In the wake of Donald Trump’s election in 2016, MSNBC had at least
two clear options: It could respond to a swelling progressive viewer
base by moving left, or it could keep playing the Beltway game and move
right, loading up with #NeverTrump Republicans, and dumping actual
progressives.
In choosing the latter — albeit with a head-fake — the
news channel has significantly skewed its coverage, to the detriment of
progressive politics and its own viewers.
Oh, there’s plenty of
Trump-bashing to please MSNBC's booming viewer base. But it’s often a
cheap thrill, giving scant or no attention to what made Trump's
presidency possible in the first place, let alone the challenge of
building a coherent alternative. The channel is currently riding
enjoying a ratings high,
despite its leadership’s centrist intentions, but that's no formula for the long haul, either for MSNBC or America.
“Without doubt, it’s Trump and his antics that have provided MSNBC’s ratings boom.” said Jeff Cohen, author of "
Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media." “A
President Hillary Clinton would have continued our country’s unequal
and militaristic status quo, and all the apologizing for her on MSNBC
would have led to boring TV and lousy ratings."
Cohen founded the
media watch group FAIR in 1986 (I was an early FAIR volunteer) and later
worked on-air at CNN and Fox and as a producer for Phil Donahue at
MSNBC, before Donahue's show axed for political reasons on the brink of
the Iraq war (more on that below). Currently director at the
Park Center for Independent Media at
Ithaca College, Cohen belongs to the long but sparse tradition of
independent progressives who’ve spent time in the innermost bowels of
the media establishment and lived to talk about it.
“There are two
big problems facing our country, and they have for decades --
right-wing extremism and Democratic corporatism," Cohen said. "MSNBC
gives you exactly one-half of that story. It reminds me of the old
George Carlin joke: ‘Here's a partial score in from the West Coast: Los
Angeles 7.’"
Bernie Sanders’ 2016 candidacy threw a harsh light
on the other half of the story, which helps explain why his supporters
get so little MSNBC airtime, in contrast to other venues Cohen cited.
Overtly
left-oriented outlets like Democracy Now!, The Young Turks and Common
Dreams continue to cover both problems, Cohen observed.
If
MSNBC wasn't devoid of strong, public Sanders supporters and other
genuine progressives, you'd hear about both problems. Look at who
MSNBC's heroes seem to be lately: war hawks and perjurers formerly
with U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon.
Their parade
of ex-military analysts have a track record of getting the facts wrong
or dissembling, but that's ancient history not to be discussed as long
as they're willing to even tepidly criticize Trump. I hope [Robert]
Mueller puts together a strong case, but he's no hero of the left. Nor
is [James] Comey. Nor is Gen. Barry McCaffrey.
Sanders’
supporters weren’t the only ones squeezed out, however. Even a staunch
Hillary Clinton supporter like former Salon editor Joan Walsh was
recently dumped by MSNBC —
and rapidly hired by CNN —
as the ranks of NeverTrumper contributors continued to swell. There’s
room for George Will, Bill Kristol and David Frum, and even for dogged
Trump apologist Hugh Hewitt, although the logic of listening to these
people is virtually nonexistent.
It’s not just that these
conservatives or conservative-adjacent commentators associated with so
many past political disasters. It's also unfair to present them as
representing any significant slice of pubic opinion. In his
post-election analysis published
in June 2017, Lee Drutman created 12 indices to analyze voters views,
which he also condensed down into two broader ones:
- An
economic liberalism-conservatism index (which combines views on the
social safety net, trade, inequality and active government)
- A
social/identity liberalism-conservatism politics index (which combines
the moral issues index plus views toward African-Americans, immigrants
and Muslims).
He then produced a
scatterplot graph.
The
large, and nearly empty, lower right quadrant represents
libertarianism, broadly speaking, which is the home turf of most
MSNBC-style Republicans. The dense cluster of blue dots in the lower
left quadrant represent the Democratic base, which is clearly MSNBC’s
core audience. But there are also many more blue dots (as well as red
ones) in the upper left quadrant than in the lower right. These are,
more or less, socially conservative but economically progressive voters
to whom the Democrats lost much more ground to than expected in the 2016
election — exactly the folks who cost Hillary Clinton the election in
Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. They are being effectively ignored
by MSNBC’s programing at the same time that the channel's core viewers
are being underserved, and treated to a diet that is oversaturated with
lower-right NeverTrump Republicans.
A healthy political dialogue,
free of corporate dictates, would allow the dominant voices in the lower
left liberal-progressive quadrant to be fully heard in their own terms,
rather than constantly being "balanced" with Republicans who
do not represent a
significant base, even within the Republican and/or conservative
coalition. Instead, it would allow liberals and progressives to engage
with thoughtful representatives of the upper left quadrant, who, believe
it or not, actually exist.
What’s
more, that would involve a much richer, more diverse mix of progressive
voices, who are now virtually invisible on MSNBC: Rural progressives
like Nebraska Democratic Party chair
Jane Kleeb, for example, or leftist women of color like Current Affairs contributing editor
Briahna Joy Gray.
A
striking example of what’s missing at MSNBC can be seen in how the
network virtually ignored the wave of red-state teacher strikes. On
March 2, FAIR
published an article noting
that except for "one two-minute throwaway report" on a daytime show,
MSNBC had not dedicated a single segment to the West Virginia teachers'
strike, including on the programs of supposed progressive stalwarts
Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell. Hayes did a short
segment later, after the FAIR story posted, but MSNBC returned to
generally ignoring the issue since then.
To say that's
underselling the importance of these strikes is to put it mildly. A
month later, as teachers’ strikes had spread to Kentucky, Oklahoma and
Arizona, political scientist Corey Robin’ called them “the real
midterms” and
described them as epochal.
Looking back to the watershed year of 1978, Robin noted that national
voters re-elected "a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate by wide
margins," despite "two years of a historically unpopular Democratic
president" (i.e., Jimmy Carter) with tanking approval ratings.
But
those weren't the midterms that mattered most, in Robin's account. What
really mattered in 1978 was "the passage of Proposition 13 in
California, which radically gutted property taxes ... and made it
extremely difficult to raise taxes in the future," launching a
nationwide right-wing rebellion against taxes that fueled the landslide
election of Ronald Reagan two years later. Now, in 2018, the wave of
teacher strikes signals the beginning of a movement, Robin argued, "to
confront the real governing order of the past 40 years: the Prop 13
order."
You could see the reality of this unfolding on social
media, but you couldn’t hear anything close to that analysis on any
MSNBC program. Indeed, you couldn’t hear any sustained discussion at
all, from any side of the issue. Robin’s arguments are exactly the sort
of thing that belongs on the network, given the reality of voters' views
in Drutman’s chart.
I asked Robin what other issues he thought
MSNBC ought to explored. “I've been fascinated by how Trump and the GOP
got completely rolled on the budget, forced to adopt a budget with a lot
of the spending that they hate,” he said — a subject that’s been noted
in the media, but hardly explored in any depth. “I'd also love to get a
lot more coverage on all these Democratic primaries: Who are these
people running for office? What are their positions, their ideologies,
etc.?” That, too, is largely terra incognita, with a few scattered
exceptions, which is surprising given the record activity levels of
campaign activity. “Last, I'd love to see good reporting on
millennials,” Robin concluded — a particularly important subject, given
that generation's strong progressive tilt and its obvious near-term
electoral importance.
Returning to the teacher strikes, Elizabeth
Catte is an on-the-ground expert who could further enrich the
discussion. She’s the author of "
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia," which,
as she puts it, “uses radical history to challenge perceptions of the
region as a hub of white, working-class woe.” Catte has appeared on
MSNBC, but not as the regular contributor she should be. “The lessons of
the West Virginia teachers' strike are complex,” she told me. “But one
takeaway for Democrats, or anyone interested in understanding our
current moment, should be that people are desperate for a better range
of political options,” precisely what MSNBC ought to provide.
“West
Virginians have witnessed a remarkable indifference among their elected
leaders to the common good, and have instead seen their futures traded
away for incentives aimed at fickle corporations and their
investors,” Catte continued. “Democrats who have seen their fortunes
fall in so-called Trump country should prioritize righting this
imbalance or face squandering any political momentum these recent
collective actions might offer.”
A better range of political
options necessarily calls for different perspectives on economics —
another way in which MSNBC falls short. Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle,
hosts of the
daytime business show that
bears their names, are well-intentioned but highly conventional
economic reporters. To their credit, they enthusiastically debunk a lot
of right-wing garbage. But there are plenty of dubious dogmas they
simply accept, such as the supposed virtues of balanced budgets, or
blaming the federal budget deficit on Social Security and Medicare.
MSNBC hardly ever offers time to economists who dispute such claims,
such as Dean Baker (defender of
Social Security and Medicare and early
predictor of the housing bubble crash) or Stephanie Kelton (proponent of
Modern Monetary Theory and the
universal job guarantee), for example.
In
addition, when Resident Trump recently announced his steel and
aluminum tariffs, Velshi and Ruhle pointed out some typical and obvious
Trump lies and misdirections, but offered no hint that are legitimate
arguments for protectionism that have a long history. In contrast,
Democracy Now! featured a debate between two progressives — Lori Wallach, author of "
The Rise and Fall of Fast Track Trade Authority," and Michael Hudson, author of "
America’s Protectionist Takeoff 1815-1914" -- which cast both sides of the argument in a very different light.
Numerous
other examples could be offered. As indicated above, Drutman analyzed
voter views in term of 12 different issue indices. There are progressive
viewpoints that never get aired on MSNBC for virtually every one of
those, and of course there is never any sustained dialogue about linking
those different progressive viewpoints together.
There are a
great many progressive ideas with substantial public support that rarely
even get mentioned. The Progressive Change Institute's
Big Ideas poll in
early 2015 identified 16 ideas with 70 percent support or more, plus
dozens more with majority support, that are rarely if ever mentioned on
MSNBC. I
wrote about it that July, in a story about Bernie Sanders' alignment with popular issues.
These included:
- Allowing the government to negotiate drug prices (supported by 79 percent)
- Offering students the same interest rates as big banks (78 percent)
- Universal pre-kindergarten (77 percent)
- Fair trade that protects workers, the environment and jobs (75 percent)
- Ending tax loopholes for corporations that ship jobs overseas (74 percent)
- Ending gerrymandering (73 percent)
- Letting homeowners pay down mortgages with 401k funds (72 percent)
- Debt-free college at public universities (71 percent)
- A $400 billion infrastructure jobs program (71 percent)
- Requiring the NSA to get warrants before collecting our data (71 percent)
- Disclosing corporate spending on politics and lobbying (71 percent)
- Medicare buy-in, available to all (71 percent)
- Closing offshore corporate tax loopholes (70 percent)
- A "Green New Deal," creating millions of clean energy jobs (70 percent)
- A Full Employment Act (70 percent)
- Expanding Social Security benefits (70 percent)
PCI
and allied groups like the Democratic Socialists of America have
identified a solid core of popular progressive ideas that certainly
deserve a hearing under any reasonable theory of democracy.
Instead of
seeing their representatives in policy discussions at MSNBC, we get the
same old tired mix of views that failed to excite voters enough to elect
Hillary Clinton in 2016.
There’s a simple explanation for this:
Corporate control and the conceptually narrow mindset that accompanies
it, especially on matters of foreign policy. This was not immediately
obvious when MSNBC cancelled the Phil Donahue show, as Cohen recalls:
We
were terminated by MSNBC because our skeptical questioning about
whether it would be wise to invade Iraq and whether cause existed was so
totally out of tune with the rest of the channel’s programming, which
offered little debate on those questions. Internal NBC documents that
leaked show that the termination was political and censorial. While we
were terminated for asking the right journalistic questions, those who
got it so totally wrong saw their careers at MSNBC and elsewhere
flourish.
Keith Olbermann, then one of the network's
stars, "started asking good questions in 2006,” Cohen acknowledged, “but
three years is a long time before independence was exhibited.” That was
three long years during which lies were exposed and opposition grew on
the ground among the anti-war movement and the progressive public, with
little or no cable news encouragement.
What really happened at MSNBC
is much clearer in retrospect, Cohen said: “We now realize that in 2002
and 2003, lobbyists for GE/NBC and other media conglomerates were
working hand-in-glove with George W. Bush's FCC - chaired by Colin
Powell’s son Michael Powell - toward deregulation allowing these
companies to get even fatter. Questioning or irritating Team Bush in any
way at that juncture interfered with corporate objectives.”
In
fact, the idea that MSNBC is a “liberal Fox News” fundamentally
misunderstands both the media environment and recent network history.
Fox News is a deliberately ideological propaganda station, conceived as
such by Roger Ailes long before it ever went live. MSNBC is a commercial
enterprise that stumbled into a center-left position simply because
that was the available audience, given Fox News' and CNN’s prior
positioning. But no one master-planned it that way.
In fact, the
network has at times lurched more to the right than the left. In 1999,
for example, MSNBC paired Oliver North - yes, he of the Reagan
administration and the Iran-contra scandal - with former federal
prosecutor Cynthia Alksne as co-anchors of "Equal Time." This is of
course a familiar format to cable news viewers: Rabid right-wingers
coupled with tepid centrists who supposedly represent the left.
That
was no fluke: At the tail end of the Bill Clinton era, MSNBC was
clearly experimenting with a sharp right turn. The network also added
shows in 1999 that featured reactionary dinosaur John McLaughlin and the
now-infamous Laura Ingraham, then a young conservative bomb-thrower.
Compared
to that, today's MSNBC might not look so bad. But compared to what
America both wants and needs in terms of new ideas and a new direction,
the so-called liberal network is still staggering around in the dark
instead of lighting the way. In all the ways touched on above, MSNBC's
corporate culture is sharply at odds with the most pressing concerns of
its primary audience, not to mention, the whole nation. By ignoring the
voices of those who are exploring bold solutions and challenging
worn-out political orthodoxy, MSNBC is only reproducing the insular
outlook that led the Democrats to political disaster over the course of
the last decade, culminating in the debacle of 2016. We can't afford
that.
Paul H. Rosenberg is senior editor at Random Lengths News, a biweekly serving the Los Angeles harbor area.
