Say you want to convince people who love skiing. Who do you hire as your spokesperson? Probably a skier.
Reporters tend to be liberals — the face of what is called MSM, Mainstream Media, or Corporate Media.
The people on tv are not the people doing the hiring. The front line workers, like almost all industries, are more liberal than their bosses. And as a mix of journalism majors and Hollywood, the front line workers do tend liberal.
Most mainstream corporate media have overlapping layers that are often in contradiction:
- liberal reporters (intellectual liberals for print; somewhat more comfy Hollywood-oriented liberals for tv),
- editors, news directors with MBA’s and a business background and a bottom line (ok, silly footnote: think about the reporters vs editors in Superman or Spiderman),
- and either conservative or simply profit-driven owners.
The owners and MBAs are trying to keep liberal and centrist viewers (conservatives are watching Fox) glued to the tv, with money coming from conservative/profit-driven advertisers they cannot offend.
The type of reporting this leads to is often a bit twisted up. Liberal reporters tend to be more skeptical about war than the average politician. But explosions and bombings and death attract viewers, so when the US military uses an interesting weapon CNN gets completely excited. Far more than politics, these are corporations looking at their bottom lines, and their bias is to titillate their audiences.
The press “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.” — Bernard Cohen, 1963.
Example: Look at the Iraq war. The left wanted to downplay the threat of Saddam Hussein, the right wanted to make him seem like more of a threat. Often you had a situation where reporters, as liberals, might be skeptical of President George Bush. But they called chemical weapons — no particular threat outside of Iraq or its neighbors, not that much more powerful than regular bombs — but the supposedly-liberal press called chemical artillery shells them WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION. Even if Hussein had them, they were irrelevant to our safety in the US, mostly useful for killing Iraqi civilians. Having obviously liberal reporters use the fear-driving frame of WMD, whatever their final opinion is, is a quite effective way to get people thinking in a pro-war way. If you saw a bunch of generals say they were pro-war, we wouldn’t take it as seriously, would you?
Example: Sanders & Trump. The liberal reporters who want to stay hired are sharply curtailed in how far left they can go. Corporate media completely downplayed Sanders and refused to give him much coverage. Trump got constant attention. Attention was more important, in both cases, then the reporters adding their opinions.
This tends to mean that the main corporate media (not including Fox and similar, for the moment) are a little more effective on social issues — the reporters treat LGBT people like people, and that alone is helpful to those causes. Corporations don’t mind the press being a bit in favor of gun control, and pissing off conservatives, who then fight with liberals about gun control instead of coming together on Wall Street getting handouts. The liberals are far less effective where money is on the line, or when a candidate is running who is outside the scope of taking lobbying money from the corporations that own the media.
It’s important not to exaggerate the corporate control either. The reporters really are liberals. The audience, from which advertising money comes, is Fox-watchers at Fox, and America minus Fox-watchers elsewhere. There are many different interests at play. A fully Orwellian corporate-mouthpiece would not be believed, and so would be less useful anyway. But the mix of ownership and profitability explains much of the media.
Framing: An effective metaphor is that ordinary people are gladiators. If CNN and Fox *watchers* are the liberal and conservative gladiators who fight each other, then CNN and Fox are the coaches — they have a complex role, they are on the payroll of the stadium, at the same time supporting their side’s gladiators but ultimately working to keep the gladiators they coach in line and keep the stadium owners happy.
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Footnotes: Press ownership by owners and media type. (https://www.freepress.net/ownership/chart) Or pretty graphics, slightly out of date. (http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-90-of-the-m…) Or just skip over to wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_cross-ownership_in_the_United_States).
Recommended: Manufacturing Consent (http://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/06/books/whose-news.html).