This Week: Media, Propaganda, and Class

"Quote" of the Week

Media and Propaganda, How it Happens, Part 5: Profits and Class

Media and Propaganda, How it Happens: Summing It All Up

Greetings,

I realize that the last issue of the Notes came out just two days ago. This is the shortest between-issues interval in the history of Nygaard Notes! The reason is that I thought this final installment of the "Media and Propaganda, How it Happens" series was so closely related to the previous installment that it made sense to put them closer together. So, read at your leisure. This is not topical stuff, it will still be timely next week, or next month.

In the next issue of the Notes I hope to do some catching up. The issue after that I hope will be the autumn 2006 Nygaard Notes Pledge Drive. If you haven't been through one of those before, you'll soon see what you've been missing. Pledge Drive issues are never solely Pledge Drive stuff; I always produce something original that should make it interesting to everyone, even those who have already made their pledges. There's a high premium on originality here at Nygaard Notes!

All for now,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

This week's "Quote" is from two of the best media thinkers that I know of, Robert McChesney and John Nichols. It's from an article entitled "The Rise of Professional Journalism; Reconsidering the Roots of Our Profession in an Age of Media Crisis," that appeared in the December 8, 2005 issue of In These Times:

"Professional journalism places a premium on legitimate news stories based upon what people in power say and do. The appeal is clear. It removes the tinge of controversy from story selection—"Hey, the Governor said it so we had to cover it"—and it makes journalism less expensive: Simply place reporters near people in power and have them report on what is said and done. It also gives journalism a very conventional feel, as those in power have a great deal of control over what gets covered and what does not. Reporting often turns into dictation as journalists are loathe to antagonize their sources, depending upon them as they do for stories. Indeed, successful politicians learn to exploit journalists' dependence upon official sources to maximum effect. This dependence also makes possible what the modern public-relations industry does in its surreptitious manner."

You can read the entire article—it's a good one!—online at http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2427/

Media and Propaganda, How it Happens, Part 5: Profits and Class

I ended the last issue by saying that many activists would love to explain their dissident views to readers and viewers of the media, and there are some unknown number of media "consumers" who would like to hear them. Yet such explanations almost never appear. Part of the reason for that is that our media system has to make a hefty profit.

The Profit Squeeze and Deep Propaganda

This past month I've been following a fascinating story about the editor and publisher of the Los Angeles Times. It seems that the Times, the nation's fourth-largest newspaper and winner of numerous Pulitzer Prizes in recent years, is "only" earning a profit of 20 percent. The Tribune Company, which owns the LA Times, recently ordered the editor of the Times to cut 200 jobs in their newsrooms in order to boost the profits closer to the 30 percent that the Chicago Tribune "earns." (For purposes of comparison, consider that the average stock in the overall stock market has earned about 8.5 percent in recent years.)

The fascinating thing about this story is that the editor of the Times, backed by the publisher, has simply refused to make the cuts, saying that the cuts "would significantly damage the quality of the paper." The media world is watching this showdown closely to see if the editor will keep his job. I don't think he will.

Two senior reporters at the Times point out that such cuts will eliminate "the kind of expensive, long-term" investigative reporting that has earned the Times the respect of their peers. Why is this kind of reporting expensive and long-term? There are many reasons, but one of them is that investigative journalism involves a lot of thinking, a lot of talking, the cultivation of multiple sources, a lot of waiting for confirmation, a lot of trips down dead-end roads, and often a lot of travel and phone calls. In other words, it's very different than stationing one reporter at the White House and another at the Capitol and asking them to simply write down what their powerful sources say in their press conferences.

The types of cuts ordered for the LA Times are happening all over the news industry. 111 newsroom employees at The Dallas Morning News were just axed a couple of months ago, a 20 percent cut. In August, the Akron Beacon Journal laid off 40 editorial employees, about 25 percent of the newsroom staff. As I reported in Nygaard Notes back in May of this year, the newspaper industry in this country has lost 3,500 to 3,800 newsroom professionals since 2000, or roughly 7% of the total in the nation. And, as I said in Part 1 of this series, "Fewer reporters producing more stories makes reporters more reliant on news that is easy to get and unlikely to be challenged by anyone who can cause trouble. Acceptable sources will thus be: Official, Accessible, ‘Credible,' Cheap, and Easy." Who are those sources? Well, whoever they are at any particular moment, you can bet they're not likely to want to challenge widely-shared ideas that support their power and privilege.

Social Location and the Modern Journalist

If it's true that the nature of the media industry itself tends to narrow the points of view that can be easily brought forward, then why don't the journalists themselves use their positions to broaden the range of acceptable ideas? Well...

The past 100 years or so has brought what has been called "professionalism" to the job of the journalist. This means a lot of things, but the relevant point for this discussion is that a job that once was a trade—one that could be picked up by anyone if they hung around a newsroom long enough—has now become a "profession." That is, an aspiring journalist now must possess a college degree and must be "groomed" and socialized in the more-or-less standardized system of journalism schools before being admitted into "the club" of working journalists. (There are exceptions, of course.) But, overall, I think commentator Mano Singham is on the right track when he says that "The rough edges of the working class journalist [have been] eliminated, and we now produce journalism graduates who fit smoothly into the corporate media structure."

Adds Singham, "Reporters now are likely to have little in common with the poorer segments of societies." Now, that's not entirely true. A reporter or editor at a small-town newspaper might only earn $25,000 a year, which doesn't place one in the upper classes. But it is true that small-town reporters are not the people who set the news agenda for the nation.

In the highly-concentrated media world of today it is increasingly true that the people who set the agenda for the news of the day are a very small group of producers, editors, and reporters. I'm talking about the folks at the top of the Washington Post, the TV networks and, most powerful of all, the New York Times. Just this past Sunday, October 1st, the "reader's representative" for my local paper pointed out that: "Every Saturday, usually before noon, the New York Times sends an advisory to newspapers subscribing to its wire service on which stories it plans to run on page one the next day." In other words, a few people in New York are telling the nation's editors what is "front-page news." That's what I call "power."

New York Magazine reported a few years ago that, at that time, "mid-level editors can make $110,000 to $250,000, while those closer to the top net $300,000 to $400,000," reporters start out at $70,720 a year and go up to $120,000, and columnist pay "ranges from $150,000 to $350,000." Many reporters at this level also go out on the lecture circuit and make even more money that way. So you see what Singham is talking about. The agenda-setters in the media are not, as a group, working-class types. And they have always been, and still are, overwhelmingly white and male.

What this means is that they are less likely to question the premises—the Deep Propaganda—that form the basis for the comments of the wealthy and powerful (and white and male) people who are increasingly their sources for "news." Without going into a big discussion of social class, one of the things that differentiates between the upper and lower classes around the world (and class is closely tied to race and gender) is that the upper classes are used to giving orders, while the lower classes are used to following orders.

Now imagine that a politician or military official claims or implies that the U.S. has the "right" to give the orders in Iraq, or at the U.N. security council, or anywhere else it chooses. You can imagine that such claims might sound different to a journalist who has been socialized to give orders than they would to a journalist who is accustomed to taking them. And if we had better racial representation in the newsroom—as in, more journalists of African or indigenous American descent, members of groups who were and are on the receiving end of colonial order-giving, not to mention genocide—it might be even more likely that the assumptions underlying such statements by today's "newsmakers" would be questioned.

So the "professionalization" of journalism, while it has clearly brought some improvements over the "old days," also has made the profession more homogenous in class terms, and has not seriously challenged the long-term pattern of domination of the news business by white males.

To sum up, it is increasingly the case that the journalists upon whom we all rely to ask questions and interpret the events of the day are located in a similar spot in the social hierarchy as are their powerful sources, and will tend to see the world through a similar lens.

Media and Propaganda, How it Happens: Summing It All Up

This series has gone on for a number of issues now (it started five weeks ago!), so here is a brief summary of what it's all been about:

1. NATURE OF THE BUSINESS. What we call "The Media" is a business involving the sale of consumers to advertisers. What we call "The News" is really just the packaging that is used to deliver those consumers. Having good packaging is important, but it's not why news corporations exist.

2. PROFIT. The modern news corporation is only a subsidiary of a much larger corporation, one that cares nothing about "news," or the good citizenship that the news is supposed to support, or anything else that you might think defines "the media." The parent corporation demands nothing but high profits, however they can be gotten.

3. TWO LEVELS OF PROPAGANDA. Propaganda operates on two levels, on the overt level and on a deep level. Overt Propaganda is the specific thing you are supposed to believe, and Deep Propaganda is the general idea or ideas that make it believable. An example of Overt Propaganda would be the idea that racial profiling makes sense. The Deep Propaganda that you would have to believe for that to make sense would be the belief that something called "race" actually exists, and that it somehow determines behavior.

4. WHAT QUESTIONS ARE OFF-LIMITS? Some ideas are so widely shared that they are rarely questioned by the media. Instead, they are assumed to be true, and function to organize and make sense of the daily news flow. These ideas I refer to as the "ABCs of Propaganda." These are our society's generally-accepted Attitudes, Beliefs, and Conceptions about the world. By failing to question these ABCs, the mass media in effect perpetuate and reinforce them.

6. WHAT QUESTIONS ARE OK? The job of the journalist is to ask questions. The writing down of the answers to those questions is what we call "the news." In the modern media industry, a successful journalist will habitually ask—and answer—the "right" questions, and avoid the "wrong" ones, in line with the prevailing ABCs.

5. THE CLASS MAKEUP OF JOURNALISM. Modern-day journalists are more privileged than their working-class predecessors, and thus less likely to question (or even notice!) the prevailing orthodoxy of ideas. Should any aspiring journalists pass through the journalism school socialization process and still retain any intentions of seriously challenging the ideological orthodoxy, the internal systems of promotion and sanctions within the corporate news environment will generally prevent them from ascending to positions of authority.

6. INVESTMENT, NOT CONSPIRACY, BREEDS PROPAGANDA. A similar process is at work at the institutional level. That is, the media institutions that will thrive will be the ones that generally behave in ways that suit the needs of the wealthy individuals and/or corporations that have the resources to invest in the media. These interests do not "conspire" to propagandize the population. It's simply that the monied interests in a culture will, over time, tend to invest in things that don't rock the boat. And, equally important, dissenting or counter-cultural media institutions will fail to attract the investments needed to reach a wide audience.