I grew up in Baltimore, and lived there until I was almost 19, which would be 1977. My choice of news and information sources until then was the locally-owned Morning and Evening Sun (known collectively as “The Sunpapers), the Hearst-owned Baltimore News-American and, if I happened to be downtown, I could check out the Afro-American, one of the few black-owned newspapers in existence at the time. For TV news, my choices were a station owned by the Sun, one owned by the News-American and one owned by Westinghouse, a huge corporation at the time. All three "channels" were affiliated with one of the major networks, which provided a half hour a day of evening news, and the Today Show in the morning.
The radio news choices pretty much consisted of the news at the top of every hour, provided by the three major networks plus Mutual Broadcasting. We had two all-news stations, one owned by CBS and one owned by Hearst and affiliated to NBC.
If I happened to have some extra money and was feeling exotic, I could go to a newsstand and find copies of the Washington Post, New York Times or Philadelphia Inquirer, usually at least a day old and at a premium price. The library often had copies of the Chicago Tribune or Los Angeles Times Sunday papers, as well, usually at least a week old.
That was the extent of my media exposure up until 1977, when I moved to Tucson, Arizona. There, I had access to two relatively rinky-dink local newspapers, The Arizona Daily Star and the Tucson Citizen, with the early edition of the Los Angeles Times available at newsstands or in the University of Arizona Student Union late in the morning or early in the afternoon. Again, the University Library had lots of papers, but most were close to a week or more old and they often had waiting lists to even read them. Other than that, I had the three major networks, two ridiculously rinky-dink local tv news choices, and one all-news radio station in Tucson, and a slightly better one in Phoenix. By then, NPR was beginning to gain a foothold, but it was still new in 1977.
Put simply, I had very few choices for news, and I was hungry for it. I actually took to DXing AM radio, which consists of mounting a strong antenna and carefully tuning to every station I could find. Of course, most of that was local news; the “national news” generally consisted of the same headlines at the top of every hour I could get from local stations. I also got a short wave radio, to listen to the BBC and Radio Moscow (the latter was for entertainment purposes only), but really, the news about the United States that appeared on the BBC pretty much came from the US broadcast networks, anyway.
Why am I engaging in this nostalgic tour of news sources from 30-40 years ago, you ask? Great question.
I keep hearing complaints about “the Media,” and how it’s putting a stranglehold on democracy, and how “propaganda” is just killing our politics, and we have to somehow stop it from engulfing everything that our country supposedly stands for, or words to that effect. Basically, the story goes, “the media” is to blame for everything bad that’s happened to this country in recent years.
Put simply, that is just ridiculous.
Let’s start with a basic premise. Propaganda is more effective when the people it’s aimed at have no other choice but to listen to it. It's pretty ineffective if people have plenty of other news outlets telling them something else. Therefore, the idea that the propaganda coming from the wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party called “Fox News” is at all effective is just unsupportable. The reason an absurd story such as the one floated to justify the invasion of Iraq – that Iraq had lots of WMDs – became effective was not because “the Media” pushed the story. The reason it was effective was because there was no effective counter to it. They said it, we repeated it, called it "bullshit" and we figured that was the end of the discussion.
You see, one of the reasons the right WANTS you to blame “the Media” for everything is because it distracts you from crafting an effective alternative message or theme. Unfortunately, it's worked all too well. The reason they coined the term “liberal media” and have used it so effectively is twofold. One; it’s simple for everyone on their side to understand and repeat to everyone they encounter. But they also know it'll throw the loudest lefties into such a tizzy that they’ll feel compelled to “refute it,” thus wasting a lot of time and energy that could be spent convincing moderate voters to show up at the polls and vote for people who aren't interested in destroying the government.
There is no such thing as “the Media.” Like “liberal media,” “the Media” is a throwaway line, completely without meaning. Some liberals have agreed that the term is too broad, so they came up with “the mainstream media” to make themselves seem a little more discriminating, but that, too, is essentially meaningless. How do you define “the mainstream media” anyway, except as “you know what I mean (wink, wink)”? What is the "mainstream"?
There are more than 1,400 daily newspapers in the United States (HERE), most of which have web sites. Many are “corporate-owned,” but many others are individually owned. Each newspaper has a separate editor or series of editors, their own reporters, and each serves a different community. Many use what used to be called “wire services” for “national” news coverage, and many of them also supply stories to the wire services like the Associated Press. Likewise, there are more than 6,000 daily newspapers worldwide, most of which have web sites and all of which have a separate set of editors and reporters. There are also hundreds of broadcast and cable news organizations worldwide, many of them owned and run by the people in those countries. Some are owned by the same people who own newspapers, but most are not.
The above numbers don't even include weekly “alternative” newspapers, or magazines, the journalistic web sites that have popped up in recent years, or podcasts. The idea that every single one of these “media outlets” is part of the same monolithic conspiracy is nonsense. It's simply not possible.
When someone speaks of “the Media” in such monolithic terms, they’re essentially lumping The Nation in with The Weekly Standard. Speaking of which, I wonder how many of those folks decrying “the Media” know that circulation for The Nation has always been higher than the Weekly Standard, and that The Nation competes favorably with the conservative-but-not-usually-far-right National Review. (Here, scroll down)
But what about that damn Rupert Murdoch? Isn’t he trying to take over the world? Well, here’s a list of the top 100 newspapers in the United States by circulation. Check out how little of that market News Corp runs. (I apologize that the list is from Wikipedia; I checked the numbers on the list and they’re accurate, though.)
When people scapegoat “the Media” as being a major factor in systemic problems with our democratic system, they invariably bring up Fox News, cable news in general, and right wing talk radio as prime examples. They’re convinced that all of this country’s problems can be tied to stories from those sources. But none of these sources reaches all that many people.
Start with Fox News and Cable News. (Check my math HERE) First of all, there are four major cable news networks, not including business news. The combined median primetime audience for ALL of these networks COMBINED is about 3.5 million, and that’s DOWN from previous years. The daytime median is even lower than that, with a median audience of 1.9 million COMBINED.
To keep all of this in perspective, keep in mind that the US population is about 300 million. That means approximately 1% of the nation tunes in to cable news these days, and the audience is dropping, probably because there isn’t much news to be found there.
The combined broadcast evening news numbers (HERE) are down, too, but even at much lower levels, they absolutely dwarf the combined cable news numbers. The average audience for the network news programs combined is 21.6 million, or nearly six times the median audience that watches cable news in prime time and ten times the number who watch cable news during the day. The lowest-rated evening news program on the networks, the CBS Evening News, has more than twice the audience as the number one show on Fox News, The O’Reilly Factor.
What I’m trying to make clear here is that Fox News, for all of its bluster, is the big daddy in the weakest segment of the news “media.” If this were Oz, Fox News would be the tallest Munchkin. Few people except news junkies and kool-aid drinkers watch cable news, which is something to consider the next time you decide to use your megaphone to parrot a Fox Talking Point™. Before you repeat it, even to refute it, keep in mind that most people you're speaking to haven’t heard it yet. A better approach is to refute the Talking Point™ without mentioning the original talking point. (I see another column coming…)
Now what about those pesky right wing radio talk show hosts? Surely, they have tons of influence, right? Their audiences must be off the charts, they're so huge.
Um, no.
Figuring audience size for these programs is really difficult in this day and age, in part because the ratings companies keep the actual numbers and demographics very close to the vest. But if you look at the Talkers Magazine’s list of the largest audiences in talk radio, number one and number two are Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, with 15 million and 14 million listeners, respectively. (I've seen lower numbers in recent months, but I can't verify, so we'll stick with these numbers.) That sounds like a lot, until you consider that the audiences for Morning Edition and All Things Considered, both of which are stellar actual NEWS programs, boast about 13 million listeners each. (HERE) In other words, if you’re going to claim that Limbaugh and his ilk are incredibly influential because of their humongous... audiences, then you have to give equal props to NPR for its two daily 3-hour news blocks.
Of course, there’s something you should know. All of the above figures are for five days combined, meaning that, at any given time, 1% of the country is listening to these programs at any given time. Yes, folks, that’s right; Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are on more than 600 stations each, and can’t get more than 1% of the total population to listen to them.
See what I’m getting at? The monsters in “the media” aren’t as powerful as you think they are. They gain power through hype, and some of you have bought into that hype. They derive their real power when liberals act fearful of that “power,” and act accordingly.
There simply is no “the Media.” Yes, there are things to keep an eye on. The unfortunate over-consolidation of the broadcast spectrum has rendered much of it useless. As noted, the cable news sector has completely blown its mission, and has largely eschewed news in favor of 24 hours of opinion programming, with less and less reliance on journalism. But what we do have is in no way monolithic, as the term “the Media” implies. There are literally thousands of legitimate news sources now available to us via the Internet; sources that were not available to us 15 years ago. To even suggest that all of them are conspiring together to somehow deprive us of information just seems absurd, doesn’t it?
Meanwhile, you should know that more and more people are getting their news from the Internet. According to a Mashable summary of Pew Center results, the most-cited news source category was television. But before you jump up and scream “See!” check the numbers, because most folks cited more than one source. Overall, the fastest growing source of news was the Internet. Even more fascinating is the revelation that 65% of those age 18-29 list the Internet as their primary source of news. They’re not watching TV or listening to the radio, and they probably only read newspapers for class. That means a major shift away from what we consider to be traditional news sources.
Fewer people rely on one single source for news anymore. More and more of us search for news. One of the great things about the iPad and smartphones is the ability to use news aggregators to find the stories we want to read. I use them almost exclusively, which means I access numerous sources every single day. I have subscriptions to a number of news apps, including some foreign sources I could never have dreamed of accessing back in those heady “good old days” when journalists were allegedly so much greater than they are now. (That's another myth.) I also now have the ability to read a story and verify it with other sources, to see if it passes the smell test.
The point is, the assumptions about an all-powerful “Media” controlling our lives are not reality-based. There are thousands of news resources available to everyone. That a few really loud obnoxious people love to repeat what Fox News or Limbaugh said as if it makes them seem smart is not indicative of an overarching conspiracy on the parts of thousands of news sources to keep you in the dark. It’s part of a very small conspiracy to distract us, and make us look at shiny keys, rather than those things that really matter.
Stop falling for it. Please.
