Hating the Media is Easy… Too Easy

Last week, I wrote about Naomi Osaka and the French Open, as well as Bob Brenly being suspended for comments he made about Marcus Stroman. The common thread in both stories was people hating the media. In the former case, the media was insensitive to mental health; in the latter, it was perpetuating racist ideas of how baseball players ought to behave.

Of course, it wasn’t really “the media” doing it either case: In the case of Osaka, there were a variety of responses to her decision, with many openly applauding it. It was the officials at Roland-Garros who disciplined her, not the media. And in the case of Brenly, the offense was limited to a single person. Even his broadcasting partner didn’t indulge his comments. And yet in both cases it was clear that a general disgust with “the media” was fueling much of the anger at the situation.

And in both cases, there were legitimate media criticisms to make. The media can in fact be insensitive to the mental (and physical) health of players, and announcers like Brenly do traffic in racist tropes about young players. Socialists ought to recognize the class dimensions at play in both situations. The media is largely drawn from the professional class, which is trained to identify with ownership. So even though reporters themselves do not make the rules about press access, they benefit from the rules the ownership class imposes—the owners want the promotion that press conferences get them, and so they force players to participate in the name of access. So there are serious, materialistic criticisms to make of the role that the media plays in sports.

The problem is that those are almost never the criticisms people make. Media bashing is almost never accompanied by a serious institutional analysis. It is usually ginned up by people in the media themselves, who do it with a sly “not ME, of course, but THEM” attitude. Because “the media” is such a large and amorphous entity, including reporters and bloggers and TV pundits and Twitch streamers and freelancers and YouTubers (and, of course, this very Substack that you’re reading right now!), that no matter how many people you include, you can always point to some OTHER group, whether it’s the “mainstream media” or the “traditional media” or the “liberal media,” and accuse them of doing some awful thing.

But it is precisely because the groups are so large and the distinctions so vague that we should be wary of these methods. Even terms that seem to invoke class like “corporate media” seem less like serious analysis (Twitter and YouTube are corporations, but those platforms don’t seem to count as “corporate media”) and more like an attempt to coopt the language of class. Indeed, bashing the media is a favorite tactic of reactionary forces that want to channel anger at the capitalist class towards something OTHER than the capitalist class. The most obvious example of this was Donald Trump, who built an entire presidential campaign and administration on an obsession with cable news, but it’s a common tactic. After all, a world in which nobody trusts the media is actually great for capitalists and imperialists trying to get away with atrocities.

In sports media, the stakes are much lower, but the tactic is even easier. Since everyone feels qualified to have an opinion about sports, the barrier to entry is low. Imagine any idiotic sports opinion and you can probably find a mid-tier sports radio host or surprisingly big Twitter account or Skip Bayless to argue it. So you can always find someone to ridicule for an awful opinion.

But this also makes the sports media more egalitarian, which often works quite well. A YouTuber and podcaster like Jomboy can break down the Astros sign stealing, based on reporting from seasoned journalists at a professional outlet like The Athletic. Overall, this shows what the media is doing, whether it’s original reporting or opinion or just entertaining videos or stories, is a good thing. The problem is that the institutions in which it operates are controlled by capital. We need to fix those institutions, but when you hear people use mistake those institutions for “the media” as a whole, you should be very, very skeptical.