This article from the London Review of Books, is an interesting read, and may include some rough waters as the author, Tom Crews, delves deep into the 1830s and Dickens' Pickwick Papers and then forward into the rest of the 19th Century to find how corporate media developed.
But we get nuggets like this:
If the relationship (between politicians and media) is no longer quite so gentlemanly – it has become unhealthier over time, as each side has attempted to control, exploit and bully the other – it remains fundamental, and incurs the same risks that have been there from the start: that close access inhibits perspective, thus affecting sense of proportion on both sides, making political journalism overwhelmingly Westminster-centric and vitiating its evidence base. Whatever the government of the day, the connection is too cosy to allow for radical critique. (Robbie Gibb, who recently quit his job as editor of the BBC’s Daily Politics and Sunday Politics to become Theresa May’s director of communications, is only the latest figure to pass through the revolving door between the media and Downing Street.)
We have the same antecedents here, and ours go back to the 1790s with the Aurora and Gazette, as dueling Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian newspapers, with each man not-so-secretly funding the editors/publishers who printed the most vile and scurrilous "information" about the other. Gordon Wood's "Empire of Liberty" (from 2009, and the title is, of course, from Jefferson's phrase) does a solid job of showing how the 1790s were a decade in which this nation was perilously close to a Civil War--yes, that should shock many of us, but it is true--and Claude G. Bowers' "Jefferson & Hamilton: The Struggle for Democracy in America" (1925), which I've lately been re-reading, has several chapters about what he calls, somewhat innocently, "The Terror" and the manner in which the two main competing newspapers and their editors fanned hysteria and were engulfed in the hysteria they created (Bowers' hostility to Adams, Hamilton and Federalists is something one must get past, but it is still riveting and informative reading).
But this issue of how "access" to the deepest bowels of power tends to skew perspective and cause otherwise bright and earnest reporters, editors and publishers to lose sight of reality is a real issue and has been for many years. I.F. Stone often talked about seeing things clearly because he did not go to the cocktail parties or mingle with the politicians.* And here is a portion of Stone's autobiography he wrote in 1963:
The fault I find with most American newspapers is not the absence of dissent. It is the absence of news. With a dozen or so honorable exceptions, most American newspapers carry very little news.Their main concern is advertising. The main interest of our society is merchandising. All the so-called communications industries are primarily concerned not with communications, but with selling. This is obvious on television and radio but it is only a little less obvious in the newspapers. Most owners of newspapers are businessmen, not newspapermen. The news is something which fills the spaces left over by the advertisers. The average publisher is not only hostile to dissenting opinion, he is suspicious of any opinion likely to antagonize any reader or consumer. The late Colonel McCormick, in his Chicago Tribune, ran a paper about as different as possible from mine in outlook. But I admired him. He stood for something, he was a newspaperman, he gave the Tribune personality and character. Most U.S. papers stand for nothing. They carry prefabricated news, prefabricated opinion, and prefabricated cartoons. There are only a handful of American papers worth reading —The New York Times, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Washington Post, The Washington Star, The Baltimore Sun, The Christian Science Monitor—these are news papers in the real sense of the term. But even here opinion is often timid; the cold war and the arms race are little questioned though these papers do speak up from time to time on civil liberty. There are only a few maverick daily papers left like the York (Pennsylvania) Gazette and Daily and the Madison (Wisconsin) Capital Times. All this makes it easy for a one-man four-page Washington paper to find news the others ignore, and of course opinion they would rarely express.
(And if you have the time, check out this wonderful film by Jerry Bruck about Stone, named after Stone's legendary, "I.F. Stone's Weekly" (1973).)
Upton Sinclair's "The Brass Check" remains one of the great historical records of the rise of corporate media and how it works to propagandize the working class into voting against its own interests, which is what Walter Lippmann, a couple of years after "The Brass Check" appeared, called "manufacturing consent." George Seldes, who personified "the intrepid reporter," now called an "investigative" reporter, went from a person who thought Upton Sinclair was a bit of a showman and too conspiratorial to became an even more arch-watchdog over corporate media (then called the "capitalist press"), to the point where "mainstream" journalists thought Seldes a "crank." However, Seldes wrote some of the most foundational press criticism that still sizzles today, and his books "Freedom of the Press" (1935) and "Lords of the Press" (1938) should be required reading in high schools across the nation. YouTube also now has the excellent documentary on George Seldes, from Seldes' first memoir, "Tell the Truth and Run."
That some think Stone and Seldes were "Reds" is pathetically and ridiculously sad, but that sort of attack dates back to the systems and institutions that were set up in the aftermath of the Espionage Act of 1917 and the post-WWI and then post-WWII worlds where corporate media, acting as a handmaiden to American political and business leaders, perfected Red-baiting. That it has reached a point where Eisenhower, were he to return today and hold the same political views, would be to the left of most American politicians, and would be positively toxic in the corporate media echo chamber, is precisely what ails us in improving our discourse and search for appropriate public policy making. And just so people know, Seldes was one of the only American journalists to have been hounded out of both Soviet Russia and Mussolini's Italy for...telling the truth and then having to run. At most, both Seldes and Stone were Popular Fronters, who were wary of Communists in the U.S., but saw them as practical allies for rallying activists to fight for New Deal policies.**
I apologize for the American history diversion, but it goes to the heart of why Crews' essay is so enlightening for us as Americans. Crews' essay begins with something very powerful, which is how the corporate media including The Guardian, the supposedly left-wing newspaper, failed to understand what was happening in the election of 2017 in the U.K.
There is a journalistic, snarkily fun but deeply researched book set for release in the U.S. later this fall--it is already released in the U.K. and my cousin sent me a copy a month ago--that documents the rise of Corbyn before this year's election, and just how lacking in judgment and perspective the corporate media in the United Kingdom really are (It is called "The Candidate: Jeremy Corbyn's Improbable Path to Power" by Alex Nunns). The book speaks directly to our news media here and to the vacuousness of the pundits, editors and publishers in our nation. It is not that the best, such as the NY Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Time, Newsweek, etc. do not report factual information. They mostly do, but the slant is ever present, starting with the word "moderate." There is also the fascination with rich business executives as if they know statecraft--which led so many to say about Trump, "But he is a rich businessman!" as if that meant he could govern. And worst are the usual bromides about private enterprise being superior to government, that tax cuts in rain or shine make sense, that those who press for war are more "serious" and that those opposing war are suspect and always have a shifting goalpost burden of proof, and how there must be two sides to the climate change debate as if this was only a political, not scientific issue we are discussing.
So yeah, I went on a bit here. But those who have woken up to the biases of corporate media in our time should know that the world did not begin to change in this regard when those persons woke up. And a deeper reading of the past will immensely enlighten those persons so that they do not reject everything in mainstream corporate media, but instead learn to discern and think critically, and with a far longer perspective--and to recognize too how capitalism is itself an ideology and a source for bias. Or maybe leave it to Upton Sinclair, who famously said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” And just over 100 years ago, it was said of the British newspaperman that he did not need to be bribed, because he already understood the needs of the Empire. It is how he kept his job.
Footnotes:
*Stone did have lunch, in the immediate post-WWII world, with Assistant Treasury Secretary, Harry Dexter White, where White would talk about expanding what later became somewhat sardonically known as Pax American, and Stone would shake his head and argue with him why that is not a good thing. Stone was incredulous that anyone would consider White a pro-Soviet spy as White was so clearly wanting to lead an International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank with pro-Western and especially pro-U.S. leadership.
**Some years ago, I had to save the Wiki entry on I.F. Stone from being too credulous about Stone's supposed pro-Stalin and pro-Soviet Union views back in the 1930s by pointing out what we learned in the Robert Cottrell biography of Stone, which is that Stone was fairly anti-Stalinist in his earliest editorials he wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer as the purges began, calling Stalin a "thug" and other epithets. I have had a disagreement with Myra McPherson about this, I admit, as she believes publisher David Stern's daughter that Stern wrote several of those editorials denouncing Stalin's tactics and actions. I don't buy that for a moment as the editorials are in Stone's deep historically minded and then invective style, especially the op-ed about the military being purged by Stalin, which op-ed includes a reference to the French Revolution's Thermidor period. Sorry, but David Stern, a newspaper publisher businessman, was not about to reference the French Revolution in that way, unlike Stone, for whom the French Revolution remained a guiding avatar and reference point throughout his life.
