Those of us in the press love to say things like “Those of us in the press.” It makes us feel worthy and important and part of something. Ask those of us in the press–and that’s “press,” not “media,” the latter including the TV networks and their low-budget radio cousins–what the hell we’re about and most of us, after some languid, Front Page-ish cynicism, will eventually get around to a modest mumble about “giving the republic the information it needs to govern itself.” I would, anyway. The phrase was drilled into me in a class on First Amendment law by a professor who besides being smart as hell had the jowly mien and sarcastic drawl of a well-schooled W.C. Fields. (“Wyman, gimme the facts in Virgil v. Time,” he’d say, with rather the same intonation as Fields saying, “Water? Never drink the stuff. Fish fuck in it.”) He loved the Socratic method and had a simple faith in the press’s ability to balance the excesses of governmental power. One day in class, a student made a not-too-sophisticated remark about certain of the powers that be, including the press, being “all in it together,” and the professor pounced.
“No, sir.”
“Why?”
Scenes like that are important for their prevalence as well as their meaning. In one sense, they represent merely the innocent sarcasm of the deluded, but, as Ben Bagdikian points out in his impressive and topical book The Media Monopoly, when it’s the press that’s deluded there’s something larger at stake. I can live with all of America’s 7-Eleven franchisees getting together for a huddle and exiting with the unanimous and pleasurable feeling that the average 7-Eleven’s floor plan is infinitely superior to that of the competition; that’s a harmless delusion–if you’re not a shareholder, you’re in the clear. But with the press, delusion is more important, on about three levels. The first is that it’s the press’s job not to be deluded: all that cynicism is at once a cover-up and an example of the heavily romanticized but still very real worldview that its practitioners use as a crucial grounding device. (“You were a little soft there on X” remains a slur in all of the mainstream and, interestingly, most of the alternative press.) Second, a press deluded about itself is dangerous–given its all but codified place in our makeshift balance of powers, a press that doesn’t know itself is close to the political equivalent of a driver who’s lost his way.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
What gives offense in my professor’s obviously rehearsed routine is not that it dismisses the potential of an international government-press conspiracy, but that it ridicules the idea at the same time it ignores the steps we’ve already taken down that path. In the U.S., at least, it is not unreasonable to worry about the ever-more-concentrated, ever-more-uniform, and ever-more-powerful position of the press in society. When institutions are concentrated, uniform, and powerful, they don’t have to meet every day, or even once a year, to be sure that everyone is with the program. It’s amazing how similar the economic and political philosophies are of the people who control our institutions–government, the press, industry, labor, the political parties–and after a while you get the feeling that it all just comes naturally to them. How can the press balance the excesses of government power when it essentially shares it? When its corporate boards have interlocking directorates with gas and steel companies, with IBM, or with defense contractors? When a defense contractor owns a TV network–as GE does NBC? When media corporations become so big–own so many papers, so much land, so many TV stations–that issues like corporate tax rates become not items of political debate, but matters affecting millions and millions of stockholder dollars?
Creeping dumbness stalks the land not because kids don’t read Tacitus anymore but because they’re not taught to think. Newspapers could help, but most don’t, because having a thinking and well-informed readership has little to do anymore with their chief interest. There was hardly a sign in Rolling Stone’s survey that anyone was concerned about the massive transfers of wealth and power and the widening class gaps we’ve seen in the last ten years, the scary cracks in our economic system, the almost complete dissolution of the country’s antitrust laws, or any other of the almost infinite number of issues that are demonstrably more important than what we’re going to do about those welfare cheaters. The reason is that people don’t think about issues like that, because even when the press does treat them it doesn’t with the same zeal or frequency, and even then it’s careful to have its objectivity antenna out, and working. Corporations have press offices; welfare recipients don’t. There really isn’t an “other side” to corporate despoliation of the environment, the fact that cigarettes cause cancer or that Pintos used to kill people, or that the “economic violence” Jesse Jackson talks about ranges from political arm-twisting to murder, but newspapers readily quote people who defend such things, usually people who are paid to lie. What’s scary is that over the last 5, 10, or 15 years the corporate press seems to have become more efficient. People used to read Republican but vote Democratic, Liebling noted. It’s not that way anymore: now we seem to read Republican, vote Republican, and think Republican. Are taxes to be avoided? Of course they are. Is regulation bad? No doubt about it. Are unions destructive? Increasingly so. Twenty years ago we laughed at the contention that “the business of America is business.” Is there anyone today who doubts that the values of America are corporate?
Is he alarmist? What’s wrong with consolidation? Aren’t a lot of papers that are part of media conglomerates–the Philadelphia Inquirer (Knight-Ridder), the New York Times, the LA Times–quite good? And doesn’t corporate ownership help, in a way, by bolstering the strength of the press in the place it needs it most–i.e., in opposition to the government? Isn’t all this concern over ownership just a bunch of leftist hand wringing? It’s possible, I guess, but I think Bagdikian’s and Liebling’s central premise–that consolidation is de facto a bad thing–is sound.
