By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday,
December 04, 2024
The American media has a Baptists and bootlegger problem.
“Baptists
and bootleggers” is one of the most useful concepts in understanding how
economic regulation works in the real world. Coined by economist Bruce Yandle,
the term describes how groups that are ostensibly opposed to each other have a
shared interest in maintaining the status quo. Baptists favored prohibition,
and so did bootleggers who profited by selling illegal alcohol. And politicians
benefited by playing both sides.
There’s an analogous dynamic with the press today.
Across the ideological spectrum, from the Chomskyite left to the Bannonite
right, partisans, politicians, and journalists themselves inflate the power,
influence, and importance of “the media.”
Let’s stay with the journalists for a moment. Members of
all professions have a tendency to hold themselves in high regard. Nearly
everyone, from politicians to plumbers, want to believe that what they do
matters. But with the possible exceptions of politicians and actors,
journalists probably have the highest estimation of their own importance.
My point isn’t that they’re wrong—heck, I like to believe
what I do matters—but that they exaggerate not just their power and influence,
but their celebrity and personal authority. Heart surgeons are famously
arrogant, but there is not an endless stream of conferences, books, editorials,
essays, and academic courses dedicated to the indispensable role of
cardiothoracic medicine. I doubt there are any sanitation or plumbing trade
journals that proclaim “Democracy Dies in Sewage” on their front
page.
In psychological terms alone, it’s in the interests of
journalists to encourage the widespread obsession with the Fourth Estate. But
the media is a mess in part because it believed its own hype.
I should be clear: I’ve had my own obsessions over the
years, working as a conservative media critic and writing scores of columns
about liberal media bias—which is real.
But I’ve grown weary with media criticism, again not
because the criticisms are necessarily wrong, but because they work from a
transparently false theory about the power of the institution itself. That’s
the Baptist-and-bootlegger problem: the outsized power and influence is a lie
agreed upon.
It’s like American journalism is an exhausted
prizefighter on the brink of collapse, held up by his opponent to give the
crowd a good show.
According to many on the right—who often unwittingly repurpose old
left-wing formulations first introduced by progressives, “cultural Marxists,”
and other lefty bogeymen—“the media” creates narratives and manufactures
consent (a term coined by Walter Lippmann and adopted by Noam Chomsky) that the
rest of us are powerless to overcome.
Consider climate change. The press has invested vast
resources into climate coverage and has been hectoring and catastrophizing
about it for 20 years. And yet, climate change remains
at or near
the bottom
of every public opinion survey about the “most important issue.” If the media
can manufacture consensus, why is there so little consensus about climate
change?
This is just one example of the media thinking not just
that it should—but can—define the interests of the public. The amount of
energy and handwringing that has been put into, say, AP Stylebook revisions
over terms like “illegal
immigrant” or whether to capitalize
“Black” or “White” when discussing race is premised on a grandiose theory of
the role of the press as guardians of the American mind or soul. The whole
“defund the police” conversation in the press transpired amid near-zero
support
for the idea among most Americans.
Or consider Donald Trump. I’m no fan, but I look like a
MAGA rally front-seater compared to many in the media (and not just among
opinion columnists), and yet Trump not only won, but improved his standing with
nearly every demographic group.
The response from some on the left is a variant of the
old “but real socialism has never been tried!” trope. If only the media had really
held him accountable—or took climate change, race, etc. seriously—things would
be different.
The response from many in the media has been to wrap
themselves in the mantle of heroic martyrdom as Trump attacks them.
And on the right, the ineffectiveness of the media to
control the narrative is occasionally celebrated but it never diminishes the
hysteria about its alleged omnipotence. The media, Michael Shellenberger insisted last
summer “is arguably more powerful than the government itself.”
Really? It has a funny way of showing it. The industry
has been shrinking for decades. Since 2000, of the 532 industries tracked by
the Bureau of Labor Statistics, newspapers saw the single sharpest decline, 77
percent. Trust in the media is in the gutter.
So here’s an idea for the press: Just tell the truth as
best you can and stop worrying about narratives. The American people will write
their own.
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