Institutional constraints or voluntary deference? Marginalized critical news content, spiked stories, series and careers subjected to the Buzzsaw

Abstract

This article focuses on all reported post-Cold War instances of several antidemocratic phenomena that occur within the US news media industry: the spiking of news stories and investigations with critical inclinations, demotions to enterprising journalists or editors, cancellations of TV programs due to critical content and forced resignations of journalists, independent and wire-based stories being overlooked by mainstream media, and investigative series whose story follow-ups are being marginalized out of existence or spiked. The reported occurrences are based on a plethora of evidence and documentation: testimony by journalists and/or their newsroom colleagues, audio-recorded conversations between editors and journalists, documented pressure by advertisers and powerful public officials, and documented meetings between editors and high-powered officials that led to spiked stories and/or follow-up reporting. This evidence shows a clear pattern of institutional constraints that result in varying forms of censorship. The focus on these repressive occurrences is of significant theoretical importance and is not only an attack on journalists but an attack on democracy as a whole. The most important theoretical tension between two models of media analysis – the indexing and propaganda models – is a conflicting attribution of culpability for poor media performance and the subsequent lack of news media independence. This article represents an attempt to unveil and subsequently address this underlying theoretical tension by criticizing the disproportionate fault attributed to journalists themselves by the indexing model as well as the underestimation by the propaganda model of the role of ‘crude intervention’ resulting from institutional constraints.