An Austrian Examination of the News Media and Its Future

0:00I'm here to talk a little bit about the media and of course what we generally get from talk radio and generally low-brow discussions of the media is that there's the liberal media that exists and that they generally take whatever position the Democrats might take or whatever leftists take and that is just consistently what's done and we've seen these sorts of analyses for quite some time, ever since the seventies When the Nixon administration was complaining about the pro-democrats slant of the media and in 1990, Brent Bozell did a book called That's the Way It Isn't, which examined the supposed liberal slant of the media.

0:48At the same time though, interestingly enough, we had a book called, in 1988, we had a book called Manufacturing Consent that Noam Chomsky did, in which he said that the media has a significantly conservative slant. And what you find then is this is often the case, is that liberals are leftists, welfare liberals, they're convinced that there's this strong right-wing slant to the media, and then the right-wing conservative types are convinced that there's this left-wing slam. It's of course much more complicated than that. It depends on the issue. What we can find looking at the research is that there's definitely a pro-government slant that exists within the media and we'll look a little bit at that and why that exists.

1:34I do not subscribe to the idea that it's any kind of top-down conspiracy but that it's a fact that comes out of a variety of factors. In order to discuss the media, we need to just look at a variety of the assumptions that go into it. The assumption that generally we dealt with over the last hundred years or so is that the media attempts to create stories based on some kind of objective professionalism that attempts in some way to create reality, to recreate reality for the reader. Now, there's been a lot of writing done on this, the first coming from Walter Lippmann, writing in the 1920s, who wrote a book called Public Opinion.

2:20After during the World War I experience, Lippmann looked around and realized that the media and the intellectuals had been extremely instrumental in really ginning up support for World War I. And he looked around and saw that this was a new role that the media could play in really Well, he uses the phrase in manufacturing consent from the people for certain projects of the state. So Lippmann attempts to understand this and Lippmann is very pro using the media to manufacture this consent. So he's not really a critic of this at all. He thinks it's a fantastic idea that this is a way of bringing about transformation in society using the media to do so and that you can create this partnership between government and the media. The way you do this is creating certain images that reinforce what people believe and using their beliefs and manipulating them slightly to create this sort of consent.

3:13But he talks about and recognizes that the images that the media create, you can't just go out and create and attempt to recreate reality for people, of course, right? You have to, if you're just talking about a 700-word article or a 1000-word article or even longer you're relying on a lot of pre-existing stereotypes and context that people have and you can really if you're if you're going to be effective you have to take advantage of all those pre-existing biases and create images that take a lot of those things into account so and so you're simultaneously reinforcing what the people believe while adding a little something to it that's going to push them in another direction and so it's not really of course recreating reality at all it's creating a new reality that will help move people in a certain direction based on creating a bond between the writer and the reader around what they already think and what they believe in common.

4:11And so it's not just an issue of hitting people over the head and injecting a bunch of false stuff into articles and really every article is some kind of column or opinion piece. That's not really the case at all. It really is an attempt to communicate information in subtle ways that really create a bonding with the reader and you don't want to alienate them at all, of course, because then they're not going to read you and they're not going to tend to sympathize with you and move along with your position and agree with you. And of course, Littman goes into a lot more detail than that, but the reason I go into is that there was for a long time for really until recently from say the 1920s up until just a few years ago that it was believed that in fact the media did produce they were providing a service for the reader by producing this information that the reader could then use and become educated and intelligent and so on and what we've seen happen is that this idea of these images that the media creates for us has begin to break down

5:23down, and that people become suspicious of it, people aren't willing to pay for it anymore, people are curious about what other sorts of points of view might be available. Now, when I say people, of course, I'm talking about a select number of educated people. The masses in general, as Chomsky points out, have never been particularly interested in any kind of critical analysis of this sort of information. We're talking about the educated classes, and that's actually quite important because The political news, they're only going to receive this tiny bit of it, and the big concern then is how can we make sure that the proper message dribbles down to everyone. But nevertheless, Lippmann thought that, yes, you could kind of do this sort of top-down planning and manipulation, but it's been really limited in its application, which you end up then with is just a journalistic class where it reflects its own opinions and ideas, and that's what gets trickled down to ordinary people, but it's not done in a conscious conspiratorial manner, and we'll look at that a little bit. So the history of the media. Why are we so concerned even about the media?

6:36and Media, and newspapers in general, well, because they've been extremely dominant in creating and shaping ideas, but really just recently as if it considered remotely objective or important as a communicator of information that we all need, certainly prior to the 18th century, newspapers were nothing like they are today, you would have some partisan papers which were funded not by subscribers necessarily, somewhat by subscribers, but also funded by political parties and certain what we would now call non-profit groups and so on, which were putting out a certain message. and until the 20th century that you get this idea of journalism and objective reporting. And so when you hear people talk about how can democracy persist without beat reporters and newspapers as we think of them today, well, it's really kind of an irrelevant question because clearly the flourishing of democracy in the 19th century and of course the flourishing of liberalism all existed without what we call the objective journalistic media of today.

7:36And so really the question to ask then is, well, if large objective media organizations really feed liberty and freedom, then how have we fared the last hundred years? It's probably hard to make the case that as you get more media, more information out there, that man has become freer throughout the world. Certainly you can make the case that the rise of stateism throughout the 20th century went hand in hand with the rise of media and media organizations, which it has. And so really what we need to ask ourselves then is do we need the media? Are they useful? What do they do for us? And if not, should we replace them? How are they going to go away? And it could be that they'll just go away without us even having to do anything about it at all. So if we look at the bias issue though, because that's clearly the number one thing that seems to interest people, there are a couple different options that we can

8:31The Top Down Bias, Bottom Up Bias, Unintentional Bias The editorial position is they can all agree that you need to make money and so that provides certain constraints on any kind of major bias within the media organization. At the same time, there's the idea of the bottom-up bias, which is you have a bunch of allegedly liberal reporters who insist on writing these biased articles that reinforce the Democratic Party line or the leftist party line and that in spite of what the managers say and do and what the readers want, this is what the reporters produce.

9:31There hasn't been a lot of evidence that's shown that as a major factor either due to a variety of collective action problems and to issues of alienating your readership and your viewership and so on. That there really is an effort that we find present in most places to reinforce what the viewers and the readers already want and what they already believe and to ensure that they're not offended and that they just keep coming back. What we do find, though, is that there's a lot of self-selection that goes on among reporters and among their employers and that only certain sorts of people become reporters and these people come from a certain social class and they're educated in a certain way and so what you then end up with is all of your people who work in media, they're used to a certain way of thinking, they're used to certain ideologies being acceptable and when you see that reporters haven't included a certain point of view into the story, it's because they can't imagine what's

10:27This sort of person would consider point of view X to be even a remotely normal or acceptable point of view and in this they reflect with the public things for the most part so a reporter who you get someone who says well clearly the answer to this is to abolish government altogether most reporters who are not Misesians they went to ordinary universities and they grew up in ordinary American homes where abolishing government is not seen as a generally mainstream position they conclude that this is a bizarre way to think Why would I ever include this in an article? I can't imagine most Americans would ever think this way. So they consider it just a disposable point of view. So they don't include it in there. And so what they're doing is simply they come from a certain social class and geographic area. So when they reinforce those beliefs, and so all you see then is that the media is reinforcing what they've already learned is acceptable and what is the realm of possible political discourse.

11:22And so in what they end up doing then is very much setting the agenda for what can we talk about, what are the possible policy implications of this and you know just simply cutting the income tax to zero just obviously isn't within that, it's not considered reasonable and so nobody, no one's quote who says that is included. And so this happens again and again and at the same time these These reporters then build social networks with the sorts of people who say things and do things that are considered mainstream and acceptable. So instead of building deep lasting relationships with people like, say, Ron Paul or Lew Rockwell, they end up talking to government officials who can provide reliable and mainstream quotes about things or maybe someone from some think tank who's considered very moderate.

12:17But you want reasonable people quoted in your article. You don't want sort of people who a reader would kind of be embarrassed by your naivety or extremity as a reporter. They want to write for the public what they think the public is going to consider normal. And what you end up though is with a situation where it's the government that ends up being the expert witness on almost every topic. So when we're talking about political reporting or even business reporting or increasingly and even sports reporting, the government is involved in some way and so that here's a topic that I need to write about and discuss about, who can I call, who can provide me with a quote so that I can have some balance and so on. And in virtually every case there's gonna be someone that you know at some agency that's usually gonna be a government agency that you can call and they'll say something and you can include that in your story and you've managed to write your story and save a lot

13:11of time. And so government then becomes a regular and repeated resource for reporters, especially these days who are looking to save time and energy to provide them with some insights and balance about these stories. And government therefore becomes the general arbiter of opinion and reason for all of this media content that's being produced because they're relevant to almost every story. And if you're on a short deadline and you need someone to call, you can't rack your

14:11The question is, should we increase taxes 5% or 10% to talk to someone who says, well, obviously, it should be repealed in its entirety, it just doesn't fit into the context of the story. and so it just doesn't make any sense to the training of the journalists to do something like that. And there's only so much you can do with 500 or 1000 words and so there are big constraints on this within the profession.

14:56And so this leads to then the importance of access. In that if I create an adversarial position with the government then and of course the government is very important to my ability to get information quotes, the inside scoop on a lot of things, how am I going to get interviews with elected officials, to antagonize government on a regular basis and to do a bunch of investigative reporting that is built on the premise of bad mouthing government and embarrassing them and making them look bad, this is going to cause a lot of extra work for me and it's really going to diminish my ability not only to get good sources but even high ranking sources because The newspapers and the reporters know that the public puts more credence into stories where they're quoting some general as opposed to some major in the field.

15:45Now data has shown actually that the majors in the field know quite a bit about what's going on, perhaps more so than the generals in many, many cases. And of course, we could extend this analogy to all kinds of other branches of government, not just the military. But nevertheless, there's always an emphasis put on the most highest ranking official. And even if the highest ranking official proves to be wrong in many cases, you keep going back to the highest ranking official because they're providing you with the most prestigious organization or most prestigious information. And so the whole culture then of the field is geared around using government to provide information and appealing to the most highest ranking official you can get. And of course, that's usually an elected official of some kind. And if you go around embarrassing that person and making them look bad, they will of course The Federal Reserve refuses to talk to you and they will no longer provide you with information and your competitor then will have all the great choice stuff from senators, so-and-so, or president, whoever.

16:42And so there's a variety of different considerations that go into that and it really just reinforces this relationship then between the media and the government because there's absolutely no incentive whatsoever for a large national media organization to make enemies with the government. And it's extremely problematic. You get this occasionally at the local level with some of those small independent papers, but almost never do you see this sort of thing at the national level. And you see also the fact that these people associate with each other socially and that they're essentially friends. You go to one of these Washington Correspondents dinners and they're hanging out together and there's that infamous video of NBC correspondents dancing on stage with Carl Rove and with others and so these people are then supposed to be digging up dirt on these politicians who they're socializing with and it's kind of a real unrealistic expectation then for the public that they would get this hard-bitten objective viewpoint of these people when their lives are so

17:45intertwined together and so the way the media is set up just doesn't lend itself And so is there any way out of this situation then? Well we can look at perhaps a return then to the old system where there were partisan magazines and they relentlessly criticized the government and there were simply no holds

18:45The fact that people accept there's bias has never been enough to get people to stop reading the newspapers or even referring to the New York Times or the Washington Post as a reliable source of information. People will one minute criticize the media and the next minute say, well, I read that in the New York Times, you know. and so there's just no real necessarily connection there. What is going to break down the newspaper monopolies is that nobody's going to pay for them anymore and that what the New York Times stock is worth two bucks today or something like that and they just sold off ten floors of their building and they just took a huge loan from a Mexican financier at 14% and so they're trying to stay in business but clearly they're having some serious problems though in my hometown the Rocky Mountain News E.W. Scripps' largest paper just went out of business and so that leaves a huge gaping hole in the number of beat reporters who are out there reporting news and every day there's another paper that's going under or cutting back or reducing their coverage so the question is what is going to happen and so really in the long term you're going to find independent correspondence, you're going to find people communicating news via blogs, via Twitter, via social media,

20:07Media, there's going to be no real set objective method of communicating information and what young people are learning now is that there is no one place that you can go for sound information when you grew up with the internet and everybody told you for years that nothing on the internet is reliable then you finally start to get a generation again where people recognize that you have to evaluate information on your own just because Walter Cronkite said doesn't make it true and no one under 30 really seems to believe that anymore and so there's a certain advantage there and so in the long run we'll see a return to a more skeptical public I think I'm not implying a golden age where people will come to the right conclusions isn't isn't a foregone conclusion at all but at least people will feel that they'll have to rely on themselves to figure out what is true and what is not and when that happens you know we'll be in a

21:02and Totally Different Situations, so thank you very much and if you want this paper you can send me an email at rmcmakon at hotmail and I'll get it to you, thank you.