So, two years ago I wrote briefly about the regime change over at Warners, which also coincided with the rightward shift of CNN, and an exodus of their talent. Then came the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post failing to make endorsements in the 2024 presidential election, directly due to the interference from their billionaire owners, which made headlines. However, perhaps no single individual had as much impact as Elon Musk, who still owns Twitter, and decided to throw all his support and $277 million behind Donald Trump.
I'm not surprised that the major media platforms are shifting rightward, but I am surprised at how fast it's happening. Part of this is probably due to the understandable jitters about the incoming Trump administration. Trump is spiteful, bad at impulse control, and has a habit of lashing out at his perceived enemies. I don't blame any of the presenters on MSNBC trying to play nice all of a sudden, or the New York Times resorting to headlines full of weasel words, to avoid being in his crosshairs. However, more often than not the editorial changes are the result of more and more media companies losing their independence. Most of the smaller regional papers across the country have either folded or been snapped up by media conglomerates. As cable news viewers get older and more Conservative, the tone of the coverage has followed suit to pander to them. All of what we used to consider the "mainstream media" - really whatever isn't social media these days - has become consolidated and corporatized to the point where it's really becoming difficult to distinguish the few remaining sources that place much importance on journalistic integrity.
What's scariest to me is that these older media platforms are generally viewed as loss leaders. Nobody is getting in the newspaper or cable news business in 2024 to make money. They're getting in to control the discourse to benefit their other corporate interests. While there are only a few outlets I'd point to as outright fear-mongering propaganda, I'm deeply unsettled by the degree to which most of the media will avoid some of the elephants in the room, and I don't just mean the Republicans. A really stark example happened in December with the killing of UnitedHealth Group CEO Brian Thompson. Nearly all the major news sources were very surprised and perturbed by the popular sentiment that the killing was justified. Many column inches and hours of screen time were taken up by analysts with dubious credentials arguing why Thompson's death was a tragedy. You could feel the increasing desperation as public opinion refused to be swayed against the shooter, and rumblings about potential copycat crimes spread.
Simultaneously, the news started running a few stories about how terrible American healthcare insurance was, a topic they had studiously ignored for years, as prices ballooned and coverage denial rates soared. Suddenly, it was a topic worth covering because somebody had killed a CEO over UnitedHealth Group's notoriously inhumane treatment of its subscribers. Whatever your thoughts o the killer's actions, he'd finally gotten the media to acknowledge a horrific social wrong that was brushed aside for years because people with finance degrees had figured out how to legally capitalize on it. And the lesson here is that nothing short of a high-profile killing would have gotten the wider American public to notice or the media to care.
I watched more cable news during the election - not much, but enough to keep myself informed of what the FOX News and CNN headlines were on most days. I quickly learned that they were pretty bad at giving me any actual useful information, but pretty good at keeping me updated on what their owners wanted me to think about any particular piece of news. I want to be clear that I don't think that things would be necessarily any better if we saw a leftward shift in any of the major media coverage, because that still doesn't solve the accountability issue, and everything is still owned by out-of-touch billionaires. However, it does not bode well that the 1%'s control over our news has gotten this obvious, when Americans' access to trustworthy information is more important than ever.
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