I’ve owned Ben Bagdikian‘s The Media Monopoly for some twenty years, and have only just managed to get around to reading it. The edition I own dates back to 1987; its analysis of the growing monopolies in media ownership and their pernicious effect on political life in the US ring truer than ever before. As I noted on Facebook this morning, it’s a “depressing read.” That mood is created by our knowledge that the situation now, in 2014, is only qualitatively and quantitatively worse.
Bagdikian’s analysis is comprehensive and his critiques plentiful. Today, I’m going to point you to just one component of his analysis of the worrying reflection of corporate values in American news:
Despite raised standards in journalism, American mainstream news is still heavily weighted in favor of corporate values, sometimes blatantly, but more often subtly in routine conventions widely accepted as “objective.” One is overdependence on official sources of news….[O]veremphasis on news from titled sources of power has occurred at the expense of of reporting “unofficial facts” and circumstances. In a dynamic and changing society, the voices of authority are seldom the first to acknowledge or even to know of new and disturbing developments. Officials can be wrong.
Overreliance on the official view of the world can contribute to social turbulence. Unable to attract serious media attention by conventional methods, unestablished groups have had to adopt melodramatic demonstrations that meet the other media standards of acceptable news–visible drama, conflict, and novelty. If they are sufficiently graphic, the news will report protests, demonstrations, marches, boycotts, and self-starvation in public places (though not always their underlying causes). But in the end, even that fails. Repeated melodrama ceases to be novel and goes unreported. Social malaise or injustice often are not known, by officialdom. Unreported or unpursued, these realities have periodically led to turbulent surprises–such as the social explosions that came after years of officially unacknowledged structural poverty, continuation of racial oppression [race riots in the 1960s], or damage from failed foreign policies [the revolution in Iran].
Over the years, the exaggerated demand for official credentials in the news has given the main body of American news a strong conservative cast….Where there are not genuinely diverse voices in the media the result inevitably is an overemphasis on a picture of the world as seen by the authorities or as the authorities wish it to be.
Bagdikian’s critique certainly puts modern critiques of the blogger into perspective; they remain part of the trend alluded to above.
As I noted in my mini-review of David Coady‘s What to Believe Now: Applying Epistemology to Contemporary Issues, (Blackwell, 2012) his work, which offers a spirited defense of bloggers, rumors, and conspiracy theories in Chapters 4 (‘Rumors and Rumor Mongers’), 5 (‘Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Theorists’) and 6 (‘Blogosphere and Conventional Media’), is:
[U]nified by two closely related themes, the importance of free public channels of communication and dangers of overcredulous deference to formal authority.
Coady thus points out how our politics is impoverished by an epistemic virtue gone wrong: we seek to be conscientious believers but end up believing too little. Bagdikian’s prescient analysis finds adequate philosophical support here.
