It isn't "corporate media" - it's capitalist media

New reporting from Semafor gives us our clearest picture yet of how big money shapes modern media.

It has been more than thirty years since the term “corporate media” first took hold in left political discourse. The first time I encountered it was in 1999 during the Seattle WTO protests; Indymedia, one of the more significant radical publishing forums of that era, emerged during the protests “to generate alternatives to the biases inherent in the corporate media controlled by profit”. Critiques of corporate media were a staple of Ralph Nader’s 2000 campaign as well. Of course NBC’s coverage of Nader was biased — it was a subsidiary of General Electric!

In those days the relationship between capital and the media was relatively simple. Most of the media was either controlled by a few major corporate conglomerates or in the process of joining one of them. Those conglomerates, in turn, were significantly (and often wholly) reliant on the sponsorship of major profit-seeking corporations. Accordingly, the “corporate media” had a systematic business interest in shutting out political perspectives that were hostile to the bottom line of corporate America.

Thirty years ago, the left critique of corporate media gave us profound insight into the structure of capitalism’s ideological apparatus. But that was thirty years ago.

In the decades since, the media has undergone profound transformations. The internet in particular has often been a genuinely democratizing force, first during the Age of Blogs (Web 1.0) and then during the Age of Social Media (Web 2.0). But in both cases, capital has labored mightily to reassert its control of mass media. And capital’s strategies have changed, the critique of “corporate media” has not only lost its relevance — it has become a red herring that capital uses to its advantage.