Column: Why the American media and their critics won’t stop telling the same lie
The American media have a bootleggers-and-Baptists problem.
Coined by the economist Bruce Yandle, the term “bootleggers and Baptists” describes how groups that are ostensibly opposed to each other can have a shared interest in maintaining the regulatory status quo. Baptists favored Prohibition for moral reasons, but so did the bootleggers who profited from it by selling alcohol illegally. And politicians benefited from playing both sides.
An analogous dynamic surrounds the modern press. Across the ideological spectrum, from the Chomskyite left to the Bannonite right, partisans, politicians and journalists themselves exaggerate the power, influence and importance of “the media.”
An ‘exhausted majority’ is more interested in a competent government, not the red vs. blue battles of elites trying to gain political power.
Let’s start with the journalists. Members of all professions have a tendency to hold themselves in high regard. From physicians to plumbers, nearly everyone wants to believe that what they do matters. But with the possible exceptions of politicians and actors, journalists probably have the highest collective estimation of their own importance.
My point isn’t that they’re wrong — heck, I like to believe that what I do matters. It’s that they exaggerate not just their power and influence but also their celebrity and authority. Heart surgeons famously tend to be arrogant, but there is no endless stream of conferences, books, editorials, essays and academic courses dedicated to emphasizing the indispensable role of cardiothoracic medicine. Nor does any plumbing trade journal proclaim that “Democracy Dies in Sewage” on its front page.
In theory, Trump could solidify and build on his winning coalition, but that would require disappointing the people insisting he has a mandate to do whatever he wants.
In psychological terms alone, it’s in journalists’ interests to encourage the widespread obsession with the Fourth Estate. But the media are a mess partly because they believe their own hype.
As a conservative media critic who has written scores of columns about the press’ liberal bias — which is real — I’ve had my own obsessions over the years. But I’ve grown weary of media criticism — again, not because the criticisms are necessarily wrong but because they overestimate the power of the institution they question. That’s the Baptist-and-bootlegger problem: The outsize power and influence of the media is a lie that all sides have agreed on.
American journalism is like an exhausted prizefighter on the brink of collapse, being held up by his opponent to give the crowd a good show.
According to many on the right, who often unwittingly repurpose formulations first introduced by lefty bogeymen, the media create narratives and manufacture consent — a term coined by Walter Lippmann and adopted by Noam Chomsky — that the rest of us are powerless to overcome.
But consider the example of climate change. The press has invested vast resources in covering the climate, which it has been hectoring the public and catastrophizing about for 20 years. And yet climate change remains at or near the bottom of every survey of the most important issues to the public. If the media can manufacture consent, why is there so little consent to their view of climate change?
This is just one example of the media thinking not just that it should but that it can define the interests of the public. The amount of energy and hand-wringing that has been dedicated to, say, revising Associated Press Stylebook guidance on terms such as “illegal immigrant” or on whether to capitalize “Black” and “white” as a race is premised on a grandiose view of the press as guardians of the American mind or soul. The media’s whole “defund the police” conversation, to give another example, transpired amid near-zero support for the idea among most Americans.
Or consider Donald Trump. I’m no fan, but I look like a MAGA rally front-seater compared with many in the media (and not just the opinion columnists). And yet Trump not only won but improved his standing with nearly every demographic group in last month’s election.
The response from some on the left is a variant of the old trope about how socialism doesn’t work because it’s never really been tried: If only the media had really held Trump accountable — or took climate change, race or some other issue even more seriously — it would make a difference.
Many in the media, meanwhile, wrap themselves in the mantle of heroic martyrdom as Trump attacks them.
And on the right, while the media’s inability to control the narrative is occasionally celebrated, that never diminishes the hysteria about its alleged omnipotence. The media, the writer Michael Shellenberger insisted recently, “is arguably more powerful than the government itself.”
Really? It has a funny way of showing it.
The media industry has been shrinking for decades. Since 2000, of the 532 industries tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, newspapers saw the single sharpest decline in personnel, 77%. And trust in the media is in the gutter.
So here’s an idea for the press: Just tell the truth to the best of your ability and stop trying to determine the overall narrative. The American people will write their own.
A cure for the common opinion
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