Capitalist Disinformation: The Inherent Contradictions in Profit-Based "Journalism"

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.

Fake News: It's Ideology, Stupid

By David I. Backer

Glenn Greenwald recently skewered Ben Jacobs at The Guardian for "summarizing" an interview Stefania Maurizzi did with Julian Assange. The essay shows how Jacobs cherry-picked ideas from the interview to portray Assange as being pro-Russia and pro-Trump, but goes on to a more general meditation on the phenomenon of "fake news":

If one really wants to battle Fake News and deceitful journalism that misleads others, one cannot selectively denounce some Fake News accounts while cheering and spreading those that promote one's own political agenda or smear those (such as Assange) whom one most hates.

While Greenwald is absolutely correct, there is a much easier way to say this, one that's largely absent in the debate on fake news.

Simply put, this "fake news" thing is just ideology. Plain and simple. And the sooner we integrate this concept into our toolbox for interpreting media, the better.

The philosopher Louis Althusser revolutionized how we think about ideology in the 1970s. His definition is the most helpful one in this case. He defines ideology as "imagined relations to real conditions of existence."

There's a difference between real conditions and someone or some group's imagined relation to those conditions. Generally speaking, real conditions are extremely complex, while people's imagined relations to that complexity are simplified versions that vindicate their agendas.

As Greenwald points out, it's in Jacobs' interest to portray Assange the way he portrayed him. Jacobs was a Clinton insider, and the Clinton faction's position on the 2016 election places inordinate blame on outside forces like WikiLeaks, Russia, and hackers.

The real conditions of Clinton's loss are complex, and obviously include the leaking of DNC emails, which we know came through WikiLeaks. But the Clinton campaign also failed in various ways that had nothing to do with leaking or Russia.

The Clintonite ideology is an imagined relation to real conditions which attempts to vindicate Clinton's position by casting WikiLeaks and Assange in a certain way. Ben Jacobs' "summary" is a paradigm case of this particular ideology, which is the ideology of the centrist faction of the Democratic Party and some moderate Republicans.

The beauty of Althusser's definition of ideology is that no one is exempt from ideological speech. Everyone must imagine their own relation to real conditions.

And it's not a matter of truth and falsity. Each speech act, to some degree, is limited by the speaker's imagination. The real conditions are always more complex.

This is why Althusser wrote that ideology is allusion, not illusion. Everyone, particularly in the public sphere, is always alluding to this or that part of complex social conditions. Why? To push their agenda.

In this sense, all news is "fake" news. People speak in the public sphere in order to vindicate their positions as much as (and sometimes more than) representing real conditions' complexity.

When they do this, they cherry pick aspects of real conditions accordingly, speaking from their imagined relation to it via their agenda. Sometimes this is intentional and flagrant (like the Pizzagate fiasco), but most times it is unconscious and subtle (like most "objective" reporting).

The term "fake news" itself is a masterpiece of ideological speech. Calling reports "fake news" is a desperate attempt to communicate that one's own report is "real news." But making this claim is clearly a power play just as much as it is an attempt to refer to something in the world.

If Democrats call Republican reports "fake news" then it benefits Democrats because it makes it look like Republicans are trying to pull the wool over society's eyes. Republicans do it to Democrats too and get the same benefit.

But the thing is: every report comes from a perspective. Even "objective" ones.

So rather than making it seem like there's some hidden force out there pulling the wool over society's eyes, what people need to realize is that political speech is always trying to win for a particular side. When people speak, whether they mean to or not, they are promoting an agenda. Period.

All political speech is subject to imagined relations to real social conditions, since speakers have positions and have to imagine what their relationship with social conditions are when speaking. This doesn't mean there isn't truth and every state is merely a Machiavellian power play.

But when it comes to speaking and writing in the public sphere, we have to consider peoples' imagined relations to society just as much as we consider the extent to which their statements refer to something like the real social world.

In other words, ideology is everywhere in political speaking, writing, and conversing. The sooner everyone in the debate about fake news gets comfortable with this basic concept, the better.

David I. Backer is Assistant Professor in the Department of Professional and Secondary Education at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.