Matt Guardino

Whose Views Made the News? Media Coverage and the March to War in Iraq

Criticism of the news medias performance in the months before the 2003 Iraq War has been profuse. Scholars, commentators, and journalists themselves have argued that the media aided the Bush administration in its march to war by failing to air a wide-ranging debate that offered analysis and commentary from diverse perspectives. As a result, critics say, the public was denied the opportunity to weigh the claims of those arguing both for and against military action in Iraq. We report the results of a systematic analysis of every ABC, CBS, and NBC Iraq-related evening news story—1,434 in all—in the 8 months before the invasion (August 1, 2002, through March 19, 2003). We find that news coverage conformed in some ways to the conventional wisdom: Bush administration officials were the most frequently quoted sources, the voices of anti-war groups and opposition Democrats were barely audible, and the overall thrust of coverage favored a pro-war perspective. But while domestic dissent on the war was minimal, opposition from abroad—in particular, from Iraq and officials from countries such as France, who argued for a diplomatic solution to the standoff—was commonly reported on the networks. Our findings suggest that media researchers should further examine the inclusion of non-U.S. views on high-profile foreign policy debates, and they also raise important questions about how the news filters the communications of political actors and refracts—rather than merely reflects—the contours of debate.

The Tea Party and the Crisis of Neoliberalism: Mainstreaming New Right Populism in the Corporate News Media

Within months of Barack Obamas election, a putatively grass-roots conservative uprising emerged to challenge the Democratic Partys agenda. In this article, we analyze the role of cable news in the rise of the Tea Party during the current “crisis of neoliberalism”—a moment of political-economic volatility brought about by the Great Recession. We argue that the Tea Partys political purpose is to hold together the New Right coalition of business elites and white working- and middle-class Americans that undergirds the neoliberal political project. In the context of a deregulated corporate mass media, we show that both “right-wing” and “moderate” cable networks mainstreamed the Tea Party by framing it as a legitimate social movement, enabling the widespread projection of right-wing populist discourse in support of neoliberalism. In light of our study, we suggest that democratizing the mass media is crucial for a sustained progressive political response in the United States.

Neoliberal populism as hegemony: a historical-ideological analysis of US economic policy discourse

ABSTRACT This article explores how neoliberal and populist elements were initially fused in US political talk to legitimize the expansion of corporate power and socioeconomic inequality that has occurred over recent decades. Applying neo-Gramscian critical semiotic analysis to speeches, news texts and legislative statements about the 1981 Reagan economic plan, I illustrate how a distinctive neoliberal-populist discourse articulates signs of ‘the American people’ with signs of market individualism, and further connects these signs to the neoliberal political project’s policy moves to roll back state protections and deliver large tax cuts. Neoliberal populism is a paradigmatic instance of what Stuart Hall has termed the ‘trans-coding’ of distinct semantic elements to form a new hegemonic discourse. Through neoliberal-populist signifying processes, people who are deemed unable or unwilling to inhabit market-centric subjectivities, or to promote policies defined as ‘free market,’ are ideologically drawn outside the perimeters of social esteem and political legitimacy. These processes have created obstacles to imagining a unified, politically effective opposition to the neoliberal project in the United States. Moreover, by ideologically constructing ‘the American people’ as anti-statists in the realm of economic and social welfare policy, neoliberal-populist discourse makes it difficult to articulate democratic values and practices with the state as a mechanism through which greater economic equality and substantive democracy could be realized. My analysis illuminates the immediate historical roots of a public discourse with deep anchors in popular common sense which continues to pervade official US policy talk. The cultural resonance and political influence of neoliberal-populist discourse help to explain the persistence of the neoliberal project in the USA.

The Capitalist Advertising and Marketing Complex and the US Social Order: A Political-Materialist Analysis

Abstract In this article, we explore the complex interconnections between monopoly power and commercial promotion and explain their role in maintaining the United States (US) social order in the twenty-first century. Our focus is the Capitalist Advertising and Marketing Complex (CAMC), or the range of corporate and state institutions that support and empower advertising and marketing in politics, culture, and the economy. Synthesizing and advancing early Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the Monopoly Capital School of political economy, we examine how the CAMC has degraded the Internet communications, the news media, and the pharmaceutical industry, in the process emerging as a formidable support mechanism for neoliberal capitalism. Our political-materialist approach illustrates how critical perspectives on political economy and cultural production at the intellectual forefront when the Caucus for a New Political Science (CNPS) was founded can motivate contemporary work that supports the “struggle for a better world” central to the Caucus’ mission.

Reason, Tradition, and the Good: MacIntyre's Tradition-Constituted Reason and Frankfurt School Critical Theory

This is in everyone’s interest, and Lerner’s book points us in a promising and under-theorized new direction. Making Democracy Fun is not long on discussions of democratic theory, and does not sufficiently explore how to address systemic barriers to participation, structural inequalities in the distribution of power, or how to create buy-in from governing elites. Future work focused on exploring the political challenges facing game integration (as opposed to design) would be useful. But Lerner has opened a new door and offers us a surprisingly fertile perspective for applied democratic theory, and with it the possibility that by making democracy fun we can once again make it powerful.