Quote:
Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
I know this is popular mythology on the right, and god knows you have the critical capacity of an ant when it comes to right-wing mythologies, but the traditional print media has always been hard-core centrist, tending to the center-right or center-left depending on local political preferences (see the Dallas News versus the Boston Globe) and who is in charge at a given time. This is because traditional print media is all about access.
|
It's also because of the fundamental economics of print. Printing presses are expensive. Print media is a business with relatively high fixed costs and relatively low marginal costs. Most newspaper markets tend to be highly concentrated, often with only one or two newspapers. Most people buy newspapers for local news. For example, for decades San Francisco had the Chronicle and the Examiner, and then the Examiner couldn't keep up and there is now only one paper in town. If you are running a newspaper in this context, then the journalistic imperative is centrist -- try to appeal to everybody, so as not to lose any readers and sell as many advertisements as you can. If you win that space, no one will threaten your franchise. So the news coverage is centrist and inoffensive. Most publishers are wealthy and skew conservative, so the editorial pages of most newspapers skew conservative, but usually not so much as might lose readers and advertisers. We have very few national newspapers, because people buy paper's for local news. The NYT is one, because it's the country's biggest city and can support better coverage. The WSJ is another, because it caters to business news. The WaPo has become one recently, but it has always been primarily the local newspaper for the capital -- no one subscribed to it outside DC until the internet made that possible. Traditional print journalism evolved within this paradigm.
Quote:
|
Traditional Network News used to be the same, but with cable they now tend to try to reach national submarkets - Sinclair the ultra-right, CBN and Fox the hard right, CNN the center to center-right, Bloomberg the center, and MSNBC the center left to left. You've got more right wing cable networks than anything else, reflecting massive investment by the Murdoch's of the world.
|
Traditional TV news was much like traditional print, for similar reasons. It's expensive to run TV stations and the profit is high on the margins. Traditional TV networks all wanted mass audiences. Cable started changing this in TV before the internet changed it for newspapers.
Quote:
The press of the left is a pretty modest and mostly academic groups, with publications like the Nation or MERIP. Most of the media pays no attention to them.
Sure, like any workplace, the owners and management are usually voting much farther to the right than the employees, and it is the employees who actually do the writing, but they don't run the place.
But why am I bothering? You don't give two shits about reality.
|
There is an interesting conversation to be had about the way the press covers politics. And then there's right-wing grievance and cynical working off the refs.
