The American Media and the Rise of American Authoritarianism

Advocates of a free and open American society who cry “Fake News” are right to distrust the media, though their logic for doing so is severely flawed.  It’s difficult to blame these people, however, as they are products of a society in which the American media has been misrepresenting reality since its inception.  

The media over simplifies serious political issues.  Due to limited space in publications and limited airtime on networks or cable channels, news outlets are forced to truncate and simplify stories.  Long speeches are reduced to two line quotes or 10 second sound bites. Thus, it becomes difficult to provide full context for stories or accurately convey the spirit and experience of an event.  

In their oversimplified coverage of politicians and serious political issues, the media tends to frame politics as a sport, focusing on the horse race aspects of elections and on keeping score of what bills have the votes to pass rather than focusing on the issues at hand or the stakes of the decision the American people must make in the voting booth.  Covering politics the same way the media covers sports allows Americans to treat politics like sports, which makes it easy for the average American citizen to forget the gravity of their own political choices. Because the decisions of politics actually impact the lives of actual, living, breathing human people, one’s political affiliation and the choices one makes associated with it carry significantly more weight than the sports team for which one roots. But the American media treats these allegiances as if they were comparable.  Such coverage encourages political divisiveness of both politicians and their constituents by focusing on the competitive, tribal aspect of politics rather than encouraging collaboration between politicians with opposing viewpoints, which is the type of reasonable compromise problem solving the American system of government is designed to encourage. 

Of course, the reason for covering politics like sports stems from the profit motive, which is one of the biggest problems facing the news media in corporate America in 2018.  Though the American media is sometimes branded “The liberal media” this assertion is flatly ludicrous when one considers the trillion dollar corporations which own networks and cable news stations. These are huge multinational conglomerates in the business of making money and they must make more money this quarter than they made last quarter lest they be considered failures.  In this environment, placating viewers and playing to their expectations becomes more important than delivering them the honest truth of their reality. Celebrating war becomes a savvier ratings move than decrying American aggression, focus is placed on a dozen soccer players being rescued from a cave rather than dozens of people dying in a ferry crash, Russian election meddling becomes a scapegoat for a nation divided and fundamentally broken system of elections.  Audiences, increasingly uncomfortable with hearing anything they don’t want to hear or which confronts the state of denial the media's sold them as reality only tune into news which confirms all their pre-existing opinions, political or otherwise. They get news from personalities, often tuning in because of the relationship they have with the host of a news program rather than the substance of that program. The result is a fractured, isolated populace with everyone only getting information from their own echo chamber.  The internet further isolates this populace, who has difficulty discerning between good and bad information because they're conditioned to only hear what they want to hear. This misinformed citizenry then takes to Twitter to discuss the nuanced, complex issues of governance they don't really understand in dialogues of less than 280 characters.

In the midst of this fractured media landscape where everyone is tuning into their own personal version of reality, the role of the United States President has only grown in prominence and power.  It’s far easier to report on the actions of one individual who is the Executive Branch than it is to focus on the 535 members of the Legislative Branch or the 9 US Supreme Court Justices and countless other federal judges who make up the Judicial Branch of the US Government.  In conjunction with this growing public sense of the President’s power, every President since Eisenhower has sought to expand the powers of his office through use of Executive Order, pardons and other legal apparatuses afforded the Commander in Chief. We are left now with a fascist demagogue, who, the way Chairman Mao’s likeness was plastered all over China, plasters his likeness all over the US news media with Tweets and other provocative behavior, meant to remind everyone all the time that it all revolves around him.  And people are tuning in, which makes media outlets money, so the media continues to perpetuate the narrative of his absolute ubiquity, thus sowing division in society as their stock prices soar and their Board of Directors laugh all the way to the bank, secure in the knowledge that if the whole thing comes crashing down, they’ll be on a private jet to somewhere else. 

Rather than fix any of this and stop the spread of authoritarianism in America, many of us are tuning to Netflix, to its 13 billion dollar catalogue of original series, replete with cool new worlds full of characters we love facing obstacles and constructed tensions all designed to distract us from the misery of our own lives the way glossy images in magazines and Hollywood musicals distracted Americans from the misery of The Great Depression and the ugliness of World War II.  Netflix doesn’t have sponsors. They could do a version of the news that was rigorous, honest and unflinching. But they are a subscriber based service, in the business of giving their customers what they want, and an honest rendering of the world around them is not what most Americans want since most Americans don't even know that's not what they're getting While the world burns, we just want to Netflix and Chill, content with our decay, willing to repress our insecurities, watch and escape, while never giving any serious consideration to what exactly it is we are seeking to escape.