Ideological Enterprises

One of the recurring themes of our Mass Media and Politics class has been that of bias.  There have been great debates and studies all over the country as to which major media outlets are conservative, which are liberal, whether or not any of them are "balanced", and just how far individual outlets swing to the left or the right.  Although there is always room for debate, FOX news is generally characterized as straying the furthest right of any major outlet, and MSNBC viewed as the far left of the spectrum.  For this EIB installment I wanted to talk a bit about how even networks such as FOX or MSNBC can part with their normal routine, when and if it is convenient.

A few weeks ago MSNBC aired a clip on one of its shows that generally would not have to tolerated all that well.  The clip was aired on the segment Morning Joe by Joe Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski. Joe, generally labeled as MSNBC's sole conservative, often stands alone in his views for the major outlet, but is often tempered some.  The segment that he commissioned a few weeks ago covered Obama's campaign promises related to the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and featured clips of Obama stating that if consumers were pleased with their healthcare plans they would be able to keep them.  For anyone who keeps up with the news, I don't have to explain that the enrollment process has been less than smooth, and millions of Americans have been notified by their insurers that they will no longer be able to keep their old plans.  The clip was essentially designed to draw attention to the differences between promises and realities of the ACA rollout, and cast Obama in a very negative light.  Scarborough has been critical of the current administration in the past, but for MSNBC to show almost a full minute of broken promises from Obama on a major show is fairly unprecedented.  

I point this out not to spark further debate over the new healthcare rollout or whether or not Obama has maintained his campaign trail and office promises, rather, to highlight the fact that anyone who says that a particular news agency is "completely one sided" is often wrong.  The mass media is generally a profit oriented enterprise more so than an ideological one; the fact that we have networks that present opposing bias is more of a strategy to gather viewers than some deep political conviction held by the CEO or CFO.  Yes, Rupert Murdoch is more conservative than liberal, but he is more business oriented than conservative.  The mass media is a multi billion dollar empire, and tactics such as bias and spin are used in order to attract various audiences to increase the amount of viewers.  The more viewers, the higher the premiums for advertisers.  All of the major networks will part ways with their normal routine when needed, especially for a short duration of time.  The Morning Joe montage got scores of conservatives viewing MSNBC that normally would not have watched, and therefore was beneficial to the company even if it temporarily alienated some liberal viewers.  This is just one example of the mass media as a corporate enterprise rather than an ideological machine.

See the clip here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3Mg-ZMeZU0