FAIR: Corporate Media Deny Their Own Existence, Despite Driving Biden's Primary Victory

View article on FAIR's website Corporate Media Deny Their Own Existence, Despite Driving Biden's Primary Victory Joshua Cho If someone were to tell you that major and influential business sectors like the fossil fuel and health insurance industries simply don’t exist, or imply that major corporations like ExxonMobil and Cigna don’t try to manipulate public opinion and advance a political agenda in order to protect and maximize their profits, you might find it hard to contain your laughter. But looking at corporate media’s coverage of corporate media, one gets the sense that anyone who dares to suggest that media corporations like Comcast-owned MSNBC, AT&T-owned CNN or News Corp–owned Fox News have their own commercial interests—which incentivize them to push pro-corporate politics—are kooky “conspiracy theorists.” That’s really strange. After all, there are plenty of reports from corporate media discussing how major oil and health insurance companies spend fortunes to propagandize Americans into believing that a single-payer healthcare system would be disastrous, or that the climate crisis really isn’t that serious, despite all evidence to the contrary (FAIR.org, 1/24/20, 1/31/20). There are whistleblowers like former Cigna PR executive Wendell Potter who revealed how he, along with other paid corporate propagandists, cultivated “contacts and relationships among journalists and other media gatekeepers,” and learned from the tobacco industry’s “groundbreaking work in stealth PR” in order to develop talking points and advance a political agenda to protect industry profits. So why exactly should we trust for-profit media outlets to be impartial and have their news coverage untainted by their own business interests? Throughout the 2020 election cycle, FAIR (7/17/19, 8/21/19, 1/30/20, 4/7/20) has documented how corporate media have been trying to play kingmaker by aggressively pushing centrist and right-wing Democratic presidential candidates like Joe Biden onto the electorate, while assailing progressives like Bernie Sanders as “unelectable.” Now that Sanders has dropped out of the race, it’s worth examining the role propagandistic and hostile media coverage played throughout the primary in determining the outcome. Jeff Cohen (Common Dreams, 3/16/20): "The media barrage on electability has proved...persuasive to many Democrats—apparently convincing them that Biden can defeat Donald Trump while Sanders is a huge risk." Analyzing the paradoxical phenomenon of the sizable “Socialists for Biden” voting bloc, FAIR’s founder Jeff Cohen (Common Dreams, 3/16/20) noted that although continuous exit polls confirm that most voters agree with Sanders ideologically, many nevertheless voted for Biden, because they perceived him to be a more “electable” candidate against Donald Trump. Although several people have debunked the myth of “low” youth voter turnout in this election cycle (FAIR.org, 2/26/20; Films for Action, 3/5/20; Atlantic, 3/17/20), it’s true that older voters turned out in massive numbers to support Biden. On Twitter (3/14/20), journalist Malaika Jabali attributed the “generational divide” in voting behavior to an “information divide,” and argued that many older voters don’t suffer from a lack of information, so much as too much information from different sources compared to younger voters. That influential media outlets like CNN, MSNBC, NPR, the New York Times and Washington Post continue to exercise a formidable class-control function on behalf of their owners and advertisers seems to be borne out by data confirming Jabali’s analysis. Pew Research (12/10/18) found that although social media has become a more popular source for news,  television still retains supremacy, with 49% of US adults receiving news most often from TV. Whereas young adults aged 18 to 29 receive 36% of their news from social media and 16% from TV, older voters aged 50–64 receive 65% of their news from TV and only 14% from social media, and voters older than 65 receive a whopping 81% of their news from TV and a mere 8% from social media. The age groups that got much of their news from television and print newspapers and little from social media were the best groups for Biden—and the worst groups for Sanders (Pew, 12/10/18). Pew (9/26/19) also documented a striking partisan divide on Americans' trust in the media, with 69% of Democrats having a “great” or “fair” amount of trust in the media, compared to only 15% of Republicans. Other media studies of cable news like CNN and MSNBC confirmed their pivotal role as an anti-Sanders attack machine (FAIR.org, 1/30/20). According to the Norman Lear Center (5/19), self-identified liberals watch MSNBC at three times the rate of moderates and ten times the rate of conservative viewers. Branko Marcetic (In These Times, 11/13/19) documented that MSNBC’s August–September 2019 coverage of the Democratic primary not only emphasized electability over policy issues, but also talked about Biden three times as often as Sanders, who had fewer negative mentions (11%) compared to Sanders (21%). Another survey by In These Times (3/9/20) of CNN’s coverage of the 24 hours after Sanders and Biden’s massive wins in Nevada and South Carolina found that Sanders received three times more negative coverage than Biden, despite winning by similar margins. Given Sanders’ massive advantages over Biden when it came to campaign staff and volunteers, organizational and online presence, ad buys as well as money in Super Tuesday states, it’s clear that the media blitz following Biden’s South Carolina win played a decisive role in propelling him to victory in states he didn’t even campaign in (New York Times, 2/26/20).  Yet, in what is truly a collective galaxy-brain level take, corporate media appeared to deny their own existence and how the profit motive compromised their coverage throughout the primary. Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple (10/24/19) puts scare quotes around "corporate media"—like they're a figment of Bernie Sanders' imagination.

Whenever corporate media discuss themselves, they frequently use scare quotes around the term “corporate media” (e.g., Washington Post, 10/24/19; Politico, 8/13/19), as if the term is referring to a nonexistent entity or a figment of their audience’s imagination. This is in stark contrast to their alarmist attitude towards foreign state media outlets like RT and Xinhua, which are frequently referred to as “propaganda” and “state media”—no quotation marks required (New York Times, 3/8/17, 2/18/20). Yet when they weren’t suggesting they were imaginary, corporate media were also fully capable on occasion of discussing their enormous impact on the race. Vanity Fair’s “Joe Biden, Revenant, Was an Irresistible Media Story—and It Helped Win Him Super Tuesday” (3/5/20) described how Biden campaign aides were gloating to CNN about riding their “earned-media tsunami” to victory in Super Tuesday—referring to coverage that wasn’t paid for following Biden’s South Carolina win—and estimated to be worth at least $72 million during those crucial days. Despite noting that Sanders actually had more free coverage ($156 million) during this time period from the same “‘corporate media’” which had “written him off” earlier, Vanity Fair argued that media narratives trump any other factor (including money), with Sanders’ narrative being largely negative in contrast to Biden’s: In recent days Biden has basked in mostly positive coverage, with TV pundits citing his South Carolina victory in arriving at a consensus narrative: Biden, despite poor showings in all of the early-primary states, is the comeback candidate peaking at the perfect moment.... Following Biden’s Saturday blowout, the media narrative shifted from Sanders being the momentum candidate to questions about whether his campaign was constrained by a ceiling due to his poor South Carolina performance, particularly with black voters, the most consistent Democratic voting bloc. Corporate media frequently noted how Sanders has been their most frequent critic when he was on the campaign trail, and even when they grudgingly admitted its validity at times, they treated Sanders’ media criticism as an ideological perspective on the media, rather an uncontroversial description. Politico (8/13/19) wrote that “Sanders has long accused the ‘corporate media’ of putting the interests of the elite above those of the majority of Americans.” Vanity Fair (2/18/20) wrote: “Sanders has long contended that the agenda of ‘corporate media’ doesn’t necessarily reflect the people’s needs, and his 2020 campaign has doubled as a rolling media criticism shop.” The New York Times (3/5/20) also gaslit readers by attributing critique of the “‘corporate media,’” and MSNBC’s hosts for pushing an “‘establishment’” perspective, merely to Sanders and the “activist left,” as if their critique were only a sectarian complaint. The Washington Post’s media critic Erik Wemple (10/24/19) mocked Sanders’ critique of the “‘corporate media,’” implying that Sanders hasn’t “done enough research” to “tease out tendencies,” despite writing that “attacking the ‘corporate media’ is good politics for Sanders, and his critiques sometimes land with heft and reason.” Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan (2/12/20) glancingly acknowledged media hostility towards Sanders when she observed that Sanders kept dissing “what he calls the corporate media,” and that his “ardent followers bond with him and with one another by despising the mainstream media, often enough with good reason”—yet she failed to explain this hostility in structural terms regarding media ownership and commercial interests. In the Post’s “Bernie Sanders’s Bogus Media Beef,” Aaron Blake (8/14/19) cited executive editor Marty Baron dismissing Sanders’ claims as a “conspiracy theory,” while the Post’s Paul Waldman (8/14/19) dismissed Sanders’ media criticism as “something in common with pretty much every candidate,” and breathtakingly asserted that “ideological bias is usually the least important.” Waldman’s assessment isn’t shared by FAIR (Extra!, 10/89), or by Politico’s founding editor John Harris (11/7/19), who admitted that “the pervasive force shaping coverage of Washington and elections is what might be thought of as centrist bias, flowing from reporters and sources alike.” Sanders' "ridiculous" claim, according to Chris Cillizza (CNN, 8/13/19), is that the owner of a media outlet has an impact on its viewpoint. Another approach to dismissing structural media criticism has been to portray Sanders and Trump’s media criticisms as equally wacky conspiracy theories (FAIR.org, 1/24/20). CNN’s Chris Cillizza (8/13/19) asserted that Sanders’ critique of the Jeff Bezos–owned Washington Post’s coverage is “absolutely no different than what Trump does.” Politico’s John Harris (2/13/20) bemoaned the “dilution of mainstream media’s institutional power” and pined for the days where editors at “major news institutions possessed enormous power” to “summon sustained national attention on subjects they deemed important” with their story selection and framing, while denouncing Sanders for following the “Trump precedent” in “taking flight from public accountability.” When corporate media didn’t dismiss their bias against him, they sunnily described how Sanders didn’t seem to need fairer coverage from corporate media—and cable news in particular—because nonprofit media outlets, with considerably less resources and reach, are increasingly picking up the slack. Citing the “formidable” influence of “alternative media,” the Los Angeles Times (12/12/19) argued that “coverage in what Sanders likes to disparage as the ‘corporate media’ may matter less to him than to any of his rivals because of the benefit he derives from a surging alternative media ecosystem.” The New Republic (2/12/20, 2/28/20) acknowledged MSNBC’s hostile posture towards Sanders, yet also failed to explain that bias in terms of corporate interests, while arguing that Sanders’ campaign strategy of relying on an alternative media infrastructure to run “against the ‘corporate media’” and “withstand attacks from mainstream networks” has “worked wonders.” Strikingly, in all these reports, corporate media either misrepresented Sanders’ proposed solutions to corporate media bias or omitted them altogether. Vermont journalist Paul Heintz (Washington Post, 2/26/19), for example, chided Sanders for not understanding what a “free press” does, and claimed that Sanders’ remedy for corporate media is merely “uncritical, stenographic coverage of his agenda.” Bernie Sanders (CJR, 8/26/19): "One reason we do not have enough real journalism in America right now is because many outlets are being gutted by the same forces of greed that are pillaging our economy." In fact, Sanders’ op-ed in the Columbia Journalism Review (8/26/19) echoed many of FAIR’s criticisms of corporate media and proposed solutions: Today, after decades of consolidation and deregulation, just a small handful of companies control almost everything you watch, read and download. Given that reality, we should not want even more of the free press to be put under the control of a handful of corporations and “benevolent” billionaires who can use their media empires to punish their critics and shield themselves from scrutiny.... In my administration, we are going to institute an immediate moratorium on approving mergers of major media corporations until we can better understand the true effect these transactions have on our democracy.... We must also explore new ways to empower media organizations to collectively bargain with these tech monopolies, and we should consider taxing targeted ads and using the revenue to fund nonprofit civic-minded media. Setting aside the interlocking commercial interests mass media corporations share with other industries and advertisers funding their coverage (FAIR.org, 8/1/17), just as one can expect the healthcare and fossil fuel industries to launch propaganda campaigns to protect their profits (Intercept, 11/20/18; Guardian, 10/23/19), one can reliably predict these same media corporations to oppose any political agenda that harms their own profitability. Given Sanders’ opposition to future mergers and corporate consolidation of mass media giants, proposals to wield antitrust legislation against Google and Facebook, and levying new taxes to fund nonprofit media outlets, is it any surprise that for-profit news sources opposed his candidacy (Politico, 8/28/19)? Perhaps future media criticism might sound less “conspiratorial” if we simply referred to outlets like MSNBC as “Comcast,” CNN as “AT&T” and the Washington Post as “Jeff Bezos” instead. When one understands corporate media as an industry in themselves, decisions to have a centrist bias to maximize profits by appealing to liberals and conservatives alike, or creating “information silos” to sell the news as a commodity to target demographics, make a lot more sense. And when we understand the news industry as a top-down institution, beholden to stockholders like all other corporations, we can stop blaming journalists for bad coverage, and start blaming executives like Les Moonves and Tony Maddox for doing things like gifting billions of dollars in free coverage for Trump (FAIR.org, 3/31/20, 4/13/20). Then maybe claiming that corporate media outlets like MSNBC and CNN are hostile to left-wing political agendas will be considered just as obvious as saying that ExxonMobil and Cigna are opposed to climate action and universal healthcare. Featured image: New York Times (2/26/20) depiction of Joe Biden addressing reporters (photo: Brittainy Newman).

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RSN: FOCUS: Frank Rich | The Casualties of a 'Wartime Presidency'

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FOCUS: Frank Rich | The Casualties of a 'Wartime Presidency'

Frank Rich, New York Magazine
Rich writes: "With Bright out of action and Redfield and eventually Fauci on the ropes, you might ask what kind of people the Trump administration wants in jobs that could have life-or-death implications for Americans."

Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today, Brian Kemp’s plan to reopen Georgia’s economy, and the removal of a federal vaccine scientist.

espite pushback from public health experts, local employers, mayors, and even Fox News, Georgia governor Brian Kemp has announced that some businesses in his state will begin to reopen tomorrow, and Tennessee, Ohio, and South Carolina will follow soon after. What’s the benefit to a governor like Kemp in making this decision now?

Having stolen an election from Stacey Abrams by disenfranchising black voters, Kemp clearly believes he can get away with anything. The only certain beneficiaries of his edict will be the owners and employees of funeral homes. Even before tomorrow’s reopening, Georgia ranks second in deaths per capita, behind Louisiana, among the thirteen states of the South. It ranks 40th among the states per capita in coronavirus testing. While federal guidelines ask that states achieve a sustained two-week decline in infections before lifting any restrictions, Georgia is doing so with infections on the rise. Then again, no one ever said its governor was a brain surgeon, or even functionally literate. By Kemp’s own account, it took him until April Fool’s Day to learn that asymptomatic Covid-19 carriers could spread the disease – information that had been publicly known since January.

It must have been shocking for a MAGA panderer like Kemp to be bitch-slapped by Trump, who unexpectedly declared at yesterday’s press conference that Georgia was reopening “too soon” and that he “strongly disagrees” with such a plan. This was a curious move by a president who had previously called for the entire country to reopen by May 1 and wielded tweets inciting states to “liberate” themselves at once from Covid-19 protections. What happened? Perhaps members of the coronavirus task force implored Trump at the last minute that Georgia might be on track to face its fiercest devastation since the burning of Atlanta. We know this is one American historical landmark that Trump has heard of because he’s on record expressing his enthusiasm for Gone with the Wind. 

The president’s favored medical tool, Dr. Deborah Birx, publicly keeps to the old script. Earlier this week, she refused to condemn Georgia for reopening nail spas, tattoo emporia, and massage parlors on the grounds that its citizens could be “very creative” in achieving social distancing in such venues. This is only the latest example of Birx debasing herself in deference to her dear leader, prioritizing his favor over public health. She first revealed her hand at one of the earliest Trump press briefings when she displayed an elaborate graphic to promote a Google site that would facilitate national coronavirus testing. The Google site didn’t exist, and neither did the testing, but Dr. Birx to this day has neither apologized for nor explained a public-relations stunt that led to more unnecessary deaths. When this “wartime presidency” is finally over, she deserves at least a cameo in any war crimes prosecutions.

Of the politicians and public officials pushing or countenancing immediate reopenings, Kemp and Birx may not be the most egregious. In Oklahoma, there’s Carol Hefner, a co-chair of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, who told the Times that because her state gets “a lot of wind” and is topographically flat, it is “in a much better position than many of the other states to go ahead and open back up.” Surely the Flat Earth Society has never had a better spokesperson. In Texas, there’s the always reliable lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, whose argument for back-to-business-as-usual is that “there are more important things than living.” Carolyn Goodman, the mayor of Las Vegas, achieved instant notoriety when she told Anderson Cooper this week that she is eager to reopen the casinos and roll the dice on whatever happens next because “we would love to be” the “placebo” for national coronavirus testing. “I’d love everything open,” she explained, “because I think we’ve had viruses for years that have been here.” She’s not wrong: Nevada ranks fifth per capita in HIV infections.

At a time when factory towns across the Midwest are suffering devastation comparable to that of the pandemic’s coastal urban epicenters, at least one prominent Republican is speaking out unequivocally against premature reopenings: Jay Timmons, who, as head of the National Association of Manufacturers, is one of the leading manufacturing lobbyists in Washington. Timmons was for a dozen years the chief of staff to the very conservative former Virginia governor and senator George Allen; in 2004 he was executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. This week, as demonstrators in Charlottesville-esque regalia marched on the Virginia governor’s mansion in Richmond pleading for “liberation,” he’d had enough. He began his Facebook post castigating the protestors with a single word, all in caps: IDIOTS. As Alexandra Petri of the Washington Post has observed, the latest incarnation of the Tea Party movement, once again underwritten by deep-pocketed right-wing donors, is rallying under the slogan “Give me liberty and give me death!”

The head of the government agency involved with federal efforts to develop a Covid-19 vaccine was unexpectedly removed from his post for, he says, resisting the use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, and he has requested a federal investigation. Will his going public push what he’s called the “cronyism” out of the federal public-health response?

Not on your life – or perhaps I should say not on all our lives. We know there is only one criterion for serving as a scientist in this administration – fealty to the boss. The fact that Dr. Rick Bright was in charge of arguably the single most important mission in public health right now, developing a Covid-19 vaccine that could shut down the pandemic, didn’t matter to Trump. Indeed, Bright mattered so little to Trump that when asked about his removal, he responded “I never heard of him.”

What Trump surely had heard is that Bright, like every other scientist and doctor in the land, pushed for clinical tests to determine the safety and efficacy of drugs that the president had told Americans to take because, as he put it, “What do you have to lose?” One of those drugs, we now know, led to higher loss of life for those who took them in hospitals run by the Department of Veterans Affairs. But Trump doesn’t care about that; he only cares that Bright, unlike, say, Dr. Birx, favored scientific empiricism over the president’s gut “feeling” about prescription medications.

Bright’s reference to “cronyism,” in his searing statement protesting his removal, no doubt refers to the likes of the Oracle tech billionaire Larry Ellison, the U.S. trade adviser Peter Navarro, and the Fox News “personality” Laura Ingraham, all of whom have been reported to have lobbied Trump to promote the drug. They, like Trump, now have blood, including veterans’ blood, on their hands. So do all the others who used their power to push this snake oil on vulnerable Americans, including Rush Limbaugh and Ingraham’s colleagues at Fox. The network is already facing a class-action lawsuit for its dissemination of lethal misinformation during a pandemic.

With Bright gone, it’s only a matter of time before he’s followed out the door by Dr. Robert Redfield, the CDC head, who made the mistake of saying in an interview what nearly every other leading public-health expert has asserted: There is likely to be a second and worse wave of Covid-19 this fall, coinciding with flu (and election) season. In Trump’s version of a public show trial, he demanded during yesterday’s press circus that Redfield eat his words. Redfield took the podium and tried to dance around this presidential order, but surely not enough for his boss’s taste. Anthony Fauci soon seconded what Redfield had originally said about the second wave.

With Bright out of action and Redfield and eventually Fauci on the ropes, you might ask what kind of people the Trump administration wants in jobs that could have life-or-death implications for Americans. One answer was reported by Reuters last night. It turns out that the man originally put in charge of the administration’s daily response to Covid-19 by Alex Azar, the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the original head of the White House’s coronavirus task force, was a crony, Brian Harrison, who for six years had run a dog-breeding business called Dallas Labradoodles. Could the Trump administration field anyone more useless? Even though we are now learning that household pets can be infected by the virus, the known victims aren’t dogs but cats.

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