this is if the current dominate media providers intentionally choose political alignment as many of their European cousins have. If you become associated with a political party- and by extension the voters who support that party-you not only can pre-capture nearly 50% of all voters but also become vested in the success of that party. It is a pattern that has occurred in Europe, where national media outlets are openly conservative or progressive and take great joy in vilifying the political opponents of the party they happen to be closely linked to. It is still possible to get a fair accounting of politics in Europe, but you have to read the conservative and progressive news side by side so you can then read between the lines to determine for yourself what is really going on.

Which brings me to the current sitting President and one of his disgraced predecessors. Nixon once told the Washington Post that their reporters were persona non grata in his White House and if any other media outlet wanted to retain access to the White House they had better treat the Washington Post as if it were something less than toilet paper. To the credit of the media in general, the major news organizations of the time told Nixon to go fuck himself. President Obama, his press secretary, and his communications coordinator have specifically told the media that Fox News Channel is not welcome in the White House, should not be considered to be a credible and respected news agency, and other media outlets should take great pains to not reciprocate or associate with Fox News Channel. Those media outlets that choose not to follow the President's command run the risk of also not having access to the White House. So far the media has remained silent.

Which brings us full circle to the start of this commentary. If the media outlets choose not to replicate their stance of 1973, they will essentially become beholden to reporting news as the President wishes it to be reported. At some point these outlets will become so beholden to him that they will not be able to be neutral at all. Given that they are currently factually wrong and biased a combined 80% of the time already- they don not have too many percentage points left to lose before they become completely biased and report news based on how the President wishes it to be rather than what the news really is.

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