Redefining Our Perceptions of the Media in America
It's not really as simple as conservative versus liberal.
I’ve been thinking for a while now about the media landscape in America. I’ve published other pieces on the topic, but it’s long felt like we all (including me) were framing things in a way that was too facile and simplistic. So I’m throwing out some ideas for how we might reorient our thinking about the American media/information landscape, with a view that goes beyond merely a conservative versus liberal framing.
The fracturing of the American media
Once upon a time, the media was just the media. For the bulk of the 20th century, most Americans got their news from a daily newspaper and the evening news on TV or, before that, from a radio broadcast. In the 1970s, for example, polling showed a very high level of confidence in the media and CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite was known as the most trusted man in America. Today, by contrast, only 28% of Americans (and only 8% of Republicans!) say they trust the media to report the news fairly.
Around the 1970s and 1980s, conservatives began suggesting that mainstream journalists framed stories and interview questions in ways that reflected the more liberal environment in which they lived. Even if this were unconscious bias, went the argument, it still meant that right wing values were left out of the national conversation. This was the impetus for building a conservative media, which led to the founding of Fox News in the 1990s.
Fox, however, had trouble matching the popularity of talk radio, which also became a force during this era. Talk radio was more focused on conservative entertainment and opinion than on traditional journalism, and it wasn’t until Fox moved toward a model more akin to talk radio that it gained the popularity it has today. (MSNBC also launched around this time but didn’t adopt a progressive personality until some years later and has never achieved anywhere near the popularity of Fox.) Fox’s success led to the later rise of even more partisan cable news stations, such as Newsmax and One America News Network.
Fast forward to today and the media landscape in the country has been utterly transformed from what it was just a few decades ago. In addition to partisan cable news and talk radio, we’ve seen the rise of social media, podcasts, and online influencers, some of whom have as much or more impact on the political conversation as do members of the legacy media. Meanwhile, the argument about media bias has gotten to the point where rightwing politicians — and particularly the current president — are now pushing the narrative that the legacy media is deliberately biased and engaged in a conspiracy to take down conservatives.
The result of all this is that we’ve been left with a country that seems cleaved into two fairly separate media environments, with a fair number of Americans believing that only their preferred news sources can be trusted to report the truth.
It’s unfortunate that we, as a people, can no longer agree even on the same facts, but that’s not the main point of what I’m writing about here. Rather, I’m trying to get at how we should understand today’s media/information landscape, which is more nuanced and complex than the conservative versus liberal world that is often portrayed.
Four sectors of today’s media landscape
So I’ve divided the media environment into four sectors, as noted below. Each one is a different interest group with its own needs and goals. I’m open to ideas as to how this list could be fine-tuned or even expanded, but I think we need to recognize that, at minimum, these different media interest groups exist and all have some level of influence on today’s politics.
A legacy media in which journalists still strive for objectivity and a desire to hold government accountable, even as the industry as a whole may spend more time chasing controversies and headlines.
Corporate and billionaire owners of legacy media outlets who preside over an empire that includes varied business interests, and who can thus be influenced to abandon journalistic independence in order to protect other profit centers.
A MAGA media ecosystem that encompasses everything from cable news stations and talk radio shows to conservative podcasts and social media platforms. It’s distinguished by the way it pushes MAGA-friendly opinions and speaks in something very close to a single voice.
A progressive media ecosystem that is a counter to the MAGA media in that it pushes liberal opinions. But it’s smaller in numbers and influence, and encompasses more diverse ideologies and thus rarely speaks in one voice.
1. The legacy media: Journalists
The legacy media encompasses every newspaper, news magazine, and broadcast news station that still employs traditional journalists. It’s what used to be considered the media before the industry fractured.
Two points, to start with:
I think we need to stop repeating the wrong assumption that the legacy media somehow represents or overlaps with the progressive media. In reality, they are two different sectors with separate interests and goals.
I’m also going to distinguish between the owners of many of these media outlets, on the one hand, and the reporters who work for the country’s print media and broadcast stations.
So let’s start with the role of journalists and with some of the pros and cons of the industry.
The role of journalists in some ways hasn’t changed for at least a century. Throughout this time, journalists have been expected to abide by a code of ethics for objectivity and for reporting only well-sourced facts. When I studied journalism in college and later worked at a daily newspaper, it was drilled into me that I wouldn’t remain employed if I strayed from these expectations. This code remains intact at traditional media outlets; some reporters refuse even to vote in elections for fear of losing their objectivity.
Let’s also throw in the fact that most people who go into journalism do so because they’re curious about the world, they want to be close to current events, and/or they believe in the importance of an institution that will hold government accountable and keep the citizenry informed. This is the noble part of journalism, and it’s for this reason that Thomas Jefferson wrote the following in 1787:
“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Now, journalism isn’t all noble, of course. The media has somewhat of an addiction to chasing stories and controversies. On the plus side, this pushes reporters to dig up and tell stories that otherwise wouldn’t see the light of day.
But it also means that a shiny new headline will sometimes (or often) take precedence over explaining, analyzing, or going deeper into a topic. This includes the tendency to engage in a “he said, she said,” style of reporting that may not distinguish between a truth and a lie but which journalists have clung to, even if it creates a sense of false equivalence. (Admittedly, this is starting to change as the media has grappled with a need to explain the sheer number of lies told during the two Trump administrations.)
There’s an obvious reason for this addiction to headlines, of course, which is that controversy sells. And analysis doesn’t. So we all should perhaps look in the mirror and consider what type of news the media publishes based on our consumption habits.
As Leslie Moonves, then president of CBS, remarked during the 2016 presidential campaign about the network’s wall-to-wall coverage of every Donald Trump speech and controversy, which gave the candidate much more free media than his opponents:
“It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”1
In the end, though, whether you appreciate the legacy media or not, journalists for at least the past century have remained devoted to informing people about what is happening in government and the world. They may focus too often on controversies or false equivalencies, but the fact remains that without journalists there would be no check on government.
2. Corporate media: The owners of newspapers and broadcast stations
Should the owners of the media be grouped into the same bucket as the journalists they employ? It’s not a question to which I’d previously given much thought, though the interests of these two groups do now seem to be diverging more than ever before.
To be clear, publishers have always been concerned with their bottom line. As business owners, it’s something they should be concerned about. But in the past more media outlets were locally owned and most of them balanced their need to turn a profit with a desire to serve the public and to maintain journalistic independence. These days, however, an increasing number of newspapers and TV stations are owned by major corporations and/or billionaires who’ve been making decisions based on a need to protect separate business interests and/or their fear of crossing the president.
This has set up an unusual dichotomy in which the reporters are still standing up for the traditional role of protecting the First Amendment, while some owners and publishers have instead chosen to bend their journalistic principles in order to appease a president who can damage their other business interests.
So when I use the term “corporate media” I’m suggesting we may need to think differently about the ownership of the legacy media than we think about the reporters who work for these outlets. This isn’t a blanket statement, as some important publishers and broadcasters within the legacy media have remained mostly on the side of journalistic independence.
Still, consider what has happened in just the past few months:
After FCC Chair Brendan Carr suggested that media companies should “take action” against Jimmy Kimmel, Nexstar announced it would stop airing Kimmel’s show. Nexstar is the biggest owner of ABC affiliates and has sought FCC approval for a $6 billion merger with Tegna that would allow it to acquire more TV stations than is currently allowed by law. Nexstar’s decision helped prompt Disney, which owns ABC, to temporarily suspend Kimmel.
Disney also recently settled a $16 million defamation lawsuit with Trump regarding comments made by George Stephanopoulos about the president’s conviction for sexual abuse in the E. Jean Carroll case. Legal experts believed the case was flimsy, but Disney settled partly out of fear that a conservative jury in Florida would support the president. Also, Disney owns ESPN as well as ABC and has been seeking regulatory permission for ESPN to buy the NFL Network.
Paramount, which owns CBS News, settled with Trump for $16 million over the president’s claim that 60 Minutes had falsely edited an interview with Kamala Harris last fall (even though CBS released the unedited transcript and video of the interview to show nothing deceptive had been done). But Paramount at the time needed FCC approval for an $8 billion merger with Skydance Media.
Two days after Skydance CEO David Ellison met with FCC Chair Carr regarding the proposed Paramount merger, CBS announced it was canceling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The Colbert decision was celebrated by Trump, who wrote: “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired,” before adding: “I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next.” The merger has since been approved.
David Ellison, the new Chairman of Paramount-Skydance (and thus CBS) is the son of Larry Ellison of Oracle, the second richest man in the world and a Trump ally. And Paramount-Skydance is now in talks to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, which owns CNN. So Trump allies could soon be in charge of both CBS and CNN.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the fourth richest person in the world, has billions of dollars in contracts with the U.S. government for both Blue Origin, his rocket company, and Amazon Web Services, for cloud computing. Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, last fall killed his paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris and more recently announced the Post opinion page would focus on personal liberties and free markets — most controversially, with no dissenting views permitted.
It’s not just major news organizations, either. This week, three small newspapers in Alaska saw the bulk of their reporting staffs resign after articles about a Charlie Kirk vigil were unilaterally rewritten by the publisher in response to pressure from a GOP lawmaker. Those Alaska papers are among more than 250 outlets owned by Carpenter Media Group, which is based in Alabama, more than 4,500 miles away. Not exactly locally owned.
There are more examples, but you get the idea. So, I don’t know, but it sure seems that when corporations and billionaires with multiple business interests happen to also own major media companies, the First Amendment shrinks quickly in importance.
3. The MAGA media
For years, we’ve used the term “conservative media” to describe an information landscape made up largely of cable news stations and talk radio. I would like to suggest replacing that phrase with this one: the MAGA media.
For starters, there just isn’t a large media outlet out there making an argument these days for conservatism. OK, maybe the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. But today’s Republican Party, including its media/information ecosystem, has largely been swallowed by a populist MAGA movement centered on ethnonationalist beliefs that has little connection to traditional conservatism. While there are still Republicans who don’t fully agree with the president or other MAGA leaders, they’re politically homeless at the moment. So I think it’s more appropriate now to call it what it is, the MAGA media.
Whether you like or dislike the MAGA media, we should recognize its impressiveness. It’s possibly (or likely) the most influential media in the country today. For two reasons.
1. It dwarfs the progressive media
First, as I said, we need to abandon the false equivalence of comparing the traditional media to the MAGA media. It’s comparing apples and oranges because the legacy and MAGA media have two entirely different business models. The MAGA media still follows the path forged by talk radio and is largely in the opinion/entertainment business, while the legacy media (as noted above) at least strives for objectivity and is more driven by headlines than opinions. In reality, the actual counter to the MAGA media is the progressive media, not the legacy outlets.
Aside from cable news stations and talk radio, the MAGA media now also encompasses hordes of conservative podcasters and other online influencers. One recent study showed that right-leaning online shows had at least 480 million total followers and subscribers, nearly five times as many as the 104 million followers of left-leaning programs. Conservatives have also exerted domination over Twitter/X since Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform.
In terms of both numbers and influence, there is simply no comparison between the MAGA and progressive media landscapes today
2. It speaks in one voice
A second point — which is quite important but sometimes unappreciated — is that the MAGA media landscape is fairly homogenous. It speaks in one voice. Just turn on Fox, open a conservative podcast, and then look to see what memes your conservative friends are posting on social media. It’s mostly all the same, sometimes even line for line about whatever happens to be the outrage of the day.
This creates a vast echo chamber that is so influential it essentially forces the traditional media to cover stories it might otherwise have dismissed as relatively unimportant. Which only adds to the power of the MAGA media.
As just one example, consider the Kimmel story. This is the quote that got Kimmel’s show suspended (you can see it here at about the 2-minute mark):
“We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
This is what he said in a monologue on an earlier day:
“We’re still trying to wrap our heads around the senseless murder of the popular podcaster and conservative activist Charlie Kirk yesterday, whose death has amplified our anger, our differences. I’ve seen a lot of extraordinarily vile responses to this from both sides of the political spectrum. Some people are cheering this, which is something I won’t ever understand.”
And this is what he posted on Instagram in the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s murder:
“Instead of the angry finger-pointing, can we just for one day agree that it is horrible and monstrous to shoot another human? On behalf of my family, we send love to the Kirks and to all the children, parents and innocents who fall victim to senseless gun violence.”
Does any of this sound like something that would otherwise have appeared on the front pages of major newspapers? Back in the golden age of broadcast news, Walter Cronkite would have laughed at the idea that this was even a story.
You’re absolutely free to disagree with Kimmel’s assessment of the MAGA movement’s goals, but that’s about the only thing that seems debatable here. It’s hard to argue that Kimmel was celebrating Kirk’s death or saying anything terribly radical.
Still, the outrage machine of the MAGA media was able to turn this into a controversy that then took over even the traditional news media for days. And it’s able to do this on issue after issue, story after story, in a way that the progressive media simply cannot match.
4. The progressive media
The progressive media is the relevant comparison to the MAGA media because, similar to the rightwing outlets, the shows and influencers on the left provide healthy doses of liberal opinion to go along with the news.
But what constitutes the progressive media? There is the cable station MSNBC, obviously. Plus various liberal podcasters, such as Pod Save America; a small number of liberal talk radio programs, social media users on BlueSky, and a variety of other online influencers on platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, and Substack.
However, MSNBC has many fewer viewers than Fox, rightwing podcasters and influencers have five times the number of followers as liberal online influencers do, an overwhelming percentage of talk radio shows are conservative, and Twitter/X looms large over BlueSky in every metric. The progressive media that exists today is like a bay next to an island in the middle of a MAGA ocean.
Some will want to include in this liberal media a number of late night hosts on popular comedy programs (Jon Stewart, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Myers, and the rest). And that’s fine, I won’t argue. It’s a mystery of the media/entertainment landscape in America that the talk radio and podcast worlds have gained such a conservative bent, whereas late night comedy is more the province of liberal voices (one theory is that more progressives are drawn to satire and irony). We should will note, though, that these comedians won’t hesitate to skewer a Democratic president, in ways that are rarely heard from MAGA podcasters or radio hosts.
But perhaps the most distinctive fact about the progressive media is that it encompasses a diverse coalition and does not speak with a single voice or from the same script. This will probably never change for the simple reason that the Democratic Party itself encompasses a diverse coalition of voices. Can you even tell me who represents progressives in this country?
Is it …?
The Bernie Sanders/AOC “Fight the Oligarchy” movement?
Abigail Spanberger, the moderate former Congresswoman and CIA agent who is likely going to be the next governor of Virginia?
Gavin Newsom, the California governor and liberal former Mayor of San Francisco?
Mark Kelly, the moderate Arizona senator, who is a gun owner, son of police officers, and former combat pilot and astronaut?
The leftwing college students who organized pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses last year … and who were actually protesting against a Democratic president whom they thought was too moderate?
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, progressive authors of the book Abundance, who argue that Democrats should favor loosening regulations to promote growth?
You can say with certainty that each of of these individuals or groups believe in the importance of government, but beyond that there are varied ideological voices within the progressive movement. Add to this the reality that progressives got a late start in building a media ecosystem and have a much smaller overall audience than does the MAGA media. This may all change in time, but is it really a surprise which one of them today has more of an impact on the national conversation?
Anyway, the next time we talk about the “media,” perhaps we should specify to which media interest group we’re referring.
Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck, Identity Crisis, 55.
My favorite liberal leaning podcast is currently found here on Substack
https://substack.com/@findoutpodcast?r=2ks7p4&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=profile