What to do about Corporate Media

If you consider yourself a leftist, corporate media are your enemy.  I don’t use the term “enemy” to sound melodramatic.  Nor do I use it hyperbolically.  I’m thinking about its denotation as a person or entity whose interests are anathema to your own.  If you are not of the elite (culturally, politically, or economically), or don’t long to join the club, then hostility exists between you as a consumer of news and those who deliver the product, even if you don’t always see it.  In fact, corporate media view you with bald contempt.  You needn’t return the favor (though it won’t hurt to try), but it’s wise to understand that the industry is beyond redemption (by its nature) and does its best to keep you disempowered. 

To the American ear, what I just said sounds conspiratorial or plain silly.  However, there is evidence for the claim.  Let’s look at this industry through the issue of Palestine.  How many TV pundits are anti-Zionist?  How many columnists for major newspapers?  How many journalists and editors?  How many cable news show hosts?  We don’t have the exact number, but at best it’s miniscule.  Indeed, it’s easier to name people fired by corporate media for criticizing Israel.  An embargo exists around pro-Palestine sentiment throughout their platforms, and even where discussion of racism exists condemnation of Zionism is verboten. 

We can suppose, then, that other limitations exist.  Consider the following:  rejection of electoral politics; analysis of anti-Blackness as a vital factor of US national identity; discussion of ongoing North American settler colonization; condemnation of police and military; and opposition to capitalism (one reason why we see heavy usage of “neoliberalism” or see “capitalism” incessantly modified by palliative adjectives like “crony” or “disaster”).  Those are your boundaries.  They’re not foolproof, but across time keep intact. 

No viewpoint becomes standardized without being filtered through ruling class preferences.  Coverage of Natives is occasionally sympathetic, but the sympathy is selective and insincere.  In keeping with what Mark Rifkin calls “settler common sense,” Indigeneity isn’t a category in US discourse and audiences identify with Natives to the extent that Natives can be made to embody a better version of America.  When it comes time to choose between Natives and the police in buildup to a confrontation, corporate media revert to apologetics for state violence.  Respectable opinion-makers celebrate bloodletting that serves corporate interests.  Every other kind of violence is barbaric or pathological. 

Still, revolutionary movements interact with corporate media (shunning, I submit, is a form of interaction).  It’s important to think through their dangers and benefits.  Relying on corporate media to entertain subversive ideas is a nonstarter; forestalling subversion in service to the imperium is one of their fundamental missions.  Some leftists avoid corporate media on principle.  I have no objection to this approach.  It’s important to maintain principled exclusions.  Nor should we expect demographics treated so poorly by these institutions, people of color especially, to voluntarily endure disrespect or rejection.  There are ways to leverage our weak position into useful action, however. 

Anybody who has contributed to corporate media knows that it’s a slog.  Getting an editor to consider a submission requires luck or connections, hard to come by for people born into dispossession.  The submission will have to be written such that it doesn’t offend establishmentarian sensibilities, in style or content, a difficult task when the subject is racism or colonization.  Arguments must be concise and pithy, which isn’t troublesome on its own, but easier to accomplish when writer and audience share certain assumptions.  Not sounding insane to the mainstream ear requires careful presentation of evidence and rhetorical finesse, often prohibitive in 700 words.  The few column inches given to the guest writer are up against the spin elsewhere in the publication.

If, after all this hassle, a piece is accepted, the author will learn that major publications don’t go for originality of prose or purpose.  Staff writers have leeway, but they don’t normally break convention (those who exhibit such tendencies get screened out or repeat clichés dressed in cutesy language).  Viewpoints on opinion pages can appear diverse, but the diversity is superficial, and usually smothered by wonkish pretention.  Certain terms won’t make the cut unless they’re deployed ironically or mechanically:  Zionism, ethnic cleansing, state violence, apartheid, systemic racism, propaganda, ruling class, imperialism, settler colonization.  Imaginative writing is a no-no; if you manage to get a piece past the submissions desk, the line editor will remove anything exciting or dramatic.  Once the text is set, the piece will have been outfitted with neutral terminology, concessions to the “other side,” and overtures to conventional reasoning.  It can lead to awkward logic.  When Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara published an op-ed in the New York Times promoting socialism, for instance, the piece managed to also employ an anti-communist sensibility.  (To be fair to the Times’s editors, the op-ed’s anodyne tone could have been Sunkara’s own initiative.) 

To understand the system, it helps to be a subject of corporate media coverage, and for around a year I had that experience.  While reporting and editorial sides differ, they share a habit of accommodating the demands of ownership (which happens even in the absence of explicit meddling).  The first thing I learned is that most reporters don’t care about their subjects as human beings; they’re interested in narrative potential.  It’s easy for the subjects to feel like one-dimensional characters in the hands of automatons programmed to reify class interests.  Individual depravity isn’t the problem.  Esteemed journalists don’t necessarily cultivate scandal or manipulate storylines because they lack compassion; ideological factors influence professional norms.  Marketability depends on clicks, and various forces (beyond management) exert pressure.  Ownership cultivates obedience by rewarding some combination of sycophancy, careerism, orthodoxy, and self-interest, but the utility of propaganda is incomplete until audiences nurse misinformation into common wisdom.  What we understand to be “news” arises from a relentless interplay of constraint and self-regulation.  Conformity doesn’t follow a particular formula.  It doesn’t need to, because it exists in all the ingredients. 

It also helps to have written for corporate media, something I’ve done occasionally during the past two decades.  As a grad student, just as email became common, I used to write at least one op-ed a week, usually about Palestine, and send it to every big paper that allowed submissions.  I was romantically, stupidly persistent.  My writing career never took off—I only got one response in all those years, from the Houston Chronicle, a few months before 9/11—but the practice was rewarding.  I would have had more luck by affirming Israel’s right to exist or by prioritizing liberal Zionist sensibilities, essential for Arabs and Muslims to get mainstream validation (see, for example, Wajahat Ali, Rabia Chaudry, Haroon Moghul, and Nuseir Yassin), but I could never bring myself to make that compromise.  Docility is absent from the Palestine of my imagination. 

I’ve never cracked the top tier—New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Atlantic—but I have enough experience of submitting to and writing for mainstream publications to pass along some observations.  Pursuing access to corporate media is more likely to produce individual rewards (and weakened politics) than it is to alter any publication’s editorial standards.  Nor are such aspirants likely to convince readers to become radical, even if their pieces reach a large audience.  They’re published to generate page views (if the topic has viral potential) or to maintain pretentions of ideological diversity.  I see access to corporate media as similar to the academic tenure process:  both can acclimate would-be radicals to the rewards of conciliation. 

On the other hand, changing a few minds is valuable, if not revolutionary.  And it can be satisfying to pressure stodgy outlets into rethinking their beltway mentality.  My suggestion?  Give it a try.  Publish wherever you can (and make sure to get paid).  But understand that accidents are rare in the industry.  If the Times or USA Today takes on your column about structural racism in the United States or legal inequality in Israel (forget about denunciation of Zionism), note how they want to frame the argument and be prepared to pull the column if editors change your central thesis.  The change can happen subtly—by swapping words with apparent synonyms that connote differently, for instance, or by cutting a paragraph deemed verbose or superfluous (read:  too militant).  I once had an article accepted at The Guardian.  By the time editors got through with it, the argument was presented entirely in their voice; both the topic and approach resembled nothing of what I had submitted.  (I pulled the column and published it at Salon.)  Don’t be surprised if your piece ends up like a Democratic Party communique or a college admissions pamphlet. 

Most important, understand that the contract you enter into with any publication is not an agreement between equals.  Corporate media are in the business of extraction.  Like the conglomerates that own them, and on whose behalf they lie and dissimulate, those media will treat you as surplus to exploit for their own benefit.  During my year in the news, mainstream sites wrote regularly about my travails.  Many of them—especially the Washington Post, whose blogger David Bernstein relentlessly criticized me—editorialized against the possibility that I should enjoy a livelihood.  (Others provided better coverage.)  When I published a book explaining the ordeal from my point of view, no corporate media outlet reviewed it.  They likewise ignored my requests to publish rejoinders to defamatory statements or inaccurate reporting.  Since that time, I respond to media inquiries by pushing “delete” (my reticence is informed by factors beyond this experience). 

I don’t tell this story to arouse your pity, but to illustrate that corporate media feel no obligation to give voice to anybody, including the subjects they cover.  Quid pro quo is not part of professional convention.  Some ideas will rarely make it onto their pages and certain people will never be allowed to author their own perspectives.  The easiest way to mark yourself as somebody worth noticing is by signaling respectability, which can include renouncing violence (specifically, the violence of domestic undesirables and foreign enemies); foregrounding or supplementing criticism of the United States with praise of American democracy; treating the electoral process as sacrosanct (and promoting a candidate); and attributing US war crimes to excess, incompetence, or overzealous altruism (describing them, of course, as something other than “war crimes”). 

Those who are uninterested in the finer points of writing for corporate media still must reckon with their influence.  Not only do those media shape the consciousness of people with whom we interact (and our own), they play a critical role in counterrevolutionary efforts.  Nearly a century ago, while in prison, Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci developed his theory of hegemony, which describes how ruling class interests reproduce under the guise of common sense—when people in a hegemon articulate or act on what they perceive to be universal values, they reify inequitable structures that suit the financial and political elite.  As Gramsci explains, hegemony is exercised through “[t]he ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is ‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production.” 

Whatever empathy corporate media manage to display exists largely to salvage receding American ideals.  To passively consume these discourses is in a very real sense to forfeit existence.  The primary struggle with corporate media, then, isn’t one of access, but of survival.  Making ourselves available to them without reciprocal demands is a kind of voluntary erasure. 

There is nothing commonsensical about upending an established social or economic order.  If Black people are to liberate themselves, if Natives are to decolonize the North American continent, if Palestinians are to reclaim their homeland, then it will have happened despite a coordinated effort by corporate media to denigrate and delegitimize their aspirations.  In the face of insurgency, corporate media will suspend differences of ideology and substance and unite around a shared devotion to the ruling class, the only audience, in the end, that matters.