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  John O'Kane: Media Muddle
Reported by Huffington Post on Monday, 16 November 2009 (on November 16, 2009)
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Ann Pettifor asked on Huffington Post recently whether all those \"top stories\" in the media these days are just for \"top people.\" Citing surveys at the Pew Research Center showing that stories about the suffering of ordinary people in the recession have nearly vanished from the media, she wonders if it\'s become thoroughly absorbed in stories relevant only for Washington and New York.
The stories that dominated were the bailout billions for the banks and auto industry, and the administration\'s stimulus. Slighted were unemployment, news of job losses making up only 6% of the total; housing and foreclosures, roughly the same; and the \"bankruptcies and failures of the industries that grow, make, produce and distribute the goods and services vital to the real economy,\" a mere 4% of the pie.
Anyone trying to keep up these days can hardly be shocked at these percentages. We sense the media--the corporate one at least--isn\'t giving us the complete picture, and that its elite-skewed stories and blurbs are glosses on the reality we want so desperately to understand in these testy times. Perhaps on some level it is merely reflecting the shared wishes of Americans to avoid too much negativity--of a social nature at least; the media thrives on gore and blips of the bizarre. Our success as a country demonstrates that optimism of the will, shaped by frontier mobility and the myth of endless progress, produces self-fulfilling prophecies. Put the grit behind you, ignore the depressing reminders, and head for happy hour at the second chance saloon. And positive thinking can buff the buying mood. Advertisers shun \"political\" publications in the belief that readers who think too much suspend the consuming urge.
Or does it blind us to realities that come back to haunt us and our future, as Barbara Ehrenreich suggests in her new book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America? Since seeing and hearing often mean believing, perhaps the story-sweetening has allied with the dumbing-down of education to make \"analysis\" a dirty word! Even on public venues we witness clicks of experts gossip about our crisis like they\'re keeping score at a sporting event, rarely raising the issues that need attention for \"change.\" And those who do are confined to marginal venues many folks feel are elitist because of the way information is presented, or that are just too \"intellectual\" for Joe the plumber.
The media sins by overvaluing whatever maximizes the ratings and increases market share, the things that get us to tune in and vote but not to reflect on the franchise that keeps the whole thing going. So it mostly covers spectacles and violence and any tidbit or story that keeps us privately obsessed but disengaged from public concerns. The coverage must limit information, and above all withhold what we need to make connections.
It also sins by undervaluing, to the point of omitting, the stories we need as a society to make informed choices for our social, economic and political welfare.
Good for profits, but bad for democracy! We owe this to the wave of mergers and acquisitions that began in the mid-to-late 70s and the corporate concentration that followed, leaving the media industry with an oligopoly market structure that guaranteed excess profit-taking. As Robert McChesney shows, updating Ben Bagdikian and Noam Chomsky, the pie is now divvied up by three global mega-corporations. These interlocked behemoths are not likely to underwrite investigations that threaten it. Imagine the credit card/financial industry supporting investigations into the increase in poverty from usury? Imagine the nightly news, partially underwritten by weapons producers, investigating why we\'re in Afghanistan by looking at pressures from lobbyists and our economic interests in the region!
Must the media lose its anti-trust exemption before it can perform for the public? It certainly needs a different model to arrange the facts and information.
The stock market recently broke 10,000, and not many will complain about that. Even though only a small minority own stock directly, more own it indirectly in the form of pension plans, etc. And the image of the market is powerful; the DOW is conjured by virtually all media except Pacifica to define economic health. The one sixth of the workforce that\'s underemployed or flat out of work though is likely taking one for the Gipper here, befuddled by the numbers and perhaps on the verge of consulting tarot to unmask the voodoo. Since the media is hardly braced to begin trashing filter-down economics, this sudden bulge at the top must be noted with care to prevent unanswerable questions that might seed doubt.
And once belief in the \"free market\" religion begins to corrode, some might wonder why that bulge can\'t somehow find its way down to the people who need it? Not as a gift, or welfare! Its beneficiaries got seed money from our taxes, so why can\'t we get the same? We\'ll even accept restrictions, unlike those TARP recipients who have a blank check. So why can\'t our top Americans do the right thing?
The experts say this is too simple. Economic science is complex and riddled with lags and unpredictable destabilizers. And change takes time.
Disbelievers may even say that this bulge means unfair and excess profit-taking in a time of deprivation for too many, and therefore it should be transferred to those in need by the government. But this means socialism, say the experts, and spending directly for jobs is economically counter-productive because it increases the deficit. But a media worth its watchdogs would ask: for whom is this counter-productive? And, why is so much money being transferred to the military, which of course is the government, and its private-contracting shadow, in a time of such need? It seems the military is going through boom times. It\'s endorsing football games and pre-game shows, actively recruiting among the uneducated who can\'t find jobs because of the budget cuts made necessary to a great extent by the subsidies it has received. The military has even been given the task of nation building in Afghanistan, and at a time when ours is starving for such funds and attention. Let\'s start with Newark!
These facts are out there, but because the media can\'t wrap them in useful stories, we get a maze of exceptions upon exceptions upon exceptions but no principle comparable to \"filter down\" that still, unfortunately, motors our system. What would that be?
How about the trade-off principle! Many already know that what goes on up there has little to do with what goes on down here. Hence the familiar divide between Wall Street and main street. But it takes a pretty substantial conversion to begin reflecting on what keeps it in place. In the absence of a little help from our friends at the top, that is. It\'s not an act of god, but a rather devilish concoction of policies that permit the two economies to function as if they\'re one, when in fact one, Wall Street, strengthens itself at the expense of the other.
Would corporate profits have entered the stratosphere in recent years without the low wage economy that\'s grown substantially since the early-to-mid 70s, and become such a permanent fixture? And it\'s become permanent from policies sympathetic with breaking labor unions, deregulating corporations, ignoring anti-trust laws, and lowering taxes for rich individuals and corporations. But this market control has been hidden by \"free market\" ideas supported by gifts from fundamentalists\' coffers.
Would the stock market have fared so well without the legal authority of corporations to gobble each other up, an event that\'s always neutral news and celebrated as good for the one economy. But downsizing and the loss of good jobs are always the ignored downside of this progress. It isn\'t just one event that spreads benefits around, but multiple events that impact others negatively. But for the media to focus this relationship would mean developing a different model to explain these events, something it has little interest in since \"filter-down\" frames the discoveries and debates. So it muddles through, praising universal progress. And there\'s no question that if the numbers are right for the elite then the system stabilizes enough so that the media can extend its holiday.
The incomplete facts which the media drips in sporadically lead overwhelmingly in the direction of saying that something\'s amiss with the filter. Studies show that the productivity gains of business have not been returned to workers. Hence three decades or more of the low wage economy! It\'s actually taken this crisis to expose hidden normalities. Relatively normal times cover the unseemly facts that don\'t fit the print.
The shaping of the news with the trade-off principle would mean trashing the \"one economy\" illusion; challenging the experts who get an inordinate amount of time to push the filter-down fiction at every turn. The \"one economy\" supposes a conflict-free mesh of wills that simply doesn\'t jive with the facts. It generates a redundant script that usually goes unchallenged. It\'s used to defuse the populist anger that\'s surfaced in the past year or so.
We\'re told that it\'s investors who create wealth and jobs, not the people, and so there must be incentives for those with money to act and take risks to produce greater overall wealth. This argument is used to justify the obscene amount of inequality we now have; that is, the wealth at the top is being put to a productive use that benefits all.
But as Robert Creamer shows, what we mostly produce now is financial transactions. Our manufacturing base has been shrinking in pace with the low wage economy, as our top Americans have ever so steadily shifted their ops overseas, and has gotten worse recently due to leveraged buyouts and private equity plays from investment banks that kill productive businesses. They cash in-and-out and pump stock values for short term gain at the expense of healthy companies who employ people in vital communities (HuffingtonPost, 10/12/09).
What kind of jobs get created and for whom? What happens to that invested money? Private actors are not forced by a power beyond them to hire. The basis of our capitalism is the mandate to push transactions to the point of maximizing profits. There\'s no mid ground, no mechanism for companies to give back to the worker and consumer. Some sports stars get philanthropic and give back occasionally, but companies give only what they have to. And the market balance is in their favor. Union and labor power has been significantly weakened for nearly 40 years. And the stock market rules. This means that companies are legally bound to make a profit for stockholders, pitting their interests against those of consumers and workers.
Take utility deregulation, all the rage back in the 90s. In this state, California, once the gas and electric product was subjected to the profit motive and owned by stockholders, rates spiked. Affordability was traded away. And state regulators have not been much help for consumers since their ranks are filled with the very industry sympathizers regulation is directed toward. Privatization is integrally linked to redistribution upward.
Which makes the case of China all the more interesting. It\'s bounced back from the recession big time, sporting a 16% growth rate earlier this year (now down to 8%!). The reasons are that it had a stimulus that worked. Banks, state owned, were required to lend. Funds were tracked to those who needed them and could provide jobs. Private middlemen were not in the picture. And since the state is the main source of capital, the stock market is not the issue it is here where the wealth banks possess passes to stockholders. Banker freedom trades off with consumer and worker freedom in a very unequal relationship that can only be fully grasped if we scrap the one economy illusion.
This model is the one practiced in much of Europe and Japan as well, with an even more extreme version in Scandinavia. All are capitalist, but they are experiencing much greater equality because the state cushions the transfer of wealth, minimizing trade-off conflicts. This is evident in their higher wages and benefits. Germany, for example, is hardly a socialist state. But according to Paul Krugman in the New York Times (11/13/09), it\'s been able to weather the recession extremely well through incentives that encourage hiring and stop layoffs, rather than deferring to whimsical corporate interests over the long term.
Such actions are ballyhooed by the media because it smacks of socialism! But it can\'t take the next step and evaluate what this means since it is slave to the filter-down mystique that endorses the myth of elite job creation. It pulls out its script that says the higher wages and benefits are a form of welfare, unable to say that anti-trust exemptions and tax breaks are already welfare.
Taxes are always the stickler, proof for the media that the state siphons wealth and stifles freedom and entrepreneurship. But of course the state also helps block excessive CEO salaries and bonuses! A fairer and more progressive tax system, along with a more competitive industrial structure and higher wages, that is not the oligopolistic corporate order and anti-labor climate we have now, actually improves the effects of filter down. The issue isn\'t whether it filters down or not, but what filters down, when, how and to whom.
It\'s a striking fact that during the Eisenhower years, for example, when the top tax bracket was 90% and corporations paid a much larger share of the tax burden, that productivity was higher and the wealth gap significantly narrower. Of course we had a nominal partnership operating then between business, labor and government, an implied social contract that pushed the idea that ordinary Americans, the backbone of the nation, should share in the good times. The federal government even actively supported home ownership and education, pumped by the collective euphoria of the recently won war.
The Kennedy administration dropped the top rate to 70%, but the goodies still filtered down relatively well into the 70s because unions remained strong and merger mania had not yet arrived. Even as late as 1976 the wealth gap remained nearly the narrowest in the country\'s history.
The Reagan administration dropped the top rate to 30%, continued the assault on labor begun during the 70s, and delivered for corporations by reducing taxes and letting them gobble each other up. Enter the era of the multi-family income making ends meet. Subsequent productivity gains have not filtered down enough to bring people back to their earlier positions. During the Reagan administration \"filter down\" becomes virtually the new national singsong that we can\'t get out of our heads, while the reality of \"filter down\" fades.
A media driven by the trade-off principle would track activities and especially merger events, hold elites accountable and show where the money goes. What does the good news mean; what does the bad news mean? How can the unemployment rate go up--it just jumped to 10.2%--while the DOW goes up? What\'s the connection between the bailed and the bail-bonded?
That\'s for the post-change world, after the anti-trust exemptions and corporate-state-run media--a close cousin of state-run-media--expire. As for now, we need to better understand the information that does come at us. We need to be the watchdogs and ask the questions and make the connections ourselves, convert the bytes and clichés into stories that matter, supplement the wealth of truth out there from indie writers and maverick mainstreamers. And there\'s always a chance that the information massage may begin breeding suspicion and bring newly aware citizens on board.
But this assumes that rationality rules...
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