Blame it on the Media?

“If you don’t want to work, become a reporter. That awful power, the public opinion of the nation was created by a horde of self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditch digging and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poor house.” - Mark Twain, 1880, Connecticut Evening Dinner Club

The location for my desk, initially, seemed perfect. I had been given a small workspace for my computer near the door, which was also next to the message boxes and a small shelf. The advantage the spot afforded me was that I did not have to look at the daily chaos unfolding in the temporary newsroom we had set up at the 1992 Democratic Presidential Nominating Convention in New York City. I was able to take my tape logs and shot sheets and focus on writing the story I had just covered without significant distraction and make newscast deadlines.

Until the tee shirts showed up.

They were black with a two-toned black and white message on their front that said simply, “Blame it on the Media.” On the back was the phrase, “Life in News.” Journalism was not yet in extreme disrepute, but the criticisms were growing energetic from all directions. The disdain of reporters began openly, I think, when Richard Nixon’s Vice President Spiro Agnew addressed the stories detailing his corruption with claims the journalists were nothing more than, “Nattering nabobs of negativism.” Hell, I didn’t even know what a “nabob” was but I assumed that Agnew was dismissive of its reference to Muslims and was more inclined to think of the other definition, which was “a person of conspicuous wealth or high status.”

As Good An Explanation As Any

I was conflicted when I learned I did not fit the descriptive of a nabob. I had no interest in high status but I could have used a portion of conspicuous wealth. Instead, I was relegated to playing cashier for the endless stream of people stopping by to purchase the “Blame it on the Media” tee shirts. A colleague, who was a photojournalist for our TV station group, had come up with the idea and had hoped to make extra cash during the convention to supplement the obscene overtime hours he would be required to work. Inadvertently, I had become his accountant, and marveled at the cash flow. Everybody wanted one of the $25 shirts, and they began showing up as attendees wore them on the convention floor in Madison Square Garden. I don’t know how much money he made but I discovered one of the 32-year-old shirts a few days ago for sale on the Internet.

Beefy Tees for Your Active Lifestyle!

The blame-it-on-the-media explanation is no longer as specious as it was during the 90s and the Clinton administration. Nightly reports of DNA on an intern’s dress are easier to write than insightful stories on our convergence of national crises, the outsized influence of money in politics, the proliferation of disinformation through social media, and systemic political corruptions that are related to environmental catastrophes. As all the horrors of our age dangerously align, the media are fragmented with niche audience interests and revenue drawn away by internet platforms like Tik Tok, Instagram, and Youtube. The media are weakest just when we need them the most. The expensive staffers, journalists with institutional memory, education, and relevant experiences, are making for the exits because their employers can no longer afford their salaries and lack a willingness to sustain their interests because they don’t draw sufficient clicks or viewers.

Although they are technically not journalists, the public behavior of Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski has become a case study in what is wrong with the faltering Fifth Estate. When Trump decided to run for president, the MSNBC morning show duo gave him constant, unfettered air time. Even when he was too lazy to get his lardness out of bed, they accommodated him on the phone, allowing Trump to rant and make wild assertions without informed challenge. They, eventually, became mild to strong critics when he was in the White House and confronted him over baseless criticisms of the Biden administration. Joe and Mika, though, had already played an engineer’s role in creating the monster that is Trump and their ascension in the cable talk show ranks paralleled his political ascent. Unfortunately, rather than hang garlic outside their door to keep away the living dead, they almost immediately flew to Florida to kiss Trump’s metaphorical ring and his political ass after he was restored to the presidency by a public misinformed, in part, by Mika and Joe. Ratings, money, and status in DC social circles is always more important than truth.

There are, however, places on the web and TV to get accurate information but they are sufficiently abundant that it requires effort and search to confirm credibility, which is just one more task added to a work day and commuting and driving soccer car pool and getting groceries and mowing the lawn and fixing the car and cooking dinner and balancing checkbooks. Informed citizenship has, for far too long, been way down on the daily “to do” list of Americans, and that has much “to do” with how we have arrived at our moment in history with a convicted felon for president. It is also a symptom of the disintermediation that has occurred between mainstream media and its audience. You can choose to refuse to believe, for instance, in climate change and find any number of sources that will reinforce the absurd notion that it is a “Chinese hoax” even as the skies above you turn as brown as the dying grass beneath your feet because there has been no seasonal rain. Scientists consider climate change a settled fact. Politicians consider it an issue that can keep them out of power. Those truisms ought to guide all news coverage.

Consumers seeking facts rather than a perspective that supports their existing biases will find their task arduous. Because of the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, corporations and wealthy individuals can now funnel vast sums into Super PACs, effectively drowning out the voices of ordinary voters. The ruling equated corporate spending with free speech and opened the floodgates for unlimited corporate and foreign money to influence elections. The wealthy and corporations send rivers of cash into those Super PACs, which have resulted in a political system that prioritizes the interests of the few over the needs of the many. No issue reflects this disparity of influence more than the fact that the fossil fuel industry has poured millions of dollars into political campaigns to block legislation addressing climate change. In 2018, ExxonMobil spent $41 million lobbying Congress, much of it aimed at stalling clean energy initiatives. Similarly, the Koch brothers, through their network of organizations, have guided billions into campaigns to promote climate denial and obstruct environmental regulations.

How can the media effectively address such an incongruence between what is good for a corporation and what is best for the American public? Is it just through a live on-camera standup on Capitol Hill or chasing after CEOs of oil companies to ask the relevant questions? Voting out the members of congress who defeated laws to reduce climate change is a logical response but how does the voter become informed? The daily appointment network newscasts might address the headline with a brief interview but, with commercials, there are only 22 minutes for news and a political story on climate change will get shortchanged by sex, lies, and videotape. We are a reactive rather than a proactive culture in America and important issues do not get airtime or digital space on news sites until they have turned to crisis. The discussion of what caused Los Angeles to burn is also subsumed by the flames, which, in the words of editorial managers, “make for good TV.”

There is, apparently, neither money nor audience in reporting on climate change. A 2019 Media Matters study found that the major networks devoted just 0.7% of overall nightly news coverage to the crisis, despite its profound implications. That number likely hasn’t changed much. Just watch the news. This kind of failure to address a profound issue lays the predicate for a political fight based on lies and a public that has to struggle to find the truth. The president-elect, in fact, accused the California governor of being at fault for the fires because he “refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.” Unsurprisingly, there was no such declaration to be signed, and, in any case, water in Northern California has no connection to either stopping or causing the fires burning L.A. Trump had also claimed that President Biden was leaving him “NO MONEY IN FEMA,” but Congress recently approved a $29 billion dollar funding package, which is already in place. Call lies, lies.

The lies that are laying America low are too many and manifest to track. Trump’s attacks on the validity of the 2020 elections has exacerbated the declining trust in our institutions and the integrity of our electoral process. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2021 found that only 20% of Americans trusted the federal government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time,” a serious decline from the 1960s, when trust levels were above 70%. Trump’s narrative about stolen elections, perpetuated by social media disinformation and amplified by his political consorts, were all proven to be fraudulent claims in five dozen different courts of law. They led, however, to the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, where disaffected citizens sought to overturn the election results.

This erosion of trust creates a vicious cycle in which disengaged citizens cede more power to entrenched interests, further denuding public confidence. There appear to be far more members of Trump’s prevarication posse and Q-anon than there are reporters to hold them accountable. Years seemed to pass before mainstream media outlets were able to transition from calling his statements “misleading” and “inaccurate” to finally getting around to the simplicity of saying, “That’s a lie.” Much damage had already been wrought on the national zeitgeist, which complicates the job of underfunded local media in cities and towns across the land. TV advertisers are increasingly taking their dollars to targeted audiences on social media where their messages are narrowcast to desirable demographics. As dollars drain from newsrooms, pay drops, and younger, less capable reporters are hired and more journalists drift away from the job. The truth gets massaged by special interest groups until it fits neatly into a political perspective to gain advantage, not solve a problem.

Meanwhile, L.A. is burning, and the fire is likely to spread.