Omar and the outrage factory: The long knives are out for her

My comment was to the point that Ilhan Omar and Michelle Bachmann are hardly two sides of the same coin. You didn’t reply to that, but instead appear to mock me (I think?) as a smarty-pants for thinking that there is an “establishment media.” My reference to establishment media was a very minor aside, but since you take me to task, I’ll reply (somewhat) briefly.

First, it hardly matters how Ms. Bachmann views the media, no more than how Mr. Trump does, or purports to. The question is what, in fact, is true of the media and the role that they play.

Second, certainly there is niche journalism, blogging and aggregating for the left and Right. But there is also NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, the BBC, the NYT, the Wall Street Journal, other major city dailies and so on, as well as the pundits, think tanks, PR firms, industry associations, politicians and others that provide them content. These latter, at any moment and over decades, are far more consequential than the niche organs in defining the broad frames in which citizens, most of whom pay very little attention, think about politics and public policy.

An argument begins with a reasonable hypothesis and follows by examining the evidence. The reasonable hypothesis is that where wealth is unequally distributed in a democracy (where the formal assent of the population is needed), one of the ways that those with wealth will seek to protect their prerogatives (in addition to putting their money into the political process, lobbying for favorable laws, seeking to control technology, &c) is by seeking to frame the civic discourse – what is discussed or not discussed, how it is discussed, and by whom … and that this effort will over time be reflected in media framing. When consistent framing is observed across the realm of large-audience media, and when that consistent framing happens to protect and extend the prerogatives of wealth and power, that accords with our hypothesis and what we expect.

And we do see it. Characterizing it is of course a much longer subject, but centrally it involves maintaining the illusion of democratic debate in the efficient form of two parties, neither of whom will advance policies that materially undermine the interests of wealth. Both Siderism, the assumed symmetry of left and Right, and of Democrat and Republican, around a “center,” is a core feature of establishment framing.

Your contention is that there is no phenomenon that can be referred to as the “establishment media,” which I take to mean that all large-audience public discourse flows in some pure objective state, or at least without any consistent framing. This would seem to rest on a hypothesis that those holding the better part of society’s wealth and power don’t care about the ideas that ordinary folks may get in their heads as to how the economy, or national security, or anything else ought to be arranged. You don’t support your position and it certainly seems profoundly counterintuitive.

We know that Fox and the other organs of the Right are propaganda, aimed at a particular demographic (authoritarian followers). Why would the third of the population who are authoritarian followers be the only demographic susceptible, and therefore subject, to propaganda? Systematic framing, i.e., propaganda, may be more or less subtle, and more or less malign, but it’s still propaganda.