Dougl at Balloon Juice thinks that maybe a big part of the problem lies in that elites in the MSM aren't very smart:
Maybe it’s time to admit that the people at the top of our political/media heap just aren’t very bright. Politics and media are both areas where there isn’t a lot of good accreditation and review of people (the way there is to some extent in law or medicine or academia), nor is there much opportunity for constructive entrepreneurship (you have to be at some large organization to get anywhere) nor is there anyway to get to the top by just beating other people, as there might be in something like sports (I realize there are elections to win, but they are mostly rigged via gerrymandering etc.). Most of it doesn’t pay very well at the beginning, with all these unpaid internships and so on.
I find it amazing that lots of smart people still don't understand that the MSM is closed system whose primary purpose is to serve corporate and shareholder interests. Big media organizations hire and promote careerists who understand that they don't move up the ladder unless they can prove themselves to be a prodigies of the banal and commonplace. The whole media structure exists not to challenge entrenched power but to reinforce it, and no one gets promoted who isn't on board with that.
Maddow and Olbermann have their liberal ratings niche for the time being because the conservative ratings niche is already occupied, and they pose no significant threat to elite power because they cater to a relatively small, toothless group that has no desire or capability to rock the establishment. And they play their role to keep the culture war alive, which keeps most Americans who have common interests otherwise divided and conquered. As long as the American people fight among themselves, they don't fight elite power. The most important thing for entrenched power is to make sure that we're all segregated into our respective tribal silos.
Calouste, in responding to the excerpt above in comments, shows that unlike most of the commenters to this post that he understands this:
You say like that is a bug and not a feature. . . .
In the olden days, there were people like Upton Sinclair who wrote nasty exposes of big business and couldn’t be silenced. So big business started buying up newspapers and tried to influence the news that way, but because there were still a number of proper journalists, that didn’t work completely either. So they started hiring people who genuinely believed in the top 1% ideology, and what better recruiting ground for that than the priviliged, entitled family members of people in power, like Mrs. Alan Greenspan,[or] daughter of a former Congressman Cokie Roberts (and you can complete the whole list yourself) to get people who genuinely believe that the top 1% are special because they are members of that top 1% themselves. Of course they expect far better pay than your average journalist, being members of the top 1%, but a few million here and there is a long term investment well made. And yes, one of the criteria these people are hired on is that they do not think for themselves or think outside the box of the top 1%.
The top 1%–and their wannabes.
It's really pretty simple. Oligarchies are self-perpetuating. People in power recruit their own or people who want to be like them. If you want to become one of the media elite, you imitate the manners, attitudes, and opinions of established media elites. Young journalists (and young politicians) might have their ideals when they first begin, but realize that they're never going anywhere unless they get "serious", and that means accepting that you must toady to power, not challenge it. This is justified as growing up, in becoming realistic and practical.
Nevertheless, there are still plenty of Upton Sinclairs, and their work appears in publications like the New Yorker and Rolling Stone, and online everywhere, but these media, like MSNBC, do not reach outside the silos of the impotent Left, and are easily dismissed as "far left" by the "serious", i.e., power-toadying, elite media. It doesn't matter what anybody says anymore; it only matters whose agenda a pundit piece or article or blog post supports, and if doesn't support the power establishment's agenda, it is easily siloed and rendered irrelevant.
Leave a Reply