The Media Doesn't Have a Political Bias, It Has a Profit Bias.
On the freakout over the New York Times's election coverage.
Political media, in its current toxic senescence, offers a great deal to despise. Many pundits posture and bluster and manage to become loathsome and irritating without ever saying something interesting; the ubiquity of thought-terminating cliches and conventional wisdom has run into a state of permanent uselessness. The stilted meta-objectivity that has become the hallmark of mainstream journalism effectively guarantees that both politicians and the journos who cover them will continue to perform the blank sadism of centrist politics. Nothing works, no one has their finger on the pulse. As a general rule, the most action political media ever pulls is when it enters false equivalency mode whenever Medicare-for-All is compared to, say, some frothing reactionary wanting to grind migrant children into Taco Bell meat, or when it covers political scandals like it’s a PageSix story while lazily attaching the suffix -gate to whatever the subject matter is. The threshold of levelheaded political analysis is nearly impossible, as network and newspaper execs don’t know how to or don’t want to quit the incentives of Trump-era madness. There is nothing left but a competition between variously nauseating aesthetics.
The New York Times is an avatar for the range of “respectable” American public opinion, and what is considered “respectable” is constricted to pencil-necked columnists who express contrived, predictable, and milquetoast center-left to center-right pablum in tedious prose. Despite its editor proclaiming in no uncertain terms that America’s paper of record is “pro-capitalism,” its reputation on the right is that it is the vanguard of radical wokeness, mostly because their conception of the political spectrum is essentially: Anything to the left of Sean Hannity is communism.
Maybe the NYT has a liberal slant, in the sense that its op-ed section is specifically geared toward the kind of feckless Democrat partisan who regards themselves as a high-minded post-ideologue because they care more about appearing reasonable to Republicans than they do defending their own stated principles with any conviction. I am loathe to go to bat for the journalistic integrity of corporate media, given their tendency to blanche into something indistinct and vaguely the color of money, but the Times at least has a solid cooking section and occasionally churns out interesting long-form magazine pieces. Ultimately, however, it is difficult for me to respect a newspaper that makes the conscious decision each and every day to employ Bret Stephens.
So it is worth taking a moment, here, to consider why liberals have been spiritually embodying Jeff Tiedrich and losing their absolute shit on the New York Times as of late. Anyone who views American public life through a sufficiently cynical lens could determine that the Times’s self-congratulatory signifiers and symbols have long been wrapped around nothing; these days, it seems to be trying its hardest to be a cynically equivocating or completely undiscerning newspaper, depending on your perspective. If that wasn’t evident in their opaque and contrived headlines around the ceaseless violence the IDF delivers to Palestinian civilians, then their specific emphasis on Biden’s age has been telling. And this revelation doesn’t expose media bias in the sense that has been popularly conceived as a liberal-conservative axis to describe outlets that are either too “woke” or Trumpist for someone’s palette. Incidentally, this bias is shaped and ultimately determined by profit motive.
After the 2016 presidential election, it was calculated that Donald Trump received over $2 billion of free coverage, and this media fixation on his ratings bonanza spectacle was undergone without any regard for how his dehumanizing and blearily apocalyptic rhetoric would affect American democracy. As Trump leveraged his bully pulpit to attack CNN and Washington Post and the NYT, it became a staple of #resistance tenant to defend these institutions at all costs and beyond reason, as these outlets flipped to obsessive coverage of Russiagate. The most gormless of libs were under the impression that this was a genuine mea culpa, but this ploy was always a cynical gambit to pander to the anti-Trump hysteria that has since come to dominate Democratic politics. This wasn’t a principled decision to defend democracy as much as it was a market demand that was waiting to be served. As the 2024 election projects to be a tossup between a deracinated mummy and a melting creamsicle, the media has made it a point and principle to equivocate Biden’s age to Trump’s fascist inclinations. America isn’t a country, it’s a business, and a horserace election drives clicks and draws eyeballs.
@S Peter Davis has made the point that conservatives perceive capitalism as a mechanism to uphold their political values, and when it doesn’t, they have no issue using the apparatus of the state to course-correct the market; or, in his words, it’s not that the right and left disagree that the market should be restrained, they just “differ is what they feel capitalism should be punished for.” But this is only one side of the culture war. The main issue liberal voters and bloodless center-left technocrats have with capitalism is that there isn’t enough diversity at the commanding heights, not that neoliberalism is producing a more rigid hierarchy that perpetuates steepening wealth inequality while subverting democratic ideals. Ultimately, liberals are beefing with the New York Times not because they are giving Biden unfair coverage, but because its profit incentive is to disproportionately slam their preferred candidate to draw attention towards its election coverage. And this profit incentive doesn’t neatly align with their political imperatives.
Sure, while it is obvious to anyone who engages with observable reality that Biden’s brain is firmly in its apple sauce phase, it is irresponsible to equate this defect with a raving golf blob who wants to end American democracy as we know it. This equivocation is blurring what is at stake in this election. In the absence of a widely agreed upon common good, the New York Times is no more irresponsible than any other company that sells out its workers, its surrounding communities, its social responsibility, the quality of its products, the environment, and even the well-being of a functioning democracy for profit. It is within the logic of neoliberalism that there is no society, just a collection of individuals and organizations acting in their own short-term self-interest. In this case, the New York Times has come to mistake all this smug and sclerotic unworkability as its moral imperative; as such, they understand all the ways in which they frame Biden’s age and Trump’s authoritarian ambitions as just another election thing as doing their job, and seems to see all the journalism-shaped anti-journalism that they author into existence.
Walter Benjamin once warned of the aestheticization of politics as a hallmark of fascism, but it was in a broader sense—a familiar one in which citizens have given up on the idea that politics would ever serve their needs, so they instead expressed themselves by proxy through their alignment with various degraded and degrading champions. Along with everything else that was once good and pure that has since been absorbed into the culture war, media consumption has become another identity signifier. Information as a consumer choice has been imbued with political valence.
The New York Times seems, given its status as America’s Paper of Record, always carried a sort of elevated status. Since Trump has made it a political mission to assault the paper’s reputation purely out of refracted spite, liberals have reflexively exalted it as a beacon of American democracy, since the dictates of culture war binarism posits that anything Trump hates must be unquestionably good. But like any other business, respective media outlets try to capture a consumer base by selling them a reality that they’re willing to buy. And this heel turn is not just disappointing to the people who believed the Times’s self-congratulatory branding, but it is somewhat of an existential crisis. The Times, in its load-bearing grandiosity, is the farcical version of this dynamic running concurrently with the tragic version currently climbing like black mold over every corner of American public life.
The NYTs equivocation and wishy washy reporting and opinion pieces (often strident and false) have become increasingly irksome. The longer it goes on, the more it looks like they support and understand that another Trump presidency is inevitable, that the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians is necessary and just, and that Putin can have Ukraine, because, who cares.
The cognitive disconnect necessary to maintain those positions day after day is deliberate, continual editorial decisions are being made.
There's no moral framework, let alone journalistic integrity.