The trouble is not that the MSM is tendentious. The real trouble is that Americans have been indoctrinated to believe the MSM for so long (a century and a half) that memory of living man runneth not to the contrary. By now it is integrated into our culture, and people seriously assume that you are a kook if you express the slightest skepticism about it. To attack that cultural problem it is necessary to identify its source. That source does not lie in the founding era, but much later.In a discussion with a "media bias denier," the first question to ask is whether it was the newspaper sponsored by Alexander Hamilton or the bitterly opposed newspaper sponsored by Thomas Jefferson which was objective back then. The answer is that neither of them claimed to be objective; everyone would have laughed them to scorn if they had tried that. They were openly partisan, and everyone understood that it was up to the reader to decide which of them was in the right, about what. Pretty much like National Review and The Nation today.
So much for the theory that the First Amendment has something to do with "objectivity." Where did the theory of "journalistic objectivity" come from? "Newspapers," as they were already called back then, did not actually have a technological advantage over the general public at gathering news - in principle the owner of the local tavern probably heard everything that the printer heard, and therefore learned but little in the way of "news" from the "newspaper." So newspapers had a different function, which was more of an opinion expressing function to disseminate the opinions favored by the printers of the various papers. As well as commercial advertising, which does attract readers. The printing presses were relatively primitive, and the press runs were perforce small. And without a cornucopia of fresh news which would be news to the reader, there was little reason to print daily, and typically they were weeklies - and some had no deadline and just printed whenever the printer was good and ready.
Two Nineteenth Century developments changed that. First, in about 1830, the high speed press came into use. With a higher capacity available, the printer in a large market had a motive to appeal to a wider audience and therefore to not be politically specialized. But the transformational technology was the telegraph, and the organization which implemented the transformation was the Associated Press (founded 1848 as the "New York Associated Press." Suddenly AP members had "the wire." There was no longer any question of not having anything to say that readers hadn't already heard. The Associated Press was interested in incorporating all newspapers into it, and it was therefore aggressive about monopolizing the transmission of news by telegraph.
So here we had a novel situation - a single organization with nationwide influence over the public. Naturally, that raised eyebrows. But the AP had an answer to the questioning of their monopolistic status - "We have newspapers of all stripes of opinion in our association. We aren't partisan, we are objective."
So there you have it. The claim of journalistic objectivity is an artifact of the coordination of all the newspapers via the telegraph. Through an identifiable organization, the Associated Press.
There are two salient problems with the AP's argument. First, anyone who assumes that he is objective makes himself subjective by that very assumption. Secondly, the famous fractiousness of the AP's members is mooted by the transformation of the newspaper business implied in the AP newswire. The newspaper business hadn't actually been a true "news" business in the same way before the founding of the AP as it was after it. The AP didn't make the political opinions of editors coincide, but it did unite the newspapers around the proposition that news reporting was objective. Not because it is a fact - it certainly is not - but because acceptance of that belief by the public is central to the business model of the newspaper (and now also, of course, the broadcast journalist).
That was not the case before the advent of the Associated Press, but it has been for the past century and a half. And the applicability of O’Sullivan’s First Law - first to newspapers, then to the rest of society through the influence of journalism - follows from that.
O'Sullivan's First Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.United around the importance of journalism, journalists promote the reporting of superficial bad news, whose importance typically resides only in the fact that the journalist knows it before the public does, and can be the first to tell it. And that is in the promotion of criticism over performance - exactly what Theodore Roosevelt"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena -warned against. The promotion of criticism over performance is the essence of leftism. The existing fee-for-service and private insurance model "isn't good enough" because it isn't perfect. And so we must institute control over the system by people who are utterly unqualified to provide the service, but who promote the idea of their own moral superiority over those who actually do. And who promote their own wisdom over the judgement of the actual patient as to the relative value of money and the physician's and the pharmacist's services. It is all a bunch of cheap talk.The Real Joe McCarthy
The Wall Street Journal ^ | April 22, 2008 | RONALD KESSLER
This is changing; yet it has not entirely changed. We have gone from the Huntley-Brinkley-Cronkite-are-gods view of "news" to a much more cynical, suspicious view. People know the "news" is not news. They know it's tainted and biased. So that is a monumental victory, but an incomplete one, because they have not yet (for the most part) figured out how to compensate, how to acquire, quickly and efficiently, the information they can trust or rely on.
For example, many people still think of Rush or Boortz or whoever as "entertainment" first and foremost. I don't. I see them as news analysts.
What we are left with is a public that still is at the mercy of the general agenda of the drive-bys ("global warming," the homosexual agenda, the "can't-we-all-get-along"-ism), but on specifics they depart substantially, usually when it affects them. "Well, I KNOW that's not true because . . . ." But for the rest of it, they just swim along. It's not that they actively accept the socialism and one-worldism preached by the drive-bys, but rather they have to some degree internalized these messages, especially that of "tolerance" and "environmentalism," the drive-bys two biggest successes.
Thus there is a sharp disconnect between individual "news items" that people challenge and distrust, and the drive-by agenda that they passively digest. Changing the latter is immensely difficult.
Finally, on the control of advertisers, many of these marxist notions are obviously silly. Advertisers engage in massive amounts of surveying, focus grouping, and so on trying to see what messages appeal to their customers. These fluctuate wildly depending on the product. (Some people buying cars want freedom and power, some want style, some want "Green.") In other words, finding a political agenda for advertisers is a fool's errand. But even saying they have a "money" agenda misunderstands the fact that they are driven by so many different consumer desires that there is no ONE political message to support.
Therefore, many advertisers/companies jump on the perceived bandwagon of the day. Now it's "green." Young, "hip" products, like clothing stores/lines are tapping into "tolerance" or homosexual themes. (Yes, it doesn't hurt that behind the scenes they have lots of people in power in their industry who are homosexuals). But a study of rock music in the 1960s/early 1970s is instructive. The authors found rock music was pro-Vietnam war or neutral prior to the shifts in public opinion, and only then were anti-war songs aired. In other words, the music industry---even rock music---was a follower, not a leader.
This gets back to the subtle shaping of American attitudes as opposed to the harder "news" that they often question or reject, which is precisely why we have John McCain as a candidate. To the large number of "middle-of-the-road" Republicans who have been influenced by this drive-by culture, they don't agree with many of his positions but completely identify with his "can't we get along" attitudes; they want a war hero, but not a belligerent one; they want a deficit hawk, but don't trust supply-side, despite the evidence ("just don't sound right, cutting taxes=more money for government"); and they want a national health care "plan" but recoil at any trappings of "socialism." They want cheap gas, but are terrified of being viewed as "anti-environment." They want conservative judges, but hate the political bloodshed that must accompany their nomination.
In sum, the "new media" has exposed the drive-bys as biased in their specific coverage and facts; but has yet to destroy their "cultural credibility" that so influences the electorate.