Never get into a pissing match with people who buy ink by the barrel, the saying goes. In other words, you can’t win an argument with the media because, well, they’re the media, and they get to frame the argument.
But maybe there’s another option: ignoring them — at least, the vast majority of them — altogether. That’s the suggestion from Steve Soto at The Left Coaster.
The fact is that we are beyond the days of an independent, and objective media. We may get back to that again depending on FCC changes and corporate profit pressures, but for the foreseeable future there is no news balance or objectivity in our media as a result of FCC and other changes that have occurred since the 1980%u2019s. The sooner that those of us on the center-left realize that and stop pining for the days of a media of balance and objectivity and start treating the media as corporate and GOP tools, the better we will be in forcing change.
Air America is off to a good start, as are various other TV and radio programming. But nothing will change until advertisers start seeing more and more people switching off their TVs and radios from the CNN%u2019s, the MSNBCs, the CNBCs, and even the Big Three network news and getting their news from the internet or other more friendly sources. And the Washington Post and other major corporate media Bush enablers inside the Beltway will not change until people tag them for the double-standard they applied to Clinton and get in their faces about it.
….The most dramatic way to make an impact is to stop appearing on Fox, MSNBC, and CNN, and to have the center-left start boycotting them and the Big Three. Yes, we‚Äôll get beat up in the short term, but the advertisers will notice the declining numbers and the one-sidedness of the coverage, and will question why they should keep paying to appeal to the same shrinking audience multiple times.
I’m so, so tempted to go along with Steve. So are a few dozen other people… maybe even a few thousand!
Tops. And there’s the problem.
See, if you really wanted to have a noticeable impact, long before declaring a boycott you’d need to do a huge campaign to convince everyone whose heart lies to the left of Tucker Carlson’s that
- the media slant too far to the right,
- the media are too biased to be useful to them, and
- there are readily available alternatives that aren’t so biased to the right that would be just as (or at least sufficiently) useful.
That’s a tall order, in part because the vast majority of that audience doesn’t think about news – or their own politics – in those terms. And they really don’t think about the alternatives in those terms.
Until you can convince them of the need for a media revolution, then launching the boycott that Steve suggests would mean only that the forces of sweetness and light would cut themselves off from the vast majority of viewers.
It’s the progressive flip-side to those misguided corporations who want to pull their ads unless they get universally positive news coverage… except we don’t have nearly the same clout. We’d end up punishing ourselves and the people we want to reach… everyone, in fact, except the media and our opponents.
All of that said, step back a little bit from the brink of a full boycott, and Steve’s analysis is bang-on. His call for progressive Americans to take on real media bias with the same ferocity that conservatives use to take on the imaginatry kind is timely and vital, and should resonate north of the border as well.
