Journalism is a Business

Media Mat­ters for Amer­ica, a lib­eral, media-watchdog orga­ni­za­tion, reflects on how Fox News cov­ered the one-year anniver­sary of the Amer­i­can Recov­ery and Rein­vest­ment Act:

On the one-year anniver­sary of the Amer­i­can Recov­ery and Rein­vest­ment Act, Fox & Friends pur­ported to ana­lyze the results of the bill and repeat­edly shed doubt on the impact of the stim­u­lus on the employ­ment sit­u­a­tion. But Fox & Friends ignored inde­pen­dent analy­ses of the stim­u­lus, includ­ing those con­ducted by Moody’s Economy.com and the non­par­ti­san Con­gres­sional Bud­get Office, that said the mea­sure raised employ­ment by 1 to 2.4 mil­lion jobs by the end of 2009.

First, I’m not going to com­ment directly on the var­i­ous economic-stimulus bills. I have not learned enough about them to com­ment fairly. My point here is to dis­cuss how busi­ness affects media, which then affects pol­i­tics and society.

But as Dan Shel­ley, a for­mer news-director in radio, noted in 2008, con­ser­v­a­tive media-outlets have suc­ceeded in play­ing to their market:

To suc­ceed, a talk show host must per­pet­u­ate the notion that his or her lis­ten­ers are vic­tims, and the host is the vehi­cle by which they can become empow­ered. The host frames vir­tu­ally every issue in us-versus-them terms. There has to be a bad guy against whom the host will emphat­i­cally defend those loyal listeners.

This enemy can be a politi­cian — either a Demo­c­ra­tic office­holder or, in rare cases where no Demo­c­rat is con­ve­nient to blame, it can be a “RINO” (a “Repub­li­can In Name Only,” who is deemed not con­ser­v­a­tive enough). It can be the cold, cruel gov­ern­ment bureau­cracy. More often than not, how­ever, the enemy is the “main­stream media” — local or national, print or broadcast.

With all due apolo­gies to my ide­al­is­tic, eighteen-year-old self when I was a jour­nal­ism major at Boston Uni­ver­sity, the media — as I learned in my later, news­pa­per career in Bean­town (see here for one exam­ple)  — is nei­ther objec­tive nor a non-profit business.

And Rupert Mur­doch is a busi­ness genius.

Fox News was launched in 1996, in the mid­dle of Bill Clinton’s two terms as U.S. pres­i­dent. Con­ser­v­a­tives had always hated the pres­i­dent — often per­son­ally as well as polit­i­cally, and many viewed the main­stream media as sup­port­ing Clin­ton as well as Democ­rats and lib­er­als in gen­eral. The grow­ing par­ti­san­ship and ani­mos­ity only grew through the con­tested 2000 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion; the fol­low­ing one in 2004; the two, polar­iz­ing terms of Pres­i­dent George W. Bush; the 2008 elec­tion; and the cur­rent antag­o­nism towards Barack Obama.

Over these years, Mur­doch saw an oppor­tu­nity, and he pur­sued it relent­lessly. Roughly half of the mar­ket of media con­sumers were dis­sat­is­fied with the prod­uct (rightly or wrongly), and he hoped to pro­vide them with a sub­sti­tute prod­uct that would rein­force their views and cement their media alle­giance. And he was suc­cess­ful. Today, it is fairly easy to pre­dict someone’s polit­i­cal views based on whether he watches Fox News or CNN.

In mar­ket­ing terms, Mur­doch imple­mented both “push” and “pull” strate­gies. A “pull” strat­egy iden­ti­fies a pre-existing need or demand in the mar­ket and tries to attract con­sumers to a prod­uct or ser­vice that ful­fills that desire. A “push” strat­egy — often used in com­pa­nies that invent or inno­vate some­thing entirely new — pro­vides a new prod­uct or ser­vice and then tries to cre­ate a new mar­ket and demand for it. (Who needs some­thing called an iPod?)

A dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the main­stream media had already existed, so Fox News ini­tially pulled those view­ers into the net­work. And once they had taken the emo­tional bait, Fox News pushed more and more con­ser­v­a­tive rhetoric, talk­ing points, and ide­ol­ogy onto them to keep them watch­ing. And it worked.

But there were larger issues at play. As tech­nol­ogy and the Inter­net short­ened the public’s atten­tion span, Fox News adapted by hir­ing bubble-blond anchors in miniskirts and replac­ing a half-hour of read­ing head­lines and talk­ing to reporters with ten min­utes of news sum­maries and twenty min­utes of talk­ing heads shout­ing about the issues at hand. This was the nat­ural result of shows like CNN’s “Cross­fire,” and the phe­nom­e­non later evolved into news-as-comedy (or vice-versa) on “The Daily Show” and “The Col­bert Report.” After all, young peo­ple would no longer watch cur­rent events if there were not a joke every thirty seconds.

Still, the cen­tral sig­nif­i­cance of Fox News is its recog­ni­tion of the seg­men­ta­tion of the mar­ket­place in mod­ern times. One of the first things I learned in my MBA classes was to iden­tify which spe­cific mar­kets would be inter­ested in a prod­uct and then cre­ate a dif­fer­ent mar­ket­ing strat­egy for each one accord­ingly. After all, a mass-market no longer exists.

Think about it. How many dif­fer­ent brands of tooth­paste exist? Do peo­ple really need one for whiten­ing, another for tar­tar con­trol, another for plaque, another for cav­i­ties, and another for bad breath? How many dif­fer­ent break­fast cere­als exist on a super­mar­ket shelf? How many cable or satel­lite chan­nels are on tele­vi­sion? The world has become seg­mented and indi­vid­u­al­ized. In jour­nal­is­tic terms, Fox News was the first to cap­i­tal­ize on this trend. Then, MSNBC fol­lowed by focus­ing on liberals.

But, in the end, soci­ety suf­fers. Decades ago, the desires to attract a mass mar­ket and report objec­tively (or at least fairly) on cur­rent events com­ple­mented and helped each other. For exam­ple: The New York Times wants to gen­er­ate as much adver­tis­ing rev­enue as pos­si­ble. There­fore, the news­pa­per wants to attract as many read­ers as pos­si­ble. To do that, the Times avoids alien­at­ing any read­ers, and, there­fore, chooses to give only facts and analysis.

Today, how­ever, the seg­mented, indi­vid­u­al­ized, niche-driven mar­ket rewards those who tar­get a cho­sen demo­graphic intensely rather than a gen­eral mar­ket as a whole. In jour­nal­is­tic (and busi­ness) terms, how does one com­bat this trend?

(Hat tip: Crooks and Liars)

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