The Ash Twins Blog

The foremost interest of the news media is pecuniary. News stories are chosen, and news-gathering resources are distributed, to maximize corporate profits. Unlike the demand for money, the individual and aggregate demand for news is finite. On the consumption side, news consumers have only so many minutes a day dedicated to consume news.  In newspapers, the number of pages determines the amount of information presented. In television or radio, the length of the program does so. Because the amount of information in the world is virtually infinite and the space constraints of news media are finite, the news media are compelled to make judgments in every decision about what facts and issues are printed in the news.[1] Remarkably, professional journalists are rarely even cognizant of this extraordinarily important political function they perform daily.[2]

Many—probably most—journalists believe themselves to be presenting nothing but the facts.[3] The journalistic myth of objectivity lends an air of mysticism and sacredness to their enterprise. Journalists, like ecclesiastics, are treated as more trustworthy to the degree that they are observed as ascetic. This asceticism is reflected in low salaries for print reporters as well as sensational public sacrifices, exemplified by braving hurricanes and war zones on camera. The intensity of self-sacrifice for their craft lends credibility to their news gospel, which, like religion, is costly to verify.[4] This self-sacrificial element of the journalistic ethic is internalized by journalists and makes them believe their own myths of objectivity.[5]

Many media scholars share the view that news media—in a far cry from factual objectivity—serve as little more than unquestioning conduits of the political elites’ self-serving propaganda.[6] This line of scholarship has made important contributions, but a more nuanced model of the news media has emerged. Rather than propaganda vehicle, the news media is a self-interested middleman, dependent on the government as supplier of information but beholden to the public as consumer of media products.[7] The government supplies such information that serves its own ends, and the media must work from that supply. But if the public demands other information, journalists will seek it out. On the other hand, the public is generally uninterested in hard political news,[8] so government abuse will be mostly ignored by media and public. The media’s collective blindness to the military analyst program following Barstow’s story illustrates this dynamic.

Possibly complicating the business-oriented goals of media companies are the professional ideals supposedly instilled in journalists by journalism school. Many of the reporters working for the media have ethics training and beliefs that run counter to the profit-making mission of their employers.[9] Those beliefs—that truth is more important than profit and that a vigilant Fourth Estate is necessary to the healthy functioning of democracy—might interfere with the employer-corporation’s amoral profit-seeking belief system.[10] Certainly, these principles matter in individual cases.[11] But aggregate studies suggest that their influence is limited on a macro level.[12] This might be explained by the promotion to editorial positions of employees with profit-friendly political dispositions.

Meanwhile, research shows that media can indeed influence government policies.[13] The importance of media in a democracy was not lost on the founders, who saw it fit to constitutionalize the freedom of the press in the First Amendment. “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government,” Thomas Jefferson famously wrote, “I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”[14]

[1] Michael Schudson, The Sociology of News Production, 11 Media, Culture & Society 263, 265 (1989).

[2] Id. at 264.

[3] Id.

[4] Brooks B. Hull & Frederick Bold, Towards an Economic Theory of the Church, 16 Intl J. Soc. Econ. 1, 11 (1989).

[5] Schudson supra note 37 at 263.

[6] E.g., David Hermann & Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (2002).

[7] Matthew A. Baum and Philip B.K. Potter, The Relationship between Mass Media, Public Opinion, and Foreign Policy: Toward a Theoretical Synthesis, Annual Rev. Pol. Sci. (2008), pg. 21.

[8] Id. at 28.

[9] John R. MacArthur, The Second Front 20 (1992).

[10] Herman & Chomsky, supra note 42.

[11] Barstow, supra note 2; see also Dana Priest, CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisoners, Washington Post, November 2, 2005 at A01.

[12] Id.

[13] David Stromberg, Mass media and public policy, 45 Euro. Econ. Revi. 652 (2001).

[14] Letter to Edward Carrington, 1787.