In July Congress passed a recission bill to claw back $1.1 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the organization that allocates funds to local National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Station affiliates. In many regions these are the last remaining media sources providing local news coverage as local media organizations have been decimated by changes to the media ecosystem, resulting in news deserts in much of the country. Both corporate consolidation of media companies and the disaggregation of sources for information with TikTok, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, and various other internet sites has put the national media environment in flux as well. Warner Brothers Discovery plans to spin off CNN and some of its other cable channels from its more profitable streaming business.
The claw back of CPB funding is also only one instance in what has become a larger pattern of behavior in Trump's nascent second term. Earlier this year ABC settled a defamation lawsuit with President Trump for $15 million. The lawsuit stemmed from George Stephanopoulos colloquially describing then presidential candidate Trump as a rapist, when he was found civilly liable for sexual assault. CBS similarly settled a suit with President Trump for $16 million related to 60-Minutes editing of an interview with presidential candidate Kamala Harris for a promotional ad, despite this being normal practice and her full response being aired during the program’s regular broadcast. The Trump administration has also said they would select the members of the press pool, a responsibility normally held by the White House Correspondents' Association. Further, the Associated Press has been removed from the press pool for their refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
While past Presidents have bristled at the coverage they’ve received from the media, the actions of the current administrations are without precedent. These actions are, however, the logical conclusion of a decade of attacks against the media from Trump. Since he began his first campaign for president, Trump has called the media “fake news” and escalated his attacks from there.
Said another way, Trump is accusing the media of being biased against him. Like so much with Trump, this criticism is not original to him. Since this isn’t exactly a new argument, media organizations have addressed these criticisms. However, I think there is a component of this discussion that is often overlooked, so lets start by understanding the disagreement as it currently stands.
Critics of the media argue that there is a liberal group-think or monoculture at the elite levels of our society. This includes the executives of media organizations who then guide the editorial decisions in the country’s newsrooms. It also includes the professors and administrators at universities that are not only educating and training the next generation of journalists, but also where scientific and sociological experts are sourced for stories, independent scientific research is conducted, and lawyers and judges learn their trade. Depending the individual making the argument the reasons for this elite’s bias towards the Democratic party ranges from a deep belief in the project of neo-liberalism; to being a part of and beneficiary of Democratic governance; to the true bias being against Trump specifically from a uniparty.
The response to these arguments range from satirical snark, as Stephen Colbert quipped at the 2006 correspondence dinner that “reality has a well-known liberal bias”, to the more earnest that point out all the ways in which the media strives to be fact-based and unbiased. News organizations will publish corrections or publicly retract stories when they get something wrong in an effort to maintain trust and credibility. Further, when reporting on a story media organizations will ensure that both sides of an issue are fairly represented.
These retorts have not only not quieted the criticisms of bias that, if were honest, are coming largely from the political right, but invited criticisms from the political left; specifically in regards to the last defense. Media observers point out the reductiveness of this defense. Because our political system has been reduced to a two party system our media views all issues through a conservative/liberal lens.
You would be hard pressed to find an issue with only two sides, which suggests that media organizations are regularly determining which issue positions are legitimate and which are illegitimate. It is perfectly appropriate for a news organization to use this sort of editorial discretion. However, if the mechanism to determine the legitimacy of those positions is the bifurcation of our political system this would be an abdication of that news organization’s responsibility as journalists. Further, other issue positions might warrant individual examination by a journalist so as to not normalize that position by contrasting it with past or current policies, or other mainstream issue positions. This is a nuanced position, which is why journalists should be professionals with a set of standards and ethics guiding these decisions.
It is also worth considering the motivation behind the accusations of bias within the media. To some extent this is projection—every accusation is a confession. The political Right has cultivated and benefited from a Conservative media ecosystem. While there are a great many benefits in this media ecosystem it also has a weakness, illegitimacy that comes from partisan bias. One solution to this problem would be to be less partisanly biased, but this would diminish the partisan benefits. The other solution is to attack the rest of the media as having a liberal bias. There can be no fact-based critiques or corrections from other media organizations of Conservative media if those are simply partisan attacks. And if they are caught towing the party-line? It's all part of the business, all media organizations do it. At least that's what they would like you to believe.
There is a deeper cynicism here though. First, the type of fair and balanced reporting demanded by Conservatives was once a regulatory requirement enforced by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). This was called the Fairness Doctrine and it mandated that broadcasters devote time to contrasting views on issues of public importance. It was Republican President Reagan's FCC repealed this doctrine in 1987 which lead to the rise of Conservative AM talk radio. Gone was the pretense of fairness on these Conservative talk radio shows.
Almost a decade later Fox News would be created by Roger Ailes who worked in the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush White Houses. It was in the Nixon administration that Ailes authored a memo outlining his desire to create a Republican news network to "avoid the censorship, the priorities, and the prejudices of network news selectors and disseminators." This leads into the second point; given Fox News' position within the broader media ecosystem they are able to lend credibility to Conservative talking points and policy priorities. In this way Fox is able to strongly influence the editorial decisions of the other news networks so those news networks do not appear biased by not covering the stories that Fox News is covering. However, there is an asymmetry here; Fox is not at all interested in taking their editorial cues from the other media organizations. Remember, they've already eroded the public trust in media so they do not need to be worried about appearing partisan or biased.
What is unfortunately lost in this debate is that there is a bias in media, its just not a partisan bias. For this reason I will call it blind spots to avoid confusion, and because I do not believe it is necessarily willful or intentional. This is not a critique of how the media covers stories but rather what stories the media chooses to cover.
Part of this is the direct result of the hollowing out of local news organizations. Often it was the beat reporters in the small towns across America that would do the investigative legwork that would uncover a story of national importance to be picked up and elevated by the national news networks. Without this infrastructure of local reporters it is harder for larger organizations to identify the important stories. It is more difficult to report on how national policy making is affecting individuals in small towns across the country. It is that much harder to know what are the important issues in these areas.
In practice this means that when someone listens to NPR or picks up the New York Times they will hear or see stories from DC and New York and will hear about national policy or a humanitarian special interest story from a faraway country. What they wont find is stories about their community, or a community like theirs, or even about the issues their community faces. This results in a kind of disenfranchisement, disengagement, and resentment. These communities view the media as wholly out of touch with their reality and so what relevance does the media have to these communities? What legitimacy does the media have to say what the important issues of the day are? What credibility does the media have?
Compounding this feeling of resentment are the (in)famous "diner stories". Every four years journalist from the large news organizations fan out across the country in search of "real America" only found in the diners in "middle America" or "fly over country"—already you may be picking up a hint of condescension in how we refer to these communities. The journalists come to observe these voters as if they are some foreign culture to be studied and reported back to civilization. They will claim that understanding which issues are important to these voters is essential to understanding the "mood of the nation". But as soon as the ballots are cast the reporters retreat back in their studios, betraying a deep insincerity in the interest in these communities.
Rebuilding the network of local news organizations is the obvious solution to this issue. Joshua Darr wrote for FiveThirtyEight, "a growing body of research has found that government is worse off when local news suffers. In fact, inadequate local news has been linked to more corruption, less competitive elections, and weaker municipal finances and a prevalence of party-line politicians who don’t bring benefits back to their districts... in the absence of local news, people are more likely to vote for one party up and down the ballot”. Short of rebuilding a robust local news environment, which would be a years long project, the national organizations need to take seriously their credibility gap in "middle America". Resources need to be put into covering these communities consistently, not once every four years.
