It is trivial to claim that the press are biased. Everybody says it.

In particular, one hears that the press are biased towards the left, but this is incomplete. In fact the press advance a very specific political line that is less undifferentiated leftism than it is establishment progressive liberalism. In Germany there are Marxist publications, like Junge Welt, which lie substantially to the left of the media liberal programme, and there are of course various traditional or conservative publications that outflank it on the right. Institutional media is not just “as left as possible,” but rather a carefully calibrated centre-left internationalism.

The Politically Incorr... DiLorenzo, Thomas J. Best Price: $12.95 Buy New $12.96 (as of 10:36 UTC - Details) I think about this a lot, because reading the press is more than half of my job as a blogger. It is the only thing that I do each and every day. I don’t always watch broadcast media, because I much prefer the written form; and I don’t write every day, whether because circumstances intervene or because my writing muscles need a rest or because the ideas I’m developing are not yet ready for the wider world. But, I do read the press every day. I probably read thousands of articles every month, and it is impossible to do all of this reading without getting slightly creeped out. It is amazing how such a wide range of diverse publications, across different regions and countries, can maintain nearly identical messaging on such a wide range of issues. I also find it curious how they manage to change direction in tandem – within literally hours of each other – when as so often it comes time to sing a new tune.

The problem here is simple: How do you maintain this discipline in a decentralised system, across hundreds of different publications all claiming editorial independence? How do you keep literal state media like Deutsche Welle, public media like Norddeutscher Rundfunk and private media like the Süddeutsche Zeitung all on the same page? We should not minimise what an achievement this is. Communist regimes like the DDR had relatively few press outlets, all of them controlled directly by state or party operatives. Their coordination was anything but mysterious. Western liberal democracies, on the other hand, have vastly more complex and decentralised media systems, but despite this they still manage high degrees of coordinated and even manipulated coverage.

Whenever I bring up this topic, people respond with the same two or three explanations, so allow me to go through them and explain why they are in themselves inadequate:

• “The press are all owned by the same two or three corporations”: Sure, the ownership of private media is highly consolidated, but we still have to explain the seamless integration of public and state media in this system. I find it particularly amazing that German state media (which has no aspirations to editorial independence) and German public media (which is separately funded via mandatory license fees precisely to ensure its independence) end up with more or less the same takes on a wide variety of issues.
• “Journalists are just highly-networked professionals who copy from and follow each other”: Sure, but the phenomenon we’re witnessing is bigger than mere herd behaviour. It is herd behaviour always in the same specific direction, always making the same specific arguments, always thematising and downplaying the same things.
• “Journalists are a bunch of urbanite professionals who express opinions typical of their class”: Sure, even I have said this, and while it explains a great deal, it cannot account for the complexity of the phenomenon before us. Consider how establishment papers of different ideological bent work together to block off opposite sides of the Overton Window and confine discourse. Centre-left papers, for example, sometimes voice nervousness about progressive liberal foreign policy, while demanding more progressive liberal domestic policy. Centre-right papers, for their part, often voice scepticism of progressive liberal domestic policy while doubling down on progressive liberal foreign policy. In this way disparate media work together as a system to support the same political programme while providing the illusion of diverse opinion. The Problem with Socia... Thomas DiLorenzo Best Price: $9.49 Buy New $11.93 (as of 06:45 UTC - Details)

This is not the phenomenon you’d expect from market forces alone. The system we have is constantly flooding the airwaves with the same narrow range of bland and hackneyed opinions. The demand for journalism and analysis from a different perspective is enormous, which is one of the reasons it’s even possible for a nobody like me to have any readership at all. It’s also why anti-establishment views quickly dominate any platform that is not heavily moderated. The standard liberal progressive fare is on offer everywhere; nobody need wade into the dark and dubious recesses of the internet to find more of it.

Of course, by saying that the coordinated messaging of the liberal press is a problem to be understood, I don’t mean to say that it is entirely mysterious. Media throughout the West is awash in outside money and influence. In addition to the farce of public media (that is, direct government intervention in the media marketplace), a wealth of non-profits, non-governmental organisations, academic institutions and other monstrosities are always sticking their fingers in the pie, and always towards the same ends.

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