Our Sacred Airwaves™

What passes for the media today is an exercise in doctrinal enforcement, with outlets sharing only information deemed healthy for public consumption.

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Ronna McDaniel, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, lasted all of four days at NBC. As part of the standard politics-to-media carousel, she was hired by the network because it was “seeking out conservative Republican voices to provide balance” in its election coverage. McDaniel was quickly fired, however, after a swarm of liberal political pundits and journalists banded together in a chorus of outrage, declaring that her presence on their “sacred airwaves” was Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy™.

McDaniel, you see, wasn’t properly anti-Trump enough for most Democrats to like, and she was deemed an “election denier” for having opined that Biden’s victory in 2020 wasn’t “fair.”

NBC has apologized for originally believing such a person — someone who may have ended up feeding audiences politically motivated lies (gasp!) — was a worthy addition to its team of contributors, all of whom are beholden to a dogma, unwritten but understood: a set of “correct” opinions and beliefs, or at best, a narrow range within which disagreement is permitted. The network would have you believe that its roster of on-air personalities is replete with objective brokers of information rather than former political operatives and flaks who are all utterly convinced that opinions can be transformed into facts if held passionately enough—a “talent pool” that includes John Brennan, who went from Obama’s CIA, where he set up the “Crossfire Hurricane” FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s supposed “Russian collusion,” directly to NBC/MSNBC, where he was arguably the loudest and most influential voice flogging the Steele dossier and the Russiagate hoax, for which he suffered zero professional consequences.

Explaining why McDaniel had been dismissed, the chairman of NBC Universal’s News Group, Cesar Conde, proposed that “no organization, particularly a newsroom, can succeed unless it is cohesive and aligned.” Which is true, if that “newsroom” is little more than a political safe space for viewers in ironclad alignment with the Democratic Party that specializes in not just Biden hosannas, but self-protective fiction meant to ensure audiences do not experience breaches in the fortress of familiarity, through which doubt might flood. In this respect, NBC is no different than any other mainstream media outlet today. They exist not to inform the public, but to move the world as it is closer to the world as it should be—and what it should be is a progressive empyrean. The point isn’t to deliver the news, or to even convey true information. The point is to express the right attitude. Wrong information is tolerated when it allows the right attitude. And the right information is ignored if it supports the wrong attitude.

During a time when modern politics resembles a kind of intellectual holy war, left-wing ideology has become the New Faith. It’s therefore hardly surprising that people like Rachel Maddow, Chuck Todd, Chris Haynes, Jen Psaki, Joe Scarborough — crusading moralists who seek to refashion society in accordance with their own ideological fervor, and who are completely out of touch with the hoi polloi — covet a vision of themselves as an unimpeachable intellectual vanguard with priest-like authority, anointed prophets of what we all should think and believe. Spend five minutes listening to any one of them and you will inevitably get the nagging sense that you’re not supposed to engage with anything they’re saying as much as absorb it unquestionably. Each represents the same religious, unfalsifiable worldview; as such, their daily sermonizing is neither smart nor informed, it’s just convinced.

If reinforcing the New Faith in a congregation of true believers is the goal, it’s hardly surprising that the hiring of Ronna McDaniel triggered an internal rebellion at NBC. The New Faith does not bend to reason. It is not up for argument. It does not tolerate heretics. And an outlet concerned about protecting the public from ideological contagion is obviously going to deny Republicans and conservatives a voice in any forum where their words might confuse the faithful.

Besides, there is nothing to debate, even with a Republican hired as “controlled opposition,” a tackling dummy against whom square and unanswered shots could be taken. Democratic voters, donors, and advocates resent the notion that their preferences even need to be argued. The idea that they might benefit from entertaining the solicitations of moderates and conservatives is a deep affront to them; those on The Right Side of History™ have no desire to be part of an ideologically heterogeneous coalition. It has been deemed unacceptable to even countenance the notion that persuasion might be valuable, as doing so would concede the legitimacy of the other side’s arguments.

Which is why it makes sense that mainstream media outlets have made it clear that they would rather have targets than converts. The raison d'être of these outlets used to be contributing to an informed public. Now, however, the focus is on constructing a feed of self-affirming narratives that vindicate the partisan loyalties of Democrats, which is why so much content and coverage is just reflective of a desire for psychological satisfaction. What passes for “political discourse” at MSNBC and CNN is usually preaching to the choir while demonizing the opposition by drawing as broad a circumference around the GOP as possible and branding it all Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy™. And mainstream publications are no different. Whether it’s The New York Times or The Washington Post, The Atlantic or The New Yorker, Mother Jones or Rolling Stone, all are more often than not bare Xeroxes of each other, with writers either promulgating the fashionable bigotries that enchant the activist left, or penning endless variants of the same screed in which conservatives are denounced as rabid white nationalists threatening to create a fascist dictatorship right here in America, and Trump voters are depicted as just a bunch of racist troglodytes pining for the past.¹

Needless to say, it wasn’t always like this. But the media industry has radically changed over the past two decades or so.

Journalism as an institution and the news as an industry peaked at the end of the 20th century, a time when even regional newspapers such as the Baltimore Sun possessed several well-staffed foreign bureaus. It was considered the Golden Age of ad-based media.

But the internet, with its digital tsunami of information and emancipation of authorship, shattered this idyll, crippling the traditional newspaper business model and the elite-controlled dispensation that had long endowed newsrooms with a sacrosanct authority as a gatekeeper to knowledge with a monopoly over dissemination and agenda-setting. A deafening Babel of voices now contradicts and drowns out everything the elites say, undermining their authority.

Worse still, advertisers and audiences fled to better platforms like Facebook and Google, where content is free and more attractive and ad delivery is cheaper and more efficient. Newsrooms were suddenly forced to chase viewers and readers. But because the amount of information available through the internet is infinite, with supply vastly outstripping demand, and because such a sizeable chunk of the public transitioned to getting the news from social media, mainstream media outlets were forced to find a new commodity to sell. They settled on polarization.

This industry transformation brought tremendous financial gains when Donald Trump arrived on the scene. Led by The New York Times, mainstream media outlets decided that Trump could not be safely covered, he had to be opposed. A new style of reporting was needed, one free of the traditional strictures of commercial journalism. As Matt Taibbi details in Hate Inc., the industry-wide adoption of a more openly adversarial take on Trump “was pitched to us in the media business as an ethical decision, a necessity for a reporting corps that needed to ‘do better’ to save democracy.” Objectivity was replaced with shrill, self-righteous advocacy and an “oppositional” stance that often took the form of a highly emotive, sloganeering kind of activism.²

In 2016 especially, news reporters began to consciously divide and radicalize audiences. The cover was that we were merely “calling out” our divisive new president, Donald Trump. But from where I sat, the press was now working in collaboration with Trump, acting in his simplistic mirror image, creating a caricatured oppositional demographic and feeding it content. As Trump rode to the White House, we rode to massive profits. The only losers were the American people, who were now more steeped in hate than ever. — Matt Taibbi, Hate Inc.

The media class, whose job it is to exercise narrative temperance, took to shouting from the rooftops about the imminent fall of democracy and the specter of Republican fascism, as if we were witnessing the resurrection of the Third Reich. There remains no shortage of pundits who jump at the opportunity to forewarn the Republic’s collapse, so long as Trump exists.

These people share the inability to talk about the 45th president (and, increasingly, conservatives in general) in anything but the language of civilizational catastrophe. The reason they so often sound like unhinged eschatologists who trade in threadbare hysteria and respond with theatrical convulsions to anything not explicitly left-wing is because the theme of unending crisis, with its hyper-intense tone, is now a key part of the new coverage concept. Anything less is seen as normalizing Trump and legitimizing right-wing views. It is, as Taibbi points out, “a scheme to boost profits by addicting audiences to a never-ending narrative of moral mania.”

It’s unlikely that things will get better.

As polarizing agents within a new business model dependent on engagement and subscriptions, mainstream media outlets now sell validation. And that’s because the only people willing to pay for the “news” with their attention and money are those interested in the news as presented from a certain angle. The New York Times, for example, is basically just a notary at this point. Its imprimatur and the fact that people know the Times is going to convey the news from the right perspective, that of the Good Person™, is why the paper has managed to survive the industry’s most turbulent years. Even if they don’t realize it, the vast majority of its readers are paying to support a cause—that of ensuring a specific worldview, a specific creedo, is proselytized to others.

As media ecologist Andrey Mir has pointed out, without the advertising-dictated necessity to appeal to the median American, the inherent liberal predisposition of these outlets is now unchecked by any financial imperative. The practice of objectivity is fading into obsolescence. As a result, editors have stopped adhering to the filtering policies that once incorporated the idea of the public good into news selection. It’s the will and wish of the audience that sets the filters of agenda now. The price is the loss of newsroom autonomy.

This has led to the development of “post-journalism”—essentially, commentary commodified and sold as the modern-day version of news. This new form of journalism, which is basically crowdfunded propaganda, sells not the news, not even the truth necessarily, but an ethos and agenda to like-minded people, an orthodoxy already known to the “enlightened” whose job is to inform everyone else, as Bari Weiss puts it. The ideological concerns and values of overwhelmingly liberal audiences are exploited. Reader/viewer irritation and frustration must be continuously stoked because the more agitated and concerned and energized people become, the more likely they are to “donate” their attention and money. It’s therefore to the mainstream media’s benefit to exaggerate issues and induce public unrest and outrage, which is why the news agenda has become narrower and more repetitive as journalists focus on select partisan controversies.

Given the magnitude of the shift in the media ecosystem and the fact that the industry is losing its ad revenue and news business to the internet, it’s reasonable to conclude that polarization is here to stay and will only intensify under worsening business conditions that require appealing to divisive issues. In order to prevent the public’s attention from waning, ever-increasing levels of agitation must be attained. Going forward, depoliticized media will be at a significant disadvantage and ultimately cease to exist, while traditional journalistic standards of impartiality, accuracy, transparency, and accountability will continue to deteriorate.

This is obviously a source of great distress for those of us who understand that these outlets have the ability to determine America’s primary picture of public reality by collectively defining and enforcing in cultural and moral terms what counts as truth and lies, acceptable and unacceptable positions—and that because the vast majority of the media industry has been repurposed to instill and enforce the narrow and rigid agenda of the ruling ideology, it is inevitable that the distinctions will continue to slide in a leftward direction over time.

1. It was the writer Stanley Cohen who coined the term “moral panic.” Cohen talked about the institutional utility of whipping up the public against what he called “folk devils,” irredeemable monsters deemed by credentialed experts to be a threat to decent society.

2. The practice commonly travels under the name of “moral clarity.”