Sunday, August 7, 2022

Andrey Mir: "How the Media Polarized Us"

Last week FT Alphaville linked to George Will discussing this piece in Will's WaPo opinion column.
We on the other hand will go straight to the source.
With me doing a line or two of commentary.

From City-Journal, Summer 2022 issue:

The shift from ad revenue to the pursuit of digital subscriptions has turned journalism into post-journalism.

Public trust in the media has hit an all-time low. Common explanations for this crisis of credibility include bias, polarization, and fake news, but these causes are themselves effects of the tectonic, and generally overlooked, shift in the media’s business model. Throughout the twentieth century, journalism relied for its funding predominantly on advertising. In the early 2010s, as ad money fled the industry, publications sought to earn revenue through subscriptions instead of advertising. In the process, they became dependent on digital audiences—especially their most vocal representatives. The shift from advertising to digital subscriptions invalidated old standards of journalism and led to the emergence of post-journalism.

Everything we once knew about journalism depended on the model of the ad-funded news media. Advertising accounted for most of the news industry’s revenue during the twentieth century.

This business model provided a selective advantage to certain kinds of media. Since the revenue from copy sales was not sufficient to maintain news production, news outlets needed to attract advertising. As a result, media that relied mostly on the reader’s penny, such as the formerly influential working-class press, eventually lost out in the marketplace. The mass media that oriented themselves around the “buying audience”—the affluent middle class—received money from growing advertising and thrived.

In political economy, this selective effect is called “allocative control.” The ad money did not tell the media what to do; it just chose the media that encouraged its audience to buy goods. Media critics Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky argued that it affected the mechanism of discourse formation, as the media maintained a context favorable for consumerism and political stability, and thereby “manufactured consent.”

This business model was extremely successful. By the end of the twentieth century, the news media had reached the apex of their 500-year history. Even regional newspapers such as the Baltimore Sun possessed several well-staffed foreign bureaus. Never were the media as rich and influential as in their golden age, just 25 years ago. Plenty of journalists still on the job remember those glorious days.

“If the audience was supposed to be mature and capable, so, too, were journalists expected to avoid judgment.” (PVDE/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES)
“If the audience was supposed to be mature and capable, so, too, were journalists expected to avoid judgment.” (PVDE/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES)

Under the ad-based model, media capital represented a significant social force. It protected its interests, its market value, and therefore its independence. The abundance of money enabled newsrooms to develop an autonomy secured by the division between news production and ad-sales departments—a “glass wall” between ads and news. Preselected by ad money, news organizations geared toward affluent audiences became influential to the point that their autonomy determined their market value.

Ad money carried the risks of advertisers’ pressure in news production, which would have undermined newsroom autonomy, a source of reputation and therefore capitalization. So professional standards were elaborated to protect journalism from advertisers and establish the credibility of news coverage. Credibility was seen as a professional virtue but also as a commodity. “The theory underlying the modern news industry has been the belief that credibility builds a broad and loyal audience, and that economic success follows in turn,” declared the American Press Association in its 1997 “Principles of Journalism” statement.

Thus, paradoxically, the allocative control of ad money determined the allegiance of mainstream media to corporate elites (hence, “corporate media”) but also sustained high-quality journalism. Newsroom autonomy was protected by the standards of objectivity, nonpartisan and unbiased reporting, attention to the arguments of all parties involved, investigative rigor, the separation of fact from opinion, and other guarantees enshrined in the ethical and professional codes of news organizations.

The same set of professional standards that was meant to secure credibility and independence from ad money turned journalism into a public service. “The central purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with accurate and reliable information they need to function in a free society,” claimed the American Press Association’s statement. “Commitment to citizens also means journalism should present a representative picture of all constituent groups in society. Ignoring certain citizens has the effect of disenfranchising them.”....

Having read a lot* of Mr. Mir's words I think he is too facile in timing the polarization; that he is shoehorning the facts into his mental matrix. To be clear, this piece is far, far from as egregious an example as some of the books that were popular a decade or two ago: "Business Lessons From Attilla the Hun," where an author might have one decent insight but then tries to stretch it out for two hundred pages, jamming as many square pegs into round holes as necessary to get the needed word count. 
 
Rather, in Mr. Mir's case it's just that he doesn't put as much emphasis on the fact that American media has always been partisan, and that in the half-decade 1985 -1990 it went hyper-partisan. 
However, even if that observation is true (it may not be, who knows?), Mir knows more about media ecology than just about anyone writing on the topic. period.
*Previous links to Andrey Mir:
I'll get off this Andrey Mir, post-journalism kick, I promise. But not yet. (shades of St Augustine)

The reason for my borderline obsession is the fact that mass media has changed so dramatically over the last five or ten years, which makes it imperative to understand and possibly channel the forces that attempt to shape our everyday view of reality. And it really is getting close to the point that the call to arms "If it isn't censored, it's a lie" is a description of what is going on.

And that would be a shame, we like journalists and, among other reasons, get some of our best ideas from them.
Which begat:

You see how dangerous it can be to argue with Mr. Mir

Posted by at