Corporate Media and its influence

The Myth of “Fair and Balanced”

How corporate media is secretly brainwashing the American public.

Aaron Nytes

July 3, 2023

Getting that awkward Facebook Messenger notification from your distant uncle is never fun. As soon as the notification dings and you look down to see his name, the secondhand embarrassment fills your conscience as you wonder which it would be this time: the yearly holiday BBQ plans or repugnant social commentary? These days it is almost exclusively the latter. You swipe the notification away, hoping that the intrusive thought about the message’s content will elude you. But it gnaws at you relentlessly until the mysterious process in your brain forces it open. Repugnant social commentary it is…

It is no question that the media we consume has a profound effect on our individual beliefs and our shared values as a society. One might think that, with such a keen influence on the social psyche, the content of the news and entertainment that we consume should be closely studied and carefully scrutinized. However, the major news companies, even more shrouded by the advent of social media, proves that the opposite is the case. While corporate media, especially the right-wing variety, package addicting content to the masses, they use their power to normalize their status-quo agenda and obfuscate their true influence.

Side of Building advertising Fox News. Retrieved from flickr taken by user ajay_suresh

Addictive Media

Although most media organizations, right and left, package their product through addictive means, perhaps no liberal organization is more potent and emblematic of the dangers of this trend than Fox News.

It is not entirely clear which comes first, the chicken or its racist tendencies. Would the highly polarized viewpoints of Fox News’s consumers be just as warped if they were without it entirely? Perhaps Fox News is responding to a demand already inherent in the American public. This theory, however, does not explain the “large decreases in knowledge of

information covered on Fox News” compared to alternative networks. Reducing one’s consumption of Fox News and viewing different news content also “moderated [viewers] attitudes and bolstered knowledge they need to hold elected officials accountable.”

Far more likely, given these realities, is that Fox News tries to sell an addictive product that makes its customers’ symptoms worse, thereby drawing them in further. By focusing on “sensationalism and identity politics,” the network’s founding established itself as a catalyst for conservative cultural values. Since then, by pushing the ‘revenge-button’ in their viewers’ brains, the network has enabled addictive tendencies in its huge audience by scaremongering and pushing “tribal hate porn.”

Fox News’s practices have allowed them to dominate consumers on the right better than any of similarly situated networks on the left. The network has risen to fame as the most popular news channel on cable TV.

Since then, by pushing the ‘revenge-button’ in their viewers’ brains, the network has enabled addictive tendencies in its huge audience by scaremongering and pushing “tribal hate porn.”

But what specific tactics make Fox News most successful? A Yale study attempted to describe the process by which most American news entities—but Fox News especially—cultivates their cult-like following. By setting a broad agenda, filtering content to fit that agenda, and then filtering coverage of an issue, a network can strategically create a consumer-dependency on their content.

Image of table created in study by Broockman and Kalla, outlining process of how partisan media can change viewers’ attitudes

Screenshot of table provided in study by David Broockman and Joshua Kalla

Let’s look at a prime example of this process—the 2020 presidential election. The network began by setting an agenda. Immediately after the election, Fox News began relentlessly questioning the results, thereby setting the agenda of election integrity (or the supposed lack thereof). Once the topic was sufficiently known to its viewers, it framed the issue as substantially similar to actions of the Democrats. Disregarding the obvious distinction between voicing disapproval for an electoral process that would crown a less popular candidate the winner and airing debunked voter fraud claims (which later forced the network into legal damage-control), Fox News framed it as a partisan, instead of an anti-democracy, issue. Finally, in the post-carnage cleanup stage of the insurrection, Fox news filtered out any coverage of the hearings held to investigate prominent Republicans’ involvement in the insurrection itself.

And there is actually a neurological reason these tactics are so successful. As journalist Linda Rodriguez McRobbie has described, “any perceived threat — physical, metaphysical, ideological, or imagined — causes the amygdalae to alert the brain to prepare for a fight.” This response triggers a release of dopamine, which is accompanied by various physical responses like increases in heart rate and blood pressure. Beyond dopamine’s addictive effect, our emotional response to this triggered anger can have similar effects. “The more we use anger to dominate or control others (or to protect ourselves),” McRobbie writes, “the more this outrage shapes our identity.” “It feels good,” Dr. Jean Kim, a psychiatrist for the US Department of Health and Human Services, said. “It feeds into your sense of self and you end up liking it.”

These tendencies were echoed in my conversation with Professor Mina Cikara, an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. “My expertise is in the domain of intergroup behavior and conflict, so I study how people’s feelings, thoughts, and brains may be changed when they stop interacting with others,” she said. When asked if current political times are unique in its group interaction, she responded: “My understanding from the data is that yeah, things have gotten a lot worse. Particularly in the domain of affective polarization—I just call it prejudice.”

She spoke about how powerful and well-coordinated groups of political elites might use or even create conflict to manipulate a population through prejudice. “There are all manner[s] of threat that can come up and remain salient in intergroup conflicts, or just intergroup context,” she said. These threats are wielded like knives by those who know how to properly throw them. “One source of threat that gets quite a bit of attention is economic threat,” Professor Cikara added. Fox News’s obsession with inflation under the Biden administration, despite its potential genesis under the Trump administration, exemplifies this tendency perfectly. This incongruency or inaccuracy does not matter to their network nor its viewers. As Professor Cikara opined, “Whether or not there is any reason to believe that’s actually what is going on is beside the point—it’s a story that people tell.”

And this economic threat is hardly the only story told. Professor Cikara added, “another source of threat is symbolic threat, when political leaders or elites in a group of any kind will argue that there is another group out there who is seeking to change our way of life, to undermine our values, our traditions, the things that we cherish, our morals, everything.” This rhetoric is particularly dangerous, because, as Professor Cikara outlined, “when I feel like I’m under threat, there is no legal or psychological morality that precludes self-defense. ‘I am righteous in my self-defense.’ If I feel like I’m under attack, almost everything is on the table now.”

This incongruency or inaccuracy does not matter to their network nor its viewers. As Professor Cikara opined, “Whether or not there is any reason to believe that’s actually what is going on is beside the point—it’s a story that people tell.”

When leveraged against groups hardly capable of destroying an entire way of life, especially a way of life so entrenched as the one conservative mainstream media pushes, the story is more acute within its manipulated audience. “So you see this marshaled quite a bit in respect to groups that very little political power by dint of not having many people in them,” she stipulated. The double-think inherent in naming a small, political unimpactful group as one capable of metastasizing into a disrupting force is no accident. “Group size—this is like decades-old research from psychology, political science, sociology and so on—is one feature that is associated with threat.” Finally, “the perception that any gain of theirs is a loss of ours, that sort of zero-sum instantiation can actually really give it a lot of weight, if people really do perceive that their gain is our loss, that is a very compelling form of threat.”

The double-think inherent in naming a small, political unimpactful group as one capable of metastasizing into a disrupting force is no accident.

Aided by the dopamine effect described earlier, these tactics allow Fox News to spin its audience further and further into their web, forcing them to be enveloped by the same tendency as well. The result: a public addicted to extreme views and a network profiting off platforming them.

The Broader Pro-Capital Agenda

While Fox News’s tactics are uniquely right-wing, the agenda that it sets is emblematic of the capital-sympathizing viewpoints that are perpetuated throughout liberal news networks as well.

Aside from the topics they choose to cover or ignore, news corporations subtly bias their customers throughout their consumption. Although most present themselves as neutral and purport to be fair and balanced, “mainstream news media, divisions of major corporations themselves, are usually savvy enough to avoid covering” most topics “with a blatant business perspective.” As Professor Cikara explained, “all of the data that we have from even just this most recent midterm election is that voters’ prioritization of issues did not map onto what it was that programming was covering … it turns out ‘drag-show library hour’ is not top of mind for voters in Kansas, access to abortion is.” Nevertheless, this disconnect between what the public cares about and what news is covering will evade many viewers who will not notice that they are being fed curated and distracting content.

This subtlety in the news’s agenda manifests itself visibly in American news coverage of the labor movement. Despite the fact that “media institutions indirectly affect the duration of collective-bargaining procedures,” those same institutions rarely use that power to assist workers in their fight to gain rights in the workplace. When they do utilize their power, they more often do so on behalf of corporate owners, with one study finding that “workers, and unionized workers in particular, are almost always portrayed in a negative light by the mainstream media.” In this effort, the news in the United States “has the effect of submerging issues of citizenship, political activity, and class relations and of elevating issues of consumption and the myth of a class-free America.”

With a dearth of experience in the realm of economic subjugation within its workers, it is no wonder why news networks might continue to ignore it.

The media’s elevation of consumerism and their obfuscation of class is no accident. Sarah Smarsh, in writing on the topic for The Guardian, suggests that “the main reason that national media outlets have a blind spot in matters of class is the lack of socioeconomic diversity within their ranks.” Working class representation in the news industry is indeed sparce. With a dearth of experience in the realm of economic subjugation within its workers, it is no wonder why news networks might continue to ignore it.

The existence of social media complicates any analysis of news domination and its pro-capital narrative. Still, what might have originally been seen as a force for meritocracy and democracy in consumable content online has quickly been weaponized into a force for spreading false and radicalizing content.

In addition to the well-documented right-wing Youtube force, the currently-crumbling Twitterverse accomplishes similar results, whether intended or not. The right-wing media outlets hold onto their grip of power on the new social media terrain. “It’s not that social media itself is polarizing people,” Professor Cikara said, “it’s that we are selecting in and out of information spheres—that’s a human behavior.” “What’s bad about it,” she added “is that people have very homogenous informational diets, and they’re also subject to actors who would knowingly present them with misinformation.” The tactics that forged a pro-upper class, right-wing movement over the air continues to do the same over the web. A 2018 Pew Research study found that, aside from amusement, anger is the second most frequent emotion elicited by content on social media. As articulated before, this manufactured anger, along with amusement for that matter, goes a long way towards drawing users into social media addiction. This addiction drives profits of the social media giants and the news organizations that promote their content on the platforms. Thus, the platforms have a clear incentive to catalyze more extreme views. The incentive is more than just theoretical, with companies having admitted this cultivation of extremism to be true. Instead of a liberating force, social media has been co-opted by the same powerful entities, with their insidious profit-maximizing practices, that have dominated television news.

Ben Franklin on the side of a USPS mailbox, found on unsplash by Jon Tyson

Hidden Corporate Power

In pre-social media times the inquiry into what was being consumed seemed so straight-forward. A simple analysis of the few major networks dominating airtime would surely reveal a select group of corporate shareholders chuckling in their c-suite offices, eating cashews (the fattiest of nuts), and drinking fancy soda pop—all while the world, that they lit on fire, burns.

“I find it overwhelming to even understand who is our media,” says Heidi Legg, a research fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University. Heidi is an expert in media ownership, having created one of the Indexes of Mainstream Media Ownership, one of the clearer compilations of data in a sea of confusing statistics on news ownership.

Ok… Well obviously, in pre-social media times, those evil companies instead just gobbled up smaller publications and controlled the media through those entities, making it harder to even know who controls what.

“I’ve always heard that rule, that ‘there were like 5 companies that control all the media’ and I feel like I debunked that with these indexes.” The talking point that she recalled seemed to reference a Business Insider graphic that claimed GE, News-Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS accounted for 90% of consumed media in 2011. Heidi referred me to the indexes that she created as a member of the Future of Media Project. “When you start looking at some of them that are publicly held, you’ll see like Vanguard has a holding or Blackstone has a holding, but they own like 7% or 12%. They don’t own a major amount.”

Shit. Well now I’m confused. Isn’t this an anti-corporate article? Why aren’t the corporations at fault? If it was this mystifying even before accounting for social media, I can’t imagine it’s gotten much clearer since.

What is apparent, though, is that news, media, and entertainment in the US has gone twilight-zone levels of crazy. A quick glance at Twitter headlines shows Elon Musk, in real time, exposing the lie of the meritocracy. But if it’s not mustache-twirling corporations, what’s the cause of the chaotic state of US news?

“What really stood out to me is how much either political parties, religious groups, or wealthy individuals own media,” Heidi said.

Obviously, it would be improper for political parties, or candidates themselves, to directly fund news organizations or leverage the access they provide. This does not stop either of them from engaging in a reciprocating circle of lovemaking. Politicians appear on shows to boost the ratings of both, networks spend money (both visibly and behind the scenes) on political candidates, and both wield their collective power to influence public perception. Yet, as Heidi illuminated in her USA Today article, US campaign finance laws prevent the exact details of this back-scratching from reaching the public.

Obviously, it would be improper for political parties, or candidates themselves, to directly fund news organizations or leverage the access they provide. This does not stop either of them from engaging in a reciprocating circle of lovemaking.

Before the laissez-faire enthusiasts start to sprawl angry emails, it’s important to note that the free market does not provide a sufficient remedy for individual ownership of media networks. “Even though the New York Times is publicly traded and has many shareholders,” Heidi described, “the voting rights shareholder is majority the Ochs-Sulzberger family. Or like for CBS its Shari Redstone who has all the voting shares, or Rupert Murdoch has all of the voting shares. So even if they are public companies, they are owned by these wealthy families and dynasties.” Individual control is not easily curbed by share-holder primacy—the idea of maximizing the profits of those who own shares of the company is the first priority of a company—however much one fetishizes that corporate legal structure.

The result of the current legal and corporate landscape of news networks leaves unelected media moguls in charge of what millions of Americans think and the policy priorities of the individuals they elect. At their disposal lie numerous weapons (like the ones discussed previously), with a majority of decision-making authority, to singlehandedly dictate the direction of not only their publicly traded company, but governments around the world.

This problem is hardly limited to Fox News, or even just right-wing news networks. “We all like to simplify as humans. So it’s like ‘Murdoch is a bad guy, he owns the Wallstreet Journal, and he owns Fox News, and he owns the New York Post, and all of those have an incredible reach and influence on this country,’” Heidi mimicked. “But I would argue that these liberal funders are also starting to have a real impact because they have 250 emerging nonprofits—and the liberals do own a lot of media too.” Despite the label of ‘nonprofit,’ this practice is similarly problematic. “No it isn’t all just right-leaning media, there’s lots of left-leaning media. And in those nonprofits that are emerging, they are heavily funded by many of them Silicon Valley left-leaning billionaires, or at least millionaires.” Of course by ‘left-leaning’ Heidi likely means liberal sympathizing networks, guilty of pushing the same pro-capital dogma the pervades American media.

Ultimately, the funding structure seems to be the root of many of the problems in American news. Aside from implementing and enforcing antitrust laws in the media industry, which is about as likely (and obvious) as fixing the American healthcare system, solving the dilemma of new-age ad sales seems like a promising start to addressing some of these issues. As Heidi recounted: “Back then, or [maybe this is] a romanticized fable when I was in journalism school in the 90’s, we were told that there was always an uprising between the newsroom and ownership; they might be the owner of the paper, [but] the real money was from the ads. So therefore it seemed to empower editorial to stand up to publishers more.” Romanticized or not, the current funding of American news is deeply problematic. “Having our own revenue model in news is actually the most independent state for the state of journalism, and that if our money is dependent on a rich person giving us the donation then I think we may pander to them more.” It may not be as easy as relying on ad sales again, as the social media experiment has demonstrated.

Aside from implementing and enforcing antitrust laws in the media industry, which is about as likely (and obvious) as fixing the American healthcare system, solving the dilemma of new-age ad sales seems like a promising start to addressing some of these issues.

“I think we’ve just been in a dying industry,” Heidi said. “We’ve lost more journalism jobs than we’ve lost coal, and so it’s a desperate state. And in a desperate state, dark money is coming in from SuperPACs, rich funders from Silicon Valley have come in to fund these nonprofits, and people like Murdoch and Bezos are able to use media, maybe we can’t prove it but at least anecdotally, to sway public opinion.”