The Press: What Has Happened to the Lifeblood of our Democracy?

How did America reach this point where about half our country thinks up is down, black is white, and Republicans are best trusted with our money and national security?

The fifteen or twenty percent of Americans  who follow actual news reporting are dumbfounded:

— Only about half of Americans know that Trump set up and wanted the end of Roe v Wade while one-in-five think President Biden is responsible for it,
— More trust Republicans with the economy than Democrats and 46% say Trump can fix the economy compared to 32% for Biden,
— Only a third of Americans know that Republicans appointed the majority on the Supreme Court,
— 46% of Americans say a second Biden presidency will weaken American democracy,
— More than half (55%) of Americans believe the economy is shrinking and we’re in a recession (when it’s growing faster than under any president since FDR and has been for three-plus years),
— When President Biden came into office in 2021, almost two-thirds of Americans approved of his handling the economy and foreign affairs; today that number is fewer than a third,
— Almost half (49%) think the stock market is down for the year when in fact the S&P 500 was up 24% last year and is up more than 12% this year,
— About three-quarters (72%) are sure that inflation is up right now, when the rate has fallen from 9.1% to a current low of 3.4%, far better than the lowest inflation number Reagan had at 4.1% in his entire 8 years in office,
— While unemployment is lower than it’s been in over 50 years, half of Americans (49%) say “unemployment is at a 50-year high,”
— Only 34% of Americans can name the three branches of government while 69% of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump,
— As violent weather tears apart America, only 23% of Republicans consider climate change a major threat to our nation’s well-being,
— Today, 58% of Americans say the economy is getting worse daily because of mismanagement by Biden and Democrats in Congress,
— Almost half of Americans (44%) think Social Security will be gone by the time they retire,
— Fully 44% of Americans say the media and politicians are “making too much” of the January 6th assault on our capitol.

How did America reach this point where about half our country thinks up is down, black is white, and Republicans are best trusted with our money and national security?

The first imperative for any dictatorial regime is to seize control of the press. Hitler not only shut down all the opposition press and turned all of Germany’s newspapers into propaganda outlets, but ordered Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda masterpiece Triumph of the Will played in every theater in Germany before every movie. The first thing his soldiers did upon occupying every country he conquered was to seize the offices of the local newspapers and radio stations.

Orbán destroyed the free press in Hungary by changing that nation’s libel and defamation laws in the same way Trump is today advocating, setting up libel lawsuits against virtually every press outlet that had ever criticized him and bankrupting them and their owners and editors with lawsuits. His oligarch buddies then bought the media properties out of bankruptcy for pennies on the dollar.

Putin did the same in Russia, and Modi is pursuing a similar effort in India.

Here in America, though, the rightwing billionaires who overwhelmingly own our media didn’t need the heavy hand of libel laws to seize control of this nation’s news and information channels (although Trump promises to do so anyway).

Zuckerberg built Facebook by buying out and shutting down or taking over his competitors in defiance of anti-trust laws that haven’t been used (until recently) since Reagan’s famous 1983 order to stop their enforcement.

Musk brought in cash from Saudi Arabia to help finance his purchase of Twitter, turning it into a rightwing cesspool that has become one of America’s premier sources of misinformation tilted toward Trump and hard-right Republicans.

Billionaire Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, and the wealthy owner of The New York Times, some argue, is pushing that paper to hammer Biden’s age because the president won’t do a sit-down interview with him.

From the 1930s, media monopoly laws prevented the consolidation of TV and radio stations and newspapers into a few rich hands. That ended when Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which discarded those ownership restrictions: within a decade virtually all of America’s media (in terms of reach) was in the hands of fewer than a dozen corporations.

A few years ago, I met with the billionaire owner of 900 or so radio stations, many of them carrying rightwing talk radio. We were in the offices of a US Senator, who pointed out to the billionaire that my show was regularly beating Rush Limbaugh in the ratings and asked the media mogul if he’d ever considered balancing his programming with some progressive shows, which make just as much money for their stations as do conservative hosts.

The billionaire laughed at the senator and said, simply, “I’ll never put anybody on the air who wants to raise my taxes.”

Ever since Reagan’s deregulation of the financial sector legalized the private equity scam, these predatory companies have bought up, sucked dry, and driven into bankruptcy more than half of America’s small local newspapers.

It’s the same strategy they used to drain hundreds of billions from Red Lobster, J.Crew, Neiman Marcus, Toys “R” Us, Sears, 24 Hour Fitness, Aeropostale, American Apparel, Brookstone, Charlotte Russe, Claire’s, David’s Bridal, Clear Channel, Deadspin, Fairway, Gymboree, Hertz, KB Toys, Linens ’n Things, Mervyn’s, Mattress Firm, Musicland, Nine West, Payless ShoeSource, RadioShack, Shopko, Sports Authority, Rockport, True Religion, and Wickes Furniture (among hundreds of others).

The fact that information is the lifeblood of democracy and news media is the only industry explicitly named and protected by the Constitution is as irrelevant to these parasites as it is to Supreme Court justices Alito and Thomas, who the billionaire owners of such firms regularly spiff with luxury vacations and other gifts.

Political and economic commentators seem baffled. Last week, Steve Rattner did a long-form charts-and-graphs presentation for Joe Scarborough’s show demonstrating how the economy, by almost every measure, is better than any time since World War II but — bafflingly — Americans are convinced it’s in the tank and getting worse. He didn’t once, however, mention the role played by the media.

When large numbers of the people of any nation believe things that are objectively untrue, it’s a huge warning sign that something is awry with that nation’s media.

Almost half of Americans get all or most of their news from social media, which is dominated by two rightwing billionaires and the Chinese Communist Party, all of them apparently fans of Trump and his dreamed-of autocracy.

The rest of us get our news from radio, TV, cable, and other online sources, again dominated by billionaire interests who put keeping their tax rates low above threats to our democratic system of government.

Back in the 1980s, when the media told the truth about Reagan’s massive tax cuts, deregulation, gutting public education, and selling off public lands for pennies on the dollar, rightwing strategists began a unified chant about “liberal media bias.” Other than being unhappy about news outlets telling the truth, the one twig they could hang onto was the fact that most journalists were college graduates and colleges were then considered bastions of liberalism.

Rush Limbaugh debuted in 1988, claiming his show was a necessary antidote to liberal media bias even though it was the “liberal media” that made him famous and promoted his show to the top of the ratings. By the end of the ’80s the “liberal media” had become the GOP’s go-to meme under almost all circumstances.

At the 1992 Republican nominating convention, everybody from Barbara Bush to Marilyn Quayle was trashing the so-called leftwing media. GOP Chairman Rich Bond told The Washington Post that this was, in fact, a coordinated effort to influence coverage by intimidating reporters and their editors:

“But there is some strategy to it. I’m a coach of kids’ basketball and Little League teams. If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is ‘work the refs’ — meaning the media. Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack on the next one.”

It’s high time for Democrats and advocates for democracy to begin working the refs, and pushing for legislation to outlaw media monopolies, eliminate Section 230 liability limitations on social media, and end the destruction of local news by private equity.

If we don’t, America will continue to look more and more like Hungary or Russia and it could soon be too late to do anything about it.