By Marcus Kahn
When you work as an employee, you do what your boss tells you to do. If you didn’t, you’d get fired. You occupy a specialized niche tied to the actual production process, while your boss manages multiple projects and employees from above. Unlike you, who will often only see a sliver of the larger priorities and direction of these projects as it pertains to you executing your function, your boss has access to a broader picture. Your boss’s boss (the owner) gets an even larger picture than that.
As you move up the ladder priorities change. As an employee, your highest aspiration might be to fulfill your position to an admirable degree with the aim of acclaim and eventually promotion. Your boss might want to see their projects executed successfully and have an incident-free, productive staff. And the owner is concerned with the overall profitability of the company, aka their own pockets. Actions performed at your level and your boss’s level reflect the immediate goals of the individual in that specific role, as it relates to the larger priorities of the owner. And the owner can act purely in their own interests, though the pattern of profit-seeking is decently predictable. You on the other hand, only get to perform as well as you can in the role you’ve been designated, allowed to continue in this role so long as you contribute to the overall profitability of the company through your continued labor (*you’ll probably get paid the same amount no matter how much you produce).
This is an obvious abstraction of common corporate business models, but the structure is essentially the same across the board. Employees take their directives from managers (an elite and highly stratified subset of employees), who take their orders from owners. The totalitarian, elite-oriented structure of large privately owned companies is either the world’s worst kept secret and everyone passively accepts it, or the best kept secret because elites have managed to subdue our awareness of its existence through various iterations of capitalist ideology. In either case, this structure is ubiquitous in the corporate world. If we apply these principles of hierarchy, domination, and control over production to media corporations, we would expect to find a similar elite-orientation in the behavior of employees (corporate journalists) and consequently their products (news).
Take every instance of ‘you’ in the first paragraph and swap it with ‘corporate journalists’, ‘boss’ with ‘editor’ and you have a good sense of the implicit structural pressures facing journalists in large media conglomerates. It’s easy to forget that these media giants are still corporations at their core, and not bastions of objectivity. While the journalists (employees) focus on crafting their story (product), they often have no sense of the larger objectives of their piece due to inadequate information and the ideological constraints on their perspective that likely qualified them for the job in the first place. The distance between the implicit (and perhaps explicit) directives of the executives to editors and the execution of an article in the newsroom and on the ground allows journalists to maintain a cognitive dissonance between the ethical standards and motivations they claim, and the journalistic bias they reproduce.
Though they are often sincere in their commitment to journalistic integrity, journalists’ claims of objectivity are irrelevant given their limited view of the larger corporate entity, and the journalist’s ultimate lack of control over content and direction. Media giants are profit-seeking entities directed by owners and governing boards concerned with the bottom line not only for their name-brand media outlet, but also for a litany of closely associated corporations. By virtue of their vertical command orientation, they will ultimately produce a media product and accompanying ideology that is designed to increase profitability for the owners rather than promote general welfare, in the same way a Big Mac is formulated with profit in mind rather than nutrition or consumer health.
The news we’re getting isn’t good for us, but corporate journalists continue to operate regardless of the dangerous contradiction between their self-image and the impact of their product.
