The Ideological Side of Media Bias

Media critics from Thorstein Veblen to Theodore Dreiser to Upton Sinclair to, more recently, Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky, Norman Solomon, Thomas Frank and Matt Taibbi have made it clear over and over again that economics is the key to the news media's functioning in a society such as ours--who owns the media outlets and what their interests are, and how they make their investments pay; who subscribes to them and advertises in them; how they come by their news, who they fear as able to inflict financial pain on them by withholding advertising money, credit and means of circulation, or striking back with a lawsuit; how they hire and fire the staff that does the job they demand of them.

All of that, of course, has made the news media in a "free" society as much a propaganda organ operated by and for the powerful for their ends as the press in any more officially dictatorial one--and indeed it seems that with so many having covered this ground before so thoroughly, with results that are incontestable to any even slightly aware person, there is little anyone can add to all of the foregoing. Still, if economics dictates the fundamental task there is the distance to be covered between the fundamental economic interests behind the media and the specifics of the media's standards, procedures, practices, legitimacy--as seen in, for instance, the news media's notions of "objective" coverage, its stress on politics relative to policy, its understanding of the uses of expertise, its propensity for "both sidesism"--and it has seemed to me that "centrist" ideology has been hugely important in the mainstream media's mode of operation, the more in as that ideology has been a constant even as so much else has changed technologically, organizationally, commercially and even socially and politically as the institution evolved from the overwhelmingly local and print periodical-dominated press of Dreiser and Veblen's day, to the multinational corporation-controlled digital media of which Taibbi writes.