In the midst of a national disaster Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had to take a shot at the news media when he told Florida’s Voice, “You have national regime media, that they wanted to see Tampa [get hit], because they thought that would be worse for Florida.”
First off the word “they” is almost always vague and all encompassing. It can be specific in the sense of pointing out a certain group. What “they” does, is takes the individuality out of the group and assumes that all of “they” or them think the same. Or, have the same agenda. But a red flag should always be waved when anybody uses the word “they,” particularly in what follows.
The group identity can be variously based–on skin color, on religion, on ethnic origin. But it is always contrasted with a perceived other against whom the nation is to be defined. Fascist nationalism creates a dangerous “them” to guard against…”
Jason Stanley “How Fascism Works The Politics of Us and Them”
Pronouns are useful little words but they can be dangerous little mines in today’s grammar. For instance Seventeen.com says beware of third person pronouns. “These words carry meaning and impact, and are a crucial marker of one’s identity, especially for nonbinary, gender non-conforming, and transgender folks.”
Having a vague idea of nonbinary political affairs in Florida, I doubt seriously if that was where DeSantis was going with “they.” According to Newsweek, DeSantis continued by professing his deeper understanding of the national media, and not their sexual identification, by saying, “That’s how these (again they) people think. I mean, they don’t care about the people of this state. They don’t care about the people of this community. They want to use storms and destruction from storms as a way to advance their agenda.”
“Were it left to me to decide if we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Thomas Jefferson
This says a lot, particularly about DeSantis and his perception of a national news media agenda concerning an impending national disaster. What is interesting is how DeSantis takes the national media, as “they,” a group, which is really a mass media conglomeration of individual news organizations. He then boils them down into a singular group with a single agenda, sort of groupthink.
Groupthink refers to the tendency for certain types of groups to reach decisions that are extreme and which tend to be unwise or unrealistic. Groupthink occurs when individuals in cohesive groups fail to consider alternative perspectives because they are motivated to reach a consensus which typically results in making less than desirable decisions.
By Derek Schaedig, SimplyPsychology.org published March 25, 2022
DeSantis is making the assumption that the “national regime media” is a monolithic block. It could be argued, within any industry, news gathers included, that there are best business practices to be followed. Individual political ideology may be different, though. Let’s get realistic newspapers and politicians are symbiotic creatures that always have had an agenda. From the very beginning the two have swam in the same ink barrel. Some newspapers may have been started to push a particular political agenda, politician or business. One of the first real political papers with an agenda was the Gazette of the United States. Talk about regime media. The name drips with all inclusiveness and one-sidedness. John Fenno founded the Alexander Hamilton backed-paper in April of 1789 with a motto: “he that is not for us, is against us.”
Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.
Benjamin Franklin
Of course the main target of this gazette was Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic Republican Party, which clashed with the Hamilton backed Federalists–on the agenda for the new country. As the political animosity between Hamilton and Jefferson grew, Jefferson felt the need to respond in like. He oversaw the founding of a rival paper in October of 1791. And not to be outdone he named it The National Gazette.
Before long, Jefferson’s affair with, and fathering children, with Sally Hemings was exposed. Hamilton’s political-career ending affair with Maria Reynolds came under public scrutiny, too. The whole Hamilton/Jefferson print war is an agenda onto itself.
Caught in the cross hairs of these agendas was the thin-skinned President John Adams. Adams found himself in clashing foreign affairs agendas between France and Britain, which ended up with the United States in a Quasi War with France. This time there was no Washington around to keep America out of the foreign fray and tamp down domestic differences.
Federalist took a pro British position while the Democratic Republicans backed France. In fact, Hamilton wrote in the Gazette of the United States that Jeffersonians were “more ‘Frenchman than American’ and claimed that they were prepared ‘to immolate the independence and welfare of their country at the shrine of France.’” Today we hear the same sort of claims concerning the U.S. being rolled over with socialism, fascism, critical race theory and wokeism.
But a lot has happened since those founding days. The evening news paper is a thing of the past and many local newspapers have folded–an agenda just to stay in business. The press, like a lot of industries, has gone from private ownership to corporate control through the decades. Just look at the airline industry. It has gone through all sorts of mergers. American Airlines has merged with Eastern Airlines, Trans World Airlines and US Airways–which operated Trump Shuttle. Banking and investments companies have gone through several iterations of bankruptcies and mergers to where the corner bank has had multiple signs coming down and going up. Take the recent 2008 real estate meltdown, I am sure most every real estate, construction and finance company prior to the bubble bursting had an agenda: cash in now while the market is hot. Some were able to get in and get out. Others, not so quick, it has given us the economic concept of “too big to fail.”
The news gathering industry, like all other businesses, is not immune from economic downturns, corporate buyouts and consolidations. Take the media company Comcast for instance. According to Investopidia, Comcast is a $200 billion dollar company that owns NBC and “controls the news media outlets NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC, and UK’s Sky News.”
Then there is News Corp, a $10 billion market company which includes famous brands such as “The Times, Dow Jones, The Wall Street Journal, The Sun, Herald Sun, and HarperCollins Publishers. News Corp formerly owned FOX News properties before they were spun off.”
The list goes on with Disney owning ABC; Paramount owning CBS; and IAC/Interactive Corp which owns The Daily Beast. IAC/Interactive Corp owns “online news and information providers such as People Magazine, The Balance, Entertainment Weekly, Better Homes & Gardens, Food + Wine,” –and Investopdia.
And then there are companies, like Sinclair Broadcasting which operates in multiple markets. As of December 31, 2019 Sinclair “operated and/or provided services to 191 stations in 89 markets.”
Governor DeSantis should be a little more specific in “they.” If the national regime media has an agenda against Florida and DeSantis, it has to be a corporate agenda. And that agenda, like all businesses, is to make a profit. Take Air America, the progressive talk radio network launched in March of 2004. Its agenda was to counter conservative talking heads like Rush Limbaugh. It went through several bouts of economic upheaval before it finally crashed and burned. What seemed as a winning format (agenda) was a financial bust, going off the air in January of 2010. An agenda is great but if there is no bucks there is no agenda.
If anything can be true about “they” or “them” it can be said about politicians. “They,” politicians, all have an agenda. And if it is one thing they know, it is how easily they can spread their agenda through the “national regime media.” Framed in an “us versus them agenda” it can merge right into any event or news cycle. Best of all, it’s the “free” press. There is no economic cost to spouting off an agenda. Just a political cost.
https://www.history.com/topics/early-us/alien-and-sedition-acts
By Delbert Tran. Yale Law School, Media Freedom Access Clinic
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