Much discussion of journalism is predicated on a notion that it is a professional enterprise, politically neutral in tone, and independent of commercial values. This is a fairly recent notion historically, so let’s put it in context. ...

In particular, the rise of the modern commercial press system drew attention to the severe contradiction between a privately held media system, and the needs of a democratic society, especially in the provision of journalism. It was one thing to posit that a commercial media system worked for democracy when there were numerous newspapers in a community, when barriers to entry were relatively low, and when immigrant and dissident media proliferated widely, as was the case for much of the nineteenth century. For newspapers to be partisan at that time was no big problem there were alternative viewpoints present. It was quite another thing to make a claim by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when all but the largest communities only had one or two newspapers, usually owned by chains or very wealthy and powerful individuals. For journalism to remain partisan in this context, for it to advocate the interests of the owners and the advertizers who subsidized it, would cast severe doubt on the credibility of journalism. As Henry Adams put it at that time, “The press is a hired agent of a moneyed system, set up for no other reason than to tell lies where the interests are concerned.” In short, it was widely thought that journalism was explicit class propaganda in a war with only one side armed. Such a belief was very dangerous for the business of newspaper publishing, as many potential readers would find it incredible and unconvincing.

It was in the cauldron of controversy, during the Progressive era, that the notion of professional journalism came of age. Savvy publishers understood that they needed to have their journalism appear neutral and unbiased, notions entirely foreign to the journalism of the era of the Founding Fathers, or their businesses would be far less profitable. Publishers pushed for the establishment of formal “schools of journalism” to train a cadre of professional editors and reporters. None of these schools existed in 1900; by 1915, all the major schools such as Columbia, Northwestern, Missouri and Indiana were in full swing. The notion of a separation of editorial operation from the commercial affairs – termed the separation of church and state – became the professed model. The argument went that trained editors and reporters were granted autonomy by the owners to make the editorial decisions, and these decisions were based on their professional judgement, not the politics of the owners and the advertizers, or their commercial interests to maximize profit. Readers could trust what they read. Owners could sell their neutral monopoly newspapers to everyone in the community and rake in the profits. 

Of course, it took decades for the professional system to be adopted to all the major journalistic media. The first half of the twentieth century is replete with owners like the Chicago Tribune’s Colonel McCormick, who used their newspapers to advocate their fiercely partisan (and, almost always, far-fight) views. McCormick’s Tribune was so reactionary that when Hitler came to power, the Tribune’s European correspondent defected to work for the Nazi propaganda service. And it is also true that the claim of providing neutral and objective news was suspect, if not entirely bogus. Decision-making is an inescapable part of the journalism process, and some values have to be promoted when deciding why one story rates front-page treatment while another is ignored.

Specifically, the realm of professional journalism had three distinct biases built onto it, biases that remain to this day. First, to remove the controversy connected with the selection of stories, it regarded anything done by official sources, e.g., government officials and prominent public figures, as the basis for legitimate news. This gave those in political office (and, to a lesser extent, business) considerable power to set the news agenda by what they spoke about and what they kept quiet about. It gave the news a very establishment and mainstream feel. Second, also to avoid controversy, professional journalism posited that there had to be a news hook or a news peg to justify a news story. This meant that crucial social issues like racism or environmental degradation fell through the cracks of journalism unless there was some event, like a demonstration or the release of an official report, to justify coverage. So journalism tended to downplay or eliminate the presentation of a range of informed positions on controversial issues. This produces a paradox: journalism which, in theory, should inspire political involvement tends to strip politics of meaning and promote a broad depoliticization.

Both of these factors helped to stimulate the birth and rapid rise of the public-relations (PR) industry, the purpose of which was surreptitiously to take advantage of these two aspects of professional journalism. By providing slick press releases, paid-for “experts,” ostensibly neutral-sounding but bogus citizens groups, and canned news events, crafty PR agents have been able to shape the news to suit the interests of their mostly corporate clientele. Or, as Alex Carey, the pioneering scholar of PR, put it, the role of the PR is to so muddle the public sphere as to “take the risk out of democracy” for the wealthy and corporations. PR is welcomed by media owners, as it provides, in effect, a subsidy for them by providing them with filler at no cost. Surveys show that PR accounts for anywhere from 40 to 70 percent of what appears as news.

The third bias of professional journalism is more subtle but most important: far from being politically neutral, it smuggles in values conducive to the commercial aims of the owners and advertisers as well as the political aim of the owning class. Ben Bagdikian, author of The Media Monopoly, refers to this as the “dig here, not there” phenomenon. So it is that crime stories and stories about royal families and celebrities become legitimate news. (These are inexpensive to cover and they never antagonize people in power.) So it is that the affairs of the government are subjected to much closer scrutiny than the affairs of the big business. And of government activities, those that serve the poor (e.g., welfare) get much more critical attention than those that serve primarily the interests of the wealthy (e.g., the CIA and the other institutions of the national security state), which are strictly off-limits. The genius of professionalism in journalism is that it tends to make journalists oblivious to the compromises with authority they routinely make.

Professional journalism hit its high water mark in the United States from the 1950s into the 1980s. During this era, journalists had relative autonomy to pursue stories and considerable resources to use to pursue their craft. But there were distinct limitations. Even at its best, professionalism was biased toward the status quo. The general rule in professional journalism is this: if the elite, the upper 1 or 2 percent of the society who control most of the capital and rule the largest institutions, agree on an issue then it is off-limits to journalistic scrutiny. Hence, the professional news media invariably take it as given that the United States has a right to invade any country it wishes for whatever reason it may have. While the US elite may disagree on specific invasions, none disagrees with the notion that the US military needs to enforce capitalist interests worldwide. Similarly, US professional journalism equates the spread of “free markets” with the spread of democracy, although empirical data show this to be nonsensical. …..

The best journalism of the professional era came (and still comes) in the alternative scenarios: when there were debates within the elite or when an issue was irrelevant to elite concerns. So, important social issues, like civil rights or abortion rights or conflicts between Republicans and Democrats (such as Watergate), tended to get superior coverage to issues of class or imperialism, like the weakening of progressive income taxation, the size and scope of the CIA’s operations, or US-sponsored mass murder in Indonesia. But one should not exaggerate the amount of autonomy journalists had from the interests of owners, even in this “golden age.” In every community there was a vital Sicilian Code of silence, for example, regarding the treatment of the area’s wealthiest and most powerful individuals and corporations. Media owners wanted their friends and business pals to get nothing but kid-gloves treatment in their media and so it was, except for the most egregious and boneheaded maneuver.

The professional autonomy of US journalism, limited as it was, came under sustained attack in the 1980s and after nearly two decades is only a shell of its former self. The primary reason for this is that, beginning in the 1980s, the relaxation of federal ownership regulations and new technologies made vastly larger media conglomerates economically feasible and, indeed, mandatory. Today some seven or eight firms dominate the US media system, owning all the major film studios, music companies, TV networks, cable TV channels and much, much else. Another fifteen or so companies round out the system; between them they own the overwhelming preponderance of media that Americans consume. As nearly all the traditional news media became small parts of vast commercial enterprises, owners logically cast a hard gaze at their news divisions and determined to generate the same sort of return from them that they received from their film, music and amusement park divisions. This meant laying off reporters, closing down bureaus, using more free PR material, emphasizing inexpensive trivial stories, focusing on news of interest to desired upscale consumers and investors, and generally urging a journalism more closely tuned to the bottom-line needs of advertisers and the parent corporation. The much-ballyhooed separation of church and state was sacrificed on the altar of profit.

This has meant that all the things professional journalism did poorly in its heyday, it does even worse today. And those areas where it had been adequate or, at times, more than adequate, have suffered measurably. Empirical studies chronicle the decline of journalism in numbing detail. Perhaps the most striking indication of the collapse of professional journalism comes from the editors and reporters themselves. As recently as in the mid 1980s, professional journalists tended to be stalwart defenders of the media status quo, and they wrote book after book of war stories celebrating their vast accomplishments. Today the thoroughgoing demoralization of the journalists is striking and palpable. One need only go to a bookstore to see title after title by prominent journalists lamenting the decline of the craft due to corporate and commercial pressure. As Jim Squires, former editor of the Chicago Tribune put it, our generation has witnessed the “death of journalism.”

Journalism as Ideological Class Warfare

All of this suggests that contemporary journalism poses a severe problem for the left and democratic forces. It is the class bias that is the biggest obstacle. In the 1940s, most medium and large-circulation daily newspapers had full-time labour-beat reporters, sometimes several of them. The coverage was not necessarily favourable to the labour movement, but it existed. Today there are less than ten full-time labour reporters in the media; coverage of working-class economic issues has all but ceased to exist in the news. Conversely, mainstream news and “business news” have effectively morphed over the past two decades as the news is increasingly pitched to the richest one-half or one-third of the population. The affairs of Wall Street, the pursuit of profitable investments, and the joys of capitalism are now presented as the interests of the general population. Journalists rely on business or “free-market”- loving, business-oriented think tanks as sources when covering economics stories.

The dismal effects of this became clear in 1999 and 2000 when there were enormous demonstrations in Seattle and Washington D.C. to protest meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Here, finally, was the news hook that would permit journalists to examine what may be the most pressing political issues of our time. The coverage was skimpy, and paled by comparison to the round-the-clock treatment of the John F. Kennedy, Jr., plane crash. News coverage of the demonstrations tended to emphasize property damage and violence and, even there, it downplayed the activities of the police. ...

It is also worth noting that the WTO demonstrations launched a troubling degeneration of media coverage of large public demonstrations that grew worse in Washington in April 2000 and at the Republican and Democratic conventions this summer. By the time of the conventions, demonstrators, were being ignored altogether in the press or treated with contempt. As police in Philadelphia and Los Angles effectively terminated the right of free assembly for Americans, the corporate news media regurgitated the press releases of the police and the spinmeisters inside the convention halls. Even by the deplorable standard of news coverage of antiwar demonstrations in the 1960s and 1970s, this was a striking lack of concern for the termination of elementary civil liberties.

In recent years, this increased focus by the commercial news media on the more affluent part of the population has reinforced and extended the class bias in the selection of tenor of material. Stories of great importance to tens of millions of Americans will fall through the cracks because those are not the “right” Americans, according to the standards of the corporate news media. .…

For a related and more striking example, consider one of the most astonishing trends lately, one that receives little more coverage that O. J. Simpson’s boarder Kato Kaelin’s attempts to land a job or a girlfriend: the rise of the prison-industrial complex and incarceration of huge numbers of people. The rate of incarceration has more than doubled since the late 1980s, and the United States now has five times more prisoners per capita than Canada and seven times more than Western Europe. The United States has 5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of world’s prisoners. Moreover, nearly 90 percent of prisoners are jailed for nonviolent offenses, often casualties of the so-called drug war.

…. Well, consider that the vast majority of the prisoners come from the bottom quarter of the population in economic terms. It is not just that poor commit more crimes; the criminal justice system is also stacked against them. “Blue-collar” crimes generate harsh sentences while “white-collar” crime- almost always netting vastly greater amounts of money- gets kid-gloves treatment by comparison. In 2000, for example a Texas man received sixteen years in prison for stealing a Snickers candy bar, while, at the same time, four executives at Hoffman-LaRoche Ltd. were found guilty of conspiring to suppress and eliminate competition in the vitamin industry, in what the Justice Department called perhaps the largest criminal antitrust conspiracy in history. The cost to consumers and public health is nearly immeasurable. The four executives were fined anywhere from seventy-five thousand dollars to 350,000 dollars and they received prison terms ranging from three moths all the way up to ... four months. 

Hence, the portion of the population that ends up in jail has little political clout, is least likely to vote, and is of less business interests to the owners and advertizers of the commercial news media. It is also a disproportionately nonwhite portion of the population, and this is where class and race intersect and form their especially noxious American brew. ...

Imagine, for a moment, that instead of being from the bottom quarter, nearly all the prisoners, were from the richest quarter of the population. Imagine that the students attending Yale or the University of Illinois, for example, had half of their friends behind bars or dead from the confrontation with police, and that they had been hassled by the police for being “suspects” in some crime. Imagine, too, that their parents had the same experiences, and that they knew that many of those friends in prison were innocent. Imagine the donation the ACLU would receive! Would this be a news story then? Of course it would, but this is hypothetical, because the problem would have been eliminated long before it could have reached that point, and it would have been eliminated because it would have been the biggest political and news story of our era.