By Jeff Brubaker
11/9/24
In business school, we learn about healthy market relationships: vendors serve clients, suppliers meet customer needs, and competition drives innovation. But what happens when these fundamental relationships become distorted, when the roles of supplier and customer blur beyond recognition, and when the ultimate consumer—the public—becomes the product rather than the beneficiary?
This is precisely what has happened in American political media, where a toxic web of codependency has replaced normal market dynamics, with devastating consequences for our democracy.
Consider first the peculiar relationship between right and left-wing media outlets. Far from being mere competitors, they have evolved into symbiotic partners in a lucrative enterprise of division. Each needs the other’s outrage to survive. Fox News requires MSNBC’s latest progressive stance to fuel its counter-narrative; MSNBC depends on Fox’s controversial takes to drive its own coverage. They’re locked in a dance of mutual sustenance, each feeding off the other’s extremes.
But this symbiosis masks a darker truth: collectively, these media entities have developed a parasitic relationship with the American public. While they sustain each other, they drain the vitality from our national discourse. Every inflammatory chyron, every hyperbolic headline, every manufactured controversy serves to deepen societal rifts while filling corporate coffers. The public, rather than being served, becomes mere fodder for engagement metrics.
Most troubling is the increasingly codependent relationship between media outlets and political parties. Traditional roles of information provider and political institution have become hopelessly entangled. Right-wing media simultaneously serves the Republican Party while controlling its narrative; left-wing media does the same with Democrats. They are at once supplier and customer, master and servant, each trapped in a spiral of escalating extremes.
This distortion creates a marketplace where truth is secondary to narrative, where journalism’s mission of public service has been sublimated to the imperatives of entertainment and tribal affiliation. The media needs outrage for profit; parties need media for reach; both feed division; and public discourse suffers.
Breaking free from this cycle proves nearly impossible because the participants have become addicted to their dysfunctional roles. Media outlets can’t moderate their tone without risking audience defection. Political parties can’t challenge their media allies without facing backlash. The system has become self-perpetuating, with each participant both enabling and being enabled by the others.
The consequences extend far beyond ratings and poll numbers. This warped ecosystem erodes the very foundations of democratic discourse. It transforms political differences from matters for debate into existential threats, rendering compromise impossible and cooperation unthinkable. The moderate middle, where most Americans actually reside, becomes increasingly uninhabitable.
What’s the solution? Recognition is the first step. We must acknowledge that this isn’t simply about bias or partisanship—it’s about a fundamental breakdown in the relationship between media, political institutions, and the public they supposedly serve. We need to reimagine these relationships, to establish new boundaries and expectations.
Perhaps we need new models of media ownership, ones that prioritize public benefit over profit. Perhaps we need stronger institutional firewalls between media outlets and political parties. Perhaps we need to rethink how we, as consumers, engage with and reward quality journalism over sensationalism.
What’s clear is that the current system is unsustainable. A democracy cannot long survive when its information ecosystem is optimized for division rather than understanding, for reaction rather than reflection, for profit rather than public good.
The choice before us is stark: we can continue down this path of mutual destruction, or we can begin the difficult work of disentangling these toxic relationships and rebuilding a healthier media landscape. The future of our democratic discourse hangs in the balance.