Left-wing media is crucial to the success of left-wing ideas…
by NATHAN J. ROBINSON
It’s tempting, when you write about politics, to think that you are useless. And if the received view of political media is correct, you probably are: people choose the news sources that they agree with, thus you’re speaking almost entirely to the already-converted. Financiers read The Wall Street Journal, liberal professors read The New York Times, alt-righters read Breitbart, racist uncles watch Fox News, democratic socialists read Jacobin, Stalinists read CounterPunch, and insufferable policy nerds read Vox. Every media outlet just reinforces already-held beliefs, news consumers build themselves an echo chamber, etc. It might even be worse than that: Ryan Cooper of The Week says that “95% of journalism is infotainment for the upper middle class,” meaning that even when the content is ostensibly “political,” in its function it bears no real relationship to politics. It’s just something for people to look at, with The New York Times serving roughly the same purpose for upper-middle class liberals that wrestling and motor racing serve for a different demographic.
There’s certainly good reason to be skeptical that journalism does very much. The idea that we should read the news to “be informed” has always seemed strange to me, since the process of becoming informed is treated more as a ritual than as an act with any obvious utility. That’s especially true because the entire concept of “news” is somewhat irrational. It’s not just biased toward the sensational and toward treating some people’s lives as more important than others, but it leads us to have a fundamentally warped view of the world, because it prioritizes sudden events over continuous facts.
But it’s important to distinguish between the statements “media doesn’t do very much good” and “media doesn’t do very much.” The fact that something is “infotainment” doesn’t actually mean it doesn’t have an effect, insofar as being drunk off infotainment can affect a populace. Every time I watch CNN I am conscious of the fact that I am not learning anything and slowly having my brain deadened. That in itself, though, means it is doing far more than simply parroting back my own opinions and worldview. I am far more inclined toward the “manufacturing consent” view of media, which says that mass media functions to spread an ideology favorable to the economic interests of those who own it, rather than the “echo chamber” view, which seems to suggest that media entities simply reflect and reinforce people’s existing inclinations.
It’s important to adopt the view that media creates people’s biases rather than reflecting them, because this has been precisely the philosophy guiding the creation of right-wing media, which has been incredibly successful in actually affecting its audience’s worldviews. A study of the effect of FOX News on its viewers showed that it had an impressive power of persuasion. When FOX News was introduced into a local television market, it succeeded in turning people more conservative; the study authors found that “Republicans gained 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns that broadcast Fox News,” concluding that “Fox News convinced 3 to 28 percent of its viewers to vote Republican, depending on the audience measure.” There’s a huge gap between 3 and 28, of course, but actually shifting people’s opinions to any measurable degree is an impressive accomplishment, and can make a difference in places where elections can turn on small margins.