Understanding the US Media, Part II: How & Why it Controls Public Sentiment

Part I of this two-part post discussed how journalists claiming to be “unbiased” create a worse result in the process. This post will continue the look at the media, focusing on its role within US society.

Follow the Money

To start, it’s important to understand who owns the news outlets, because they get to dictate what information is shared by their journalists. Most well-known news sources are owned by wealthy corporations or individuals. The few that aren’t are the nonprofit media, the most famous of which are NPR and Associated Press (AP). AP and Reuters are wire services, meaning they compile the big news stories for the day and sell them to other outlets, like newspapers, radio, and TV news. Those two are generally the least editorialized sources, but as the previous post explained, this doesn’t mean they’re the best source for understanding the world. Unlike AP, Reuters is owned by a for-profit company, Thomas Reuters, whose market cap at time of writing this is over $70 billion.

NPR, though a nonprofit, isn’t a wire service like AP, meaning NPR features more opinions instead of simply stating facts. It’s important to note that while NPR receives some money from the government, it’s still independent from the government. Most of its money comes from elsewhere, like ads and dues from member stations across the country. Being a nonprofit, NPR is less chained to the ideas that benefit wealthy people than the rest of the big media outlets, making it one of the best major new sources. However, NPR, AP & Reuters are among the worst culprits of obsessing over being “unbiased”, the topic of Part I.

Beyond those three, the media outlets most Americans have heard of are all owned by rich people and corporations. The “Big 3” of ABC, CBS, and NBC are owned by Disney, Paramount, and Comcast, respectively. Fox is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, which also owns the New York Post, Wall Street Journal, and other outlets in the UK and Australia. MSNBC, like NBC, is owned by Comcast. CNN is owned by Warner Bros. All of these make the Fortune 500 list, and the smallest of the bunch is Paramount, at an $8 billion valuation.

Local stations are mostly owned by large national companies like Nexstar and Sinclair, who have been known to give almost-identical scripts to the many local channels they own. This turns these local stations into something more like a national news station with local flairs. The same process has been ongoing with radio stations being bought up by companies like Cumulus and iHeartRadio.

The New York Times Company has a valuation over $8 billion. The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. One of the last sources of news outside the internet that isn’t controlled by big business is local newspapers, which have been dying off, due largely to the internet. Also, most of their state/national level articles come from wire services like AP. Many people today also get their news from internet algorithms like Google, X, and Reddit. These are also controlled by large corporations.

Magazines like The Atlantic and The New Yorker can deliver some good articles, but given their fairly well-off target audience, they also generally have an elitist bias.

Basically, just about any major news outlet is going to give you the viewpoints of wealthy people, which often are directly opposed to those of the working people. After all, power is a zero-sum game, meaning for anyone to gain, someone(s) else needs to lose. This argument is often incorrectly applied to economics, where zero-sum situations do exist, but not always. For example, investing in education can allow more innovation, which benefits all, without anyone having to lose. Power, on the other hand, is always zero-sum. Power specifically means someone’s ability to coerce others’ behaviors. One’s power is the sum of the influence they have over others, and those others have less power over their own lives as a result. No one gets power without taking it from others.

The powerful people in society, AKA “the wealthy”, want policies that allow them to solidify and consolidate their power. Everyone else should want power more evenly distributed, allowing them more power over their own lives. In practice, though, many people support policies that allow wealthy people to take power from them. Some examples are low minimum wage, anti-union laws, low taxes on the wealthy, weak social safety net, deregulated banking and manufacturing industries, and keeping health insurance privatized. As mentioned in Part I, most Americans do in fact support the opposite of these policies (meaning they support the policies that benefit most Americans, not just the wealthy). Why, then, do we not see movement in those areas? Why are both political parties to the right of the average American voter? The complete answer to that would need way more than a blog post, but perhaps the biggest factor is the media.

Manufactured Conflict

While all the major news outlets offer up the ideas beneficial to wealthy people, they also don’t universally agree with each other. How can that be? The answer is simple: the media amplifies the few issues that rich people disagree on, to get Americans focused on those instead of the issues the rich people agree on (which can be summarized as “let rich people do whatever they want no matter how many people it harms”). If the latter is hardly ever talked about, and simply taken as a given when it is discussed, then anyone who lets the media inform their position is guaranteed to take the stance the rich people want on those issues.

The issues the media chooses to amplify are generally those of the “culture war”, which to rich people are nothing more than window dressing. The reason this strategy works is that, while rich people know they won’t be meaningfully impacted by laws regarding things like LGBTQ rights, abortion, and book bans, those laws do meaningfully impact everyday people. Someone rich enough will be able to be gay or get an abortion without getting in trouble, and can send their kids to better private schools if the public curriculum gets wrecked by political activism. Regular people don’t have these privileges, though, so how the culture war issues play out actually matters to them. This is not a happy coincidence to the rich people, it’s exactly why the media does this. Divide the populace over wedge issues rich people don’t really care about so that the masses fight each other instead of working together for their own interests.

The issues that get lost in the confusion of the culture war are the policies the rich people care the most about, which is exactly why they don’t even want them discussed. You can’t lose a political debate if no one even realizes your position is up for debate. By amplifying differences that amount to window dressing to the rich, but not to others, the major media outlets can seem like they’re giving a wider range of viewpoints than they really are.

The issues the rich people most care about are by-and-large economic ones, as things like trust-busting and increasing the minimum wage would actually reduce their power. This is what Cornelius Vanderbilt was alluding to when he said “What do I care about the law? Ain't I got the power?” The power he had was economic, it came from his control of the physical conditions of the world, via his railroad empire. Rich people would rather make concessions on social issues than economic issues. Thus, the media the rich people own amplifies social issues and suppresses economic issues. When they do present economic issues, it’s nearly always in favor of right-wing economics, which are those that benefit rich people.

This behavior can be seen most evidently in the media’s reaction to two developments of the 21st century: Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders’ campaigns for president. These two are the closest working people have come to making meaningful economic changes in their own favor, pushing back against the wealthy people who have been concentrating power in their own hands since the 70s. A casual observer might have expected the “left-wing” outlets to be in support and the right-wing outlets opposed, but that’s not what happened. Instead, both cases saw a unified effort by the major media outlets to suppress them.

Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street was a protest movement that arose in reaction to the 2008 financial crisis. The high levels of unemployment due to the resulting recession provided a mass of potential protesters. The already-wealthy bankers causing the crash due to irresponsible “investments” (AKA gambling) purely in pursuit of more riches gave the protesters a target. The government not prosecuting those bankers and instead bailing out their banks gave them reason to believe there were not simply a few bad apples, but an entire bad system that had to be reworked. As a result, it became the largest popular movement opposing elites’ control of the economy that the US had seen in a generation. The initial protest in NYC lasted just under 2 months, in the fall of 2011, but a broader “Occupy movement” continued until 2016. This scared those elites.

The initial response to Occupy involved the usual police crackdowns, arrests, and FBI/DHS surveillance. This, according to the official US military manual, is a strategy that invariably leads to the protest movement gaining support, instead of losing it. The manual in question, FM3-24, can be found here. Paragraph 4-43 reads (emphasis mine):

An insurgency [AKA protest movement] uses the military-focused approach to achieve its policy goals by military success. In this approach, insurgents’ efforts focus on causing the government to lose legitimacy by military success and inspiring a population to join the insurgents against the government. The most important idea behind a military focused method is that it does not require building political support among the population. Instead, military success and action will gain the support of a population.

In short, what this is saying is that violent suppression of a protest movement is beneficial to the movement, as it makes more of the population sympathetic to the cause. As such, some other, softer, strategy beyond police suppression was needed to fully defeat the Occupy movement. Cue the media.

Following the initial Occupy Wall Street protest, in the years of the broader Occupy movement, the media drastically increased the amount of reporting on racial issues, as shown here and here. The use of terms like “racism”, “white privilege”, and “unconscious bias” in headlines skyrocketed from 2011 to 2016, when the Occupy movement was happening. This had the effect of drawing the public’s attention away from economic reform to racial issues instead. No doubt the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO in 2014, and the subsequent riots in the same city, played a role in this increase, but it started before the killing and continued after the riots ended.

Most of the people who have commented on this rise are rightists who generally blame this and the resulting increase in focus on racial tensions on Obama or even the media wanting riots and harm to the US. This increase only started midway through Obama’s presidency, though, so that explanation doesn’t make much sense. As for the media wanting riots, that’s clearly untrue. One of the non-economic positions that all the corporate media agrees on is that protests are bad.

Really, though, this is economic, as protests have the potential to stop economic activity. This potential makes protests perhaps the most effective tool the populace has to fight against the status quo the elites want to maintain. Of course they want such a threat against their power painted in a bad light. As such, all outlets will fixate on the most violent & destructive examples when covering protests, and even entirely peaceful protests will either not be reported on, or only reported in terms of all the traffic they’re causing!

Ask someone about the 2020 protests in Portland or Minneapolis, and if they’re from those cities, there’s a good chance they’ll tell you there were some protests, mostly contained to known locations, that had a decent amount of support from the local population, though certainly not universal. Ask someone who wasn’t in those cities in 2020, and they’ll tell you the cities were completely burned to the ground. The difference is the first group saw things first-hand, and the second group saw what the media wanted them to see. If the media wanted protests and riots, they wouldn’t do whatever they can to paint them in a bad light.

Multiple factors probably contributed to the rise in racial division in the media, there doesn’t need to be just one cause, but the explanation that fits the timeline best is that this was mostly a response to Occupy.

A key point from the last post was that people shouldn’t trust any news outlet to give them a complete and accurate representation of reality, and should instead look to history for that. Here, historical context backs up this claim about the media’s response to Occupy, as capitalists have long used resentment between white and black workers to keep both down.

Early in US history, the existence of slavery had the effect of suppressing white wages, as work could be given to slaves instead if the white people demanded higher wages. Even in places where slavery wasn’t legal, the same logic could be applied, since black people were still kept down there. This led to violent clashes like the Cincinnati riots of 1829, between black people and Irish immigrants.

During the Jim Crow era, especially pre-New Deal, when the treatment of both white and black labor was particularly brutal, labor strikes were common and violent. Regularly, black people were brought in as scabs to break up white workers' strikes. This prevented the white workers from achieving better wages and working conditions. Additionally, if the white and black workers united in a strike, it would’ve been more effective, but the black workers breaking the white workers’ strikes reinforced division between the two, making the white workers less likely to welcome black workers to join their strikes. Both of these effects helped the capitalists keep workers down.

Eventually, Jim Crow was legally ended in 1965, and the very next election was won by Richard Nixon, who employed the “Southern Strategy” of appealing to white workers’ resentment towards perceived special treatment of black people. He then implemented the War on Drugs, which his advisor John Ehrlichman said was done with the explicit intention of keeping black people down (as well as leftists):

We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities

12 years after Nixon was elected, Reagan was elected, once again following the Southern Strategy. He drastically increased War on Drugs enforcement, and passed a bill that made the punishments for crack 100 times more severe than for cocaine. Crack, of course, is just another form of cocaine, so even if you believe in drug criminalization, they should’ve been treated the same. Instead, crack, the form used predominantly by black people, was given 100 times as much punishment as cocaine, the form of the same drug that white people predominantly used. This was no coincidence coming from the guy who supported Apartheid South Africa, and spoke of “states rights” during his campaign at the site where three people were killed trying to get black Mississippians registered to vote. I can’t speak to the man’s individual opinions, but Reagan the politician repeatedly leaned into racial division as a puppet for capitalists.

In the 21st century, the racial division between workers has been targeted more at immigrants, but it’s the same strategy of turning workers against each other so they don’t realize the capitalists are the ones pulling the strings.

It might sound conspiratorial at first to say the media amplified white vs. black resentment as a way to derail the momentum Occupy had gathered, but the history outlined gives a decent case. Is it really that hard to believe that the media, owned by economic elites, did the thing economic elites had been doing for the entire 200+ years of US history? That certainly seems more likely than Obama randomly deciding halfway through his presidency that he wanted to pivot from a uniting message to one of division, or that the media wanted riots in the streets and the downfall of the USA for…some reason.

Bernie Sanders

Following Occupy, the next closest brushes the US has had with threatening the elites’ continued consolidation of power was Bernie Sanders’ runs for president in 2016 and 2020. In these campaigns, he was the most economically progressive candidate ever for either major party, and had a legitimate shot at the nomination. Once again, both “sides” of the elite-controlled media united in their main goal of preventing any threat to their power.

These included giving him significantly less coverage than his opponents; giving his supporters the juvenile, unserious-sounding name “Bernie bros”; MSNBC comparing Bernie winning a primary to the Nazis; MSNBC also making graphics that make pro-Bernie sentiment look like the opposite if you don’t inspect closely enough; presenting polls where everyone’s numbers are accurate, but Bernie’s are shown lower than they actually were in the polls; and much more.

The main counter-argument made to these claims is “Bernie lost fair and square, he got fewer votes”, which misses the point. The outcome of the primaries doesn’t excuse the media’s behavior. You can acknowledge that the media had it out for Bernie without it becoming an election denial argument. The evidence is very clear, Bernie was given harsher treatment than anyone else both elections. The biggest culprit was the supposedly-left-wing MSNBC.

This all would be confusing to someone who believed MSNBC was truly left-wing, but makes all the sense in the world if you recognize the media stands more for pro-elite bias than any left/right distinction. Bernie called for economic policies that elites don’t like, including the breakup of telecom giants like Comcast, who, as noted above, owns MSNBC & NBC. Once again, this point can sound conspiratorial, but is really what anyone who honestly considers the situation would expect to happen. The elite-owned media pushes pro-elite narratives, and Bernie was a threat to that, so even the likes of MSNBC tried to portray him negatively. To think they, or any corporate-owned outlet, are a left-wing news organization is to misunderstand the reality of the US media landscape.

This is interesting to contrast with Trump, who many media outlets will tell you is an existential threat to US democracy. Their words indicate that he’s a serious threat, but their actions tell a different story. They’ll gladly give him lots of air time, and even if it’s negative, Trump benefits from it, as he’s foremost an entertainer who thrives on attention. All the liberal news outlets constantly harping on how horrible he is only feeds into his image as the candidate who’s fighting the establishment that hates him. This image is obviously a carefully-crafted lie, coming from a billionaire who’s bragged about owning politicians, but the liberal media gives him ammo to run on it.

If the media actually cared about the threat Trump posed, they would stop giving him as much air time as they possibly could. Instead, they would’ve given Trump the same treatment as Bernie. If anyone would be hurt by simply not giving them attention, it would be Trump, and the media proved they knew this was an effective strategy when they did it to Bernie, twice.

Based on the media’s actions, it’s clear their warnings about Trump are not based on earnest concern, but based on that being what plays well to their audience. The chairman and CEO of CBS, Les Moonves, openly admitted this when he said Trump’s run for office “may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS … this is going to be a very good year for us.”

To be clear, Trump is a very serious threat to the US and the world (explained more in Part I). The point is that the corporate media simply doesn’t care because, once again, Trump’s authoritarian goals wouldn’t meaningfully harm capitalists, it would only harm everyone else. Free from the need to care what damage Trump would do, they’re happy to talk about him constantly, no matter how much that helps Trump, as long as it gets views. Trump is a threat to everyday people, Bernie was a threat to the capitalists. The media showed its true colors in the treatment of those two.

Besides the elections, when Bernie has been just a Senator and not a threat to become the presidential nominee, he’s gotten more positive coverage from the media. After all, polls often place him as the most popular sitting US politician, which is unsurprising if you recall from Part I that polls show the median American voter is to the left of the Democrats. Bernie, despite what the media will tell you, is the US politician whose positions most align with the average American. When he’s not in a position to make real change, the media might as well pander to those fans. The same sort of treatment happens with other progressives in the House, who similarly don’t have enough power to actually achieve their aims.

AOC has played the best out of these progressives, and thus gets a good amount of media attention, but if she ever runs for president you can bet it will go one of two ways. Either she’ll run similarly to Obama, using progressive rhetoric while promising wealthy donors to govern conservatively, or the media will give her the Bernie treatment.

Overton Window

The role the different media outlets play is nicely encapsulated in a concept called the Overton window. This is the range of political ideas considered reasonable by the broad population. If the elites can ensure that the entire Overton window spans only ideas that they support, then there’s no risk of any policies being passed that threaten to diffuse wealth and power to working people.

The reality that most Americans don’t seem to understand is that liberalism and conservatism are very similar ideologies. As an example, think to yourself which ideology these beliefs fit better in: private property rights, market economies, individual rights, liberty, and the rule of law. Many may say they’re more conservative positions, but they’re actually lifted straight from the summary of liberalism. In the US, social democracy (Bernie Sanders, the New Deal, universal healthcare, social security, etc.) is often lumped in with liberalism, which adds confusion, but the traditional sense of liberalism is closer to conservatism.

In the simplest terms, inevitably overly-simple, liberalism aims to make the fewest concessions possible to pacify the masses into not fighting against the system, so elites can comfortably stay in power, while conservatism aims to actively increase the power of already-powerful people and suppress others.

Conservatism will use political power to solidify the power of elites. This was seen in 1976’s Buckley v. Valeo and subsequent rulings by conservative judges, discussed more in the next post, that each allowed more money into politics, giving wealthier people more control of the government. Conservatism will also use political power to keep suppressed groups down, as in Jim Crow and the War on Drugs, discussed above.

Liberalism, on the other hand, will do very little with political power to interfere in such matters, allowing economics to run its course. As a result, the people with economic power are allowed to use that power to accumulate more power. Liberalism won’t provide the political help conservatism would, but also won’t give meaningful political opposition. The net result of both is that elites keep and grow their power. Hence, liberalism and conservatism are really not that different, particularly on economic issues. Where they differ most is on social issues, where conservatism once again will interfere to keep certain groups down, like LGBTQ people, while liberalism lets people be.

In order to actually level the playing field, politics has to push back against elites, rather than liberalism’s strategy of just refraining from actively helping them. Social democracy aims to help working people for this reason, but still doesn’t threaten the elites’ position in society. It seeks to reduce the power elites have over others, but doesn’t actually remove the elites from power, and maintains the capitalist system, just with some guardrails. The only real threat this poses to elites is that it will increase social mobility, allowing more people to potentially overtake them if they don’t continue to innovate economically. This, of course, is a good thing; competition and social mobility are supposed to be the main benefits of capitalism, yet attempts to make those actually happen (social democracy) get decried as “socialism”.

Actual socialism does aim to remove elites from power entirely, but social democracy, much less liberalism, decidedly do not. Even still, why would an elite want to endure competition to stay in power when they could avoid even needing to do even that, by preventing a more social democratic system from being implemented?

Previous posts like this one have discussed how the US and other countries have clearly had more average prosperity under social democracy, so I won’t rehash that here. The point is, if you’re not in the 1% (even if you are in the 1%, really), you should prefer social democracy over liberalism, and both over conservatism. As mentioned repeatedly in this two-part post, most Americans do in fact support this, as long as you don’t present it with politically-charged language that the media uses to turn people off from social democracy (e.g. “handouts”, “socialism”). This is why the capitalists need to use the media to distract and confuse people, in order to prevent them from voting for politicians who might actually implement those policies.

The result is the further to the right you go from social democracy, the more you have to skew or outright lie about reality in order to convince an everyday person to support it. At the same time, liberalism is the furthest left (i.e. closest to social democracy) that most elites are willing to support. This is why that’s been the default ideological viewpoint of the media for a while. It’s easier to convince an everyday person that liberalism is good for them than conservatism, because liberalism is actually better for them than conservatism. The missing context is that social democracy is even better for them than liberalism. That’s what the elite-controlled media wants to hide from you. Notably, it’s primarily the so-called “left-wing” media that plays the biggest role in doing so, by presenting themselves as left-wing and depicting anything to the left of them as too extreme. They, in turn, gain legitimacy by being more reasonable than Fox News, whose depiction of reality is so far from the truth that they openly admit that no reasonable person would ever believe what Fox tells them.

Framing this all with the Overton window, it’s useful to consider two different windows, one for economic policy, and another for social policy. Fox News and the like pull the economic and social Overton windows to the right, while MSNBC and the like pull the social Overton window to the left, but prevent the economic Overton window from shifting left. CNN, once considered alongside MSNBC, changed owners recently, and one of its big investors & board members, John Malone, is a Trump supporter who said he wants to make CNN more like Fox. So while CNN was historically part of the wall preventing a leftward shift, it’s increasingly helping to pull to the right.

This has the overall effect of social policy following the prevailing winds of society, but economic policy shifting to the right regardless of public opinion. This is just what the capitalists want, which is why the capitalist-owned media behaves this way.

Of course, what the elites driving this want is not simply to control the public narrative. Instead, controlling the narrative is a means to their real end of getting their preferred policies elected. With the right politicians in place, they can ensure the policies passed will be favorable to them. Not coincidentally, the Democratic Party itself has mirrored the pseudo-left posturing of news outlets like MSNBC.

In 8 years, Nixon and Ford swung the Supreme Court hard to the right with 5 appointments, enough for a majority on their own. The SCOTUS has been majority-conservative ever since, and has handed down a string of decisions, starting with the previously mentioned Buckley v. Valeo, that each erased part of the campaign finance laws. This allowed more and more money into politics, making campaign funding increasingly critical to electoral success. The big money naturally came from the people who had the most of it, the capitalists and corporations. By the 90s, the Democrats could only stay relevant if they got big-money donations, and the only way to get those donations was to govern to those donors’ liking. Namely, big-money donors were flexible on social policy, but required conservative economic policy in return for their donations, for the same reason the media cares most about economic policy.

As such, Clinton “ended welfare as we know it” and repealed Glass-Steagall banking regulations, then Obama continued George W Bush’s bailouts of banks following the 2008 crash without prosecution of those responsible. Biden has been a bit less economically conservative, though certainly no social democrat, perhaps indicating even some capitalists now think the US has gone too far to the right economically. We can hope. In the meantime, vote for social democrats over liberals in Democratic primaries, and either over conservatives & fascists in the generals.

If you enjoyed this post and haven’t read Part I, you can find that here.