In my younger years, I had a more materialist view of the world (meaning not that I cared about owning material possessions but that I attributed people’s beliefs and actions principally to their economic interests). Over time, I have come to put more weight on conviction, and less on self-interest, to explain why people do things. Matt Yglesias’s column arguing that the media is helping Donald Trump because he’s beneficial for its bottom line is a good example of how materialist analysis can go awry.
Matt is a terrific columnist, but his argument is unusually threadbare. It leans heavily on the assumption that because Trump’s election would profit leading media organs, their coverage decisions are designed to bring about that outcome:
For-profit enterprises tend to be good at aligning their work with the goal of making money, or else they’d find themselves going out of business. Reporters work for editors, who work for higher-level managers, who report to executives, who are accountable to boards and shareholders. The job is to cover the campaign for maximum revenue and minimum expense, not to inform the public — and if doing a bad job of informing the public puts Trump back in the White House, that is objectively not a bad thing from the standpoint of ratings, ad sales, and subscriptions.
What kind of coverage decisions does Matt have in mind when he is conjuring this profit motive? At one point, he cites the mainstream media’s tendency to treat flaws with Democratic presidential candidates (Hillary Clinton’s emails and now Hunter Biden’s access-peddling) as equivalent to Trump’s endless line of vastly worse scandals and crimes, which are undercovered owing to their sheer frequency:
A problem we saw during the 2016 campaign is that while many, many Trump scandals got covered, there was a convention of devoting roughly equal time to coverage of both candidates. As a result, no individual Trump scandal received nearly as much coverage as the Hillary email saga, allowing Trump to in effect benefit from the sheer breadth of wrongdoing. These days, similarly, there is a relentless drumbeat of “he’s old, his son is shady” about Biden while Trump overwhelms the system with the sheer quantity of crazy stuff happening.
At another point, he describes the media’s profit motive as a more direct interest in getting audience share:
But it’s also important for politicians and staffers and activists and readers to understand that business is business. The goal is to get people to click and watch and subscribe, and editors and managers are going to do what it takes to achieve that goal.
You may notice that these two accounts are at odds with each other. Take Matt’s example of a Trump scandal the media is underplaying: his confession in open court that Saudi Arabia would happily purchase his properties at an inflated price. I agree that Trump actually confessing in a legal document to the thing he has been accusing Joe Biden of doing without evidence should have received a lot more attention than it did.
But Matt’s second account of media self-interest is getting audience attention. I’m pretty sure that if the mainstream media devoted more coverage to Trump admitting he is open to bribes from the Saudis, those stories would land with the audience. The reality is that the mainstream media now relies on an audience that votes heavily Democratic. The imperative to get clicks and eyeballs pushes the media to cover Trump more, and more harshly, the opposite of the self-interest point Matt is making.
The more serious flaw in his argument is that it lacks any direct evidence that economic considerations have influenced the mainstream media. Traditional media in the United States follows a series of norms. One of the most important of these is a fire wall between the economic interest of the publisher and coverage decisions by journalists.
To be sure, that line has been breached many times in the long history of American journalism. But those breaches are noteworthy, even scandalous. We know about them because it’s the kind of scandal that is perhaps most prone to being exposed — a scandal that occurs within a journalistic organization and generally at the expense of reporters.
If there were any cases of the owners of, say, CNN or the New York Times exerting even mild pressure on the journalistic side to help Trump win an election, the odds that they would leak to the public are extremely high.
Matt has a quote from Les Moonves, the CBS executive chairman, saying Trump’s campaign “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” One important piece of context for this quote that he doesn’t share is that Moonves said it during the primary campaign, when most observers doubted Trump stood any chance of getting elected. Another chunk of Moonves’s comments — “I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us” — clearly indicates that he envisioned Trump providing a ratings bonanza during the campaign, not a four-year term.
More important, Moonves was not saying that he ordered CBS reporters to help Trump win the nomination in order to help the company’s bottom line. Nor have any CBS reporters ever claimed to have gotten an order like this.
The final problem with the materialist analysis of media coverage of Trump is that Trump, while good for media traffic, was extremely dangerous to its survival. Indeed, these two trends were linked: People flocked to buy subscriptions to major newspapers because doing so was an act of solidarity with institutions the president was publicly threatening.
During his first term, Trump openly used his power to punish independent media, taking a lucrative Pentagon contract away from Amazon to hurt Jeff Bezos and trying to block a merger to hurt CNN. Bezos’s tiny Washington Post business might have benefited from this dynamic, but his vastly larger Amazon business was harmed. In a second term, Trump’s vowing to impose much greater harm. (“I say up front, openly, and proudly, that when I WIN the Presidency of the United States, they and others of the LameStream Media will be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and events.”)
I don’t think any mainstream-media owners consider the bump in audience share they’d get from a second Trump term remotely worth the existential risk of his goons subjecting them to economic retribution and legal harassment.
I am not disputing Matt’s contention that the media has failed to convey the enormity of Trump’s unfitness for office and how this differs in scale from the ordinary shortcomings of regular politicians. I think he misidentifies the central issue, however.
The main problem with the media is that a very large part of it is composed of partisan Republican outlets. That is, the media is roughly divided between mainstream organs, like the Washington Post and CNN, which try to follow norms of objectivity, and organs like Fox News, which don’t. There is, in fact, a great deal of direct evidence that both the ownership and management of Fox News have pressured journalists to advance specific political outcomes, from hyping the caravans during the election run-up to attempting to make Ron DeSantis the party’s future.
A media landscape in which about half the coverage is trying to be fair, and half the coverage is operating as the media arm of an ideological movement, is inescapably going to produce an imbalanced understanding of reality in the public. The only way to avoid that outcome would be for the entire mainstream media to start mirror-imaging the media ethics of the Murdoch family, which would have all kinds of practical and moral downsides.
It is true that the mainstream media itself tries to practice objectivity in ways that are often flawed. I’ve been writing critiques of this my entire career. But stories like the Times writing that both parties deserve blame if Republicans force a default on the debt don’t occur because the Sulzberger family needs Trump to get reelected and pulled Carl Hulse aside to suggest he depict the debt-ceiling hostage crisis as a both-sides issue in order to deprive Democrats of a message. Nor do I think Hulse or his editors were chasing clicks. I think the method of alternating quotes from the two parties and then declaring them equally valid is a particular kind of old-fashioned idea of how objectivity works.
As Matt has written before, the old notion of objectivity was shaped (I would say merely influenced) by an imperative to attract advertising that formed the basis for journalism to make a profit. In the subscription-driven world, that financial incentive no longer exists. If you want to understand why many journalists and editors still believe in the old values they were taught, you need to look somewhere other than their owners’ bank account.
