Fake News Is Not the Real Media Threat We're Facing

[babylonsister]

https://www.thenation.com/article/fake-news-is-not-the-real-media-threat-were-facing/

Fake News Is Not the Real Media Threat We’re Facing
What the conservative media machine does is much more dangerous.
By David A. Bell
December 22, 2016



From all the recent hand-wringing about “fake news,” you would think that the hand-wringers had never stood in a supermarket checkout line, surrounded by 72-point headlines about alien abductions and miracle cures. Fake news has been around as long as real news, as any historian of early modern Europe can tell you (Renaissance readers gobbled up stories about women giving birth to rabbits, and men from Africa with faces in their chests). Social media has certainly transformed how fake news circulates, speeding up its circulation and extending its reach and impact. The temptation to blame many of our current ills on it—and by extension, on Mark Zuckerberg—is understandable. But the hand-wringing has in fact distracted attention from a much more important problem involving the American media. That problem is not fake news but the continuing delegitimization of real news by American conservatives. This delegitimization has been taking place for a long time (as The Nation’s Eric Alterman has meticulously reported, and as even some conservative media figures have admitted), but during the past year it has taken a frightening new turn. If the mainstream American news media are to have any hope of avoiding potentially catastrophic results—both for themselves and for American democracy—they need to change how they report on American politics, and on the ideological apparatchiks they continue to describe, misleadingly, as “journalists.”

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Unfortunately, up to now the mainstream media has shown absolutely atrocious instincts in responding to this phenomenon. Above all, they have simply failed to acknowledge and report adequately on the role that the conservative media machine now plays in American politics, and the way it has delegitimized real news. Consider the fact that in the month before the election, The New York Times mentioned Rush Limbaugh in eleven stories. Eight of these were opinion columns of one sort or another, and one was a magazine story on Hillary Clinton. Just two were news stories, neither of which focused on Limbaugh himself. But Limbaugh has about 13 million listeners. While his influence has waned somewhat over the past few years, conservative politicians still quail in fear of his disapproval. He has more influence on American politics than nearly all American elected officials. He played a non-negligible role in the presidential election—in large part because of his ability to convince his listeners to distrust any revelations about Donald Trump that appeared in The New York Times. Did he not deserve more coverage than the Times gave him?

Unfortunately, the mainstream media still tends to treat figures like Limbaugh, Hannity, and Coulter as “conservative commentators,” as if they were nothing more than slightly rabid versions of William Safire, or right-wing counterparts to Nicholas Kristof and Maureen Dowd. The term suggests a tidy equivalence between left and right, in which each side has its own flock of columnists, radio hosts, and television personalities. But Limbaugh and company are not “commentators,” who might have an ideological slant, but who can also be expected to think through each issue they tackle on its own terms, with due attention to verifiable facts. They are ideologues, who concoct their broadcasts and columns with the sole goal of advancing the fortunes of their own ideological camp in what they openly describe as an apocalyptic conflict to save America. They make no pretense of thoughtfully weighing the pros and cons of the issues they discuss, and never—ever—acknowledge that the other side could have a point.

It is long past time that the mainstream media acknowledge that whatever equivalency once existed in American political life between liberals and conservatives has long since disappeared. The point is not so much that the conservative movement has turned extreme, although of course it has. The point is that the conservative media machine, and a majority of Republican officeholders, up to and including the president-elect, now form part of a coherent, united ideological apparatus that has fought with enormous success to capture the principal levers of power in this country, and that attempts systematically to discredit and demonize anyone who opposes it. It has become an illiberal (in every sense of the word) political party of a sort the United States has never before known, one that bears striking similarities to fascist and communist parties that operated within democratic societies in the 20th century. And the members of it who work in broadcast studios and so-called newsrooms are not journalists. They are the party’s media arm, full stop. They should be treated as such.

The mainstream media today is unfortunately in a very weak position vis-à-vis this party. Nothing that appears in the Times or on CNN can now make much of an impact on the people who live within the party’s steel-walled ideological bubble—including a very large proportion of Trump voters. As noted, new revelations, however damning and sensational, are more likely to intensify their support for Trump than to weaken it. But reporting on this party as a party, as an ideological apparatus, can still have an effect. Figures like Limbaugh and Hannity benefit enormously from the perception among their listeners that they are just commentators. In a grotesque, and enormously effective, act of projection, they denounce liberals for being what they themselves actually are: a ruthless ideological movement that cares nothing for verifiable facts. This self-representation is not challenged nearly enough by the mainstream media, which continue to portray these figures as journalists and commentators, rather than as ideological apparatchiks—indeed, as members of a conservative Nomenklatura. At the very least, the mainstream media should be identifying them as such, and fighting back far more vigorously against the conservative media machine’s delegitimization of real news. It should be reporting on Limbaugh and Hannity, Savage and Levin, Ingraham and Coulter, as often as it reports on the Republican “Freedom Caucus,” and it should respond systematically to their delegitimization of real news. When so-called conservative “commentators” attack The New York Times, the gray lady should not act as if responding to them is beneath her dignity. This tactic has not worked, to say the least. The Times should be covering the charges as part of the ideological battle now being waged in America, and it should be responding to them. So should The Washington Post, and CNN, and the rest of the mainstream media. If they don’t, then in the end, they could be signing their own death warrants.

[Wounded Bear]

1. Corporate media is an existential threat...nt

[treestar]

2. kick this is so true

You can see it when debating with them. They have "facts" no one else has heard of, telling us we are stupid because we don't know what they take to be true from right wing sources.

[progressoid]

3. Conservatives have been very successful in de-legitimizing the news media.

Hell, they even turned on Fox.