Part 5 of a 10-part Series:

Big Money and the Corporatocracy Captures the Media

Indeed, whether such extreme inequality is or is not sustainable depends not only on the effectiveness of the repressive apparatus but also, and perhaps primarily, on the apparatus of justification.”

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, (2014)

Gaining a stranglehold on elected representatives, the legislative process, and appointed officials and judges was still not enough. In a democratic system, there is always the danger that the people will tire of working harder for less year after year or otherwise rebel against obscene levels of inequality. Therefore, the elites had to capture the apparatus of intellectual discourse and cultural transmission; i.e., educational institutions and popular media. 

The war on American workers has been going on since the middle 1800s. In the early days, striking workers would sometimes receive sympathetic attention in the press.  The machinery of the U.S. Congress finally responded to the plight of workers when it passed the National Labor Relations Act in 1935. What followed was growth in the American middle class that made it the envy of the world. Although nearly undiscernible at the time, this phenomenon was already starting to wane—guess when?—the middle to late 1970s—as the Powell memo was put into operation.

The full operation of the Powell memo did not become readily measurable until the Reagan Presidency. Reagan launched the first major salvo against labor when he broke the PATCO strike in August 1981. Throughout the 1980s, media coverage of unions grew increasingly negative. The 1980s were also a period where the media and popular culture was promoting a “greed is good” ethos. But, ironically, it was auto workers and teachers—who only wanted to have enough resources to do their jobs and be paid enough to support their families–who were portrayed as greedy (in the bad sense).

Although it had been noted in obscure academic publications and occasional news articles, only around the turn of the 21^st century did serious and sustained media attention become focused on the yawning gap of income and wealth inequality. Mainstream economists began to challenge the prevailing “trickle-down” theory of supply side economists, or the notion that allowing a few fat cats to become obscenely wealthy would somehow (??) inure to the benefit of the rest of us. In 1996, the economist Ravi Batra accused his mainstream colleagues of “napping in their ivory towers” for totally missing the “wage blight” that had been afflicting American workers since 1982. Others finally began making a connection between the decline of labor rights and power and increasing inequality.

In 2017, a pair of researchers at the Vienna University School of Economics and Business analyzed how the media framed issues of economic and social inequality “after decades of benign neglect.” How inequality is presented is “not discussed in economics at all, and hardly mentioned in communication studies.” The authors suggest that economic inequality has only recently been “rediscovered,” likely because it has become so extreme—especially in the U.S. They allege that the “interdependencies between economics and the media” exert an important influence over “the contested sphere of preference shaping,” including political opinions.

The scholarship that has examined this issue has found that business and financial news “tends to be framed by pro-market explanations” and rarely, if ever, “question the overarching economic philosophy of free-market capitalism.” Any one of us can conduct our own informal review and easily discern that most stories are framed around the interests of corporations and employer groups. This bias is “further intensified by the growth of public relations, sponsorship, and other subsidized information flows favoring wealth and powerful interests.” 

• Coverage of poverty is portrayed as a threat to the community, linking the poor to crime, drug and alcohol addiction, reinforcing the trope that the causes of poverty are due to individual faults rather than structural deficiencies.

• Welfare “reform” is portrayed as something that reduces dependency and fosters self-reliance. Stories seldom cover the “working poor”—the folks who work sometimes two and three jobs and are still unable to make ends meet—because this would not be consistent with the mythology that the poor are lazy and lacking in work ethic.

• Taxes on wealth—most of which fall on a very small portion of the population—are portrayed as an issue of general concern affecting all Americans. This is tied into meritocratic notions of “deserts,” that individuals should keep what they earn. The stories hardly ever delve into the fact that the very wealthy “earn” most of their income from things like stock options, carried interest, and capital gains rather than the kinds of “work” that most of the rest of us do.

• In stories about shareholders challenging executive pay, the shareholders are portrayed as “rebels,” although sometimes the executives are shown dining and drinking in luxury. The authors suggest that this “strong conflict frame” ignores wider themes around capitalist structures, austerity, shareholder agency and inequality.

The authors next examine the causes of this bias/neglect. First is the “hegemonic structure” of media ownership, which has become increasingly concentrated (as have many other industries). This concentration has affected both the elite (mainstream) traditional media like newspapers as well as newer online social media platforms.  Added to this are increasing “commercial pressures,” which result in fewer investments in investigative reporting and more sensationalized stories. The authors suggest that information should be “reconceptualized as a public good and not a commodity.”

The authors then address a more controversial issue, which they term “manufacturing consent.” They cite at least one study of stories about tax reform, which found a definite “pro-rich (or pro-corporate) bias” being promoted by “the propaganda function of institutions such as the mass media and advertising industry.” The authors conclude,

“The one-sidedness of sources already came clear in the studies we analyzed….For our topic of economic inequality and redistributional policies, this would presumptively mean that certain ways of talking about economic inequality… [and efforts to remedy it] are disregarded. Marked as unrealistic or utopian, leaving it—once again—to the market, in its wonderful magic, to do the trick, seeing growing inequality only to be explained by meritocracy…”

On one front, the strategy was to simply keep most people’s noses to the grindstone—where they have neither the inclination nor the energy to look up and ask WHY things are the way they are. On a second front was a complete lack of discourse or public consciousness of what was happening to work, wages, tax loopholes for billionaires, corporate welfare, and connection to political power. The third front involved demonizing government—or any form of collective action where working people could assert themselves. The teaching of civics in American classrooms (especially working class and minority classrooms) has been all but abandoned.

The right-wing media ecosystem was more than a platform for the propaganda of billionaires, but fomented divisiveness and distrust that has destroyed any sense of community or solidarity. The very notion of “we the people” was rebranded as “socialism.”  The system is deliberately designed to keep people tired, irritable, broke, and desperate to find a scapegoat. With the help of psychological and social sciences, messages are tailored to induce ever-increasing wants. Other messages are directed at the survival responses of the limbic system, designed to induce fear and rage.