News World: The End of the Liberal Media

Fox New Channel has again destroyed its closest cable news competitors. It’s primetime line-up, which includes Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glen Beck, regularly grosses more viewers than its next two competitors combined. CNN is the second runner up, but MSNBC is giving the cable news warhorse a run for its money. Whether or not MSNBC is able to surpass CNN in the near future, it will probably be a while before either of them gives Fox News any serious competition. For anyone familiar with the spiritual precursor of Fox News–talk radio–the current state of affairs craves the question: What has become of the liberal media?

Make no mistake about it, the vast majority of Fox News’ 2.3 million nightly viewers believes in the liberal media, and by “liberal media” they do not mean The Village Voice. They are also not referring to the likes of Alan Colmes, the liberal baggage Sean Hannity recently dropped from his show to the further benefit of his ratings. Rather, the liberal media refers to what others might call the mainstream media: NBC, ABC, and CBS network news, along with most major newspapers and news magazines. This media, many Fox News viewers believe, offers a persistent left-leaning bias on the news. What is even worse, the liberal media presents this bias without openly owning up to the fact. In the guise of objectivity, they believe, the liberal media has spent decades injecting lefty cant into popular journalism. Fox News, with its openly opinionated primetime hosts, is the self-conscious antidote to the perceived poison of the liberal media. And as such, it’s clearly doing quite well for itself.

Sean Hannity is an important link between Fox News and talk radio, and it’s no coincidence that he plays second-fiddle both on cable and on the air. On TV, it’s Bill O’Reilly who’s top dog, while on the radio, it’s the granddaddy of right-wing canines, Rush Limbaugh. It was Rush who invented the liberal media in its current form. He began as a true outsider and gadfly, churning his way through three hours of airtime a day for almost a decade before Fox News Channel existed.  Even now, it’s not unrealistic to think that Rush has as many listeners as Fox News has nightly viewers (Rush claims 20 million listeners a week, but even low-ballers don’t put it below 12 million). In any event, Sean Hannity, as both a radio and TV personality, provides the bridge between right-wing talk-radio  and the cable news renaissance.

The big difference between right-wing radio and cable news is that Rush Limbaugh bills himself as a conservative commentator, while Fox News bills itself as “Fair and Balanced.” In a very real sense, Fox’s tagline is a purposeful reclamation of journalistic objectivity from the clutches of the liberal media. It is tantamount to saying, “If the liberal media can call itself objective, so can we.” Never mind that your number 2 guy is so humorlessly conservative that he makes Rush look like a cuddly clown by comparison and your top guy touts his working-class Catholic roots as if they were enough to forbid comparisons with the wannabe WASP aspirations of the cigar-chomping Limbaugh. Despite these right-wing credentials, Fox News has no qualms about labeling itself as, well, news.

Nor, as it turns out, do other media outlets. Fox News Channel is ranked as the top cable news channel, in direct competition with CNN at number two and a fast growing MSNBC at number three. Of these three networks, only Fox is in the top ten of all basic cable stations, coming in at a healthy number two behind USA Network and running neck and neck with the Disney Channel. CNN, meanwhile, is on the decline, while MSNBC is moving up. These trends all make sense if you consider the relationship of each network to both the old mainstream–“liberal”–media and to the emerging partisan media marketplace.

CNN was founded 1980, well before the emergence of either conservative talk radio or “Fair and Balanced” cable news. At the time, it’s function was to provide a twenty-four hour source for news, a commodity previously served up only in half-hour slices several times a day by the broadcast networks. Other than having a longer day, however, CNN’s journalistic model was pretty much the same as that of broadcast news. Like the rest of the mainstream media, CNN presented itself as a nonpartisan, objective observer of current world events. This journalistic model is still the dominant form, despite its decline. Even in today’s market of slipping ratings, the least watched broadcast news show on CBS has three times the viewers of the Fox News Channel. Trends, however, are all towards partisanship, which is not something that works in CNN’s favor. As a member of the old guard, modeled on the network news of the late twentieth-century, CNN has long been a part of the unacknowledged liberal media that Rush Limbaugh built his career by defining and belaboring.

Fox News Channel, then, is the news channel for the non-liberal news seeker. It is, both explicitly and implicitly, the news source for people who want an alternative to the liberal media as they define it. That this market exists was proved almost two decades ago by talk radio, and the fact that it is the strongest market in cable news today should be neither surprising nor especially worrisome. The cable market is, by definition, specialized, and the success of a cable network has as much to do with precise targeting as it does with broad appeal. Fox News knows its audience better than CNN does, and it’s audience is real but not enormous. On any given night, far more cable viewers are watching something besides the news. Conversely, most people who watch any kind of news at all are still checking in with the liberal media mainstays of the big three, ABC, NBC, and CBS.

But hegemony is on its way out, and the hot product in the news is partisan. This is why the lowly number-three cables news channel, MSNBC, is nevertheless on the rise. Finally recognizing that part of the success of Fox News is based upon its embrace of partisanship, MSNBC is trying to do the same thing. For just as there is an audience who believes the mainstream media is too liberal, there is also a growing audience who thinks that it is too conservative. This is the other side of the coin that MSNBC is trying to exploit, despite the failure of less sophisticated imitations of right-wing success like AirAmerica radio. CNN, meanwhile, is stuck trying to play to the middle in the broad but shrinking field of moderate media.

Whatever news looks like in ten years, it will owe something to both Fox News and, ultimately, Rush Limbaugh. This is true whether or not Rush’s claims of “liberal media bias” were ever founded on anything other than paranoia. The fact of the matter is that hegemonic media, by virtue of its universality, will always rightfully inspire paranoia in any faction that does not feel served by its hegemony. The success of Fox News need not be the precursor of increasingly polarized media, wherein we are all strung out between left- and right-wing info-propaganda. Rather, the history and numbers at Fox News suggest that it is on the forefront of a media differentiation that will probably continue until the the great mass of uncritical news viewers is parcelled out into small, self-selecting groups. Conservative and liberal news outlets are just the start: We will all, eventually, be able to find some slant on the news that suits our own leaning.

Postmodern Pulitzers, Pt. 2: Business Entertainment and Serious Comedy

If you haven’t already, read Postmodern Pulitzers, Pt.1: Shock Journalists and Satire Scoop Corporate News

CNBC Gambles with Nothing to Lose

The first time I saw Charlie Rose, he was interviewing the TV actor Michael Richards. The interview took place while Seinfeld was still on the air and Richards was in his prime, over a decade before he disgraced himself during a stand-up performance at a comedy club in LA. I was struck, at the time, with the uncharacteristic reserve that is characteristic of the actors who are interviewed by Charlie Rose. Here was Kosmo Kramer, the wacky, spaced-out next-door neighbor, quietly discussing his career, his method, and his beliefs on the darkened set of Rose’s studio. It was probably the first time I had ever seen an actor without the veneer of some shtick or pose, the actor as the human being the actor took himself to be. Weeks later, by accident, I watched Michael Richards when he appeared on David Letterman’s show, also, ostensibly, to do an interview. Only this time, Richards was most definitely “on,” channeling Kramer as he bounded around the set, crawled across the stage, and tore up cue cards. Of course, I had seen entertainers interviewed on late night shows before, but it had never occurred to me that they were all doing bits. Promoting a movie or TV show, sure, but it was the real person we were seeing, the actor not the character, wasn’t it? In retrospect, the quiet introspection of the actor on Charlie Rose proved to me that the last person who thought that the Michael Richards on the Letterman show was the real Michael Richards was the real Michael Richards himself. In any event, when I saw CNBC’s Jim Cramer interviewed by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, it was this old Kramer that came to mind.

In contrast to what you might expect, the Comedy Central show brought out the real Jim Cramer rather than the raving prop-comic he portrays on his own show, Mad Money. Cramer sat, uncomfortable and diffident, while Jon Stewart ran intellectual circles around him, scolding him at will, pausing only occasionally to tell a joke which, naturally, also came at Cramer’s expense. It must be a difficult thing to be interviewed by Stewart. On the one hand, he can always fall back on the fact that his show is a comedy show, intended to provoke the laughter of college-educated twenty-somethings. Incisive criticism or investigation, when it occurs, is purely a byproduct of the entertainment process. Nevertheless, as Stewart often proves, there is nothing that excludes him from playing hardball with reporters and analysts who purport to be straightforward information providers or ingenuous commentators. The result is that any “serious” media figure who comes on the show does so at a decided disadvantage, at least if that figure has either an image to maintain or something to hide.

The irony then, is that the Daily Show’s irony is precisely what allows it to provide some of the most honest interviews on television. The tried-and-true, unspoken agreements that persist in the straight media are bound to be spoken aloud on the Daily Show. People used to trust comedians like David Letterman to play by the rules, to allow them to play their roles and yet call them by their stage names. These days, however, personalities who agree to be interviewed by Jon Stewart display the same quiet demeanor they used to reserve for Charlie Rose. With Charlie, they enjoy the freedom and distance from the roles they play, and it is this dropping of their guard that Charlie expects of them. With Jon,  they fear the consequences of playing the role, knowing that the only thing he wants more than the real thing is the chance to catch them doing a bit. In this case, they find that the only safety is to drop their hands and take their lumps.  Stewart likes to remind his subjects that comedy can be a bully, punching harder the more you fight back.

Jim Cramer certainly took his lumps, and the question arises as to why he would willing subject himself to such punishment. The answer, of course, has to do with ratings, not just the ratings of Cramer’s own show, but also of his network in general. It’s been a volatile season for CNBC, as the New York Times reports:

After it achieved record ratings last fall, the network’s audience remains above its annual average. But CNBC’s executives and hosts seem well aware that their ratings have traditionally stagnated in down times for the Dow. “People do not want to come to a show each night and hear how poor they are,” Mr. Cramer said.

So on the one hand, CNBC has been doing better than ever, but on the other, it knows that the current recession is not a recipe for continued success. This is especially true when the Daily Show is packaging the worst calls of your on-air talent and playing them back in one long onslaught of bad advice. The network had nothing to lose, in other words, by letting some of that said talent go up against Jon Stewart, where they might at least get a chance to get a word in edgewise. As discussed in the last post, the original talent slated for the Daily Show was not Jim Cramer; rather, it was a second-stringer named Rick Santelli. However, the faux-populism of Santelli’s on-air outburst turned out to be more anemic than the network originally thought, and CNBC ditched the disgruntled middle-class libertarian in favor of the relatively left-leaning Jim Cramer, who sports a working-class mug and rolled-up sleeves. The purpose, in either case, was the same for CNBC: to broaden its audience in an uncertain media market.

During the interview with Jim Cramer, Jon Stewart repeatedly asked questions along these lines: “Who are you responsible to? The people in the 401ks and the pensions or the Wall Street traders?” Cramer was wise enough not to respond directly, because the answer is and always has been that CNBC is responsible, first and foremost to “Wall Street traders that are doing this for constant profit,” as Stewart put it. And you don’t have to take my word for it. You can take the word of CNBC’s president, Mark Hoffman, who in 2007 said:

We have an extremely affluent audience, a very well-educated audience. . . .

We’re about any street where people either have wealth or aspire to have wealth. . . .

We’re very focused on an investor audience. We always frame that news and information with the biggest business stories, political stories of the day. We like that audience. What we do resonates very well with them, and we do not ever want to put that audience in jeopardy.

It turns out that Jon Stewart didn’t have to ask Jim Cramer who his network was beholding to, because Cramer’s boss had spelled it out in detail over a year ago.

And that’s always been the case with CNBC. In fact, the network has gone to great lengths to ensure that people who “have wealth or aspire to have wealth” are counted in their audience. An article at Mediabistro.com states that “CNBC was the top network in Nielsen’s highest median income categories for March 2008.” This is not enough for CNBC, however, which worries that Nielsen ratings under-count their audience because it focus on home viewers. As a press release on CNBC.com takes pains to point out:

It’s important to note that the ratings only reflect CNBC’s measured audience. Nielsen Media Research does not accurately measure CNBC’s viewership as Nielsen’s audience universe is limited to “in-home” measurement and does not include “out-of-home” viewing in places like offices, restaurants, health clubs, hotel rooms and vacation homes where CNBC is significantly viewed.

The network even went so far as to commission a study of out-of-home viewing by their on-the-go audience, just to prove that they weren’t making it up.

This all sounds almost sinister during the second year of a recession the approach to which was virtually ignored by CNBC and its on-air talent. It’s important to remember, however, that CNBC itself is supported almost entirely by advertising revenues, which is why it has always been so important to the network to prove that not only was its meager audience decidedly rich, it was also significantly under-counted. However, these times are especially bad for companies whose profits are based on advertisements that appeal to a wealthy class that finds itself both drastically less wealthy in general and less inclined to splurge on luxury goods in particular. It’s important to remember that, at least in terms of TV ratings, richer is not necessarily better. That CNBC’s audience is more wealthy than Comedy Central’s audience does not, by any means, mean the CNBC is more wealthy than Comedy Central. The only audience that a small, rich audience beats is a small, poor audience.

Understanding this, perhaps we can get a sense of why CNBC was so thrilled at the apparent outpouring of popular support for Rick Santelli’s rant against the Obama home mortgage plan. For a moment, they thought they saw a chance to broaden their appeal to include more of us everyday, non-wealthy people, a move that could only help make CNBC itself more wealthy. However, after a closer look, the network decided that Santelli was not the right horse to back: He was, at best, an upper-middle-class whiner whose claim to fame was based on a lack of sympathy for the increasing number of people making less money than him. Jim Cramer, on the other hand, claimed to have lived out of his car at one point in is life, an anecdote that has decidedly more cache at this point in time. Thus, it was Cramer who got to go on the Daily Show and have his brow beaten by a comedian. Neither he nor CNBC had anything to lose, at that point. If Cramer managed to appeal to a wider audience, the insults at his expense would be worth bearing. If he did not, the network could always go back to pandering to its shrinking audience of wealthy out-of-home viewers.

Incidentally, initial reports suggest that the Daily Show‘s recent skewering of CNBC could have put a damper on the network’s ratings, though Cramer’s show might have benefited somewhat. If so, that seems at least fair, since he was the one who had to sit there and squirm while Jon Stewart made him look like a stammering supplicant to the court of public opinion.

Postmodern Pulitzers, Pt. 1: Shock Journalism and Satire Scoop Corporate News

The Rise and Fall of Rick Santelli

Over the last month, almost every demographic has born witness to some aspect of the aftermath of Rick Santelli’s rant on CNBC. If you didn’t catch it on cable when it aired on February 19th, 2009, you might have caught it online, where a clip of Santelli’s outburst became the most popular video ever on CNBC.com and was viewed almost a million times on YouTube. For a moment, Rick Santelli was touted as a populist hero, and his call for a “Chicago Tea-Party” to protest Obama’s bailout of bad mortgages was taken literally, at least by some.

For a few days, Santelli and CNBC were riding high on the burst of interest generated by Santelli’s rant. Whitehouse Press Secretary Robert Gibbs called Santelli out by name, which apparently made Santelli feel “threatened,” a response for which he was taken to task by Matt Lauer during his round on the talk-show circuit. Fellow CNBC employee Larry Kudlow was much more supportive of both Santelli’s message and his fears, chatting him up in a segment dubbed “Rick’s Revolution.” Kudlow describes Press Secretary Gibb’s suggestion, namely, that Santelli download and print the president’s home mortgage plan, as “one of the most blistering attacks” he has ever seen against the media. Hyperbole aside, CNBC and its parent network were clearly milking Santelli’s rant for all of the ratings it was worth. Santelli’s coup-de-grace was to be an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Comedy Central’s satirical news program and CNBC’s opportunity to take a step away from its staid, navy-blue image toward hip, ironic popularity.

Santelli, having agreed to the Daily Show interview, later pulled out before the scheduled appearance. Apparently, Santelli gave no explanation as to why he changed his mind, and as of March 9th, Jon Stewart was claiming that “we haven’t heard anything from CNBC.” Not that that had stopped Stewart from eviscerating Santelli and his entire network in an eight minute segment on March 4th. The segment consists of a series of clips exposing a litany of bad calls made by CNBC analysts over the course of the financial meltdown. The segment became an internet sensation in its own right, and spurred a rebuttal by another CNBC personality, Mad Money‘s Jim Cramer. Eventually, CNBC got its chance to speak for itself on the Daily Show, only instead of Rick Santelli, it was Jim Cramer that took one for the team. But more on that later. First, what happened to Rick Santelli?

Now we must introduce a character that even Jon Stewart is too mainstream to mention. His name is Mark Ames, and he is the publisher of The Exiled, an online newspaper for which Ames and a rag-tag bunch of alternative journalists sporadically report. Ames and his crew originally published a weekly English language newspaper while living as expatriates in Russia beginning in the 1990s. Much of their content can still be found online, though the paper was shut down last year by the Russian government. In general, what is described as “Gonzo journalism” tends to pale in comparison to the kind of news stories that Ames runs on The Exiled, and mainstream notions of journalistic standards are routinely stretched to the breaking point. Nevertheless, there is a good case to be made that the rise and fall of Rick Santelli has as much to do with a series of reports run by Mark Ames and Yasha Levine as it does with anything else.

In February, Ames and Levine wrote an article that was originally published on Playboy.com. The article claims that Santelli’s “tea-party” rant was part of a broader “astro-turfing” campaign being administered by wealthy right-wing special interests. Astro-turfing refers to the practice of making well-organized, well-funded political maneuvers appear to be the work of spontaneous grass-roots citizenship.  Thus, Ames was arguing that both Santelli’s outburst and the oft-reported tea-parties that began to “spring up” across the country were really backed and supported by rich donors from the Koch family of billionaires.

Apparently, the claims that Ames and Santelli were making were shaky enough to spook Playboy.com, which removed the article from their website. The article can still be read, however, on The Exiled website. Indeed, far from being spooked, Ames seemed to be invigorated by the silent rebuke, and he initiated a campaign of his own that ran parallel to the fate of Rick Santelli, though it was largely unacknowledged by even the fringes of the mainstream media. By the time that Santelli had bailed out of the Daily Show and Jon Stewart was mocking CNBC in absentia, Ames and Levine were claiming victory for themselves. It was, they clearly implied, their meddling that had short-circuited Rick Santelli’s next step up the ladder of fame. Still, Jon Stewart gave no indication that he had ever heard of The Exiled, though as previously noted, he did say that he did not know why Santelli withdrew from the show. Santelli, for his part, also made no mention of Ames or The Exiled, at least not by name.

Ames himself, however, points to a curious letter posted by Santelli on CNBC.com. Ames describes Santelli’s missive as a “giant apologia,” a characterization Santelli himself would surely dispute. However, the first sentence of the letter does suggest that either Santelli or his NBC handlers were, themselves, spooked by Ames accusation that the “spontaneous” outgrowth of internet support for “Rick’s Revolution” was actually a premeditated maneuver. At least, they demonstrated that denying such an accusation was their top priority. The first sentence reads:

First of all let me be clear that I have NO affiliation or association with any of the websites or related tea party movements that have popped up as a result of my comments on February 19th, or to the best of my knowledge any of the people who organized the websites or movements.

While Santelli never mentions Ames, The Exiled, or specific criticism of “astro-turfing” by name, or even by any further implication, it is interesting to consider that he saves his comments about Press Secretary Gibbs until much later in the letter. Santelli’s appearances with Lauer and Kudlow both explicitly highlighted the fact that he felt “threatened” by the president’s secretary, and he implies in his letter that the secretary’s response was an “UN-American” abridgment of the “freedom of the press” and “freedom of speech.” Both in his interviews and in his letter, Santelli virtually alleges a government conspiracy against him. Oddly, however, the first concern expressed in the letter is not the encroaching fascism implied by his sense of having been threatened by the president, but rather the chance that he would be mistakenly associated with websites related to the “tea party movements.”

Ames’ reporting has as much to do with what is omitted from the story of the Santelli phenomenon as it has to do with what is explicitly visible or stated. Undoubted, this is was made Playboy.com’s legal team nervous. However, there seems to be little doubt that CNBC’s legal luminaries were just as worried, at least if we are to judge by the way Rick Santelli was turned so quickly back into a second-string pumpkin. His letter on CNBC.com has all the hallmarks of a preemptive legal maneuver masquerading as a simple position statement. As further evidence of what has been left out of the Santelli story, however, let me point you toward another CNBC.com video entitled: “Santelli’s Manifesto: Why He Called for a ‘Tea Party.'”  You will notice that there is only blank white space in the area where, presumably, the video should be played. The post is dated February 22nd, which was during the heyday of “Rick’s Revolution.” For whatever reason, CNBC no longer sees fit for us to know “why he called for a tea party.” A Google search for “santelli’s manifesto” turns up plenty of results, most of which point back to the same oddly vacant post on CNBC.com.

UPDATE March 29, 2009: Since this piece was posted, a video segment from CNBC has appeared on the page titled “Santelli’s Manifesto: Why he Called for a ‘Tea Party.'” I do not know whether it is the same segment that originally appeared on the page, or whether CNBC posted a different video after having removed the original. What does appear to be clear, however, is that the video is the exact same segment that can also be found under “Rick’s Revolution,” a clip from Larry Kudlow’s show that was referred to earlier in this post. In any event, you will probably find a video if you follow the link to “Santelli’s Manifesto.” I’ll leave it up to you to decide how well it explains “why [Santelli] called for a ‘Tea Party.'”

Ultimately, I cannot be as sure as Ames that it was Ames himself that led to Rick Santelli’s downfall. I can be pretty certain, however, that Rick Santelli has indeed fallen from grace, and that it was his own people that ultimately did it to him. Already, we have seen the online letter with the earmarks of the legal department barely scrubbed from the margins. We have seen the empty space where the video should be that explains why Santelli said what he said on February 19th, created in the heady days of CNBC’s new populism, but gone now that the hip kids at Comedy Central have blown their nose with the financial network. And it was on Comedy Central that CNBC finally threw Santelli under the bus, when his colleague Jim Cramer took Santelli’s place on the Daily Show. Regarding Santelli’s rant against bailing out “loser” mortgage holders, Cramer clearly states: “I disliked what he said; I thought that it was bad. . . . I didn’t understand it, maybe he is from a different [socio-]economic background from me. . . . It’s a terrible thing to be foreclosed on, and they’re not losers, they’re fighters.”

Rick Santelli got, at best, five of his fifteen minutes of fame before he was called off by his handlers. His movement was short lived, just a small part of a larger attempt by his network to vie for market share during a down economy–a period that is traditionally bad news for financial news networks. For a moment, CNBC thought that Santelli would be able to put their best foot forward at the dance with a new audience. In the end, however, it wasn’t just Mark Ames who believed the popular appeal of “Rick’s Revolution” was drastically overstated. Little more than two weeks later, Jim Cramer was basking in the sunshine meant for Santelli, even if that sunshine resulted in a blistering burn beneath the lights of the Daily Show. Though Playboy punked out and they were ignored by Jon Stewart, though there could still be libel cases pending and there will certainly be no Pulitzers dispensed, perhaps The Exiled is right to gloat over their unacknowledged victory. If they were not the cause of Santelli’s slap in the face, the were the first to foretell it and the last to laugh.

In Part 2, we will look more closely at Santelli’s Judas employer, CNBC, and consider where they are coming from and where on earth they were trying to go when they stuck their neck out on the Daily Show.