Phthursday Musings: Mass Communication Breakdown

So, yeah, instead of thinking, gosh, I should write something about politics, and then just posing a relatively simple question, and offering my opinion, I instead sat down to write and started articulating a jagged theory about the pillars of American democracy. Gosh gee, I hope you like it. And, well, if you don’t, then you probably just need a shot of my special Chill Tonic:

You may be familiar with the term “Fourth Estate” to broadly refer to the media. The term is credited to the British statesman Edmund Burke, and the idea was that instead of there just being "three estates” - the nobility, the clergy, and the commoners - who constituted Parliament, there was also a fourth, the newspapers, who somehow operated outside of the others.

The concept of the Fourth Estate is closely associated with what, here in America, has long been referred to as freedom of the press. If you actually step back and think about it, it’s amazing to consider how the Constitution manages to speak to so very little, yet explicitly mentions the press in the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Seriously, have you ever thought about this, how short the Constitution is, but how they still managed to make reference to the press?

America was of course not founded on any formal religious basis. You know this, because, well, you read the First Amendment two paragraphs ago. America was also of course founded on the notion that there was to be no nobility, no aristocracy. It might therefore be argued that at the dawn of the new country, America was founded on the basis of there being only two estates: the people and the press. Benjamin Franklin had famously published a newspaper in Philadelphia. And no less than Thomas Jefferson himself, writing to Edward Carrington, declared: “…[W]ere it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

So, yes, the press had a special place well established in the early days of the American republic, perhaps not super well defined, but quite literally enshrined in the Bill of Rights. And indeed, over the early decades, various publications often championed the common man’s interests against those of the variously wealthy. (Of course, the wealthy had their own mouthpieces as well. There are notional levels and then there are practical levels. While practical levels, of course. While practically speaking, America may have had no landed gentry, there has always been some sort of upper class, and they’ve always had a lot of power. For all of his egalitarian sentiments, it’s not like Thomas Jefferson lived in a cozy bungalow, amiright?)

The lofty status of the press has of course greatly morphed over time. In the 1920s the advent of the radio moved the press beyond the mere printed word. Then came television, then came cable television, then came Kurt Loder and MTV News, all the way through to what our Founding Fathers clearly had in mind when they adopted the Bill of Rights: Jim Cramer ranting about stocks.

Now, for the sake of argument, let’s say that the “estates” that define American society were semi-formally expanded in 1886, by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co., ushering in the semi-legal construct of corporate personhood.

Let’s also stipulate that somewhere along the continuum of two paragraphs ago, most of what today passes for the “mass media” became part of corporate America. In the 1990s, CBS was acquired by Westinghouse. NBC was long owned by General Electric. Jeff Bezos today owns the Washington Post as well as being the founder of Amazon, quietly one of the dominant media companies in the world.

And so I would argue that, over time, the fabled Fourth Estate has largely become engulfed by the Corporate Estate. Whatever exactly the function of the press was supposed to have been - Jefferson, to Carrington, remarked: “The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, & to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people.” - I would argue that today this information function is at best second-rate, sitting far behind the imperative to make money. Now, it might be fairly argued that, on some level, this was always at least part of the point of the press: many a fortune hunter armed with a metaphorical quill pen has blazed a trail through the bramble of life to make a name for himself (oh, but we’ll talk about J.D. Vance later). Still, notionally, the press was always understood to play a role somewhat outside that of any of the other estates, and, well, to what extent can we possibly believe this to still be the case, at least as regards the largest of the media empires? The spirit may live on in the nonprofits and the self-publishers and, well, META-SPIEL, but, alas, we’re largely overwhelmed by the various horrors of CNN and FOX and the like, and we damn well know it.

To be perfectly clear on this point: The mass media is, and for a long time has been, blatantly corporatist, and as such, on balance, center-right in its political persuasion. It’s shifted in certain ways over the last couple of decades, but even when corporations have “gone woke”, at their core, they’re still rabidly anti-union and hostile to consumer protection. There are cracks in all this, of course! It’s not all bad news (ha ha). But the media’s sense of itself is badly warped, and the closer the alignment between Big Media and Big Tech - which might from time to time be “woke” but is fanatically anti-worker - the farther the Fourth Estate sinks from its traditional role in politics.

At this point I’ve no doubt horrified a good many of you by, among other things, citing an 1886 Supreme Court decision, but fear not! All of this has just been a circumlocutious way of talking about the complete shitshow that it is the 2024 election… and/or of having an excellent excuse to use the word “circumlocutious”, to the cheers of all of my adoring fans in Kansas City.

Writing here today, it’s my belief that Joe Biden is going to drop out of the presidential race, and that Kamala Harris will be the Democratic nominee.

I believe that if Biden drops out, for a great many reasons, Harris is the only especially plausible choice to replace him. I’m not arguing that this is a good idea, or that this is a bad idea; I am, indeed, arguing that this is not much of an idea at all, because the Democrats have shockingly thoughtlessly backed themselves into a corner where all decisions are apparently being made by some combination of fiat and freakout.

The calls for Biden to drop out, at some point, become self-fulfilling. Adam Schiff getting up an saying he’s not too sure Uncle Joe can win is part of a larger fabric of statements the primary effects of which are to guarantee that he can’t. And while this is all politics and there’s all kinds of wild jockeying for position being done behind the scenes and I’m hardly so naïve as to believe that all of this performance isn’t with other motives in mind… I’ve been an observer of the Democratic Party for long enough to be quite sure that the main thing on exhibition here is that the Democrats don’t know what the hell they’re doing.

This is a classic Occam’s Razor situation: the simplest explanation is probably correct. And, in turn, this is a classic Huckelberry Corollary situation: the simplest explanation is usually incompetence. (As an aside, I am stunned to find that I’ve been writing META-SPIEL for five years and have never before seen fit to introduce the Huckelberry Corollary to Occam’s Razor.)

In recent months, I have found myself in the incredibly strange position of having more nice things to say about the Biden Administration than anyone else I might find myself talking politics with. There are a number of interrelated reasons for this, not the least of which being that I do very much enjoy talking about regulatory policy, and a lot of the good stuff I see happening is coming out of arcane places like the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, and especially the Federal Trade Commission, which recently banned non-compete clauses in employment, which is a HUGE deal for a LOT of people, almost none of whom even know it happened, because… the communications arm of the Biden Administration has been so thoroughly and unbelievably terrible as to defy even the saddest expectations anyone might have had.

Joe Biden has made a very long, supremely successful career, in spite of - or, hell, maybe because of - not always saying the right thing at the right time. This was well understood in 2020, when he ran a presidential campaign which involved him saying almost nothing to anyone about anything, because he had nothing to gain from saying anything. This can all work up to a point, and that point is some time after winning the election, when someone somewhere has to be able to start pointing to the positive things going on because of your impeccable leadership. If you’re not going to do that yourself, then at least send your surrogates out to do it, at least unleash your communications staff to talk things up.

And yet, here we are. On paper, the American economy is doing smashingly well, but the American people are somewhere between not knowing this and not believing this. The infrastructure dollars from the early days of the Biden years have done a lot of super positive things, but I don’t think people can associate any of these initiatives with any actual Biden program. Lina Khan at the FTC has been an absolute rock star, but best as I can tell, the White House staff doesn’t even understand what’s happening there so they never speak to it.

2024 rolls around, and there’s a broad disgruntlement in the country, but here’s the opportunity for Biden to find his voice, and, well… well… well.

And here’s where the media comes roaring in. Rich and still powerful but desperate for real relevance, and still struggling over how exactly to cover Donald Trump, the media has gone full throttle after Joe Biden for being too old, too feeble… too perilous to their ability to sell advertisement space between jabbering talking heads. Because the mass media is now itself inextricably intertwined with social media, and social media is a series of raging cesspools owned by craven egotists, interspersed with broad escapism also likely owned by craven egoists…

There’s no coherent attempt being made here to tell any meaningful story about the actual state of the American populace. Conflict and clickbait continue to be the primary engines of media commerce, along with the turbo-charged fever rush of insufferable self-importance (and that’s just the New York Times!) The American people have no damn idea what the Biden Administration has actually done, for good or for bad; the Biden Administration itself seems to be somewhat uncertain; and the mass media seems like they mostly couldn’t care less about finding out, because, I don’t know, journalism is hard, or something.

And this, finally, brings us to the real man of the hour, one James David Vance, the pinnacle of the postmodern, late capitalist grifters.

Vance’s ascendance has been largely predicated on the media hype surrounding his “memoir” Hillbilly Elegy, a widely criticized work which was nevertheless broadly embraced by a corporate media which wasn’t especially interested in understanding what was happening in flyover country, but which became very interested in trying to have something to present when they looked so foolish during and after the 2016 election.

Hillbilly Elegy and its aftermath allowed Vance to position himself as some sort of right-of-center “thinker” in a political climate where “thinking” was not generally a precondition for success. Mostly, though, Vance was a particular kind of storyteller, adept at modifying his narrative to suit his changing audiences. You don’t get to be Donald Trump’s running mate - especially not at this point in Trump’s life - unless you are both a champion nostrum pitchman and an absolute master tactician of the ass kiss. His navigation has been brilliant, potentially bringing him to within a heartbeat of the presidency - that heart belonging to a not especially healthy 78 year old man who would one way or another be in his final term.

It is true that nobody can get to such a point without navigating politics in so many manifestations of the word. If you want to aim for the highest offices, you seize whatever opportunities might be presented to you, and that’s precisely what J.D. Vance has done. That his particular path has been stunningly free of obstacles speaks both to his special kind of agility, to be sure. But it also speaks to a mass media landscape where the spirit of the Fourth Estate has been all but extinguished.

Donald Trump, at the very least, is a public entertainer. The general public knew what they were getting with him.

J.D. Vance, though, is perhaps the closest thing we have had in the 21st Century to a nominee selected through a smoke-filled back room process. In more ways than one, he is aiming to follow in the footsteps of the last Ohio man to win a national election: Warren Harding.

Trump meets Harding? Yeah… that’s how bad I think things could get.

Just don’t expect to hear it from the corporate media.

I think I’m obligated now to share a Grifters video:

I am also, I think, obligated to share this one again. 40 years old this month, for my money still one of the 20 greatest albums ever recorded:

Next week I’ll be seeing Bob Mould for the fifth time. You should be there too!

Finally, this week’s title was me trying to be clever, only to find… it’s a Shonen Knife song!

Rest assured, everyone, the next installment won’t be like this. How many more times can I write about politics anyway? It’s not like I’m here trying to leave you all dazed and confused. I’m aware that pieces like this can be kind of good times, bad times, what with the exciting historical context interspersed with the terrible jokes. I just hope this hasn’t all gone over like a dirigible laden with heavy metal…