The Decline of American Journalism – Robert McChesney

The media is driven by the enormous profits made during election campaigns. Feeding the fury and the fear of all types is just good for business. Bob McChesney joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast.

Transcript

Paul Jay

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Paul Jay

In many countries, newspapers and television news and media shows make no pretense of being anything other than partisans of political parties. In the United States news still postures as being more objective. But here the partisanship is to the political duopoly. The only politics that’s worth covering is the horse race between the Democrats and the Republicans. The urgency of the climate crisis, the threat of nuclear war and militarization, union organizing, protests that aren’t violent or enormous, the inequality gap, structural racism — unless there’s a video of egregious police violence — are rarely considered newsworthy, if covered at all. The major cable news networks have lost even the pretense of impartiality, with the Fox model of throwing red meat to the base now fully adopted by CNN and MSNBC. The degeneration of political discourse is a great threat to civil rights and what’s left of American democracy. To a large extent, when it comes to the media, it is driven by the enormous profits made during election campaigns. So, feeding the fury and the fear of all types? It’s just good for business.

And so, what can we do about it? Now joining us is Robert McChesney. He’s a professor emeritus in communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He’s written several books on media and politics, including People Get Ready, The Fight Against the Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy and Blowing the Roof Off the 21st Century: Media, Politics and the Struggle for Post-Capitalist Democracy. Thanks for joining us, Bob.

Robert McChesney

My pleasure, Paul.

Paul Jay

I was just telling Bob off-camera that when my eight-year-old daughter was four, I said to read the cover of Bob’s book. And she said, “People get ready to change your clothes” instead of change the world. And then she said, “People get ready to rule the world,” which I thought was pretty good. Maybe she was inspired by the book.

Anyway, let’s talk about the state of media. So, this election campaign we’ve just come through. Obviously, Fox’s business model is to support the right wing of the Republican Party, not just the Republican Party, although Karl Rove and his type, some of the more center/center-right Republicans have a pride of place there. But on the whole, it was feeding the Trump fury. CNN used to have some pretense of being an actual news organization. I think they just completely dropped it now. MSNBC, I guess, was more Fox-like. What’s your take on what’s happened and what significance does it have since so many people get their news from cable news?

Robert McChesney

Well, you framed it well. I think you also framed the fact that even at its best, commercial journalism in the United States has had real problems, even back in the glory days when we actually had journalism with reporters and newsrooms actively covering communities, which we don’t have any longer. And the problem that professional, commercial journalism had at its peak in the United States has been the range of legitimate debate on political issues. That’s always been pretty much set by people in power.

So, you know, economic issues were looked at from the perspective of the dominant interests of the Republican and Democratic parties, which reflected the dominant commercial interests in society. Foreign policy was looked at pretty much the same way by both parties: the United States was a benevolent empire, had the right to rule the world as it saw fit, and the military was a necessary part of it. It wasn’t really up for debate in the US news media in the 20th century. That was just a given, certainly in the second half of the 20th century. And during that period, we had a blossoming, resource-rich journalism for many of those decades. Yet still, its coverage of war and peace matters and of the economy tended to skew to a very narrow range of the sort of people who were leading both political parties and the economy.

And that was in the glory days. Those look like wonderful days today when you look at what passes for journalism. And so, the problem we have today is we still have elite opinion setting the boundaries of what a legitimate story from what an illegitimate story might be. But we also now don’t have the resources.

I’ll tell a story that’s not apocryphal — it’s a true story — but it is apocryphal otherwise. A little over twenty years ago, a guy named Rick Kaplan, who was the head of CNN at that time and before that had been the head of MSNBC, just when it was starting, I think. But he certainly was the head of CNN in the late 1990s. I got to know Rick Kaplan because he was an alum of the University of Illinois where I taught and he would come every year for a week to meet with students in the journalism program. And for several years in a row, I spent a lot of time with him talking to him during that week when he would be on campus.

 

He told me a really interesting story about when he was at CNN the late 90s. This was just when Fox News had started. He had a great year in the late 90s — like 1998, I think it was. He was going to meet with the CEOs of Time Warner, the parent company of CNN, and he was expecting to be patted on the back and get a big bonus and be told what a great job he was doing. He went in for his annual meeting, and the poo-bahs at Tim Warner were not totally excited.

And he said, “Well, what’s the problem? I’ve just had the best year ever in the history of CNN. It’s been a landmark year for our network.” And they said, “Well, look over here at this Fox News, what they’re doing. Fox News has made the same amount of profits as CNN and they’ve done it with far lower returns. They’ve managed to milk those profits out of a much lower revenue base. Why can’t we get that sort of return out of our revenue base?” And Kaplan said to them — and I’m paraphrasing from memory — “But if I do that, I’ll have to get rid of all my reporters.” Apparently, the poo-bahs at Time Warner were basically, like, “That’s not such a bad idea.” Because of how much profit that Rupert Murdoch was making with Fox News.

And what that got to was the commercial basis of the decline of journalism, why it has made so much sense economically to junk the reporters. Fox News found out if you got rid of reporters, you’d have to offer your audience something. You couldn’t get rid of your reporters and then have bland Associated Press reports. No one’s going to watch your network. But you get rid of your reporters and then tap into a section of the market that watches TV news and give them the take on the news they will appreciate, that’s really inexpensive. And you can build a name for yourself. That’s why Fox News was as brilliant a commercial idea as it was a political idea. It was a truly brilliant commercial idea. And I think what we’ve finally seen with CNN and MSNBC is they’ve adopted the same model. The right lane was taken so it took the left lane.

But they’re still within the boundaries of sort of elite thought. There’s no lane for you, Paul. There’s no lane for The Intercept. There’s no lane for Democracy Now. There’s no lane for the sort of investigative journalism that even our mainstream media provided in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s in our great newspapers where you’d see some deep, wonderful digging. That doesn’t exist anymore. What we have is commercially driven, this journalism-free pontificating, especially on cable TV news, satisfying an audience by sort of just talking to the same talking heads and covering the same two or three stories in every cycle.

I mean, you could watch MSNBC and CNN from now until the cows come home and you’d have no idea what’s happening in Latin America. None whatsoever. I’ll daresay that if you watched US news media in the 1970s — or certainly read newspapers — you’d have a decent idea of who the heads of state were in all the major states when elections were coming along, what the great political issues were. I know, because that’s how I followed Latin American politics. And I knew a lot more in the ’70s than I know today by watching CNN and MSNBC. You’d think the world ended at our borders, basically.

Paul Jay

A couple of things. One is if you watch the financial news, read financial newspapers, watch or listen to Bloomberg, you will get more of that kind of actual journalism. You will know more about the world because the investor class, they actually do want to know this kind of stuff. But the elites have more and more come to the realization that as far as the majority of the population goes, the more ignorant people are, the better.

Robert McChesney

I think you’re right. We see this. The business press is for the people who have to invest money and have a lot riding on the outcome. They need to know what’s actually happening in the world to a certain extent in order to protect their interests. And so, you’re going to find much better reporting in The Wall Street Journal or The Economist or Bloomberg than you’re going to find in the conventional general news media.

But it also has all the biases of the class it is pitched to. So, in that world, labor movements are by definition highly suspect. Deregulation or pro-market reforms are by definition enthusiastically embraced as probably a really good idea of as long as they’re implemented properly. That’s just a given. That’s not subject to debate, despite whatever empirical evidence there might be.

Paul Jay

To you get back to cable news, it’s not entirely driven by the business model. For example, most of the people I interview on The Analysis would make superb guests on MSNBC or CNN. In fact, most of my guests are better informed than most of the guests that they’re talking to already. But they don’t fit in with this duopoly narrative. The Analysis goes beyond just Republican versus Democrat.

So, even at that level, they have a political kind of bias and censorship. Like, AOC is rock-star material — purely from a moneymaking point of view, how could you not have her on almost every day on MSNBC? But it doesn’t play into the pro-corporate Democratic narrative. So, there’s also this political bias, which sometimes even trumps what would make money. For example, the fight between the progressive wing and the corporate Democrats is a good narrative. People would want to watch that. There’s a bit of it, but not much.

Robert McChesney

You’re absolutely right. In fact, you may see a bit of a change here. When MSNBC was first cutting its teeth as a liberal network during the George W. Bush era, 2001 to 2009, they frequently had guests like Glenn Greenwald or Jeremy Scahill.

Paul Jay

Or Thomas Frank.

Robert McChesney

Yeah. They’d been doing really good investigative critical work, exposing the Bush administration and its various crimes around the world. And then they were OK to be on the air. But as soon as Obama came in and they applied the same standards to Obama that they applied to George W. Bush, that was unacceptable. They were basically ushered out the door. That showed the strict line that was there in the sand of how far you could go. Your analysis is completely correct.

When Trump came into power, they did not open the door to the progressives in the journalism community, like they had during the Bush era. Then, to the contrary, it seemed they battened down the hatches. They called up McClean [in Virginia, the home of CIA headquarters] and said, “Get your guys over here and explain the world to us from the CIA’s perspective because that seems to be where the smart people are.” And they called in the NSA and they called in Wall Street. Basically, the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, the corporate worldview, was accepted as the proper frame of reference for journalism on this network, MSNBC. And I think that more or less trickles to CNN pretty much the same. Although I will say that occasionally stuff leaks out of CNN that would never leak out any more at MSNBC.

Paul Jay

Yeah, but not very often.

Robert McChesney

Not very often. Occasionally.

Paul Jay

Yeah. I’ve interviewed Thomas Frank a few times. He wrote a bestselling book, you know: What’s the Matter with Kansas? He was writing in major newspapers. Well-known. And he’s also a good guest. Not everybody who writes successful books is good on TV, but Frank’s good on TV. He’s funny. He knows stuff. He doesn’t get booked by anybody anymore because he was critical of the Obama administration.

Robert McChesney

I mean, Paul, the book he wrote recently, Listen Liberal, which I’m sure you’re familiar with, was a frontal assault on everything MSNBC and CNN stand for. It says, basically, the Democratic Party has abandoned the working class and embraced the professional class and rich people, and that’s a big reason why we have Trump. That’s not an argument that I think MSNBC has any interest in recognizing as legitimate. I think that was just not going to happen. When he was wondering why Democrats weren’t getting the votes they ought to get from in Kansas, that was OK when they’re out of power. Maybe he’s got some way to help them get those votes in a general election.

But when he’s actually writing a book that goes right after the Democrats saying it’s not just the Republicans who changed in the last forty years by moving so far to the right now that they’re sort of into the fascist zone, to be blunt. The Democrats have done the same thing: they’ve moved significantly to the right and on issue after issue. And that’s part of the dance with the Republicans that puts us in the situation we’re in. That discussion is verboten on MSNBC or CNN, except maybe to bring someone out if they’ve got a best-seller to yell at them. But they don’t even recognize it. It’s just not allowed there. You’re going to get the same drumbeat of a few talking points that come right out of the heart of the corporate Democrat wing of the party, which is the dominant wing. It’s where all the money is. And that’s what you’re going to hear over and over and over. In that sense, it’s not that much different from Fox or the rightwing media. But that doesn’t do justice to just how bad Fox and the right are to leave it just right there.

Paul Jay

We’ve talked in the past about concentration of ownership and the extent to which just a tiny handful of media companies own the news. But in the last few years, especially since the crash, there’s been the emergence of these big asset managers like BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard. Now it’s mostly finance that owns the media. The New York Times, I believe is 93 percent owned by financial institutions. For every major media company, with the exceptions of Bloomberg and The Washington Post which are privately owned, institutional investors own controlling interests in those companies. Now, it doesn’t mean they run them day-to-day, but they do get to choose who runs them day-to-day. And if they don’t like the way it’s being run, they can change the management.

Finance has control over the media in a way it didn’t have before. And what’s important is not only the imperative of short-term returns on capital invested, but also the same financial institutions own Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and the rest of the military-industrial complex. They own a controlling interest of shares of fossil fuel companies. So, these media companies now are not just monopolies, they’re integrated and part of financial monopolies that kind of own everything. You know, they have to get on the phone to do their quarterly reports. So, no wonder they don’t want to see the left wing of the Democratic Party showing up on television.

Robert McChesney

You know, that might have some bearing on a CNN or MSNBC or Fox because those are the most visible incarnations of national news. But in a way, I must say, I think that misses the point of what’s happening in America today by a wide mark. In the 1980s and ’90s, I was one of the scholars who did this: there was a lot of emphasis on concentration, ownership, the influence of the profit motive and concentrated ownership and monopolistic markets of news. That scholarship called, basically, for opening up more competitive markets and more public-funded voices to give some better journalism.

I think it was proper analysis at the time. But something has changed fundamentally, which I’m going to return to over and over as long as you interview me, which is that journalism is no longer profitable. No one’s investing to do traditional journalism anywhere if they’re out to make money. They might be doing it because they have a political edge they want to push. They might be doing it for this reason or that. But it’s lost all its commercial value. It is no longer profitable. The capitalist class has basically abandoned journalism altogether. The only people buying up media outlets today are these hedge funds and equity funds that are buying them to strip them for parts. They don’t care about journalism. That’s the only people in the market. You can’t find an investor to buy papers to do news or to buy news media to do news if they want to make a profit on their investment.

There are a lot of reasons for this. It goes back sixty years that the process began, empirically, but it accelerated in the last fifteen or twenty years, and now it’s collapsed. The reason is that the economic basis for commercial journalism in the United States, for 120 years, has been advertising support which provided between 60 and 100 percent of the revenues. It supported journalism in the country all during that period. It all came from advertising.

Well, in the last fifteen years, advertising has left journalism. They no longer need to support a local newspaper to reach their target audience. They no longer need to use conventional news media. They can go digitally online. They found much better ways, much more cost-effective ways, to target their audience to reach it. And for that reason, there’s just no revenues there. The only thing we’re left with is subscribers. The subscribers aren’t going to subscribe to a newspaper which is, like, two pages long because it has no ads to pay for anything. There’s just not enough money coming from subscribers.

So, the whole market’s collapsed. That’s where we’re at. That explains why the hedge funds own what remains of news media. But the problem isn’t that they are bad owners and that if they were nice guys we’d have better media. The problem is the whole system’s dead. They’re not buying to create journalism. And the fact that we’re even talking about MSNBC, CNN and FOX is a sign that we have no journalism. These are three stations that don’t do any journalism. They basically have a bunch of people sit around and gossip about the news. They don’t break any news. They talk about it. If you watch it, you won’t have any idea what’s going on, for the most part, in the country or the world. But you know what the chattering classes think is important for us to hear about, depending on your perspective. Political spin. That’s not journalism.

To the extent you see journalism on CNN or MSNBC, more often than not, they call in a reporter from The Washington Post or The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, three of the remaining newsrooms that cover national politics left in this country who are actually covering stuff. That’s not very many people covering a huge country of 330 million people. It’s absurd. We have no journalism left at the local level in this country. What remains is virtually extinct at this point. It’s on the verge of extinction.

Paul Jay

Yeah, I’m not sure we’re disagreeing.

Robert McChesney

I’m just re-framing it. The traditional idea is, well, you get more owners, more different companies producing it, you’ll get better results. You’ll have more competition, you’ll get new ideas. New types of stories would get covered that wouldn’t be covered before. Well, you’re assuming the marketplace will encourage that, if there’s a lot of different owners and participants. There’s no marketplace anymore. I mean, that’s the point. No one is starting up new media successfully. No investor is trying to anymore. They understand that. They’ve gotten the memo: “If you want to lose your money, invest in journalism. Get out.”

When Bezos bought *The Washington Post* — I forget the price he paid for it — but he probably paid one tenth of what he would have had to pay for it a decade earlier. I mean, it has no value. [Laughs.] And he bought it not to make money; it’s a vanity buy so he could influence politics and push his agenda. It’s not because he said, “This is a great investment!” It’s a crappy investment. It’s the worst investment in his portfolio, no doubt. But it’s the best method to get political influence that will protect his portfolio. Then it’s a real winner.

Paul Jay

Now, The New York Times does seem to be a bit of an exception to the rule. They are making money, aren’t they? And there are a lot of journalists working there.

Robert McChesney

The New York Times has become the national newsroom. It is the only place that has a newsroom that covers national politics seriously, that has a staff that does it. And for that reason, it’s a national newspaper. It has subscribers all over the country. It’s the only place you can go. So, there’s room for one paper. There’s room for one newspaper that can make money nationally and do what The New York Times does. Doesn’t seem like there’s room for much more than that. Certainly, for general news. Not just business news or a specific area — sports news.

So, we’re down to one. But you know what we had forty years ago in the United States, by comparison? There were probably a dozen major American newspapers that not only had a big Washington bureau, they had bureaus in London and Paris and Moscow. In South America. They were covering the world. You actually saw international news, which doesn’t exist anymore — ironically, in the global age. So, there’s one newsroom left. And to some extent, The Washington Post will cover domestic politics. It champions the stuff in Washington. And The Wall Street Journal does some good reporting, still

But the rest of it? It’s mostly just gossip. Now, there are some great reporters, don’t get me wrong, and you’re one of them. There are some great reporters covering stuff, but it’s not in that world. It’s on the margins, on the fringes. It’s being supported through — like you have to do — trying to find people to support you, willing to give you money, who understand the importance of the work. But there’s not enough money out there, even if you find rich people to give you money, to bankroll the sort of resources you need to cover Baltimore, Maryland, or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania or anywhere else in the country. That’s the great crisis we face, not to mention the national news.

Paul Jay

Yeah, I agree with all that. The thing about this concentration of ownership that I was saying is that the interest of finance is now so directly involved in the media that the boundaries of where they are willing to go is still within the realm of the two-party duopoly. Even though The New York Times is unparalleled in the United States, in terms of a functioning international and national newsroom. It’s still about Republicans versus Democrats.

But even on other issues. I’ve been preoccupied with BlackRock, this big asset management company. It controls seven trillion dollars. Between them, State Street, Vanguard and some of the other smaller ones, they vote the shares that control something like 95 percent of the S&P 500. But when I tried to find stories about BlackRock that really are revealing, the place I found them was on Bloomberg. Well, Bloomberg is privately owned, whereas The New York Times is owned by BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, and the other institutional investors. I guess people know where their bread is buttered. In no way am I disagreeing with how the market for journalism is collapsed. I’m just saying it’s gotten worse than that because the ownership is so intertwined now that the same people who write about nuclear weapons and nuclear war strategy work for the same ownership that owns the twelve companies that make nuclear weapons.

Robert McChesney

So, it reinforces the problems to begin with and then some.

Paul Jay

Let’s talk about how to change this. To really change it, we’re going to need a breakthrough politically, at least at some state levels. We haven’t seen anything with the donor model get to scale. Even The Intercept, which has some serious money from Pierre Omidyar and does good investigative journalism and does get referenced in the mainstream press. I guess maybe Democracy Now is the most successful outlet based on the foundation-and-donor model. But the vast majority of Americans have never heard of Democracy Now.

So, it’s going to be connected to the issue of a political breakthrough at the national and state levels because there needs to be some really serious public money put into a real democratic media. And that’s a political problem. The private donations alone are just not going to be enough. Like, you could imagine a state, especially a bigger state like California, say, putting up real funding for independent media if they would have the political guts to do it.

But, anyway, how do you imagine this changing?

Robert McChesney

Well, I think I’m open minded. I think we have to see what works. Throw a lot of ideas out there, work on them, and see what develops. I don’t think there’s one plan that will solve it, necessarily, although there are some things we know for sure. What most Americans don’t realize is that the First Amendment to our Constitution, as Justice Potter Stewart put it, is a structural demand on the government to make sure there is a press system, that there is an independent free press. It’s not just, don’t censor the press. You’ve got to have a press that exists in order for it to be protected from censorship. Our free-press tradition has two parts.

The first the first part I talked about, that there actually be a free and independent press, was forgotten by the time the commercial media giants came along in the 20th century. It was assumed that the market would always produce a huge news media. That was never a problem. You’d always have this huge news media and the only thing you worried about was the government censoring it.

Well, in fact, at the time of the American Revolution, there was no guarantee you’d have a press system. It required massive public subsidies to have a press system. We had enormous public subsidies. The primary one was the post office, which was created to be the free (or for a nominal fee) distribution arm of every American newspaper for the first hundred years of American history. This made it possible for to have this plethora of diverse views in newspapers which were foundational to our political democracy, the best parts of our democracy. There wasn’t a single social movement of value from abolition to the suffragettes to labor — all the rights to expand the franchise — that wasn’t led by editors, that wasn’t led by news media. The media was the center of democracy. Those media only survived because they were supported by the post office providing free distribution or really inexpensive postage that covered all their distribution costs.

That’s our American tradition. We had this rich tradition of understanding the exact problem you outline, that you need a news media to have a functioning democracy and we can’t bank on the market to provide it. And we’re in a situation now where the market clearly has given up. It’s failed. This is a public good, news media. It’s something society desperately needs, but the market won’t produce in sufficient quality or quantity.

So, how do we solve that? The great political problem: how do you get sufficient public funds to support independent, uncensored news media, but without letting the government control who gets the money and how it’s used? That’s the problem. Is it solvable? Well, the postal subsidy solved it. The postal subsidy? Everyone got it if you were a newspaper. They didn’t care what your politics were.

In fact, the reason why we know it was such an extraordinarily successful policy is that the first great scandal with the post office till big newspapers came was in the antebellum period when Southern postmasters refused to carry abolitionist newspapers. And that was considered such an outrage in the North, it was one of the main factors that drove northern anger at the South and hatred of slavery. It would take away democracy if you couldn’t even talk about slavery or abolition. There’s a handful of other incidents in which you have the post office attempting censorship. They were always criticized. In fact, during World War I when anti-war tracts were censored, what the US government did was deemed so outrageous that it led to all the great First Amendment decisions the Supreme Court made that we live with today. They came on the heels of World War I. A lot of that came from most Americans considering the post office’s censorship of anti-war material just obscene.

So, we have this rich history of solving that problem successfully. Now we’ve got to come up with how we do it in the digital age. How do we do it in era in which you don’t need ink in newspapers, in an era in which you want to have local media? Local media disappears in the digital era because once you go digital, localness means nothing. For you to do your program, Paul, even if you want to do just Baltimore, Maryland, when you put it online, it’s seen as easily by someone in China as it is in Baltimore, Maryland. You basically have an international audience automatically. Localism is stripped out of the technology. And for that reason, we’ve got to come up with a way to have local media that covers communities, that draws people together — independent, competitive media that’s functional and accountable.

Can it be solved? Well, I think it can. I’ve worked for years with a number of people not just in the United States, but in Canada and in Europe on plans to do it. We think it should be a publicly funded budget. People in local communities would vote every year for whichever non-profit media they wanted to get it. So, you know, if it’s $200 per person, it would mean you do it at the county level because then counties are the core unit. Everyone in the county could vote for how to allocate the budget for that. You pick a few and then everyone who gets over three percent of the vote qualifies. For however many votes they get, they get that amount of money. And you have it every year, so it’s competitive. No one gets to just lock in a position and ignore the public. But something like that, starting with that principle.

Now, maybe it can be done at the state level first, but I think we ought to really think nationally. I guess we’re at a point now where you look at the information level of American politics today compared to what it was even in the Reagan era, and it’s frightening. There’s no other word for it. It’s utterly frightening to see QAnon and to see this other stuff that’s being widely circulated as legitimate. The reason for that is that conspiracy theories are the only theories trying to make sense of the world. [Laughing.] No one else is trying to explain how to understand the world. You don’t have journalism. We’ve got to get journalism, in competitive groups, back in communities explaining the world to people. Not just one voice, but multiple voices.

Paul Jay

Models of public support like this already exist in Europe. In Scandinavia, I believe, there are some countries where they have actual elections and based on who wins, they have three or four channels that get resources. In the United States there is a structure that exists that could be built on, which are these community cable channels where cable companies have had to open up channels as part of their obligation to cities to put up their cable lines. But they’re completely under-resourced. The idea that cable companies had to pay money so these channels could function has been so whittled away that most of these cable channels, outside of a city like Manhattan or San Francisco, have very few resources.

But there actually is space. There are channels that exist. If they were really resourced… And they have a bit of democratic structure to them now because at least I believe some are supported via elections in the communities who runs these community channels. That infrastructure could be built on. I think the national politics is just too screwed up right now but maybe at a state level, or a city level, even, there could be some breakthroughs.

Robert McChesney

You might be right. I’m open-minded. I don’t want to stop any city or state from pursuing something like this. But at the same time, I do think it’s time that whenever someone talks about media that we inject this conversation at the beginning. Unless we get the resources to have an independent, uncensored news media that’s actually covering our communities — unless we get that right in the middle of everything — then everything else we’re doing about democracy is pretty much irrelevant. This is the foundation of democratic theory, not just in this country, but globally. You’ve got to have some semblance of a credible, independent press. We don’t have one anymore. And so, I’m fine for everyone to do it.

But that’s probably why I answered your question about media ownership in the way I did. We’ve got a bigger problem than just who owns the media. Not that that isn’t a problem. We don’t have media to be owned. I mean, we don’t have the resources there that are doing the job.

In the 1970s, there was no term for homelessness. That is, homelessness didn’t exist really. By the 1980s it was commonplace. We had millions of people who couldn’t afford housing. And now we’re have a new term that’s never existed in America before. It’s become the fastest growing concept in journalism. It’s called the “news desert.” These are places in America where there are no reporters covering a community. None, zero, nunca. And no newsroom, certainly. And if you expand news desert to mean that you have to have a minimum number of reporters per hundred thousand people, then a wide portion of this country is now a news desert where there’s no really credible journalism covering your state, your community.

You know, the difference for anyone our age, Paul, is that even given the problems of journalism as it used to be, if you read your local newspaper and listened to the AM news, you had a pretty reasonable idea of what was going on in your community. You had a baseline. There’s none of that today. Most people don’t have any clue of what’s going on in their city or their community.

And that’s what happens. Boy, you just really can’t… The system is not going to work very well as long as that’s the case. In fact, we’re seeing the results now: it makes possible someone just like Donald Trump. And it’s not an error that the far-right in this country, the far-right parts of the world — the Mercers, the Bannons — revel in the collapse of journalism. They revel in the idea that they can basically control the narrative and not have really a voice they have to contend with. They can just dismiss it as baloney, as fake news. This is a serious issue.

Paul Jay

And nothing more serious than the lack of coverage of the climate crisis even if there’s a certain amount of action by the Biden administration. Some leading scientists from the IPCC a couple of years ago published a report that said that even if every country that signed the Paris Accords fulfilled all of their commitments, by 2050 we would still hit two degrees warming above the pre-industrial average. Well, the science is getting pretty clear now that if you hit two degrees, you have an effect called “runaway.”

In fact, I have an interview I’m publishing in the next couple of days with a climate scientist. Runaway is, for example, more forest fires, more carbon emission from the fires, more melting of the Arctic, more methane released. You start getting this runaway effect after you hit two degrees warming. It gets difficult if not impossible to prevent hitting three and then four, and you essentially have an unlivable planet. How is that not the most compelling story night after night after night? It’s not just a politics story.

Robert McChesney

It’s an extraordinary story. Obviously, going back to the point of departure for this interview, the framework for American journalism is sort of what elites consider relevant issues, what they’re debating. And this clearly is not especially relevant issue for the elites of this country because they’re not encouraging this debate whatsoever. Their politicians aren’t encouraging it. They’re not paying for politicians to encourage it. And we’re living with the consequences.

Theoretically, in a democratic society, even if the people who run the country don’t want to talk about it, there’s a news media that’s focused on the issues that aren’t always going to be popular with people in power. That’s what a free press is for, and they would be doing exactly this. They would be beating the drum on this issue, publishing the work, talking to people, talking to activists about what they’re doing. So, if you live in a community, you’d know what people are doing in the community on this issue. Right now, most Americans are living in a closet, so to speak, with the light off because they have no idea what’s going on in their community. There might be lots of people actively organizing on this. They’ll have no idea. They’ll have no idea why it’s a big deal. They’re clueless and it’s not their fault. I mean, you say, well, they should know. How are they supposed to know about something if you’ve never heard about it?

Paul Jay

Seventy-four million people just voted for Trump.

Robert McChesney

I mean, there’s a bunch of related issues right up there. Issues of war and peace, which are also potentially catastrophic for our species, are completely off-limits in our commercial news media and in our mainstream news media: NPR as well. You know, the range of debate, to paraphrase Jeff Cohen’s great line, is from GE to GM. [Laughter.]

Although I must say the Republicans are caught in this new fascist element, which is really their special contribution to the last decade. You know, the range of debate used to be narrowly within a sort of corporate-liberal viewpoint on foreign policy. Now, we’ve edged into the isolationist, you know, racist, screw the rule of law — I mean, just the dark underbelly of neoliberalism. And so that’s our range of debate now. It’s, like, well, those are your two choices. It’s no choice at all.

Paul Jay

All right. Thanks for joining us, Bob.

Robert McChesney

My pleasure, Paul.

Paul Jay

And thank you for joining us on theAnalysis.News podcast. And I hope Bob will be back often in the future. And don’t forget, we have a fundraising campaign on now. Go to the website; it explains everything. It’s a matching grant campaign. And if you donate, it’s going to get matched those. Thanks for joining us on theAnalysis.news podcast.

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