Dear Corporate Media:
In bringing us the 2016 election spectacle, you demonstrate once
again that the national mass media in the United States function,
consciously or not, as the guardians of “managed democracy.” That is,
as the distinguished political scientist Sheldon Wolin observed,
democracy that does not threaten the interests of, well, you, the
corporate elite.
For much of the campaign your entertainment medium called TV news has
been fervently attending to the demagogic campaign of Donald Trump.
Competing for audience attention, your cameras gravitate to the latest
outrageous comment of Trump (or Ted Cruz, or Ben Carson for that
matter). After all, the Donald was already a media-anointed celebrity
on reality TV.
As huge corporations, it is obviously in your immediate economic
interest to give the demagogues a lot of air time—they do grab our
attention, whether positively or negatively. And sure enough, as media
watchers like Andrew
Tyndall and Eric
Boehlert
have documented, Trump coverage on network news has radically
overwhelmed coverage of other candidates, most notably Bernie Sanders:
The three major news networks gave Donald Trump 284 minutes of
coverage from January 1, 2015 through November, as compared to 10
minutes for Bernie Sanders. The disparity on ABC
World News Tonight was even more staggering: 81 minutes for Trump, less than 20 seconds for Sanders!
The content of coverage of Bernie Sanders’ campaign has also been
telling. Initially, of course, Senator Sanders was viewed as a nobody
candidate on the very margins of American politics—until you media
started to notice that huge crowds were turning out to hear his message.
From that point on, the establishment has played up Sanders’
non-electability and/or lack of “realism.”
Now, with Sanders and Clinton finishing in a virtual tie in Iowa, and
Sanders the landslide winner in New Hampshire, you seem to have
panicked—nowhere more clearly than on the liberal paper of record, the
New York Times.
Times columnists from David Brooks on the right to Nicholas
Kristof and Paul Krugman on the liberal left have gone after Sanders
ever since his polling caught up with Hillary Clinton’s. Brooks’ penned
a plaintiff column, “Stay Sane America, Please!” equating Sanders with
Trump and Cruz as extremist candidates who are “not acceptable to all
parts” of their parties. Hmmm, I wonder whom he’s talking about.
On January 22, the liberal Krugman lectured the passionate Sanders
partisans on “How Change Happens,” warning them against preferring
“happy dreams to hard thinking.” Kristof chimed in recently with the
warning that Sanders’ bolder proposals simply “won’t happen” and that
voters won’t vote for a “socialist.”
The editorial board itself issued an unusual pre-primary endorsement
of Hillary Clinton as “one of the most broadly and deeply qualified
presidential candidates in modern history”—a one-term Senator and
Secretary of State with a record of devastating foreign policy
decisions? The paper did acknowledge that Sanders’ “boldest proposals …
earned him support among alienated middle-class voters and young
people,” but asserted that he did “not have the breadth of experience or
policy ideas that Mrs. Clinton offers.”
Others have chimed in as well.
The Boston Globe, once owned by the
Times, also endorsed Clinton. The editorially conservative
Washington Post attacked Sanders’ allegedly “fiction-filled campaign,” and
Post columnist Dana Milbank chimed in that the Democrats would be “insane to nominate” Sanders. A David Horsey column in the
Los Angeles Times
suggested Clinton and Sanders posed an “imperfect choice” for
Democrats, the latter because Americans were not attracted to “old guys
with stooped shoulders and white hair.”
Corporate media bias is also readily apparent in post-New Hampshire headlines and editorials.
The Boston Globe’s
lead headlines read “Trump Crushes His Rivals in N. H.” and “Bernie
Sanders Defeats Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire.” Note to Globe: 60%
is conventionally known as a “landslide.” Meanwhile from its lofty
heights, the Times assured Clinton that she “had no reason to panic,”
since, as the paper reported, she was clearly the “more experienced”
candidate with strong support from the Democratic coalition.
Up to now, you national media have obviously misjudged Bernie
Sanders’ appeal, narrowing it to “telling progressives what they want to
hear,” or more recently tapping into the “alienation” of youth and the
middle-class. But Sanders’ critique of the control exercised by
corporate and wealthy elites over our political system taps into
consciousness that has been building since the Occupy movement first
emerged in 2011.
Clearly, the more Americans hear Bernie Sanders, the more they like
what they are hearing: personal integrity, commitment to an egalitarian
democracy, and some profound truth-telling about the nature of American
politics. The campaign has galvanized a hopeful fervor around these
issues and has introduced into our political discourse issues that have
lurked on the margins for a long time—the very ones you media criticize
as “unrealistic.”
All the talk about “experience” and “realism” reflects age-old
American elitism, echoing back through our history. In the tumultuous
1930s, Harold Lasswell argued against “democratic dogmatisms”—like the
belief that people are “the best judges of their own interests.” A
decade earlier, journalist Walter Lippmann’s asserted that only the
“responsible men” of the “political classes” could discern the nation’s
“common interests.” The rest of us are just the passionate, misguided
“bewildered herd.” The Framers of the Constitution, themselves, feared
democracy –the “faction” of the property-less masses, or as Alexander
Hamilton put it, “the people, sir, are a great beast.”
The distinguished sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein has argued the
world historic capitalist system that has, one way or another, shaped so
much of world history for the last several hundred years has entered a
period of transition to something different. That “something different”
can be
more democratic than what we have or it can be less democratic.
It doesn’t take genius to catch the whiff of fascism in some of the
passions aroused by the demagogues on the right. But the enlightened
answer would seem to be the candidate, Sanders, who offers something
more democratic,
rather than the “politics as usual” candidates who offer at best minor
tinkering here and there in ways that bend to the interests of the
corporate elite.
It
may not happen soon, but the deep social fractures must be
acknowledged, and then healed, if progress is ever to take hold. (Photo:
Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images)
