Via Atrios, Jay Rosen has an interesting piece about how elite media determine what constitutes the “the sphere of legitimate debate”, how they do so while pretending they don’t, and how blogs and other new media are beginning to undermine elite media’s ability to make this determination unilaterally.
The sphere of legitimate debate is the one journalists recognize as real, normal, everyday terrain. They think of their work as taking place almost exclusively within this space. (It doesn’t, but they think so.)
[….]
This can be confusing. Of course, the producers of Meet the Press could say in a press release, “We decided that Pat Robertson’s CBN is now to be placed within the sphere of legitimate debate because… ” but then they would have to complete the “because” in a plausible way and very often they cannot. (“Amy Goodman, we decided, does not qualify for this show because…”) This gap between what journalists actually do as they arrange the scene of politics, and the portion they can explain or defend publicly—the difference between making news and making sense—is responsible for a lot of the anger and bad feeling projected at the political press by various constituencies that notice these moves and question them.
[….]As Len Downie, former editor of the Washington Post once said about why things make the front page, “We think it’s important informationally. We are not allowing ourselves to think politically.” I think he’s right. The press does not permit itself to think politically. But it does engage in political acts. Ergo, it is an unthinking actor, which is not good.
[….]
Now we can see why blogging and the Net matter so greatly in political journalism. In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized— meaning they were connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. But today one of the biggest factors changing our world is the falling cost for like-minded people to locate each other, share information, trade impressions and realize their number. Among the first things they may do is establish that the “sphere of legitimate debate” as defined by journalists doesn’t match up with their own definition.
Now, the problem here, for me at least, is not that the media is completely undemocratic. There are plenty of undemocratic institutions which seem to function well (the military is one example, universities are another). Nor is the problem that the elite media tends to focus on superficial, personal issues the public professes little interest in. The public also claims to be interested in making informed decisions about the products it buys, yet is influenced by catchy advertising campaigns.
The problem is that our current, elite-dominated media system produces bad outcomes. Most Villagers believe that the Bush presidency has been a complete failure (Broder has said this explicitly, though I can’t find a link right now). Many would even agree that the three interrelated disasters of the Iraq War, the destruction of federal bureaucracy by Bush (which encompasses the FEMA fiascoes, the politicization of the DoJ, etc.), and the financial crisis are unprecedented in modern American history.
Yet, there can be little doubt that their lack of interest in questioning pre-war propaganda, bureaucratic shennanigans, and the Bush fiscal policy contributed to these remarkable failures. And, looking back on the 2000 election — given that Bush was clearly a mediocrity and that the country was happy with the general state of the sate under Clinton — its clear that the nation “chose” Bush because they’d rather have a beer with him or some such. And only a fool would deny that the media’s anti-Gore, anti-Clinton jihad encouraged this attitude.
The trouble with our media elites isn’t that they’re arrogant, isolated, and disinterested in the public’s opinions. History is filled with arrogant successes. The trouble is that their particular brand of isolation produces such horrible effects. We should always remember that.
Comrade Stuck
That, and they have been plugged directly into the Corporate Watchtower and not independent of profit making that was originally agreed when TV was birthed/ when the licenses were handed out with the proviso that providing real news was to be a public service.
El Cruzado
Do they?
Just playing Devil’s advocate, really, but there’s no lack of disfunction at either of those institutions.
Xecky Gilchrist
…the elite media tends to focus on superficial, personal issues the public professes little interest in.
This is true, and it blows away the conventional wisdom that the tawdry state of American news reporting is what it is because the market demands it. Viewers choose among things that the different media outlets offer, and if the sphere of legitimate debate doesn’t include what the viewers really want, the viewers are SOL.
its clear that the nation “chose” Bush because they’d rather have a beer with him or some such. And only a fool would deny that the media’s anti-Gore, anti-Clinton jihad encouraged this attitude.
I agree with the second part, not so sure about the first. I think the have-a-beer-with metric was a pure media creation and that Bush was elected because the public was dumb enough to swallow the ideas that a) Republicans were good for the economy and b) Gore was as bad as the Villagers said he was.
Rachel
This is another instance where unbridled capitalism proves corrosive to the social contract. Our democracy depends on an informed citizenry making informed decisions, an impossibility when the market has congealed our news choices into a cross between Fox News and Entertainment Tonight.
Xenos
Why was the village so set against Gore, given that he was a villager born and bred, just like the Cokies and the Tuckers? It could not have been leftover animus against Clinton, could it? Maybe Gore did not leak juicy gossip to Little Russ an David Broder, and so he had no-one looking out for him and protecting him.
Or it is possible that Gore was a dull speaker who would not boost ratings every time he was on the news, just like the brilliant but insufferable John Kerry. While Bush was someone they could package into watchable news, a face that would not drive the masses to Wheel of Fortune every night at 7:05. I suspect the Wheel of fortune theory is the answer.
harlana pepper
I thank God for the progressive blogs and the intertrons. They brought me to Howard Dean and the early, much despised anti-war movement. That was a very lonely place to be, without the inter-tubes. They helped me to understand I wasn’t crazy just because everyone I knew disagreed with me and I felt part of a community and felt like I was doing something positive for a change. They validated my concerns and informed and educated me. I learned where the good sources of information were, where I didn’t have to muck through CNN type bullshit to get to a nugget of fact. And most important, they challenged and exposed the establishment media for the charlatans most of them are. Yay fer de blogs.
harlana pepper
oops, I said the blogs edumucated me and I forgot, that’s not a good thing, to be edumucated. See Sarah Palin, but not right now cuz I have difficulty watching her, I find her disturbing and creepy.
Danothebaldyheid
I have to say that I think that you are seriously and unremittingly wrong on this one. The problem with the media is precisely that it is undemocratic. As El Cruzado adroitly highlights, the military and academia are arguably as dysfunctional as any other authoritarian system – it is simply that we have no way of judging their performances (as long as people get killed and educated we assume everything’s ok).
Information is the world around us – we only construct an understanding of the world through the information that we engage with. The concentration of tools for information dissemination and retrieval in the hands of a few wealthy oligarchs has caused the world to appear as they (consciously or unconsciously) structure it to appear.
The "sphere of legitimate debate” has stretched precisely because others now have access to information and methods through which to structure it. This is democracy in action.
Next, these principles have to be applied to the institutions of power – it will happen, just maybe not for a long time.
Sorry to go on, but I’ve just finished a Political Theory MA and this subject is close to my heart!
BC
.
Hear, hear. I am an old fart and thought I was in a Lewis Carroll novel. I went online to find sources for a more skeptical look at the claims about the Iraq war. They were there and easily found, but for some reason our media elite decided to just parrot the Bush-Cheney line. I am of the opinion that the entire DC establishment just went crazy from fear of another attack and all they wanted was some assurance that it wouldn’t happen again. And then Bush used all the impolitic language – the bring ’em on, the brash braggadicio, etc., – and they just thought the new sheriff was in town and applauded. Same with the reluctance of reporters to use the word "torture" to describe what we have done – they’ll use "harsh interrogation methods" or some such sissified language. As Obama once said, they have to accept their failures.
sparky
@Danothebaldyheid:
har-de-har-har
If you really think that the institutions where real power resides are going do whatever you think they will (give access?) you need to get out more.
Zifnab
Three things.
First, the media does not exist in a vacuum. The GOP ran an aggressive political campaign going back nearly a generation in the run up to the Bush Presidency. They didn’t just waltz into office because Chris Matthews threw a snit against the Clintons. The entire GOP political machine had been egging on the refs for going on twenty years. Monica-gate wasn’t the product of evil journalists more concerned with panty sniffing than actually reporting the news. It was the climax of conflict between the Gingrich Congress and the Clinton White House going right back to the original Republican Congressional Takeover of ’94. You can blame the media for playing along, but you can’t blame them for starting the game.
Second, Bush didn’t win the election in 2000. Bush’s friends leaned on a SCOTUS packed with cronies from previous Republican administrations and they gave it to him rather than explore the massive voter irregularities occurring across the nation. So claim that the media tricked Americans into voting for Bush assumes that A) the GOP stayed home on November 4th, 2000 because Tucker Carlson and Peter Jennings were doing all the blockwalking and church stumping and fund raising and baby kissing necessary to put Bush in the White House and B) the Democratic Candidate didn’t maybe win some quarter million votes over his Republican rival because they’d all be totally snookered by too much evening news.
And third, and most importantly, I think the one guy who has really received a free pass in all of this is Ralph Nader. I’ve been told on numerous occasions that it was All His Fault(tm). The fact that you’ve left him out of your criticism proves how deeply unserious and shrill you’ve become, DougJ, and I’ll have none of it.
Jane2
I don’t agree that the blame lies solely with the elite media, as you put it. Republicans blame the elite media. Palin blames the elite media. You blame the elite media. Yet, somehow there are a Chosen Few (you and Red State, for example) who aren’t duped, who see beyond it.
It’s more complex than finding a straw elite media man and beating it to death. The media doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and the willingness of so many blogs to discuss nothing but the media issue of the day suggests to me that the Brave New Blog World isn’t much better at informing people.
DougJ
Yes. Exactly.
TheHatOnMyCat
This is a very interesting blurb. It just struck me (I mean, I knew it but didn’t know I knew it) that apolitical media is more dangerous than political media. For exactly the reason expressed the blurb: It’s an unthinking actor.
The apolitical media acts as if there were no political reality when in fact, there always is.
DougJ
Yes, I agree completely.
demimondian
@Jane2: I have very mixed feelings. On the one hand, I absolutely believe that the elevation of a broader set of voices to the class of opinion makers can only be a good thing. In this regard, Atrios’ example of the Clinton impeachment is absolutely on point: the overwhelming majority of Americans thought it was stupid, but a small minority of the Washington press corps played along with the he-said/she-said polka that the conventional wisdom imposed. On the other hand, I don’t like the self-righteous tone that a lot of commentary on the Rosen piece has. Hey, guys? You need to be listened to — but you also need to listen.
ricky
I got to observe Bush and Co. when he was Governor. It was clear to me that most people would not like to have a beer with him during the period in which he drank beer, which is why it took him so long to find a wife. And most of the people around him after he professed to stop drinking beer were not people who had a beer for any reason other than it was all their relative had to offer on their rare visit that had alcohol.
Gringo Starr
If only mainstream liberals hadn’t bought into the right wing bullshit about Noam Chomsky being a dangerous, America-hating radical, they could have figured this shit out back in the fucking mid-’80s when he wrote Manufacturing Consent, just to name one.
Christ. 2009, and this is apparently cutting-edge thinking for Democrats.
DougJ
That’s my feeling too. And the issue isn’t diversity for diversity’s sake, it’s diversity for the sake of improving the crap level of current dialog.
Corner Stone
@DougJ
The problem that I have observed is that most times when an outsider is successful at raising their voice to a level where they can be heard they rather quickly become assimilated.
slag
The problem I have with this kind of argument is that there seems to be no way to create a model from it that will prevent the same outcomes in the future. There’s got to be some room for improvement in the system and not just the participants in it; otherwise, we’re doomed to repeat the exact same mistakes.