Critics full of advice about where media went wrong
Partisans seem to love pinning the woes of traditional media on ideological bias.
News businesses everywhere are wrestling with declining revenues. There are lots of theories about why this is happening. Some people are very worried about this. Others are taking it as a kind of vindication.
Last week, sports broadcaster ESPN announced the axing of 100 journalists. American conservatives felt a bit smug about this. They didn’t mind letting their schadenfreude shine through on the internet.
Everything is political now. Sports can’t simply be about sports any more. ESPN’S critics say it has become a mouthpiece for liberal advocacy. The intrusion of politics into the escapism of sport has driven viewers away, they say.
The criticism is not completely paranoid. The people in charge of the network agree it has expanded into areas of political and social concern. As the default setting for any media organisation tilts Left, it’s natural for ESPN to tilt that way, too. And surveys show that at least some viewers are switching off in response.
But the idea that political bias is at the heart of ESPN’S financial woes doesn’t stack up. As Sonny Bunch, one of America’s fore most cultural critics, tweeted: ’’Layoffs at ESPN have nothing to do with the politics of the on-air staff and everything to do with structural problems in the cable biz.’’
Bunch is right. It doesn’t take much reading to determine what is doing ESPN in. In the past six years, ESPN has lost over 10 million subscribers. Some of these people may have quit over politics, but most of it is part of a larger trend away from pay TV. Sky Television is struggling with the same phenomenon here.
At the same time, the network is party to expensive sports broadcasting contracts. The astronomical costs of these rights may have made sense in the old environment. But in the brave new digital world, the return on investment isn’t there.
If you read New Zealand blogs, you may recognise the same misguided analysis. If you read the comments sections, you will definitely recognise it. Partisans seem to love pinning the woes of traditional media on ideological bias.
Those on the Right point to the documented Left-wing dominance of mainstream media. Consumers are sick of lectures from out-oftouch gentry liberals, the argument goes. So they’re cancelling subscriptions and getting the straight dope from new media sources.
The Left-wing counterpart is that the news has become too ‘‘corporate’’. Declining subscriptions are a kind of people’s revolt against a subservient press. In this telling, the real villain is neo-liberalism. The media won’t recover until it is fully publicly funded and fully directed towards advancing their version of social justice.
Both of these views were out in force following the Commerce Commission’s rejection of the Fairfax-nzme merger.
Both companies said merging was necessary to safeguard journalism in this country. Without it, they say, it’s not clear newspapers can remain viable. I don’t really have an opinion on whether that’s true, because I haven’t given it a lot of thought.
But the armchair analysts of the internet are full of advice. According to one Twitter user, the real problem is that ‘‘NZ media so biased towards neo-liberalism & degrading victims of it, they’ve lost trust & respect of most of NZ.’’ At the same time, a blog comment maker suggested that newspapers ‘‘dump their [social justice warrior] advocates and get some staff who will report the news with facts vs pushing some personal agenda’’.
At least one of these views has to be wrong. As it happens, I am confident that both of them are.
Hyper-partisans can be driven to distraction by perceived ideological bias. There are those who find the existence of my column to be a kind of torture and they sometimes reach out to me. Often, they actually seem to have lost sleep over the fact something appeared in a newspaper with which they didn’t agree.
Why would a newspaper print such a column? The culprits commonly suggested include a secret agenda, corruption or editorial indifference to reader preferences. ‘‘No wonder newspapers are going down the tubes!!!’’ is a common valediction to these complaints.
Few things are more comforting than the apparent confirmation of one’s wishful thinking. It is all too human to infer cause and effect in the cause of confirming your preconceptions. If contrary opinions cause you mental anguish, they must be the cause of declining subscriptions. After all, you did warn them.
Modern newspapers developed when the barriers to publication were high. If you could print and distribute content, you could easily sell advertising alongside it. In the digital age, that’s no longer the case. Compared to that issue, disgruntled partisans are the least of the media’s worries.
As with ESPN, the problems facing newspapers are more prosaic – and more daunting – than editorial bias.