The Counterpublic Papers vol. 8 no. 8

Author

Lester Spence
January 22, 2024

The past few issues I’ve been writing about higher education and the project arrayed against it, using DEI and anti-semitism as scapegoats. This morning the New York Times ran an investigate report on the wider network working against higher education through DEI. If you have a subscription it’s worth a read, although the article doesn’t do nearly enough in examining the wealth behind the initiative. 

I’d like to spend a bit of time in this issue writing about another institution—the mass media. Even as we’ve seen the power to create media radically distributed through the creation of platforms like YouTube and more recently TikTok, we’ve also seen the power to generate content through more traditional means (TV, radio, theaters, newspapers) become more concentrated. This past week the Baltimore Sun was sold to David Smith, executive chairman of the Sinclair Broadcast Group. The group owns over 180 local stations, often using those stations to promote reactionary politics. From Joshua Benton at The Nieman Lab: 

…Sinclair has become best known for its willingness to press the Smith family thumb on the political scale. To mention only a few:

During the 2016 campaign, Smith met with Donald Trump and offered the then-candidate exclusive access to Sinclair reporters, saying “We are here to deliver your message. Period.”

Trump advisor/son-in-law Jared Kushner bragged about a deal he struck with Sinclair to have extended Trump interviews broadcast without commentary during Sinclair stations’ local news programming.

After Trump’s election, Sinclair hired former Trump spokesman Boris Epshteyn as its chief political analyst and ordered stations to air his pro-Trump commentaries during local news broadcasts. His were only a few of the many “must-run” segments Sinclair imposes on stations, including shows by QAnon-curious Sharyl Attkisson and nightly conservative editorials by Mark Hyman.

I remember Deadpan creating a mashup combining all the local news anchors using the same phrases over and over again like a dystopian SF flick. 

Benton reminded me that those anchors were all Sinclair anchors.

Doing my best Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner in Avengers: Infinity War: that was HIM.  

According to Fern Shen at the Baltimore Brew, in his conversation with staffers he allegedly told them “they were in the manufacturing business.” 

Baltimore has a mayoral election coming up. One of the proposals that Baltimore voters will vote on is a proposal to reduce the size of the City Council from 14 to 8. Such a move would arguably increase the power of development capital on the one hand and Eds and Meds power on the other hand over local concerns. 

The funder? Smith. 

One of the arguments against media consolidation is that the process makes it difficult to cover local issues with the rigor they deserve. With the sale to Smith, the Sun does return to local hands for the first time in decades. But with hands like these, who needs hands?

(As an aside in the Sun article about the sale, part-owner Armstrong Williams talked about seeing the Sun as an opportunity for expanding viewpoints and avoiding bias. But it’s worth noting Williams’ own history—he was a routine figure on news shows in the early 21st century until he was found to have taken money from the Bush administration for touting its “No Child Left Behind” legislation on news programs without disclosing the relationship.) 

I cited the Nieman Lab above. It was created in order to “help journalism figure out its future in an Internet age.” Some suggested years ago that the solution lie in capital—more specifically in Silicon Valley capital. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post over ten years ago. But here the suggestion wasn’t that capital would save journalism as much as it was that Silicon Valley capital would transform journalism into a profit making industry. 

A couple of decades ago, during the second Gulf War, Ron Suskind wrote a long piece about George W. Bush’s presidency and the role that faith and truth played within it. Near the end of the piece he drops the following quote:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

(Ron Suskind, “Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush”)

The goal of the reactionary right is to destabilize the “truth-making” institutions it doesn’t control and then to replace them with ones it does. They can’t control Disney or the Washington Post. But they can control the Sun and other local entities like it.

There isn’t a solution, but in the interim, folks are suggesting that people interested in solid news coverage donate to other news entities like the Afro, the Baltimore Banner, the Baltimore Beat, and The Real News Network. 

 ….

I almost almost forgot. Everytime I think reality can’t get more tragicomic, I read someone like Peter Wehner, lamenting that Trump’s transformed his party into one he doesn’t recognize:

This is not the republican party I once knew. Ronald Reagan was a formative president for me; I cast my first vote for him and I later worked in his administration. He was generous toward all immigrants, even those who had crossed the southern border illegally.

(Peter Wehner, The Party of Malice)

This, after noting Trump’s attacks on Nikki Haley and Mexicans and…etc. etc. etc. But for Wehner to make this claim out loud (with his mouth so to speak), he has to basically ignore the state’s rights Reagan, much less the Reagan who in a private conversation with Richard Nixon in the early seventies called Africans monkeys. Wehner above laments a party that hasn’t existed in my lifetime.