Media Criticism Is a Racket
It's big business because partisans eat it up; meanwhile, the common biases of the mainstream media are far less ideological
We are a nation of press critics. Everyone criticizes the media. (Even me.) And press criticism is big business- from the highbrow NPR “On the Media” to the more base Fox “MediaBuzz”. Online press criticism is popular too- blogs and online publications are always writing about cable news coverage, there are ideological organizations (Media Research Center) and individuals (Eric Boehlert) who make careers out of constantly repeating that the press is biased against their political team, and Twitter is awash with takes such as how Fox is supposedly not covering the news when it is favorable to President Biden. Everyone hates the press.
Of course, we don’t actually hate the press. We love the press. The mainstream media is mainstream precisely because it makes boatloads of money. Cable news networks are profitable, talk radio is profitable, and at least the big national newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post are profitable. We read and watch, we love to read and watch, and we are like the baseball fan who is constantly criticizing her team’s errors on the field but tunes in every day to watch the next game.
Except, it isn’t quite like that either. Are we really criticizing errors? No, actually not. When you see press criticism online, there’s a simple test for determining whether it actually makes sense as press criticism: ask yourself what the person’s theory of what the press should and shouldn’t cover and how it should cover things is.
Here’s an example. There was extensive recent criticism of press outlets who went to the border to cover the issue of immigration, and called it a “crisis”. Outraged Democrats went on Twitter to blast the press for this. But what’s their theory of coverage decisions? Is the point that reporters shouldn’t go down to interview people crossing the border? That people crossing the border is not a story? That whether we have enough asylum officers and immigration judges, whether we are paroling people into the country, and whether smugglers are taking advantage of the situation are not newsworthy? Obviously, none of that makes sense. But this is the thing- people aren’t getting mad at the media for covering stuff that isn’t news. They are mad at the media for making their political side look bad.
Or take the depressingly common phenomenon of counting “mentions”. Here’s a good example from Eric Boehlert:
What’s the problem with this? It’s pretty simple: what’s the baseline for the proper number of Gaetz mentions? Without more analysis, it’s possible that Fox is correctly weighting the story whereas CNN and MSNBC are having a field day with it because it makes a hated Republican congressman look bad, or even just because of the oldest reason at all for covering a sex scandal: because it involves sex and viewers like that stuff. Or it’s even possible that everyone is overcovering it, because, after all, all we have are a few unnamed source leaks and nobody’s confirmed that Gaetz slept with a 17 year old girl or brought her across state lines with criminal intent. Under normal journalistic standards, that sort of thing would counsel caution. (It took the media a long time to go after John Edwards’ sex scandal, because while the National Enquirer had figured out what was going on, there wasn’t enough confirmation of the story to justify mainstream media coverage.)
Or maybe everyone is undercovering it. I doubt that one, but the point is, counting mentions tells you nothing. Why do you see this tactic so often (Boehlert’s Twitter feed is particularly replete with it)? Because it manages to make whatever media outlet you want to criticize look bad, and appears to be an objective, data-based analysis. But it offers no theory or analysis of what the media should actually do. Because that’s not the point- people who subscribe to Eric Boehlert’s media newsletter just want to bash on the media every time it makes a coverage choice that helps conservatives.
And in that sense, this is not press criticism at all. It’s just trying to browbeat the media and rile people up every time the news coverage helps the other team.
What does actual media criticism look like? Actual media criticism starts with a notion of what the media is supposed to do, and then evaluates media conduct according to that metric. So let’s go back to my Gaetz sex scandal example. One persistent bias of the media is that it loves sex scandals. Sex sells. So sometimes entirely silly stories, like the time Gary Hart was photographed on the S.S. Monkey Business with Donna Rice in his lap, become media sensations even though they aren’t really very newsworthy when you think about it. A serious critic of the media might evaluate the coverage of Gaetz in light of the media’s known predilection to overcover sex scandals- is this different because of the specific allegations against Gaetz, how much does it depend on whether Gaetz really violated any laws with a 17 year old girl, should congressmen be shamed in the media for patronizing sex workers, etc.? The point is, the theory comes first: “this is how a media should act with respect to this sort of story”. Then you evaluate actual media conduct against the theory.
And the media does have real biases! Biases towards such things as sex, bogus culture war “scandals” (I’m looking at you, reporters who went wild over the Kamala Harris “book” story!), stories with compelling video footage, stories that specifically impact the Ivy League/private school set that many of them belong to, horse race coverage in political campaigns, etc. The media also has negative biases: against foreign news and stories that require translators, against any sort of detailed policy analysis, stories that have no video and just need to be read from a newsroom, etc.
There are also, obviously, ideological biases. Nobody really believes Fox News is fair and balanced (though their news division gets a bit of a bad rap sometimes, as a few hosts such as Chris Wallace try and keep things down the middle). MSNBC is pretty liberal, and CNN has gotten somewhat more liberal in the last few years. There are also situations where the news media can make choices in the way they portray current events that can really put a spin on things- two outlets can present the same anti-police protest as a basically peaceful demonstration that was busted up by violent cops or a riot that got out of control and threatened public safety. I don’t doubt that this stuff matters.
But our current crop of press critics really lack the credibility to suss that type of bias out, because they are always claiming that everything is biased against their team. That’s the business model. And they never hold anything the press does against any real theory of what the press is supposed to do. That’s not what their customers want.