We Need to STFU About The MSM
Rubbishing journalism is not a strategy for success, not least when the alternatives are so dire
I hate the mainstream media. But not in the way you might think. I don’t hate the people or organizations that comprise it. No, I hate “the mainstream media” — the phrase, the term, the concept. I hate its abbreviated version, “MSM,” even more. I hate its meaningless, how it concertinas different organizations, people, and platforms into a gelatinous blob of nothing. I hate how those who invoke it present themselves as members of an exclusive club of those who have ascertained the real truth, surpassing the sheeple unwilling or unable to decode the media’s myriad manipulations.
I am convinced that use of this term undermines any serious attempt at scrutinizing journalism (that’s journalism, not media — the difference is crucial). More generally, I believe the venom increasingly directed toward journalism and journalists corrodes the functioning of a democracy. The far-right fringe of American politics — where the origins of the “MSM” term lie — has successfully mobilized contempt for journalists into an aggressive post-truth politics where journalism that does not report favorably upon one’s favored party or politician is branded as “biased.” That the term now finds currency among sections of the British left, amid the febrile atmosphere of the Labour leadership election, is as baffling as it is disturbing.
What is this “MSM,” anyway?
At a basic level, “the mainstream media” refers to an organized corps of journalists at newspapers and television stations. It hints at some important dividing lines between old and new media, traditional and online platforms, and “professional” and “citizen” journalists. It implies a further divide between journalism that is safe, staid, and “establishment” and journalism that is edgy, rule-breaking, and alternative.
In social media discussions about the Labour Party and its leader, the term becomes a pejorative describing an intrinsically bad institution. If Labour are polling poorly it is the fault of the “biased MSM” conspiring with the “Red Tories” in the Parliamentary Labour Party. If the public have a negative impression of Jeremy Corbyn, it is because “the MSM” have brainwashed them into thinking ill of this obviously decent man. If “the MSM” weren’t so biased against Corbyn, the scales would be lifted from their eyes and they’d see how brilliant and perfect and utterly pure he really is. And so on.
This logic holds that if information comes from the mainstream, it is automatically suspect; virtue lies outside of the mainstream, and if people want honest information, they’ll need to put down their newspaper, switch off their television, and find an alternative (invariably online). After all, why would any sensible person continue to read The Guardian when they have all the information they need via the Twitter feed of Eoin Clarke?
Corbyn’s MSM Problems
Much of the anger of Corbyn’s supporters is directed at journalists who, it seems, have not given the Labour leader a fair hearing. This perspective is given credence by studies conducted by researchers at the London School of Economics and the Media Reform Coalition. I am sympathetic to the aims of this research, and we should always encourage a wide and open debate about press ethics.
And yet, I find these studies dazzlingly superficial. To observe that a Labour leader is receiving bad press is as original as observing that grass is green. Undoubtedly, Corbyn has received wretched coverage from the tabloids, but could we reasonably have expected otherwise? Were people expecting The Sun to salute his election by printing the lyrics to “The Red Flag” on page three? Have these people suddenly woken up to the terrifying realization that British newspapers have a point of view? The assertion — posed by the LSE study without empirical evidence — that Corbyn has been on the receiving end of worse coverage than his predecessors is a straightforwardly ludicrous claim.
I am much more concerned about the ongoing criticism meted out toward institutions like the BBC and The Guardian. These are, of course, imperfect institutions but they represent among the very best that British journalism has to offer and for these sloppily-done studies to slur their reputations so casually is irresponsible.
At the core of the critique is a fundamental misunderstanding about journalistic “balance.” To be clear: Balance is not an end in itself and the argument that every “side” of a story should be afforded equal weight is an utterly stupid proposition with obviously damaging consequences. Balance is a means to an end — the end being that the public understand the totality of an issue.
This means journalists should not reduce every story to a flat 50/50 but must ascertain the appropriate weighting relevant to the situation. In other words, the goal is to find the correct balance, not to find balance itself. This is, in fact, much more difficult a task — and I’m not for a minute pretending that journalists always get it right — but this misunderstanding shapes far too much commentary about journalistic performance.
The Media Reform Coalition’s study stretches this misunderstanding to farcical extremes. Its narrow sample frame focuses on coverage of the mass Labour front bench resignations and 172–40 PLP vote of no confidence following the Brexit vote and — amazingly — faults the BBC for affording more airtime to Corbyn’s critics. Its core finding is, essentially, that at a time when a large majority of Labour MPs were critical of Corbyn’s leadership, BBC journalists interviewed a large majority of Labour MPs who were critical of Corbyn’s leadership. And this is presented as a bad thing! This inane logic is the inevitable result of reducing coverage to a flat metric stripped of context, combined with a total misunderstanding of how the BBC should have applied balance.
I’m not convinced that these studies tell us anything illustrative. Their principal function, based on how they have been received on social media, seems to be as salves to comfort existing beliefs.
In a similar vein, Jonathan Cook argues that Corbyn “terrifies” The Guardian, which is now intent on “character assassination” in order to prop up “the neoliberal model.” It is very hard to find evidence of this in even the most cursory analysis of The Guardian’s day-to-day reporting (Cook, notably, provides none).
Any rational analysis would surely conclude that The Guardian’s staff are not huddled in a smoke-filled room developing a strategy for undermining Corbyn’s socialist revolution, with Owen Jones, Zoe Williams, and John Harris taking it in turns to stick the knife in. Cook’s piece is less a work of media criticism than a romantic vision of underdog insurrectionists fighting against establishment hacks desperate to preserve the neoliberal order and cut down the radicals’ visionary in his tracks.
For Cook, the fact that The Guardian’s news and commentary is increasingly “ridiculed below the line by its own readers” is incontrovertible evidence of its disconnect from reality. Cook is onto something. Whereas they used to possess only the occasional shimmer of tin foil hattery, replete with cleverdick references to “Tony Bliar,” “New Liebour,” and (drumroll) “ZaNu-Liebour PF,” today’s comments sections express nothing less than sheer rage at the paper’s betrayal. These comments express a fundamental loss of faith in the organization to do the kind of journalism they expect.
What journalism is for
It should not need to be said, but a journalist writing things that you would rather not hear about somebody you rather quite like is not biased journalism. It is not the job of an independent news organization in a democracy to serve as the Labour leader’s personal Pravda or to provide you with only information that conforms to your existing ideological worldview. Reporting, commenting on, and scrutinizing things that political figures have said and done, views they have held, organizations they have associated themselves with, and causes they have supported is the bread and butter of journalism.
Nor is this “personal abuse,” to quote Corbyn’s own rhetorical formulation that seeks to place some of his political views and associations outside public scrutiny. The views of political figures must always be open for political debate. The public interest is not served by mean-spirited trivia about Corbyn’s appearance or whether he bowed low enough at the cenotaph. However, his views on, for example, the IRA or his work for Iranian state television are objectively a matter of public interest and ought to be subject to much greater journalistic scrutiny. Illuminating the character, worldview, and associations of political leaders — of whatever ideological stripe — is not “abuse” or “character assassination” but precisely what journalists in a democracy ought to be doing.
I can has journalizm
Fundamental transformations in how information is produced and consumed mean “the MSM” can be bypassed altogether. The widespread availability of the tools and technologies once restricted to a credentialed caste of journalists mean that “the people formerly known as the audience,” as media scholar Jay Rosen puts it, can create and disseminate their own “journalism” (I use the word loosely here) and wrest control of the public sphere from corporate media.
At the same time, the Internet gives people greater flexibility and choice over the media that they consume. In an early contribution MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte wrote approvingly of a “Daily Me,” a newspaper that could be designed according to the personal preferences of the reader, as opposed to a newspaper that would serve an aggregated public.
Transformations in how journalism is produced and consumed liberate the public from the shackles with which it was previously bound. This has been described by Manuel Castells as the shift from “hierarchies” to “networks.”
This all sounds very romantic, yet empirical evidence that deinstitutionalized networks and masses of lone citizen journalists can fulfill the functions of an organized corps of journalists is distinctly lacking. It is also philosophically hollow, with nothing to say about how it helps atomized individuals realize themselves as a public. It is unanchored to any theory of what democracy ought to look like and how we get there.
These transformations have instead multiplied the number of bad actors with megaphones in the marketplace of ideas and multiplied the resultant possibilities for misinformation. It is the great tragedy of our present information age that people have much greater capacity to isolate themselves in ideological echo chambers rather than confronting an actually existing reality that would force them, as John Dewey might put it, to move from disparate individuals and groups to become a public with common problems to resolve.
A Party of Conspiracies and Memes
The Labour leadership election is an excellent case study in the shift to a model of small-scale media organizations serving ever-smaller ideological enclaves and of “We Are His Media” Twitterstorms that seek to replace the functions of traditional journalism (they can’t, by the way). A cottage industry of citizen journalists now preaches the good news to an echo chamber of the like-minded. The premise of the anti-MSM vogue is that these new, alternative sources will tell you what the mainstream media won’t, either from fear or, more likely, corruption.
The loss of nuance and compromise leads to ever-decreasing circles of trust that amplify, rather than challenge, existing beliefs. As the circle of trusted sources grows smaller, the intensity of emotion grows stronger. Corbyn supporters increasingly respond to what they regard as misleading media coverage of Corbyn with ropey memes about Owen Smith that pick over the minutiae of his life to find a vote, belief, or comment that reveals his unwholesomeness. This is proving the old maxim that “a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on” to be distressingly true.
The ludicrous conspiracy theory proffered by The Canary that “Blairites” with the Portland Communications PR firm were behind the “coup” against Corbyn is a case-in-point. This theory prompted one individual to go to the organization’s office and demand answers from two very patient staff members. The conspiracy theory was even repeated by Unite’s General Secretary, Len McCluskey — a grown man with a beard and everything! — on The Andrew Marr Show, urging the BBC to spend license fee money investigating the “sinister forces” behind the PLP “coup.”
Elsewhere, Vox Political Online has cemented its status as the online left’s tawdriest outlet, running articles suggesting that Smith “resembles a domestic violence perpetrator” and that Jess Phillips’ installation of a panic room in her office following threats of physical violence against her and her family was “the result of her own behavior.”
What is so tragic about this is not that these tatty little outlets are writing this half-baked garbage dressed up as journalism, but that it is so readily and uncritically believed and shared on social media.
If you fancy yourself a little more highbrow, then the left’s waistcoated prophet of the digital age Aaron Bastani has established himself as the man for figuring the new politics out (he’s wicked smart, he’s got a Ph.D., he’s read Rasmus Kleis Nielsen and everything). And if you want to pretend to your brocialist mates that you’ve read Gramsci, there’s always Paul “Neoliberalism” Mason, a once-compelling journalist reduced to peddling nonsense in the hopes of re-tweets from Bastani and his followers.
Meanwhile, the Labour left’s very own flat-earther, Eoin Clarke, has parlayed his talent for creating poorly-drawn memes and misleading graphs to become the witchfinder-in-chief of the Corbynite insurgency. A vocal champion of Andy Burnham in last year’s leadership election, Clarke now uses his time and design skills providing evidence for his eager followers of Smith’s secret Blairism.
There’s Only One Socialist in The Labour Party, And His Name is Jeremy
If social media is to be believed, there are only two types of Labour MP — those backing Corbyn and “Blairites.” Elevating Corbyn to saint-like status, his supporters prepare for battle against the flinching cowards and sneering traitors that would conspire to do him in.
But isn’t it possible that among 172 MPs there are many thoughtful, decent individuals whose loyalty to the party and experience on constituency doorsteps leads them to the honest conclusion that Corbyn’s continued leadership spells electoral disaster? Isn’t it at least possible that some MPs gave it their best shot but gave up due to the incompetence of the leader’s office? Where is the benefit of the doubt? Why are we so eager to paint these MPs as BLAIRITES and RED TORIES who need to be DESELECTED?
This effort to create a cocoon of the pure — made comically literal by Eoin Clarke’s much-mocked habit of blocking anybody who disagrees with him — means the circle of trust grows ever-smaller. This unseemly emphasis on purity means that former allies, whose politics were once regarded as sound, are cast out of the flock once they express dissent. How else do we explain why Owen Jones’ thoughtful recent article on Labour’s challenges was described by one outlet as the work of a “fraud” who uses his “platform in the corporate media” to undermine Corbyn?
Similar treatment has been meted out on social media to MPs on the left of the party, like Lisa Nandy, Louise Haigh, and Jo Stevens and once-supportive figures outside Parliament like Richard Murphy and Danny Blanchflower. The default presumption is not that there are serious issues of competence in the leader’s office, but that Corbyn’s critics are motivated by dishonesty and bad faith. Plotters and conspirators, one and all.
Post-Logic, Post-Reason, Post-Empathy Politics
Closing the circle of trust means less exposure to inconvenient facts, which is why we see people on social media arguing with pollsters about what the very polls they themselves conducted actually mean or insisting that Labour were ahead in the polls prior to the PLP “coup” despite the evidence to the contrary. Total trust in the leader sees a bizarre “unendorsement” of NEC left slate member Ann Black (a figure liked and respected across the party) responded to as an order from central command to be faithfully executed rather than something to independently reflect upon.
This also results in a distressing lack of empathy. As Gentle Jeremy can do no wrong, it must be his opponents who are at fault. This leads to armchair DCIs looking for evidence of a stitch-up when a brick was thrown through the window of Angela Eagle’s office. It leads to people casually dismissing women MPs urging action to be taken about bullying and intimidation in the party, such as that received by Eagle, as the words of plotters making something out of nothing to damage the leader.
Joined together, these disparate examples paint a portrait of a deeply unwell party whose ill-health cannot be compensated for by whatever amount of people turn up for a Corbyn rally at a cathedral hall on a wet Wednesday. The denial of facts, the presumption that any criticism of Corbyn comes from dishonest motives, and the lack of empathy within the party are genuinely worrying.
Where do we go from here? I wish I knew. For all the romance about “networks” and a more “participatory” media culture, I’m unconvinced that rubbishing the BBC and The Guardian and getting your news from some bloke who makes graphs on Twitter is a wise move. What I do know is that when logic, reason, and empathy go, and all Labour is left with is blind faith, anger, and memes, it is in a desperately bad place.
