America’s Non-Elite Press - Liberalism Goes Corporate
By Richard Davis (08/18/04)
The ludicrous debate over whether America’s media are liberal or conservative--the liberal’s position being championed, suitably enough, by a second-rate TV comic--has centered primarily on television and the Fox News Channel, whose existence enrages liberals like Al Franken almost as much as does the Bush presidency. Any discussion of print media invariably focuses on the country’s elite newspapers, such as The New York Times and The LA Times, but elite papers make up only one or two percent of the industry. To understand what is happening in American journalism today one must leave the coasts and venture among the non-elites. There the news is not so good.
After 40 years of exuberant corporate buying, the country’s much-vaunted free and independent press has gone the way of mom-and-pop grocery stores. American print journalism is now virtually the sole prerogative of monopolistic newspaper chains, the 10 largest alone accounting for 50 percent of US circulation. Together, corporate chains control over 90 percent of dailies, most weeklies and, of course, nearly all hiring. This is a marketplace of ideas that is determinedly noncompetitive. Chains loathe competition and by gentleman’s agreement stay clear of each other’s territory--one town, one paper, one handsome profit margin.
You might think such pervasive corporatism would steer journalism naturally toward the right--or at least toward the center--but the opposite has occurred. As the chains took possession of the industry, the traditional laissez-faire liberalism of the media was itself corporatized. The resulting liberalism--institutional, bureaucratic, and increasingly ideological--is changing both the face of journalism and the very faces of the journalists who produce it. Driven by corporate culture and the rising ambitions of special-interest groups, it is this liberalism, socialistic at its core, that is besetting American newspapers and driving the industry inexorably to the left.
Not that traditional liberalism has vacated the premises. Journalists are overwhelmingly liberal and becoming more so, thanks largely to diversity initiatives and the advancing radicalism of liberal arts departments. Which is fine with the bosses. Liberalism has always been a boon to corporate opportunism. By leveling traditional values and authorities--promoting secularism and materialism as the only universal norms--liberalism destroys local economies and clears the way for homogenized markets and mass consumerism. Its monopolistic control over public discourse, both practically and ideologically, helps preserve market equanimity.
And liberals, notoriously apathetic and uninformed when it comes to business in general, can almost always be counted on to be looking the other way. The sprawling, corporate excesses visited upon communities during the past half century have all come while these self-proclaimed watchdogs were standing guard. They didn’t even bark as their own profession was devoured.
Though more programmatic than its traditional laissez-faire counterpart, corporate liberalism, a product of group-think, evolves principally to protect and maintain the group’s ideology, its patronage and, most importantly, its functionaries. Thus its preoccupation with conformity and control. Which is also fine with the bosses. Conformity is cost effective.
Not surprisingly, the agenda of corporate liberalism coincides perfectly with corporate "core values." It could have been conceived in a corporate boardroom, though in fact it was conceived in the academy and imported into corporate boardrooms through the multiculturalism factory of today’s journalism departments. Consider its agent of choice, political correctness, and its rallying cry, diversity.
Political correctness offers corporate media a first line of defense against potentially bothersome and costly incidents involving minorities. If it can’t be said, it can’t offend and that avoids boycotts and lawsuits. Keeping content safe and consumer friendly for advertisers, who pay 80 percent of the bills, is a top priority of chain management, though seldom expressed openly. Political correctness enables the chains to centralize both product and personnel, which satisfies the corporation’s desire for control as well as its liberal journalists’ desire for bureaucracy, particularly among its growing cadre of females.
A virtual army of PC and diversity commissars inside and outside of the corporation now sustain a tightening grip on the industry. Papers are routinely "audited" for their PC content--which means faces and names are literally counted to insure that enough (approved) minorities are included. The results are used in employee evaluations and by groups associated with the industry. In other words, a profession that is relentless in its attacks on police and government agencies for supposed racial and ethnic profiling engages in the practice with unashamed enthusiasm. And no one says a word.
PC’s censorial effect on content--virtually eliminating meaningful journalism, which is expensive and risky--allows the industry to markedly reduce labor costs, a goal always on corporate’s mind. PC journalism is innocuous, bland and superficial and can be produced by lower-paid, entry-level reporters who are as interchangeable as McDonald’s fry cooks. Though corporate media applaud themselves continuously for their diversity programs, is it just coincidence that diversity opens up a new pool of traditionally lower-paid workers for an industry whose pay structure long ago stopped attracting the best and the brightest?
Corporate media embrace diversity because they have no choice, politically speaking (a situation they themselves have inflamed), and because they’ve been seduced by the promise that it will lead to greater market penetration, especially among Hispanics (it hasn’t). Corporate support for diversity is rationalized publicly with the half-baked but fully racist argument that a paper must "reflect" a community’s ethnicity to be "accurate." That has thrust a virulent quota mongering into the newsroom concerning both staff and content.
Despite the rhetoric coming from diversity ideologues, America’s media are not run by hardcore bigots trying desperately to keep minorities out. Newspapers face the same problem encountered by another liberal institution, public schools, whose teaching ranks have an even lower (much lower) black and Hispanic representation--there are simply not enough qualified candidates. (Unlike with the press, however, no one blames teaching’s racial makeup on racism. Why? Teaching is 90 percent white female. Racism is 100 percent white male.) Journalism, like teaching, is intellectually (and literarily) demanding, and that runs counter to most trends in minority culture. Compounding the problem, both professions sport starting salaries that are among the lowest of all college careers. Highly qualified minorities are easily enticed away by more lucrative professions, or are quick to abandon the rigors of teaching or journalism for greener pastures.
The ideologues don’t care. They want bodies in the seats, period, and they want the industry to find them and adopt special measures to keep them there ("mentoring" is how they refer to it). Anything less is racism. For a conscientious editor, whose staff already has been reduced by corporate, that presents a dilemma--hire the best candidate available or bring in a social hire who is less qualified and, more often than not, highly politicized (journalists today are first and foremost proxies of their racial or "minority" clans and are expected to behave as such). Of course, he really has no choice. Reports have exposed the deleterious effect this politicalization is having on American newsrooms, but they’re dismissed as simply further evidence of the continuing racism of white staff members (who are among the most liberal, least racist workers in America).
To coerce compliance with diversity mandates, the industry each year tabulates and publishes the racial and ethnic ratios of newspaper staffs across America. These staff ratios--"Newsroom Diversity Indexes"-- are being used unabashedly by industry-related groups to set ethnic and racial quotas (just don’t call them that!) and to target newspapers that fall short--all part of a growing nationwide campaign to colonize newsrooms and corporate offices with hires who carry the ideological banner of these groups, most of which have far-left social agendas (racial, sexual or ethnic). Not a single one of these groups, or any of the approved "minorities" included in diversity efforts, could even remotely be classified as moderate or conservative.
These groups now demand, and receive, a privileged seat at the news table, a task made easier by the concentrated nature of ownership. A statement from a recent article on diversity in the online journal of the Newspaper Association of America sums it up patronizingly well, "Editors and journalists at newspapers are learning how to consult with members of the minority associations to ensure accuracy in coverage." That is, editors are vetting copy through approved diversity groups to ensure its political correctness. The minority group given as an example of an approved vetter--the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. In the next paragraph, the author instructs his untutored readers, "What works even better than having diversity on staff is having diversity in decision-making positions."
Surrendering de facto control of newsrooms to collective influences inside and outside of the industry--in effect, to socialize the industry--isn’t much of a stretch for corporate journalists who are already bureaucratic functionaries accustomed to PC journalism. A tight job market, cost-cutting corporate environments and the ever-present fear of being labeled a racist provide all the motivation necessary. That is why stories critical of political correctness or diversity never appear in chain newspapers, despite widespread dissatisfaction among traditional journalists.
And so journalists quietly assume the character of social workers. When postmodernism ejected truth and objectivity from the journalistic pantheon and substituted relativity and group perspectives, journalism shifted its primary mission from gathering news to mediating group "voices," as the protector of approved diversity. Journalists insure that these voices, seen as historically suppressed, get an adequate airing, and that nothing perceived as offending the sanctity of these groups’ perspectives gets through the PC filter. And very little does. Stories are routinely suppressed for PC reasons, and content is created solely to satisfy the demands of the approved groups--that is, content and content selection have become ideological. An entire panoply of topics is now assiduously avoided as too sensitive for the community and/or corporate. Politically incorrect editing, by intention or mistake, is career-ending.
This socialization process has been particularly evident since 9/11. Not only has there been a concerted effort to insulate the public from news seen as potentially disturbing--and to enforce an exacting political correctness in the reporting of what content is permitted--but the media consciously present countervailing or "manufactured" news to manage the public’s mood and response. Thus on 9/11 accounts of the widespread celebration throughout the Muslim world over the attacks was routinely suppressed (and remains so). Yet by that evening virtually every corporate media outlet was running original stories about Muslims in America who had been "victims" of reprisals, though most of the examples were ludicrously insignificant. To corporate media, insinuating that mainstream Americans are racist vigilantes had greater facticity--and social value--than a factual story about Muslims rejoicing over American deaths.
In fact, corporate papers have been filled with fawning stories about Islam and local mosques since 9/11, not to edify the public about Islam--only positive spin is permitted--but as a Big Brother effort to implant tolerance within the minds of their readers. Indoctrinating the public in right-thought has become a primary mission of American socio-journalists.
Will readers continue to buy socialized journalism? They’ll have no choice if they want a newspaper. Media monopolies are among the most secure in the marketplace. The internet provides only a meager bit of competition, and the conglomerates are moving aggressively to take control of that medium as well. Not long ago Americans were taught about the evils of monopolies; you don’t hear much about that these days, certainly not from the media.
The biggest threat to socialized journalism probably lies within itself. It produces a low-quality, distrusted product, which makes it vulnerable as America’s appetite for newspapers declines. Some forecasters predict that newspaper readership among young adults may drop to as low as 10 percent in a decade or so. Surveys repeatedly indicate that readers are unhappy with what they are getting and that their respect for journalists has slunk off into used-car territory.
And that includes minorities, who want what everyone else wants--good all-around news coverage. Insipid, patronizing stories written by PC journalists, even if those journalists are people of sufficient color, are paltry substitutes. The obsession with diversity PC journalism is not only destroying journalistic quality and integrity, it is simply bad for business.
Whether the corporate CEOs will ever connect the dots between declining sales and growing customer dissatisfaction remains to be seen. Journalists have historically blamed readership declines on extraneous causes--television, busy lifestyles, declining literacy, etc. Never have they assessed any of the blame to themselves, which explains the liberal hysteria over Fox News. The suggestion that there just might be a nonliberal news alternative and that the public might prefer it threatens both their world view and their careers.
But Fox is just one outlet, and the CEOs seem more content at this point to sustain profit margins by cutting costs rather than reforming the product. If the CEOs ever do connect the dots, liberal journalists might get a lesson in just how much ideology really means to profit-hungry capitalists. Until then, the chains will continue to consolidate their monopolies; the special-interest groups will grow more influential; newspapers will become more insipidly ideological; and the talent level of the profession will descend further into mediocrity. For American journalism today, there is no good news.
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