Sean Hannity's private plane and the Wake Forest tennis team: A morality fable
Do you ever wonder why Republican propaganda appears to be everywhere while solid, informative news keeps going belly-up? It’s all about money, author Katherine Stewart tells Bulwark. Republican propaganda has it and news does not.
Fox News channels and amplifies rage at a carefully curated target, which never appears to be the Republican Party and that channeling “has worked overwhelmingly to the advantage of the authoritarian right wing,” Stewart said.
You can try to blame it on new technology, or the kind of reporters working in the industry, or the theory that the media has simply come to reflect the biases and polarization of the public. But it all really comes back to money and the moneyed interests who value driving the argument.
“Today … 40 percent of all local TV news stations are under the control of the three largest broadcast conglomerates: Sinclair Broadcast Group, Gray Television, and Nexstar Media Group,” said Stewart. “Their stations — each company now owns about 100 affiliated with ABC, CBS, FOX, or NBC — operate in more than 80 percent of U.S. media markets. A conglomerate with a distinct and well-documented right-wing bias, such as Sinclair, has an outsize footprint on our information ecosystem.”
And under the Trump administration, the concentration of the media business has accelerated.
“Consider that Trump cleared the way for [“Trumpy billionaire Larry Ellison, and his son, David”] to merge their Skydance Media company with Paramount in order to gain control of CBS News. Thanks to this preferential treatment, the Ellisons’ new media giant is now in the running to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery, which includes the crown jewel of the media marketplace: CNN,” said Stewart. “Other companies adapt swiftly to the new cronyistic landscape. Comcast, which previously drew scrutiny from the Trump administration for its own efforts to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery, recently donated up to $10 million to fund Trump’s White House “renovation.”
These major media executives feel little need to satisfy any mission to genuinely inform the public, said Stewart. What they want is profits, and hate-based rage-bait is generally more profitable than information.
“Fox News blazed the trail when it reconceived the product that cable news produces: Instead of the straight story, information became fodder for entertainment, persuasion, and grievance. Under the direction of Roger Ailes, the outlet applied all the tricks of demagoguery to expand and consolidate its reach, including a hand-in-glove coordination with the GOP,” Stewart said.
These same companies “protect their turf” by protecting governments that decline to regulate their anti-competitive moves.
A similar drive toward oligopoly profits is at play in the tech industry, Stewart warned. When a government grants and enforces an effective monopoly to some technologist, they are “likely to use just as much misinformation and manipulation as they can get away with to protect their privileged position.”
The corporations that own the tech industry are also in the hands of plutocrats, who generally favor right-wing governments “because they want to keep as much of their money as possible—and prevent the little people from telling them what to do with it, said Stewart.
“Consider Peter Thiel, who identifies those who wish to end tax exemptions for the super-rich as possible representatives of ‘the antichrist,’” said Stewart. “Or consider Jeff Bezos, who is undermining TheWashington Post’s long tradition of exemplary journalism by turning the Opinion section into an regime-friendly advocate for ‘personal liberties.’”
There’s no pretending this can all be overcome “simply by reducing partisan divides and promoting civility,” said Stweart. “… We need to confront and challenge media and tech oligopolies and establish a system that produces journalism committed to the goal of any free press, which is to inform the public and promote the truth.”
Read the New Republic report at this link.