VIDEO: How Profit Motive Distorts The News

And why liberals and Democrats should talk about it

A few readers have asked me to elaborate on the connection between Decoding the News and the rest of Off Message content. What’s a video series about media criticism (and really about, snooze, media literacy) got to do with a project that’s otherwise about fostering internal liberal critique, and dispelling the notion that vigorous debate betrays the home team in some way.

Here’s why it’s actually all just one project:

First, the culture I want to influence is broad: it encompasses all liberals, not just elected Democrats or self-described Democrats or people employed by the Democratic Party.

Second (thus) it’s scrutinizes at all of liberalism’s sacred cows, not just party leaders. And mainstream news elites are definitely a part of that rarified group.

Obviously many, many people from the center to the left feel free to criticize the legacy media. In the realm of practicing journalists and scholars, I keep the esteemed company of

Margaret Sullivan

,

James Fallows

, Jay Rosen, Greg Sargent, and others—public intellectuals who not only air their critiques fearlessly, they often air these same critiques! This isn’t lonely iconoclasm, and I’m not inventing the wheel.

Then outside the realm of practitioners, progressive social media teems with all kinds of media criticism, some fairly sophisticated, some not; some gentle, some biting. The media elite do not enjoy the same level of deference in this realm as Democratic leaders.   

But some liberals do practically conflate them. Prestige journalists (mostly small-l liberals) are in general highly sensitive to and often disdainful of public criticism. After Donald Trump won the presidency, newspaper subscriptions soared, the press became a sanctuary, outlets rebranded and raised money and clout by embracing the perception that they were generals in the twilight struggle against authoritarianism. Democracy Dies In Darkness and all that. A bunch of those liberals are still out there; the real Resistance was the content they read along the way.

Hang around with enough of us and you’ll meet, in roughly equal measure, people who think of New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman as a hero of the the Trump era, and who view her as its court reporter or even an abettor and ally of the administration.

(Ed aside: She has done some work I liked quite a lot, other work I’ve liked less so, and she’s done a ton of it—the sheer quantity is remarkable; also, let’s think of this as a Post-it note reminder for a future DTN episode on the concept of “access journalism.”)

So that’s the connection: I want readers and subscribers to have a more knowing relationship with mainstream political journalism, a healthy appreciation for what journalists do well and how to identify it alongside a healthy skepticism of the institution, without worrying that good-faith critique contributes to undermining Trust In The Institutions or makes you a handmaid to right-wing subversion. 

And these two ends connect in a circle.

One of my first entries here was to encourage Joe Biden and his White House to consider mixing it up with the press more directly—not with smears and bad-faith attacks, or to fan widespread distrust of journalism as a means of consolidating power, but, in well-chosen moments, to encourage a more faithful representation of the parties and their differences. That would be of obvious benefit of the public (truer news!) but it’d also help Democrats become more effective liberal leaders, piercing the distorting effects that often block the messages they want to move from the people they want to reach. 

And I think the line of criticism that ties both strands of Off Message together most efficiently is the distorting effect of the profit motive in the Trump era, which is the topic of this week’s Decoding the News.

Watch, enjoy, like, subscribe, and share!