Class and the Press
Much more than "media consolidation," the subject that I think deserves to get more attention is class. The trouble is that, irrespective of ownership, the important people in the media are all significantly more prosperous than your typical American. On top of that, the audience for "serious" journalism and so forth is more prosperous than a random sample of the public would be. And on top of that, richer readers matter more to advertisers than do poorer readers since there's more percentage in advertising to people who have more cash to spend. Without anyone getting together in a secret cabal clucking about a plot to kill the poor the result is a systemic class bias toward the problems and concerns of rich people.
You can see this perhaps most strongly and pervasively in the coverage of inflation. Certainly, inflation is problematic in various ways and accelerating inflation can do real wreckage to the overall economy. But there's a band in which non-accelerating, non-destructive inflation can exist. And whether a non-accelerating annual inflation rate of 1 percent or 2.6 percent is "good" or "bad" has a great deal to do with your personal financial situation. If you have a lot of debt, you'd be better off with a higher inflation rate. If you own a lot of stocks, you'd be better off with a lower one. But this goes totally unreflected in coverage of the American economy. The bulk of the writers and the implied audience of said coverage is asset-owning people, so the risk of moderate levels of non-accelerating inflation is collapsed with the universally problematic risk of accelerating inflation. As it happens, today's Paul Krugman column is an exception to this trend, but as of yesterday you'd be hard pressed to discover that this was even a debatable issue.
Then you just see questions of perspective. This comes up all the time in coverage of college education. Increases in tuition costs are treated as world-historical catastrophes, while increases in the cost of goods that working-class people buy aren't considered as big a deal. And besides that, there's a wildly disproportionate emphasis on issues related to very expensive private colleges, and even a disproportionate emphasis on the whole set of selective colleges, both public and private. In fact, huge socioeconomic swathes of the public are unlikely to send their kids to college and very unlikely to send the to a competitive admissions school. You almost never hear, however, about community colleges and the like even though these are a very important element of the education system.
At any rate, examples abound.
The crucial thing, it seems to me, is that this is both a big deal and not something it's clear there's a remedy for. Dispersing the ownership of the media isn't going to change anything. Nor would even an class-based affirmative action campaign seem to make a difference. The New York Times could hire a working class columnist, but then there'd be two options. Maybe nobody would read her column, in which case it wouldn't make a difference. Or maybe it would be wildly popular in which case someone would start paying her a lot of money to write it or offer her a big book deal.
The one counterveiling trend is that there's at least some reason to think the Internet is undercutting the basic financial model of journalism. It's possible that writing things that largish numbers of people enjoy reading will be much less lucrative relative to, say, plumbing in 2048 than it was in 1998 since I don't think technological advances or outsourcing will significantly undercut the economic model of the building trades.
A poor versus rich example of media attention: the safety problems of sometimes counterproductive air bags or occasionally (but rarely) exploding tires of SUVs had huge and propt attention. Then problem that light trucks and SUVs kill every year thousands of occupants of small cars because of avoidable design problems for years had scant attention (eventually it got some and industry is supposedly voluntarily, albeit slowly, correcting the problem).
This is a good example of a double bias: concerns of less opulent media customers can be ignored, concerns that go against the interest of a very important group of advertisers are adressed in a perfunctory manner at best.
The bright side is that in several years most of active news consumers will have broadband access and will be able to acess internet news sources that have a low barrier of entry and thus can be inherently more democratic than the old media.
June 16, 2006 2:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
There's a rough correlation between class [or income if that's what you mean] and literacy, isn't there? People who read books are going to get better jobs, generally, than people who don't. They will certainly do better in school. And their children are more likely to be exposed to books and reading and better schools.
Of course this perpetuates itself. It's not as though lower income/class people have no access to the "serious" journalism. The highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow stuff is usually on the same rack. But my own experience suggests that you need a little introduction to the harder stuff, or it seems forever intimidating. I distinctly remember as a young teen reading only the "newsmakers" section of my mom's Newsweeks, and then later being actually able to understand other parts, and then more other parts, etc. It was a gateway periodical to harder stuff, like the Economist. Lots of people who never get past "People" didn't have Newsweeks sitting around their apartments, is my guess.
Where's the unfair part? One huge glaring obvious perpetuator is public schools getting funded by property tax, so that poor neigborhoods get poor schools. I've never heard a politician mention anything about this, probably because it directly pits the haves against the have-nots for the limited resource of school funding, and the haves tend to vote more.
June 16, 2006 2:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Great points. I think this also plays into the ever-important "hack gap," since the only broadcast journalists or pundits who consistently make explicit appeals to working class viewers or listeners are rightwingers.
O'Reilly is alleged to paint the circumstances of his family as lower class than it actually was, and he appeals the "regular guy, middle-class" viewer explicitly or implicitly quite a bit. Same with Rush and with most other right-wing talkers, as well as with right-wing enabler Chris Matthews. When I hear them making evocations of class, it sure ain't white collar people they're giving a shout-out to.
That's got to be one reason that middle and lower-class people can vote against their economic interest: the working class heroes are rich guys who poor-mouth.
June 16, 2006 3:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Resentment is the stock-in-trade of O'Reilly and Limbaugh.
The fact that the Media are willing and ready to feed resentment in the service of reactionary politics tends to undercut Matt's thesis.
June 16, 2006 4:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, class, but also region. The only press who matter nationally are clustered in New York or DC or write from there. I'd guess they also were educated mostly at east coast universities. They don't have an ear for other regions or even smaller cities in their own region. They may have reacted to the red state election victories but I don't believe they have any ear for interpreting the results. They can't understand anti-war isolationist Iowans any better than they understand social conservatives in Kansas.
June 16, 2006 4:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
The crucial thing, it seems to me, is that this is both a big deal and not something it's clear there's a remedy for. Dispersing the ownership of the media isn't going to change anything.
There's only not a remedy if you're unimaginative. On the other hand the solution _would_ be very complex, and involve a diversification of our political system and then granting ownership over media to political parties. We need a multi-party political system in which each member would own a piece of the information media. So, I guess I agree, there is no conventional-thinking solution.
Less revolutionary semi-solutions are also thinkable. The most obvious is to fund and govern the PBS and NPR so they are independent of corporations, foundations, and the political party currently in power. It would make a big difference having just that one major information network independent of ownership by the owning class. Also, govt rules could encourage the diversification of media ownership, especially the radio and TV, toward non-profits and unions. This also would bring in a different, non-elitist perspective.
June 16, 2006 6:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Something that you're missing (or at least glossing over) is the difference between national and local media producers. Reporters, editors and producers for most local print and broadcast outlets don't make that much and are very much in contact with multiple groups in their communities. This doesn't necessarily translate into good journalism -- local TV journalism in particular is wretched pretty much across the board -- but I don't think it's self-evident that working-class issues have to be covered by working-class people at the national level in order to be covered in a valuable way.
June 16, 2006 7:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
How about gummint ownership of the means of production?
June 16, 2006 7:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's not, I believe, class, so much as class identification.
We have a whole class--er, set of pundits who've never covered dog shows for KPFT in No Corners, Iowa, or (more to the point) done a story about a tenement without heat on the West Side of Chicago.
The fact that Jimmy Breslin probably has a lot of money is pretty irrelevant.
Elevation to the punditocracy used to be a reward for years of service--and now it goes to Jonah Goldberg.
The problem is not so much, are they rich, but how do you get in?
I don't see a solution to this--short of the one that's already taking place: the level (if cratered) playing field of the Net. When you have access to everybody's opinions, why the hell should you choose those of Chris Matthews? He brings very little to the table-=not expertise, not experience, not style, not originality.
You don't have to identify with your income level if you've covered the police blotter for a while--actually look into the faces of people on the bottom.
June 16, 2006 9:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
there's a wildly disproportionate emphasis on issues related to very expensive private colleges,
I agree! Here's a challenge for MY. For every mention in a blog entry of an Ivy League school, another entry has to balance it by mentioning a state college with regional modifier (e.g. Western Nebraska, Northern Florida), in some meaningful, school specific way.
Two such references, or one community college, to balance out any mention of Harvard.
June 16, 2006 9:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re: Elevation to the punditocracy used to be a reward for years of service--and now it goes to Jonah Goldberg.
Jonah aside, isn't it a good thing have younger folks in the punditocracy too? Must they all be old foogeys?
June 17, 2006 4:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Re: This comes up all the time in coverage of college education. Increases in tuition costs are treated as world-historical catastrophes, while increases in the cost of goods that working-class people buy aren't considered as big a deal.
Other than health care and (very recently) gasoline, has anything else seen the sort of inflation that college tuition has? Also, what goods (types of goods not specific products) do poor people buy that wealthier people don't?
June 17, 2006 4:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
I happen to know something about prices in Ivy League and in public colleges of PA. My impression is that the price increases were much higher in the latter. A working class kid after being admitted to Ivy League may have his entire tuition waved, while he or she qualifies only for a rather limited aid, almost exclusively in loans, if he or she chooses to go to a public university.
The picture is more complicated because of merit scholarships, but bright kids that are not exceptionally bright have to struggle.
June 17, 2006 7:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
You are wrong about media concentration. First of all, media concentration in a small number of companies (and 4 or 6 or 10 or 20 in a nation this size is concentrated) that have all expanded by issuing huge amounts of debt means that these are all seriously LARGE companies that will be dominated by people sympathetic to the interests of large semi-monopolistic companies and to Wall Street. Consider how Wall Street consistently discounts Costco in spite of its extraordinarily good performance because it violates the orthodoxy of cut wages/benefits & build up debt. Imagine what would happen to a network that didn't toe the line. It's naive to assume that there is a clear line between what is profitable and what is ideologically obvious. If you assume that pro-big-business is hard headed, then a media company that produced populist material would be automatically considered soft headed and a poor investment choice. Then these big companies all depend on advertising from other big companies. A small media company might have a mix of advertisers. A big media company has to be very nervous of offending, for example, insurance companies, who provide advertising. Then there is that famous "synergy" - a GE owned network will not run exposes on e.g. the corrosive effects of the military economy on the civilian economy. And finally then there is a serious race and class effect. GE management would not be as comfortable with Chuck D. or even Cornel West as with Tweety or Timmy.
The example of Phil Donahue's top rated show being cancelled for ideological reasons and the UCC not being able to buy adverts on TV networks shows how utterly narrow the permitted range of thought has become.
June 17, 2006 10:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Do we all have this same fantasy of a news source - print or tv or whatever - that addresses low-income issues, and gets this segment of society to raise its collective head from wherever it's grazing and, you know, take part in civic life to better their conditions, or even vote?
As somebody pointed out, the ones who style themselves as speaking to the regular Joe do so primarily by appealing to Joe's hatred for weirdos and elitists [i.e. vote for who you'd rather have a beer with, assuming for the instant that G.W. still boozes it up], and not to Joe's concerns over what actually might affect his mortgage or whatever.
Is that what we're talking about here?
If so, I'm with you 100% but here's my question: And it involves a very un-p.c. generalization: How would you even get Joe to read or watch this stuff? I married a Joe, so I get to raise my hand on this. He hates PBS and anything that looks like it. Joe didn't do all that well in school, and is not a big reader, and does not like to foray into territory where he feels unsure of his ability. You are really going to need to dumb it down, and you are going to have to slip it in somewhere between the football and the strippers. And use the same angry tone that Bill O'Reilly uses.
The one person I see doing some of this is Oprah Winfrey, but for the chicks. Oprah slides some guy who talks about debt reduction in between the Nicole Kidman and the makeovers. Instead of anger there's empathy. She's really elevating the level of engagement for a lot of people, to the extent that The Daily Worker just never will. And I don't think you can approach the problem of non-engagement without recognizing that a huge part of the underclass reflexively shies away from anything that looks school-y and not fun.
We need some guy to be the Oprah, and make guys care about debt reduction. Howard Stern would be really good, actually, and I remember him - when I lived in NYC years ago - even talking about how the flat tax would be better for low income people. In between the strippers and freaks, of course.
June 17, 2006 1:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Good point about Howard Stern - and where'e he now?
On satellite radio.
Which brings us back to media consolidation.
Janet Jackson does a nip slip and the FCC made sure the broadcasters knew who was in charge of the airwaves with the penalties.
That's how state and corporate cooperation works. The media supports the state and the status quo and if they do something the state doesn't like, the state reminds them to support the state and the status quo.
The only answer is technological - which is why wireless mesh and the Internet are important, and the state and the telcos need to be kept out of it.
June 17, 2006 2:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Don't know if that's true generally, but City College of San Francisco has a Board of Governors Fee Waiver which is pretty much automatic if your income is low enough (that may be the key point - how low is low? My income was very low - in fact, nearly nonexistent).
California also has CALWorks, which pays for books for persons in that job program.
Then there's local work study programs - I survived for the last four years on Federal Pell grants and $500/month from lab aide jobs at City College. True, however, I couldn't have done it paying for a regular apartment in San Francisco at SF housing rates...
It's also true that California has raised the community college fees from $11 a credit hour to $28 a credit hour - a big jump.
June 17, 2006 2:44 PM | Reply | Permalink