Prolegomenon to a theory of slump media

Introduction: slump media

The great crisis whose onset was marked by the fall of Lehman Brothers in 2008 has now lasted some six years, passing from financial meltdown to general recession to an age of austerity that, in North America and the Eurozone, is forecast to last a generation, and carries uncertainty to the entire world market. David McNally (2011) calls this vast faltering of capital, teetering on the brink of massive depression, not quite falling over, yet promising only long term stagnation, the ‘global slump.’ This article is about ‘slump media’: focusing on news media in North America, it discusses how television, radio, the press, the Internet and social media at once contributed to the making of the slump, were themselves its economic victims, culturally defined its meaning, and hence shaped responses, acquiescent or rebellious, to the convulsion. It is a ‘Prolegomenon’ in that it is not so much a report on research findings, as preliminary introduction to such a study; a mustering of intellectual resources and laying out of initial hypotheses. The article begins by presenting the major critical concepts that inform it, explaining why conceptual instruments forged to analyse media’s role at the start of neoliberalism can, with some adaptations, be applied to the crisis that may mark its end. Within this theoretical perspective, we then posit five moments of news media involvement in the global slump: 1) as a causal contributor to the bubble economy and its implosion; 2) as a relay for the ideological confusion and disarray of ruling elites caused by market catastrophe; 3) as a casualty of the crisis, one of the many industries ravaged by recession; 4) as an agency for the restoration of new hegemonic ‘common sense’ legitimating private sector bailouts and public austerity; and 5) as a circuit within which challenges to this ideological construction unexpectedly erupt, propelled by resistances such as the Occupy movement and the Montreal student revolt.

Concepts: ‘this sucker could go down’

Our analysis does not set out to reinvent the conceptual wheel; rather it adapts and applies to today’s situation theoretical tools developed by previous media scholars. In particular, we draw on the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (BCCCS). Cultural studies are today sometimes charged with ignoring issues of class and crisis. But early BCCCS work dealt with the rise of Thatcherism in the UK, confronting the onset of the very neoliberal regime which is today in crisis. Texts such as Policing the Crisis (Hall et al., 1978), the collection Culture, Media, Language (Hall et al., 1980), and later work by the Centre’s leading theorist, Stuart Hall, achieve a synthesis of cultural, political and economic analysis aimed at understanding how media perform in a crisis of capital, combining Marx, Althusser and Gramsci to analyse news media as sites of hegemonic struggle and ideological interpellation operating within the determinate constraints of political economy. The ‘social production of news’ was, BCCCS proposed, subject to a complex of pressures tending to reproduce dominant ideology, yet could be contested, either by fractions of the ruling class with a new agenda, or by movements from below challenging the system. News media were thus crucial sites for making or preventing articulations between various class forces that would determine which historical bloc would emerge ascendant from ‘conjunctural crises,’ when tensions or contradictions developing at different levels of society-the economy, politics, ideology – ‘convene’ or ‘condense’ to produce a ‘ruptural fusion’ (Hall & Massey 2010: 38).

To take up these tools after 30 years of apparent universal capitalist victory, massive trauma on the left, global alterations in media businesses, and the rise of digital networks raises questions about their continued validity. Let us confront the most fundamental: ‘Why still Marxist?’ Because, we reply, the financial catastrophe of 2008 marked the end of ‘the end of history’ (Fukuyama, 1992). With George W. Bush’s memorable comment at the height of the crisis, ‘this sucker could go down’ (cited in Herszenhorn, 2008), belief that the market had escaped the possibility of catastrophic perturbations died. What loomed back into view was that system failure was an endemic possibility, and economic crisis a crucial driver of modern history. Three years later, in 2011, uprisings from Tahrir Square to Wall Street pushed into view the possibility of radical social change from below. All this generated revived interest in Marxism, to which we aim to contribute.

Nonetheless, we evidently write about a very different conjunction from that the Birmingham theorists addressed: not the exhaustion of British social democracy, but the explosion of a US-centered neoliberalism. They described a beleaguered, contradictory capitalist welfare state falling apart in festering class confrontations centuries old. We address a free market regime blowing up at what looked like the top of its game in a gilded age of naked greed, imperial triumphalism, and cynical consumerism – the consequence of the victory of the very forces whose media-assisted rise was analysed by Hall and his colleagues.

However, the changed context makes our analysis if anything more, not less, frankly Marxian than that of the BCCCS. Writing in a British context marked by the continuing influence of public broadcasting, incarnate in the BBC, Hall and his colleagues downplayed (though never forgot) the role of capitalist media ownership in the ideological shaping of news, emphasizing the more subtle interplay of journalistic work routines and reliance on accredited sources. Their work was, for the left of its era, a somewhat heretical attempt to release Marxist media analysis from a mechanistic economic determinism in favor of more complex models of the relative autonomy and contested representation.

We admire, and attempt to preserve, these elements of BCCCS analysis, yet think the stick can now be bent back in the other direction. Since the 1970s, global mergers, acquisitions, and expansions have created an oligopolistic media sector with startlingly direct and unabashed institutional ties to the financial sector, and to neoliberal regimes; we have only to point to the Murdoch empire whose rise and scandalous fall is so symptomatic of ‘slump media.’ In the light of such lurid events we reaffirm the importance of corporate ownership and logics in news-making, in a way running the Birmingham School’s experiment in reverse, no longer aiming to free media critique from a crude base/superstructure model, but instead giving a renewed attention to the constraining, compelling force of the economic ‘last instance,’ without losing a sense of the many mediations through which this determinant power emerges. One of the numerous contradictions we seek to historicize through conjunctural analysis is ‘why, when people now seem to be well-versed in a demystified version of things, do they nonetheless continue to follow the script as it is?’ (Best and Belanger, 2012).

Our position flies in the face of the greatest media dogma of our epoch – that digital networks dissolve the problem of media ownership. No view is more commonplace than the Internet has inaugurated a democratic, transparent, participatory field of public discourse, free of ideological filters. Our view is that networks have increased the volatility of media arena; contributed to the crisis of newspaper journalism; and have indeed enlarged opportunities for ideological contestation from both left and right. They have not, however, extinguished, and in some ways actually reinforce, the institutional concentrations of mainstream media power. We point out that: a) television continues as a primary news source; b) news accessed via the internet frequently originates within institutional media; much of so-called ‘citizen journalists’ is derivative of work of professional journalists; and c) corporate media increasingly fold grassroots digitally generated content back into their production cycle, where it provides an imprimatur of authenticity even as it is reframed within dominant paradigms. Moreover, while the growth of networks and social media has extended popular access to the means of communication, their spread has been accompanied by an increasing emphasis on a cultural diet of entertainment, distractions arising from information overload, and a decline in attention to news media and current events.

Cause: in debt we trust

The accelerated financial flows that contributed to the global slump were made possible by huge investments in information and communication technologies (ICTs). As David Harvey (1989) has argued, the last great crisis of over-production, experienced during the 1970s, was overcome in part through the use of these technologies to provide a ‘spatial-temporal fix’ that allowed for the globalization of supply chains. Food, clothing, TVs, and, yes, editorial news services, are now part of these value chains, which constitute what Wayne Hope calls a ‘mediated fusion of money, information and economic activity’ (Hope 2010). According to Paula Chakravartty and Dan Schiller, this 30-year expansion transformed the structural orientation of the news industry which, in their words: ‘naturalized the symbolic violence of neoliberal reasoning’ (Chakravartty and Schiller 2010: 677).

Corporate media contributed to the bubble of consumer debt that burst in 2008. This was pointed out before the fact by marginalized media critics such as Danny Schechter (2007), in his prophetic film In Debt We Trust. Broadly, advertising-driven media’s interpellation of audiences as consumers, promoting ‘lifestyles’ unsupportable at actual wage levels laid the ideological foundations of the housing bubble in a thousand real estate sections, design magazines, reality TV reno-shows, and financial-advice programs. The vanguard were the 24-hour cable news channels; CNBC, CNN, and Fox News institutionalized spectacular news events and scandals alongside a global expansion of economic journalism that ‘played a direct institutional role in legitimating the larger financialization process’ (Chakravartty and Schiller 2010: 685). Jim Cramer, of CNBC’s Mad Money, was the Clown Prince of the genre.

More narrowly, the question is how far business media failed in its supposed early warning function – of the precise balance between ‘unheeded warnings’ and sheer ‘indulgence of madness.’ The most authoritative study is Dean Starkman’s comprehensive review of business press coverage of the US housing bubble from 2003 to 2008. This finds that during the critical years of 2004–2006, the press missed Wall Street’s massive move into the high risk mortgage market; coverage was limited to useful-but-not-sufficient consumer-and investor-oriented stories, ‘low-priority bleats from the back of the paper’ not ‘investigative stories that confront directly powerful institutions about basic business practices.’ Instead, there were plentiful affirmative stories about financial institutions (Starkman 2011).

In both broad ideological support of credit-driven consumerism and failure as financial watchdogs, news media contributed to the hegemony of finance capital. Former Wall Street Journal reporter Anya Schiffrin puts it directly: ‘The growth of international capital markets and the spread of the Washington consensus-style economic liberalization served to promote the free market gospel globally’ (Schiffrin, 2011). Some economists saw the crisis coming, but they were marginalized. It wasn’t until the aftermath of collapse that reporters turned to Ivy League critics of Wall Street’s high-risk behavior, such as Nouriel Roubini (‘Dr. Doom’) and Joseph E Stiglitz for answers (Schiffrin, 2011).

Confusion: a state of shocked disbelief

When the house of cards comes down, the ruling class is in disarray. Alan Greenspan, US Federal Reserve Chairman, confesses to ‘a state of shocked disbelief.’ The self-described Ayn Rand enthusiast is at a loss for words and is forced to apologize. Individual self-interest, he discovers, does not provide the rational check on financial speculation he predicted. Market bubbles expand, and eventually, as they did for 17th-century Dutch tulip traders, burst. Neoliberal consensus is shaken. Ruling class fractions compete to hegemonize the crisis – divided between Democrats and Republicans over the stimulus package, and, less visibly, within the Obama regime between centre-right and centre-left factions.

Dissension within elites gives a real fluidity to this moment. Over six weeks at the end of 2008, previously derided Keynesian public-spending is suddenly legitimated. In a famous analysis of Vietnam war reporting, Daniel Hallin proposed major media become porous to previously unspeakable possibilities when there is division with ruling elites (Hallin 1984); it isn’t clear who to take orders from, or, to put it more politely, what is the authoritative perspective, or consensus position. According to W. Lance Bennett’s indexing thesis,

when official opinion is in disarray for any of a variety of reasons, the journalistic process may be relatively more chaotic. With this chaos may come a decline in the familiar ‘official’ narrative structure, opening the way for anomalous news narratives told through disparate social voices. (Bennett 1990: 107)

This is the moment when the complicity of the business media in the crisis is lambasted in Jon Stewart’s famous takedown of CNBC business analyst Rick Santelli, who had criticized the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) for ‘promoting bad behavior,’ and ‘subsidiz[ing] the losers’ mortgages.’ ‘Yah man!,’ responded Stewart. ‘Wall Street is mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore. Unless by it you mean $2-trillion dollars in their own bailout money. That they will take.’ Slump media are situated within a contested space of contradictions where a popular late-night comedy program, not the 24-hour cable news channel devoted to covering Wall Street, clarifies the core issue: how the US state engaged in a massive transfer of wealth from below to above. It is the moment The Globe and Mail runs reports on the revived fortunes of famous Marxist academics, and of Newsweek’s famous February, 2009 ‘We are All Socialists Now’ cover. New media performances are given, as bankers ritually enact repentance, and are equally ritualistically berated by staunch defenders of the market. In neo-Gramscian terms, media become a key site where new discursive articulations are made, new subject positions stitched together, and where the ruling class grasps for a new narrative. The moment of confusion was ripe for populist intervention. Understanding the complexity of credit default swaps was beyond the reach of most people. But with TARP, the Right had found an anchor for its own hegemonic narrative.

Who would personify the villain? Wall Street bankers, or irresponsible homeowners who had borrowed money to live beyond their means? Was it a story about the structural contradictions of finance capital, or one of personal moral failure? The populist Tea Party uprising chose the latter explanation. But while the villains were narrowly defined, the victims would be many.

Casualties: lay-offs, speed-ups & media profits

Meanwhile, the mediascape is itself melting down. Having helped create the crisis, corporate media are among its casualties. Whatever critical capacities existed within them for analysis, investigation, critique and reflection become more and more stressed. It may seem paradoxical to condemn the compliance of major media with neoliberalism in preparing the crisis and simultaneously lament their auto-incineration within this self-started firestorm. But we need analysis sophisticated enough to recognize that media conglomerates are institutions with uneven and contradictory composition, in which powerful tendencies towards subordination to and replication of ruling interests collide with residual traditions of journalistic responsibility, serious reporting and investigative disclosure. It is these latter elements that are most threatened in the crisis.

The transformation from Fordist to Post-Fordist media production, underway since the 1970s, took both concentrated and diffuse forms, standing in dialectical relation to each other, producing contradictory outcomes and practices. Post-Fordist networked capitalism is concentrated, in that a handful of corporate media behemoths – that is, News Corporation, Comcast, and Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE) – remain dominant players in their respective markets. On the other hand, forces push to disaggregate and de-emphasize convergence strategies (Yong Jin, 2012). New companies, such as Demand Media and other so-called ‘content mills,’ take advantage of user-generated content (UGC) and the expanding reserve army of volunteer or under-employed workers who produce it. Simultaneously, News Corporation buys MySpace, Google now controls YouTube and thousands of small new media sites become networked with mainstream news media. ‘What we are observing,’ argues Manuel Castells, ‘is the coexistence and interconnection of mainstream media, corporately owned new media, and autonomous Internet sites’ (Castells, 2007: 253).

Prior to the 1980s, media and newspapers in particular, were tied to local and national markets. But since the 1990s, newspapers and television have become integrated into the global mergers and acquisitions market. This impact has become more pronounced as the role of the finance sector has swelled over the past couple of decades. In the US, the overall share of the finance sector jumped from 11% to 12% of GNP in the 1980s, ‘to 20–21 percent by 2004–2005’ (Philips, 2009, cited in Winseck, 2010: 375). A recent survey of publicly held American newspapers conducted for the Nieman Journalism Lab found that the top investors in these companies are banks and hedge funds. One prominent player Alden Global Capital has played a direct role in the recent bankruptcy ‘shakeups’ at MediaNews Group, Tribune and Postmedia Network which bought the newspaper holdings of the now defunct CanWest Global (Langeveld, 2011).

Contradictions abound. Not the least is that while incidents of so-called ‘citizen journalism’ are on the rise, employment prospects for reporters are on the decline, as newsrooms hemorrhage jobs and finance capital strengthens its grip on news organizations. News media ostensibly serve local and national readers/audiences but they are answerable to globally integrated transnational capital which commands large cross-media empires. In each case the pattern is similar: cross-media consolidation, fueled by finance capital results in enormous debt loads. Otherwise profitable companies, struggling to make short-term debt commitments stumble, fall, or if not, find success through new efficiencies at the expense of quality journalism.

We see more spectacular news coverage of celebrity, crime and scandal, more commentary (not to be confused with diversity of opinion), and fewer resources invested in the labor of reporting, investigative or otherwise. Slump media have contributed to a crisis of political legitimacy that has, in part, been manifested in the Occupy movement and the student tuition strike in Quebec. Slump media is constitutive of the contradictions of neoliberal capitalism, while simultaneously making those contradictions visible.

Common sense: age of austerity

As we have already seen, when the crisis broke the financial implosion threw media into a disarray reflecting the confusion of the supposedly authoritative primary definers of hegemonic ‘common sense.’ Speculations about the justice and viability of capitalism unspeakable for decades briefly flashed across TV screens and newspaper headlines. And yet very soon, despite the continuing material effects of the crash in unemployment, foreclosures and insecurity, this moment of ideological turmoil subsided. Another ‘common sense’ congealed, one that neutralized the radical implications of the disaster. Its watchword: ‘age of austerity.’

Measures taken at the height of the crisis became the basis of policies designed to preserve finance capital at the expense of indebted homeowners and taxpayers. This rapid exoneration of finance capital (and of capitalism itself) provides a striking instance of what Arjen Boin, Paul ‘t Hart and Allan McConnell (2009: 16) term ‘crisis exploitation framing.’ As they explain, ‘the aftermath of a crisis and its outcomes can be usefully understood in terms of “frame contests” between the various actors that seek to exploit this crisis-induced opportunity space’ (82). When a crisis delegitimizes power and authority, ‘structural change is desired and expected by many. Such change can happen, but not necessarily so.’ Whether it does or not depends in part on the discursive framing of the disaster. We would add that in these ‘framing contests,’ a crucial operation is one the BCCCS theorists highlighted in their examination of the ‘moral panics’ that accompanied the rise of the new right: scapegoating. In Policing the Crisis, they examined how media representations of ‘muggings,’ street robberies, usually by black youths, served to condense a whole range of anxieties, around economic decline and social disintegration, so as to define a crisis of ‘law and order’ favoring authoritarian neoliberalism.

Mean streets are a long way from Wall Street, but we suggest that in the ‘framing contests’ following the crash a related, if more complex, process of media ‘scapegoating’ was at work. First was a ‘bad apples’ frame, singling-out for moral opprobrium individual ‘corrupt and greedy bankers’ (Castree, 2009), a frame promoted both by the Obama regime and the business community. Second was the right-Republican frame of targeting feckless mortgage takers (particularly poor racial minorities) and the Federal programs that subsidized banks for offering those mortgages: this frame made the crisis a result of Big Government, in collusion with welfare recipients and immigrants. Third, and perhaps ultimately most telling, was a softened, liberal version of the same idea, which avoided (explicitly) stigmatizing particular groups, and often loudly repudiated ‘playing the blame game’ but then attributed the crash to generalized consumer greed.

This last frame – ‘we are all to blame’ – was particularly important in providing discursive support for what gradually emerged as the hegemonic route out of the crisis: a private-sector finance bailout paid for by public austerity. By a remarkable series of elisions, this universalization of responsibility proffered a very specific scapegoat. If ‘all of us’ are to blame, and ‘all of us must’ pay, and as the representative of ‘all of us’ is the state, the costs of the crisis must be met by a reduction in government services. And since such cuts involve the jobs or wages of those employed by the state the new enemy of ‘all us’ became, not banks, or capitalism, but the public sector. By January 2011, The Economist, flagship journal of capital, overtly declared the new common sense with a cover showing placard waving demonstrators arrayed on the crest of a hill like barbarians awaiting the charge of Roman legions, and titled ‘The Battle Ahead: Confronting Public Sector Unions.’ Capital had clearly found how to police this crisis.

Then things changed again.

Challenge: we are the 99%

For three years, North America saw no major challenge to austerity. A decade before, in the era of the anti-globalization movement and the Battle of Seattle, the US had witnessed a wave of left-activism making wide use of networked indymedia. Now this was notably absent. And then, in 2011, suddenly, to use Paul Mason’s (2012) phrase, ‘things were kicking off everywhere,’ and kicking off in North America as the Occupy Movement. Resistance, slow to emerge, when it did had a very different tone from alter-globalization, infused not with the optimism of ‘another world is possible’ but with the grim confrontation of ‘no future.’ Confronting disaster arising from the global fluidity of networked capital, the response was to seize space, hold ground, occupy.

At this point in our narrative we must directly confront the issue of digital networks and social media in the political mediascape. Occupations depend on bodies filling space. But they also involve communication, in at least two aspects: horizontal general-assembly decision-making, and networked social media strategies. The very slow and very fast. The latter is now difficult to discuss intelligently, because Liberal commentators so heavily fetishize it – as if Facebook and Twitter, not unemployment, rising food prices and authoritarianism, were the cause of uprisings in Egypt – a backhanded way of vindicating high-tech advanced capital, and one that locks attention on middle class activists at the expense of those of workers and the poor.

The preconditions for Occupy Wall Street (OWS) lay in material conditions: an official US unemployment rate officially at 9%, in reality close to 16%, grotesque income polarization; evictions; bankruptcies. But the spark was virtual. Or better, there were sequence of virtual sparks, like a gunpowder trail: the initial Adbusters Internet call to occupation then relayed through a circuit of left blogs and news sites; the independent, yet intersecting, establishment of the Tumblr micro-blog, ‘We are the 99%’ where the photo and text testimonials of the victims of the global slump attracted a mounting number of hits; the endorsement of the occupation by hacker network Anonymous, articulating it to the WikiLeaks struggles. It was also on-line that news of OWS radiated out.

All this emerged from a vortex that mixed individual digital users; highly politicized, shoestring budgeted media collectives; liberal small scale media capital or would-be capital; and the not so small scale resources of media celebrities. It took about two weeks before the mainstream media response tipped from a vicious circle of silencing dissent to a virtuous circle of movement amplification, a transition marked by the New York Times decision to cover OWS in depth, and second, by the anomalous irruption of critical reporting about police violence against the occupiers on the network news of MSNBC.

In the aftermath of 9/11 security pundits declared that Al Qaeda had mastered a ‘netwar’ formula, namely: stage a dramatic event, at a global media center, conveying an unmistakable message and exemplifying a modus operandi that can be relayed to and replicated without central control by numerous franchising groups. And this was pretty much the dynamic unleashed by OWS, one week following the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Within a month, by October 15th, synchronized occupations and demonstrations proliferated across large and small cities in the US Canada, and internationally.

A mere three months later, OWS was over, the occupiers evicted and sites dismantled by police, generally under municipal public safety and anti-vacancy ordnances, as the weather turned cold and media attention waned: journalists had lost patience trying to decipher protracted assembly debates. Nonetheless, even in this brief manifestation, OWS did leave traces, on the political landscape, and in media discourse. As Dorothy Kidd (2012: 3) observes ‘OWS disrupted the frame of the dominant corporate media, and of the Washington neoliberal consensus’: With the phrase ‘We are the 99%’, it ‘finger[ed] Wall Street and the tiny minority of Americans… for the economic and social crises affecting the great majority of people, expanded the collective lexicon, [and] put poverty and systemic inequality back on the political agenda.’ Even as OWS vanished from US cities, much of its spirit – not to mention its media tactics – migrated north, to the equally remarkable and more immediately successful revolt of Montreal students against tuition fee increases in Quebec’s Maple Spring. More generally, OWS appearance alongside the other 2011 movements of Egypt, Spain, and Greece, mark a new phase in the story of slump media, inaugurating a period of intensified struggle, and signaling that capital might not have things all its own way in the making of hegemonic common sense.

Conclusion: uncertainty and possibility

This prolegomenon has mapped a theoretically-informed narrative history of slump media. It is, as we said at the beginning, inspired by the work of the Birmingham School, in particular by Policing the Crisis which in the 1970s studied how a law and order crisis prepared the way for ‘authoritarian populism’ of Thatcherism. Grasping the dynamic complexity and the process of change within the mediascape in a period of conjunctural crisis is crucial for the strategy and tactics of movements whose project for the future aims for greater social equality and public control of economic resources. To contribute to a progressive project for the future, media scholarship must go beyond fatalism about ideological domination or euphoria over social media, and grapple with the real contradictions of slump media.