The Data Are In. The Media Are Plural.

By Daniel Rigney

You don’t have to be an old-school grammarian to realize that we should say “the media are,” not “the media is.”  This is not just about grammar, nor is it just a semantic quibble.  This is about how our words unconsciously shape our thoughts and perceptions of reality.  George Orwell understood this. Do we?

For the grammatical  record: The media are; the medium is. The data are; the datum is.

To say or write that “the media is” (singular) is to imply that the media are monolithic, which they are not – or at least not in the United States at this moment in history. In fact, while American media today are nearly all corporate, and thus represent one or another version of corporate ideology, there are still significant  shades of difference among them.

On the one hand, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Nation, and MSNBC are reasonably described as liberal or progressive in their overall editorial core values.  (I prefer to avoid words like “biased,” which are almost infinitely elastic and can used by any ideologue to disparage any other ideologue.)

On the other hand, media that include most talk radio shows, Fox News, and The Wall Street Journal opinion pages represent the value perspectives of the conservatarian right.*  For convenience I will refer to the conservatarian media as The Rush Fox Journal.

I started to wonder about the phrase “the media is [singular and monolithic]” several years ago after noticing that The Rush Fox Journal repeatedly disparaged  “the media”  and  “the liberal media,” using these terms interchangeably to imply that liberal media were the American public’s only source  of news,  as though The Rush Fox Journal did not exist and was not itself a loud and influential segment of “the media."

What’s wrong with this picture? Ask yourself: How dumb would a person have to be not to see that the right-wing media (complaining about "liberal bias") obviously have their own media biases? How dumb would a person have to  be not to realize that Rush and Fox are non-stop spin zones?

In the the region where I live (Texas, in the Old Confederacy), the The Rush Fox Journal  enjoys something nearly approaching a media and ideological monopoly.  With the brave exception of the  Austin-based Texas Observer, a progressive voice in a belligerently conservative state, progressives in Texas have to search actively to find an alternative point of view of any kind.

One can barely walk into a pizza restaurant or car dealership in Texas without seeing Fox News on television.** 

To avoid a falsely monolithic view of the media, can we please agree that “medium” is singular and “media” is plural, and that the latter permits the possibility that media do not all speak in one (right-wing) voice?

George Orwell understood that our words and clichés shape our thoughts, often unconsciously. When conservative media refer to “the media” as “the liberal media,” they strategically and cynically deflect attention from their own hard-right media agenda. 

Not everyone is fooled.

Don’t even get me started on “datum” vs. “data.” This is another singular/plural issue, and unfortunately, the data is in, even in some New York Times usages.  Old-school grammarians have lost the battle, even though, in fact, data (like media)  are almost always plural.

*"Conservatarianism"  is an attempt to combine elements of traditional social conservatism with elements of economic libertarianism to form an unstable ideological compound that is currently imploding on Republican debate stages across the country.

**Attention, merchants: I walk straight out of places that have Fox News on their screens. They obviously don’t want my business. Maybe it’s time to organize a progressive boycott against any business that crams Fox News down the throats of its customers. I promise to be an active participant in this movement. Comment if you’re interested.