The Party Message Machines, Not the Media, Control Political Discourse
Who actually chooses what issues Americans discuss
This is a story about two major political issues.
The first you have heard about a ton recently- voting rights. Indeed, you have probably heard that Republicans have passed numerous vote suppression bills around the country, and that the very fabric of democracy itself requires that Congress pass a bill called the For the People Act, which contains not only voting rights but campaign finance provisions and other reforms that Democrats believe will improve democracy and protect it from Republican vote suppression tactics. And you have probably heard how evil Sens. Manchin and Sinema are for supporting a filibuster rule that obstructs the bill’s passage.
The second, maybe you have not heard so much about- consumer arbitration reform. I have written about it before (of course, I have written about the voting rights bill too), but you haven’t seen a lot of press coverage, heated debates on CNN, or contrarian segments hosted by Fox News hosts about it.
These issues are both important. Obviously, if you have a right to vote, you should be able to vote. (At the same time, there are a number of studies that have shown that Republican vote suppression bills just make life more inconvenient for voters but don’t actually suppress the turnout very much.) And as I said in my piece on arbitration reform, the result of the enforcement of consumer arbitration clauses is simply that consumers who are injured by big corporations they do business with are unable to sue them and get meaningful redress, which means that big corporations can just abuse consumers and act egregiously.
But the media focuses on voting rights and never on arbitration reform. Why is that?
Now, of course, a Marxist (or even a follower of Noam Chomsky’s theories of the media) would have one answer- big powerful corporate interests control the media through direct ownership, advertising, and class solidarity, and have no interest in reporting on arbitration clauses. And that might be a part of it, though it’s worth noting that it’s not like the corporate media, for all its faults, never reports on corporate malfeasance. They actually report stories about big polluters or big frauds all the time.
I have a different theory. The media doesn’t do stories on arbitration, while catastrophizing voting rights in “our democracy is ending!” terms, because the party message machines have a great deal of control over our political discourse, and in this case the Democratic Party’s priority in messaging right now is voting rights, not doing anything about arbitration clauses.
I first noticed this with Republicans, and, in fact, I think everyone has noticed this with Republicans. More than a decade ago, when Republicans were pushing the “Ground Zero Mosque” non-issue (which you have surely forgotten), I wrote an e-mail to Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo site about this. Republicans would gin up an issue, turn it into the biggest thing in the world, and then completely forget it after it lost its utility.
At the time, I theorized Republicans did this because their actual policy preferences of things like low taxes and extensive religiously-inspired regulations of people’s private lives were unpopular. And that’s true as far as it goes. But I have come to realize that I was also witnessing a particular version of a larger political truth, which is that the party message machines can dictate what the political media talks about.
Remember Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation? Democrats decided that they were going to oppose Barrett’s elevation to the Supreme Court on the health care issue. Op-eds were written on the issue. Supreme Court journalists who are in the tank for the Democrats all predicted Barrett’s sure vote to overturn Obamacare in a pending case. Meanwhile, nobody talked about abortion. (Jud Apatow’s joke of having Katherine Heigl say “smashmortion” in Knocked Up is still a pitch perfect satire of politicians’ fear of raising the issue).
The thing is, we know Democrats made a messaging decision to talk about health care rather than abortion. But what you have to ask yourself is, “why should that bind the media?”. Shouldn’t media be able to bring politicians on their shows and ask them “isn’t what you are really concerned about abortion?” or “do you think ACB will vote to overturn Roe?” or “why aren’t you talking more about abortion given Judge Barrett’s previous views on the matter?”. But in reality, that isn’t what happens and really can’t happen.
Political journalists rely on the political parties for their sourcing and interviews. There is an implicit deal- we’ll give you content, and you have to let us get our message out. In addition, as media has become more ideological, journalists sympathize with the parties and want them to win anyway, so they become more willing conduits of the message. And the flip side of it is, a journalist who is constantly trying to take politicians off message is going to be seen as an enemy, and bookings and background briefings are going to dry up.
Plus- and this is a bit more legitimate- what politicians talk about is news. This point is often misunderstood or deliberately ignored by the sorts of people who are in the business of “media criticism”. They pretend to get mad when the media airs politicians from the opposing party talking about stuff they don’t like. But the fact of the matter is, that what our high public officials talk about is, in fact, news. If Ted Cruz is talking about some silly, made up issue, it’s still news that a Senator from Texas is talking about a silly, made up issue. Decisions can be made about how to cover it, but it is, in fact, news, and journalists should not get in the habit of ignoring politicians just because they are full of it sometimes.
But the effect of this is that party message machines can dominate the news simply by deciding what politicians will talk about. During the 2008 presidential campaign, there was a point in which almost every Republican politician was talking about Barack Obama’s controversial pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Well, if you are a journalist, there’s really nothing you can do but cover that. You can cover it skeptically; you can bash on the Republicans for doing that. But the fact that this is their messaging choice is news, and that means that the audience is going to receive the message.
For these reasons and perhaps others, the major determinant of what political issues our media talks about, and often we talk about, is the decisions of party message machines. We saw a great example of this last year. Black Lives Matter had been kicking around awhile, but had been basically ignored on the mainstream media. After George Floyd, Democratic politicians started talking about police abuse, and suddenly it was all over the media and dominated the political discourse for the summer. Then, just as suddenly, Democratic politicians dropped the issue, and we are no longer talking about it anymore. That’s how it works.
And the upshot of this is that all of us need to be a little more aware of what’s going on when we hear coordinated messaging. I am not saying voting rights aren’t important, but surprisingly few people are probably aware that the Republican vote suppression laws, while quite objectionable as policy, have not succeeded in preventing very many Democrats from voting. What happened is that Democrats did a lot of polling and focus groups that showed that “threats to democracy” polls well as rhetoric, and so they turned it up to 11, and that’s what the media talks about.
Meanwhile, nobody’s turned the consumer arbitration issue up to 11. Sen. Elizabeth Warren sometimes talks about it, but the Democratic Party has almost certainly concluded that a big push on the issue will offend a lot of corporate donors and more corporate-friendly politicians. The fact that the President of the United States comes from Delaware, an extremely corporate-friendly state that is the state of incorporation for so many American corporations, possibly plays a role as well. The fact of the matter is that there’s an actual crisis with consumer arbitrations- poor and middle class consumers who are injured or defrauded by corporations are finding they can’t sue and that the arbitration system is stacked against them. But until Democrats decide this is a messaging priority (or, even less likely, Republicans decide to steal the issue), those people will continue to be screwed over.