The term mainstream media is so common these days, we can forget where it came from. But it has an interesting connection with the web.
Somewhere at the intersection of the information age and the rise of twenty-four hour news cycles, the phrase mainstream media began to take hold. It’s a word that’s origin can be hard to place, but its popularization is deeply connected to the web.
At least some of that story began in 1997, when Noam Chomsky wrote about the mainstream media for Z magazine. In the piece, he skewers the institutionalization of news and politics designed to enforce adherence to a certain worldview.
Chomsky’s primary insight is that this is not due to some Machiavellian conspiracy, but rather from decades, or indeed centuries, of a power structure designed to funnel people through elite institutions and universities and into centers of power and influence. Along the way, this very structure filters out individuals who stray from that worldview. Each individual in this system is able to speak freely. Most have no idea they are a willing participant. Even so, the result, Chomsky argues, creates a homogeneity of perspective within the news, “real news,” also known as the elite media, or agenda-setting news. Try as they might, it is near impossible for those who exist within mainstream media to remove themselves from it.
The real mass media are basically trying to divert people. Let them do something else, but don’t bother us (us being the people who run the show). Let them get interested in professional sports, for example. Let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems or something like that. Anything, as long as it isn’t serious. Of course, the serious stuff is for the big guys. “We” take care of that.
Chomsky goes on to describe how a challenge to mainstream media has come as the country has trended towards a more direct democracy. As more people participated in the political process, a process which moved out of smoke-filled rooms and into the public, individuals began to question mainstream media. “So what do you do?” Chomsky asks. “Obviously, you have to control what people think,” he concludes.
This article was published in 1997. The World Wide Web hadn’t quite yet brought publishing to the masses. It hadn’t yet taken root in the form of blogging, a publishing model not nearly as beholden to large audiences and big-pocketed advertisers and investors as the mainstream media.
The late 1990’s coincided with a rise of indie blogging. Publishing on the web, where costs were near zero, meant that anyone could do it. And lots of people who may have been shut out from traditional media created their own identities online.
In his book Say Everything, writer Scott Rosenberg traces this rise. He includes a chapter on political blogging, which gained momentum in the early 2000’s following September 11th and the subsequent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Politics, Rosenberg notes, was when the blogosphere began to actually challenge the mass media status quo. To step into the “serious stuff”, as Chomsky would say.
These bloggers set themselves apart from their “serious” predecessors as often as they could. They imagined blogging as something more authentic, on the ground, unencumbered by the pressures of the elite-driven media industry. Which is how the term mainstream media came into popular use by political bloggers in this era, as Rosenberg notes.
They wrote with awe about the brave new Web world they felt they were discovering, and with disdain for the tired old media world they were leaving behind—a world they would eventually label dismissively as “the MSM” (for “mainstream media”) They discovered, as if for the first time, the power of linking, to one another and to original source material. They reveled in their freedom from authority and paraded what they saw as dissent from liberal norms.
Pulling from examples like Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo and Matt Drudge’s Drudge Report, Rosenberg describes how some blogs were actually able to outpace their traditional mainstream media counterparts. Andrew Sullivan, who created the blog Daily Dash, would later recall how he was sometimes able to break a story before the big players.
I remember trying to fathom some of the complexities of the Florida election nightmare when I got an e-mail from a Florida politics professor explaining every detail. If I’d been simply reporting the story in the traditional way, I’d have never found this fount of information. As it was, I found myself scooping major news outlets on arcane electoral details about chads and voting machines. Peer-to-peer journalism, I realised, had a huge advantage over old-style journalism. It could marshal the knowledge and resources of thousands, rather than the few.
“Blogs are useful because they are immediate,” Ira Brodsky once wrote, “interactive and accessible to anyone who stumbles on a truth the mainstream media, for whatever reason, chooses to. Bloggers could use a personal and distinct voice and tone, blog at whatever frequency they wished, and write about their own areas of interest. It was decidedly different than its counterpart in traditional media.
After a couple of years, the mainstream media began to take notice. Some were merely in awe of its success. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, one reporter tried to chart what it was that made blogging so special.
The most popular bloggers build a sense of community by linking to each other and writing in a voice that cartwheels off the page, as a distinct alternative to what they see as the distant, establishment voice of newspaper journalists and others. Hence, the latest angst-filled question: Whither the blog-o-sphere, not to mention the future of the news media as we know it?
But many others treated blogging as unserious. A hobby of amateurs, not to be trusted. An offhand interview with Brian Williams sums it up well. “Someone named ‘Spike,’ blogging in his bathrobe may consult Wikipedia,” Williams was said to have commented, as the interviewer notes that traditional outlets “fact checks before going on air by consulting real, hard bound encyclopedias, in real office libraries.”
That kind of contempt set up an antagonistic relationship. Bloggers frequently took aim at the mainstream media in their posts, in an attempt to undermine their authenticity and trustworthiness. More traditional outlets, in turn, hand-waved blogging away as something frivolous.
That tension never went away. It wasn’t long before “mainstream media” became less descriptive and more pejorative. It was hurled at any source considered under the influence of elite control, warranted or not. If you chart its use on the blogosphere, you’ll find mention after mention deriding the mainstream media.
After a time, it entered more popular usage. In fact, many bloggers eventually went on to work for the very same organizations they once stood in opposition too. The term became even more common.
In the last few major political cycles, mainstream media has been adopted by sources that would have formerly fallen squarely into the category. It has been more or less drained of any original meaning, leaving only the pejorative connotation of “elite,” or often as just an “other.” Don’t trust this source, the usage seems to infer, they are mainstream.
Blogging is alive and well, of course. And alternative media is once again on the rise. The Chomsky definition may have been stripped away, but the web remains a path to something different.