When Attorney General Palmer started his so-called “radical raids.” so many newspapers entered into the spirit of that infamous piece of witch-hunting that the reputation of the American press suffered heavily.”
So much for the press’ “superior” performance nine decades ago. Did anything really change since then? Let’s look at the “output”— again.
• Did the press stop “Tailgunner” Joe McCarthy in his tracks when the Republican senator started pulling rabbits out of his hat, which the media, along with many other powerful opinion forming institutions, could have easily done? Nope. He practically had to self-destruct by hubristic overreach before the puppeteers upstairs decided he’d become a liability and threw the switch to cancel his show (mostly because, in search of more headlines and power, the opportunistic senator had begun to insinuate that the Army was crawling with Reds). With a real quality press McCarthy and the whole stinking anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s would not have happened.
• Did the press stood in the way of the “forgotten war,” our cynical imperial war in Korea? Nossirreee. With a real quality press Korea would not have happened.
• Did the press stop our cynical and even more murderous imperial war in Vietnam? Did it expose its off-the-charts hypocrisy and immorality? No again. With a real quality press Vietnam would not have happened. (Let’s recall this was the “golden years” of TV journalism, with names such as Murrow, Cronkite and similar press heroes emblazoned on the profession’s escutcheon.)
• In the same postwar period did the press expose—on its own— the shameless and criminal abuses of the great industrial monopolies, drugs, cars, food, etc? No. It took a crusading populist Senator from (of all places) Tennessee (Estes Kefauver) to conduct revealing hearings on these oligopolies (the story was quickly swept aside), and the work of an outsider to the media, Ralph Nader, to blow the whistle on the automotive cartel’s deliberate underperformance.
In more recent times, why didn’t this supposedly “liberal” media stop Ronald Reagan, a man whose political resume reeked with willful prostitution to the plutocracy? Let’s recall that it was the Reagan regime that inaugurated the radical right’s ascension to power, with a cast of necocon malefactors soon to find continued employment in the two Bushes’ administrations—and whose handiwork require no further comment on this blog.
The media did not perform its basic duties in the 1920s, nor in the 1950s, nor in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, or since the turn of the new century. Yet in earlier years there was far less media ownership concentration. So where is the significant correlation between quality and concentration? Where is this wonderful past, this period when the American press was behaving according to its own glowing mythical best?
Matters of degree you may say, and I’m not saying that some differences, however small, may not have important consequences in a monster nation of this size and power. One or two degrees of difference may spell life or death for hundreds of thousands or even millions of humans, animals, and other species. True enough. (The same logic applies to differentiate between Democrats and Republicans, for those who like to study quantum particles.) But that’s a different discussion, related to quantitative aspects of social institutions, not qualitative aspects. Perhaps the lesson of this cursory review of the American media record is that many people continue to confuse “numerosity” with true diversity. But as is the case with fractals, you can split an entity into innumerable pieces, and, as long as those pieces carry the same “DNA”, they will stubbornly replicate the same marching values.
We see this in media and we see this in any other industry or institution of the capitalist matrix we inhabit. In 1911 the Feds split Standard Oil, thinking that size was the culprit. It was as effective as King Canute ordering the waves to recede—do we have real competition today? How do you think we are being treated by the oil companies? The breakup of AT&T was initiated in 1974 by the U.S. Department of Justice antitrust suit against the telephone monopoly. Under the terms of a settlement finalized on January 8, 1982, “Ma Bell” agreed to divest its local exchange service operating companies, in return for a chance to go into the computer business, AT&T Computer Systems. Effective January 1, 1984, AT&T’s local operations were split into seven independent Regional Holding Companies, also known as Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), or “Baby Bells”. Did the public really get better service out of this, especially after de facto deregulation? Not really, because monopolies—and even subparts of a huge monopoly are grotesquely large entities—do not really compete, except in superficial matters. True price and quality wars are the exception, not the rule.
Sociology rules: It’s a class question, chump
Since the overwhelming majority of the corporate media—big or small—is perforce beholden to capitalist values and goals, then it’s the resulting sociology of the profession that trumps matters of simple size. As media critic Robert McChesney has pointed out in his intro to Danny Schechter’s classic, The More You Watch, the Less You Know,One of the important functions of the profession of journalism is to make journalists and the public regard issues of ownership and control as unimportant to explaining how the media operate.
And McChesney goes on to elaborate,
[P]rofessional journalism was born almost a century ago precisely during the era that newspaper ownership was consolidating and advertising was becoming the primary means of support. Urged on by the largest publishers, professional journalism was supposed to assure readers that the news could not be influence by owners or advertisers or the biases of the journalists themselves.
Noble intent, indeed, but what happened? What always happens: the logic of business, the irrepressible dynamic of the economy that owns all and controls all, soon blew away anything exogenous or inimical to the goals of the company or business in general, and in passing created a tacit set of workplace rules that no ambitious journalist concerned about his or her career is bound to disregard for long–or ever. As Ben Bagdikian himself has noted,
…professional journalism internalized the overall political values of the owners and advertisers (nearly identical, anyway), and recognized a decontextualized “neutral” coverage based upon “official sources” as legitimate news.
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