Two events, juxtaposed, tell us a great deal about what is rapidly taking shape in the US. In one, Melania Trump releases a glossy documentary, Melania, an account of her return to the White House. Amazon outbid others to secure the rights to the documentary, spending $75m (£54m) in total, and ticket sales so far suggest that this was, shall we say, not a purely commercial venture.
In the other, the Washington Post is set to cut up to 200 jobs early this month, including the majority of its foreign staff and a sizeable chunk of its newsroom. Both Melania and the Washington Post are backed by Jeff Bezos. His two decisions, to invest in state propaganda and divest from the fourth estate that supposedly holds power to account, reveal much about how capital and authoritarianism join forces to decide what audiences read and see.
Trouble is afoot at another legacy US media outlet, CBS News. In July of last year, tech billionaire and Donald Trump ally Larry Ellison and his Hollywood producer son, David, took over Paramount, which oversees CBS News. The former New York Times columnist and, more recently, founder of anti-woke blog the Free Press, Bari Weiss, was parachuted in to run CBS News. She promptly ran into trouble, as she took on veterans of a channel that produces such storied programmes as 60 Minutes, and tried to justify editorial decisions that were seen as slanted in favour of the Trump administration. Weiss is now also expected to make cuts to the newsroom.
The telling thing is what will remain in these institutions, what is to be emphasised. Weiss has announced that she has added a host of opinion writers and wants to put “huge emphasis on scoops … crucially scoops of ideas. Scoops of explanation.” In short: more heat, less light. The opinion section of the Washington Post is also of interest to Bezos, who announced last year that its pages would “be writing every day in support and defence of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets … viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others”.
Not, as a columnist, to be a turkey voting for Christmas, but this fetishisation of opinion writing is a bad sign. Points of view should sit in tandem with domestic and global news coverage. News coverage should not be used for partisan ends or cannibalised for commentary. But, more than anything else, the pivot is a symptom of a rightwing-owned media that no longer seeks to report on the world as it is, but creates the world as it wishes it to be.
Trump regime talking points in favour of “domestic terrorists” being deservedly killed on US streets are treated as matters of opinion that simply must be aired. Reality itself has become twisted and contestable. What people have witnessed with their eyes and ears is questioned by rolling commentary of lies and conjecture, given the imprimatur of truth through being shown or printed on credible platforms.
But this move from news to opinion is part of something wider. Politics has become a performance of narrative about who is friend and who is foe. It taps into the public’s emotions by agitating and provoking fear. Channelling and emphasising these feelings then becomes the business of the media. All the while, actual power structures remain unchallenged. This is what Walter Benjamin called the “aestheticisation of politics” under fascism.
Everywhere you look in this age of tech-mogul-owned media, decisions follow these fascistic tastes. What use is foreign coverage, an expensive and time-intensive effort, when the wider world is viewed as a place of enemies and freeloaders that must either be cut off or brought to heel? Who cares about long-form investigations into abuses of power? Or features exploring the details of people’s lives elsewhere?
The impact is a degradation of the very way humans communicate with and about each other. Knowledge about and affinity with others are things to be excised under authoritarianism. So, too, is artistic expression, as with Trump’s takeover of what was the Kennedy Center and the assault on the Smithsonian. What some see as old and venerable US institutions, the right sees as organs of an ancien regime to be repurposed. This is what happens in coups – all that is associated with the values and style of the old order is uprooted.
Autocracy slowly grinds and spits out all that is impertinent. Billionaires, who have amassed way more money and power than is healthy for a democracy, own the machines. Those who service them are misfits, useful idiots and attention seekers. This grinding will be sold as pragmatism, simply giving readers and viewers what they want. In a world where legacy media finances are unsustainable and attention spans are frazzled, they will say that reporting is too demanding of institutional resources and audiences.
These problems are real – journalism is a struggling industry and technology is degrading our ability to learn and think – but it’s interesting that the solutions to these issues trend towards the introduction of more rightwing voices, the privileging of expression over reporting and the diminishing capacities for bearing witness to a global human experience.
It is not an accident that tech moguls entrusted with the solutions happen to be close to, or associated with, those who have links to the Trump administration. And that government is one that has waged war on journalism, with its “fake news”, and is now even arresting journalists. In no way are the Ellisons or Bezos good-faith stewards of the media, concerned only with the viability of journalism in a changing world. It all stinks to high heaven.
