The American media has a Baptists and bootlegger problem.
“Baptists and bootleggers” is one of the most useful concepts in understanding how economic regulation works in the real world. Coined by economist Bruce Yandle, the term describes how groups that are ostensibly opposed to each other have a shared interest in maintaining the status quo. Baptists favored prohibition, and so did bootleggers who profited by selling illegal alcohol. And politicians benefited by playing both sides.
There’s an analogous dynamic with the press today.
Across the ideological spectrum, from the Chomskyite left to the Bannonite right, partisans, politicians, and journalists themselves inflate the power, influence, and importance of “the media.”
Let’s stay with the journalists for a moment. Members of all professions have a tendency to hold themselves in high regard. Nearly everyone, from politicians to plumbers, want to believe that what they do matters. But with the possible exceptions of politicians and actors, journalists probably have the highest estimation of their own importance.
My point isn’t that they’re wrong—heck, I like to believe what I do matters—but that they exaggerate not just their power and influence, but their celebrity and personal authority. Heart surgeons are famously arrogant, but there is not an endless stream of conferences, books, editorials, essays, and academic courses dedicated to the indispensable role of cardiothoracic medicine. I doubt there are any sanitation or plumbing trade journals that proclaim “Democracy Dies in Sewage” on their front page.
In psychological terms alone, it’s in the interests of journalists to encourage the widespread obsession with the Fourth Estate. But the media is a mess in part because it believed its own hype.
I should be clear: I’ve had my own obsessions over the years, working as a conservative media critic and writing scores of columns about liberal media bias—which is real.
But I’ve grown weary with media criticism, again not because the criticisms are necessarily wrong, but because they work from a transparently false theory about the power of the institution itself. That’s the Baptist-and-bootlegger problem: the outsized power and influence is a lie agreed upon.
It’s like American journalism is an exhausted prizefighter on the brink of collapse, held up by his opponent to give the crowd a good show.
According to many on the right—who often unwittingly repurpose old left-wing formulations first introduced by progressives, “cultural Marxists,” and other lefty bogeymen—“the media” creates narratives and manufactures consent (a term coined by Walter Lippmann and adopted by Noam Chomsky) that the rest of us are powerless to overcome.
Consider climate change. The press has invested vast resources into climate coverage and has been hectoring and catastrophizing about it for 20 years. And yet, climate change remains at or near the bottom of every public opinion survey about the “most important issue.” If the media can manufacture consensus, why is there so little consensus about climate change?
This is just one example of the media thinking not just that it should—but can—define the interests of the public. The amount of energy and handwringing that has been put into, say, AP Stylebook revisions over terms like “illegal immigrant” or whether to capitalize “Black” or “White” when discussing race is premised on a grandiose theory of the role of the press as guardians of the American mind or soul. The whole “defund the police” conversation in the press transpired amid near-zero support for the idea among most Americans.
Or consider Donald Trump. I’m no fan, but I look like a MAGA rally front-seater compared to many in the media (and not just among opinion columnists), and yet Trump not only won, but improved his standing with nearly every demographic group.
The response from some on the left is a variant of the old “but real socialism has never been tried!” trope. If only the media had really held him accountable—or took climate change, race, etc. seriously—things would be different.
The response from many in the media has been to wrap themselves in the mantle of heroic martyrdom as Trump attacks them.
And on the right, the ineffectiveness of the media to control the narrative is occasionally celebrated but it never diminishes the hysteria about its alleged omnipotence. The media, Michael Shellenberger insisted last summer “is arguably more powerful than the government itself.”
Really? It has a funny way of showing it. The industry has been shrinking for decades. Since 2000, of the 532 industries tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, newspapers saw the single sharpest decline, 77 percent. Trust in the media is in the gutter.
So here’s an idea for the press: Just tell the truth as best you can and stop worrying about narratives. The American people will write their own.
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