The NYT, transphobia, and journalists as "watchdogs"
Are newspapers enemies or servants of the powerful?
Today, I canceled my subscription to the New York Times. This letter and the NYT’s response to it should help contextualize my decision. One of the letter’s signatories, p.e. moskowitz, argued on Twitter today that journalism was a “fourth estate” serving the interests of the powerful:
If you read much about journalism as a profession, you’ll find a lot of canine metaphors. Newspapers are “watchdogs” with an adversarial relationship to politicians, keeping an eye out for corruption. This is why the Washington Post’s tagline is “Democracy Dies in Darkness”; it’s a professional invocation of “sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
Something interesting about the Post’s tagline is the notion that journalism directly upholds and reproduces bourgeois democracy. The idea that journalists serve the powerful rather than challenge them is an old one - it dates back to Walter Lippmann’s 1922 articulation of “manufacturing consent,” later popularized by Chomsky and others.
Later in the 20th century, theorists like Gramsci and Althusser explained how media and other “ideological state apparatuses” cultivate hegemony in service of the ruling class. Political sociologist Ralph Miliband has maybe the best line addressing the canine metaphors:
The press may well claim to be ‘independent’ and to fulfil an important watchdog function. What the claim overlooks, however, is the very, large fact that it is the Left at which the watchdogs generally bark with most ferocity, and that what they are above all protecting is the status quo.
Miliband famously sparred with fellow Marxist state theorist Nicos Poulantzas in the New Left Review. One interesting feature of their debate centered the position of newspapers in relation to the state and capital. For his part, Miliband argued that ideological institutions like the media were adjacent to and partially enclosed by the State system. On the other hand, Poulantzas argued that journalists were themselves state agents:
If the State is defined as the instance that maintains the cohesion of a social formation and which reproduces the conditions of production of a social system by maintaining class domination, it is obvious that the institutions in question—the State ideological apparatuses—fill exactly the same function.
In other words, if the State is the thing that constitutes and reproduces the oppressive social order–and if media outlets also reproduce this order–then we might benefit from thinking about journalists as part of the State. This is counter-intuitive in the sense that capitalist democracies think of themselves as protecting a free press. But some of the best scientific explanations are very counter intuitive…
It’s hard to fathom how editors at the NYT sleep at night these days. Trans people are being murdered, and the paper of record is publishing screeds that create political consensus for this reign of terror. If journalists really are enemies of the powerful, I’d hope to see some internal revolt.
In any case, I won’t pay for it, and neither should you.