Big Media Plays Divisions
Once upon a time in America, we had a shift from radio to television. Newspapers dominated local and national journalism, then the landscape shifted to include three major television channels that built a solid reputation around informative, fact-based journalism largely free of bias toward the outcome of public conversation. Fast forward to the cable-TV age, the digital technology age, the internet age, and the podcast age. As audiences spread to alternate forms of media and competition became fierce for subscription and advertising revenue, the purpose and venue for news media shifted.
Big Media in the United States, when viewed through a political lens, generally refers to the large, dominant media conglomerates that exert significant influence over mass communication and public opinion. These entities often own a variety of media outlets, including television and radio stations, newspapers, magazines, and online platforms. From a political perspective, Big Media is frequently discussed in terms of its impact on democracy, public discourse, and political polarization.
Author and journalist Ezra Klein summarized what happened when all the right digital media metrics came into play: “The combination of direct competition and constant access to audience analytics transformed newsrooms.”1 The transformation of news to segmenting the audience, tracking real-time feedback of audience preference, and measuring how shareable content would trend across the viral social media landscape, changed the interplay between journalists and the public.
During the early days of the internet, the adventurous pioneers in the media space were experimenting with what we now refer to as “clickbait”—a short catchy phrase that stirs our human curiosity or sense of outrage. Buzzfeed hit on the ultimate formula for targeting human psychology (sorting): “X Things Only Y Would Understand.” If you identify with Y as a person, then you probably have to find out if your identity is appropriately matched, so you click to see. This has turned out to be identity media in its purest form.
Of course, this is an oversimplified telling of how social media sorts and polarizes people into political camps, but it captures some key features. When thinking about systemic feedback loops, this insight from media expert Klein is golden: “You feed an interest with information; you build an identity through socialization.”2
It’s not clear that media chose to lean partisan for the sake of being partisan. As the country sorted and polarized during the last three decades and the digital media tools arrived to provide more granular audience analysis, media outlets became more incentivized to provide news that would drive engagement with the core audience attracted to each media source.
The political news media also adapted to the audience needs by creating “savvy” political journalism, or “game day” political journalism. The updates were incremental, rather than comprehensive, barely enough to educate the general public on major policy discussions. News became similar to sports broadcast analysis: who is winning and losing today, who are the key players and how are they interacting, what strategy is being employed and is it working, etc. Election coverage has turned into horse race coverage, rather than substantial engagement into issues of voter concern. Somehow, as the media landscape broke from a near-monopoly into a more decentralized situation, the political news offerings shifted to content for the political class and the engaged partisan, rather than the general public.
For the Republican Party, one can’t understate how significant the rise of talk-radio personality, Rush Limbaugh, was for the conservative movement. From 1984 to 2021, Limbaugh drove the conversation on issues that impacted the national political direction of the Republican Party. His example was not lost on the many derivative talk-radio personalities and more recent podcasters who drive dialogue for right-leaning political media. This includes Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, and many others.
Big Media includes social media, where users create and share content within defined networks. As network participation grows, the technology begins to learn the users’ circle of influence.
“YouTube's recommendation algorithm serves as an engine of radicalization. It serves up your search interest, then offers up the next slightly more extreme content connected to that interest—based on others who overlap in interest. It would help the Left to become more Radical and the Right to become more Reactionary,” says Klein. “That algorithm isn't just an engine of radicalization; it's an engine of identity.”3
The effects of polarizing social media and Big Media messaging to the political class are felt as reinforcing loops building disdain for the politics of the other side. Developing the common enemy is critical to unifying a less than cohesive coalition. Having a mutual enemy is a fast way to make a friend.
Both the right and the left have competed for media attention using different organizations and channels. The echo chambers of media now crowd out more serious consideration of ideas that challenge one’s own thinking. Many listeners—the voters—risk being lazy by simply adopting the “team approach” to political thinking—a group think—that serves the powerful interests already in control of power, in control of media, and in control of institutions that benefit from government programs that favor those who have the right relationships in government.
One unique component of Big Media presence has been the political positioning of the right, or conservative party, to call out Big Media as biased and full of questionable news reporting. The public distrust of media has become a partisan issue. The Republican Party has at times made media the real enemy in the political battle to win office and gain votes. The development of a mainstream media bias against Republican thought has been an ongoing dimension of the political culture wars.
Even as journalists attempted to provide a balanced approach to coverage, the efforts didn’t come with a true sense of the reporting angle from which the media proceeded. Absent a more forthright discussion of the viewpoint behind the news, the “news from nowhere” vantage point simply sowed seeds of mistrust by those whose views were seemingly less represented as worthy of consideration in the great political dialogues.
The public has become fragmented, and people now look for media wherever the best voices match the identity of the listener, while the remainder of the general public simply tunes out.
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Ezra Klein, Why We're Polarized (New York: Avid Reader Press, 2020), 150.
Ibid.
Ibid., 157.