Dollarocracy (40 page)

The unraveling of media over the past two decades has driven many liberals, not to mention those to their left, to the brink of madness. Many are frustrated that traditional journalism has proven so incapable of resisting the right. With the success of Keith Olbermann's on-air commentaries condemning the Bush-Cheney administration, MSNBC began to recognize that a lucrative market for low-expense, high-revenue programming was being underserved; it gradually put a few explicitly liberal programs on its schedule, which now includes boundary-breaking shows hosted by Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell, Chris Hayes, and Ed Schultz.

Some have equated these programs with Fox News in style, imagining MSNBC as just a left-wing variant on Rupert Murdoch's network, but the comparison fails upon inspection. Although these programs are expressly liberal, they are more independent of the Democratic Party than Fox has been of the Republican—as was amply evident when MSNBC hosts were quick to decry Obama's weak performance in the first of 2012's three presidential
debates.
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They also have a commitment to factual accuracy and intellectual consistency that is rare on the right. At the same time, as Olbermann and Cenk Uygur learned as they were shown the door, the corporate management has little sympathy with the politics of these shows if it veers too often outside the mainstream Democratic Party, even when the shows are profitable. There is an implicit pressure to rein in the politics.

Most striking is this: the explicitly liberal programs tend to spend considerable time fact-checking, debunking, and ridiculing the material on Fox and conservative talk radio. Right-wing media seem far less interested in what the liberals are saying. Why should they be? In the overall calculus, they are still calling the shots, and the liberals spend inordinate amounts of their time responding to the right. This call and response is a logical commercial manifestation of the postjournalism moment. Neither Fox News nor MSNBC has its own teams of reporters to send out to break news stories. Slogans like “We Report, You Decide” are rooted in fantasy. Cable channels have program hosts, producers, and guest bookers. They look at what others are reporting, and then they invite people to talk about the politics of the day. At their best, they invite interesting and diverse guests who might even disagree with one another—as happened on Ed Schultz's MSNBC show during the debate about whether to include a public option in the Affordable Care Act. At their worst, they feature Sean Hannity and Karl Rove abandoning all the touchstones of realism and engaging in extended preelection discussions about how all the polls are wrong and Mitt Romney will win by a landslide.
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If the rise of conservative media aggressively pushing Dollarocracy policies has strongly shaped political journalism, it has had a similar effect on election coverage. Conservative media are obsessed with elections and with winning power. They aggressively promote Republican candidates, push their issues, and amplify the charges made in TV political ads.
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They can provide a launching pad for charges against Democrats or progressive organizations and use their influence to demand mainstream coverage. Consider how the group ACORN, which was instrumental in registering poor people to vote, was destroyed in 2009–2010, based on a largely bogus video hatchet job. The stalwarts
of conservative media are by their own admission expressly committed to Republican electoral success—as anyone who has heard the whistle of Sean Hannity's “Stop Obama Express” well understands—by any means necessary.
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During the 2012 presidential campaign, Fox News steadfastly refused to address
any
significant Romney campaign falsehoods that had been exposed in the balance of the media. It routinely announced that the “mainstream” media were “in the bag” for Obama, all the while giving the Romney campaign an enormous advantage on the amount and tenor of coverage. In the final week before the election, Fox News gave coverage of Romney's campaign speeches eighty-four minutes of airtime, compared to eighteen minutes for Obama. In contrast, the coverage elsewhere was only slightly greater timewise for Obama: forty-nine minutes to forty-two at MSNBC and fifty-three minutes to forty-two at CNN.
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Fox News is now a singular force in Republican politics. “The introduction of Fox News into the cable roster has been shown to have coincided with an uptick in voting for Republican presidential candidates,” Skocpol and Williamson noted. “The capacity to shift U.S. voting patterns suggests that Fox News has a very real persuasive power.”
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Fox News almost singlehandedly made the Tea Party a powerful force in American politics in 2009–2010, as Tom Frank put it, by presenting “the emerging protest campaign as if it was the network's own reality show.”
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Skocpol and Williamson's comprehensive analysis of the media coverage of the Tea Party concluded that Fox News' “assiduous promotional and informational efforts surely made a big difference.” They argued that “Tea Partiers' factually inaccurate beliefs about many policy matters are particularly striking given their relatively high levels of education and overall savvy about the political process. It is hard to escape the conclusion that deliberate propagation of falsehoods by Fox and other powerful media outlets is responsible for mis-arming otherwise adept Tea Partiers, feeding them inaccurate facts and falsely hyped fears.”
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By 2011, observers noted that traditional presidential “retail” campaigning had all but disappeared on the Republican side. “The contenders,” the
New York Times
observed, “are far more likely to make their visits on television than to ever drop by in person.” “Everything has changed,” Kansas Republican governor Sam Brownback stated. “It's like a town hall every day on Fox
News. You hear people talking back to you what you saw yesterday on Fox. I like Fox, and I'm glad we have an outlet, but it is having a major, major effect on what happens.”
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Fox's first great achievement came in 2000 when it played a foundational role in getting George W. Bush in the White House despite the fact that he lost the vote. At a critical point in the early morning hours of the day after the November 7, 2000, election, Fox analysts—led by a cousin of Bush, John Prescott Ellis (who would later admit to having been in contact with the Bush campaign in the fateful night)—declared that Bush had won Florida. Thinking Fox had simply crunched the numbers more quickly, the other networks quickly followed Fox in making the call and, with it, identifying Bush as the winner of the Electoral College competition that would identify the next president. But Fox had the same numbers that the other networks had, and its analysts could not by any reasonable estimate have found a win for Bush in the available data. The Florida race, as the ensuing weeks of wrangling over recounts would confirm, was too close to call on election night. Indeed, there is an argument to be made that it was still too close to call when, thirty-six days later, a U.S. Supreme Court majority, made up of justices appointed by administrations in which Bush's father had served, called the contest for the Republican nominee. To our view, there is a better argument to be made that Democrat Al Gore had a more credible claim to victory. That Gore was never able to effectively stake that claim, that he was in fact portrayed throughout the recount fight as a sore loser, was a media construct. By making a seemingly impossible election night call for Bush, Fox positioned the Republican as the inevitable winner.
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Twelve years later, the mastermind of Bush's campaign, Karl Rove, melted down on Fox's election night broadcast, openly arguing with the network after it called the key swing state of Ohio for Obama. In 2012, however, it wasn't too close to call. A grudging Rove had to accept the will of the people, a circumstance with which he did not seem to be entirely familiar.
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But only the most naïve commentators presumed that Rove's embarrassment was anything but transitory. The next day, he was on a conference call, explaining how he was recalculating for the next election. And Fox was featuring him once more, as if nothing had happened. For conservatives, Fox means never having to say you're sorry—even when you are massively, publicly wrong.
That's because, like most of the right-wing echo chamber, Fox is not journalism. It's what fills the void when journalism disappears.
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The political right is perfectly comfortable with the false construct of a “news” network that has, in the words of Eric Boehlert, “altered the game by unchaining itself from the moral groundings of U.S. journalism.”
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For partisans who do not want to be held to account, the conservative media landscape of the twenty-first century looks like a future in which they could reside quite comfortably. A world with little journalism, where the affairs of the wealthy and corporations receive little scrutiny, especially their dalliances with politicians, and where the political news agenda is dominated by their partisan news media and pundits, is jim-dandy. The conservative media can continue their migration and colonization of the news so that they are indeed the mainstream. It is a world where their ability to win elections is greatly enhanced, even when they are pushing policies opposed by the majority of the population. Even if they lose an election, as happened with the 2012 presidential race, conservative media are there the next day to tell conservatives that they need not accept the will of the people. “Conservatism did not lose last night,” shouted Rush Limbaugh on November 7, 2012.
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Actually, it had lost. Rather badly.

But if there is a basic premise that unites Limbaugh, the folks on Fox, and the vast infrastructure of regional right-wing talkers, it is this: conservatives should never bend to the demands of the voters; voters should be made to bend to the demands of conservatives. To that end, conservative media actively campaign against any proposal that might renew actual journalism. The conservative media and dollarcrats oppose all policy measures to address the journalism crisis, from increasing postal subsidies, enhancing public media, or breaking up monopoly media firms to create more competition. To the conservatives and to Dollarocracy, the status quo is just fine, thank you.

ELECTIONS ARE the tip of the democratic iceberg, the only moment at which everyday citizens are in control of the system. “The presidential election, when the public's attention peaks, should produce a widening public reporting and discussion,” Nader wrote. “Imagine twenty presidential debates around the country with tough questioning by informed reporters and engaged citizens.”
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Instead, by 2012 our elections became what Greenwald termed “a
tawdry, uber-contrived reality show that has less to do with political reality than the average rant one hears at any randomly chosen corner bar or family dinner. . . . the process is suffocatingly dumb and deceitful, generating the desire to turn away and hope it's over as quickly as possible.”
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Discussing election coverage, Greenwald wrote:

           
If there's an afterlife, I feel sorry for the American Founders: imagine how they must feel looking down on all of this, thinking about all the work they did to enact a First Amendment to protect press freedoms, and wondering why they bothered. . . . Actual journalists think that their “careers will be made” if they expose serious wrongdoing on the part of those in power; these people think that their careers will be made if they get to run in front of an MSNBC or CNN camera and announce Mitt Romney's Vice Presidential pick 11 seconds before everyone else announces it. The latter view about what is career-making is probably more accurate than the former, which explains most everything.
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Elections traditionally are embraced by the mass of citizens and feared by the privileged. They become farces without journalism, the kind that hold people in power accountable to the citizenry. By 2012, it was widely acknowledged in research and among political professionals that “nearly all citizens have extremely low levels of knowledge about what their various representatives have actually done while in office.”
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Walter Lippmann famously wrote in 1920 that “in an exact sense the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis of journalism.” Unless a credible independent system of journalism were established, Lippmann was despondent about America's future: “Men who have lost their grip upon the relevant facts of their environment are the inevitable victims of agitation and propaganda. The quack, the charlatan, the jingo, and the terrorist, can flourish only where the audience is deprived of independent access to information.” The choice was to address the “fundamental task” of creating credible journalism—and become “genuinely self-governing”—or see democracy “degenerate” into something more akin to dictatorship.
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The words appear prescient, but they simply clarify what always has been true and always will be true about free and democratic societies.

Tom Paine's ideas, the example he set of free expression, the sacrifices he made to preserve the integrity of his work, are being resuscitated by means that hadn't existed or been imagined in his day—via the blinking cursors, clacking keyboards, hissing modems, bits and bytes of another revolution, the digital one. If Paine's vision was aborted by the new technologies of the last century, newer technology has brought his vision full circle. If his values no longer have much relevance for conventional journalism, they fit the Net like a glove.