Third Way: Crises In The United States Media
Nenov
Over the past four years, the United States experienced a president who made the term "fake news" the centre of his political and electoral strategy. By discrediting the media among his supporters, doing so by calling the New York Times and Washington Post "the enemy of the people", Donald Trump was able to easily withstand scandals that would have ended other politicians’ political careers.
Trump's abundant use of "fake news" revealed a drastic shift in how his supporters, deriders, and everyone in-between consume and receive news. Since the 1990s there has been a sharply growing distrust of the media in the United States, rather decidedly on partisan lines. A 2019 study done by Pew Research Center, a pollster, found that trust in the media was directly correlated with approval of the president. In response to Trump's bashing of the media, Democrats have ventured deeper into ideological caves, pushing the news organizations they support towards the political left, while Republicans disdain for "mainstream media" has caused an eruption in the number of right-wing media outlets that peddle misinformation.
Any advocate of democracy would be worried sick by this (and many have been). A strong, free press is a central pillar of the democratic process, as it informs citizens politically and level headedly holds government officials and centralized power groups to account, and offers a way for citizens to engage with one another in something akin to a town square. All of these represent key aspects of democracy: pluralism, deliberative debate, and a body politic that thinks critically and independently. The threat of news that endorses an irrational, counterfactual narrative or that entices readers to look through opinionated, partisan lenses is close to existential for a democracy. Like many problems in the United States, this problem has roots in a myriad of different places. From increased commercialization of the news, the rise of technology and the dissemination of information online, a misunderstanding of data-driven journalism, and a blending of fact with opinion, the news landscape has transformed since the era of Walter Lippman. Over the next few weeks, the Third Way columnist will be tackling these big themes and exploring them in-depth.
To understand the relevance behind these issues, it is important to first establish why a free, fair, and the trusted press is so fundamental to democracy in the first place. There are a few reasons for this, but one of the main reasons so that the press can inform citizens accurately about the actions of their government and the events shaping their lives. This is the obvious originator of the news as a "watch-dog" of government, or the "fourth estate", as it acts to check government maleficence. As the informant of the public, the news, along with parts of civil society, has a duty to ensure political literacy among the body politic to make citizens effective self-governing agents. An informed populace can decide freely for themselves whether their government is acting appropriately, and, if they feel it is failing, work to change that. In order for that to happen, the body politic has to trust what the media is saying. The only watchdog of the media is the citizens, and there is no watchdog for the citizens besides themselves.
With such a foundational role, threats to a free press, therefore, are immensely dangerous. The German philosopher Hannah Arendt pointed them out in a 1974 interview. Arendt cites the threat misinformation poses to rule by the people, asking "how can you have an opinion if you are not informed?" Without the ability to form a cogent opinion, Arendt argues, citizens have no means of thinking in any other way but besties the way their leaders prescribe, and the majority follows. Arendt argues that distrust in the media as a truthteller is corrosive for society. "If everybody always lies to you", Arendt claims, "the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer... And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."
% of U.S. adults who say the public has __ confidence in the news media
The massive decrease in trust of media outlets should be alarming not just because of its many roots but because of the political cynicism and deadlock it causes. With the rise of misinformation, it has become impossible for politicians or citizens to debate anything when they cannot agree on a common pattern of facts. A dangerous cynicism, which leads to political inaction and a glorification of violence as a means of achieving change takes the place of reality constrained by facts. Cynicism will also, Arendt writes, lead to “an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything, no matter how well this truth may be established.” “Once facts are lost,” she continues, “no rational effort will ever bring them back.” Distrust in the media opens the doors for doubt of facts, which leads to a deeply paralyzing distrust of information in general. That, as COVID-19 has shown, is deadly.
Raking Journalism Through The Muck
What is so novel about the current threats against media in the United States is that it is coming from both the government and American culture itself. The first amendment to the Constitution protects the free press from government intrusion, yet the past four years have seen the Trump administration, Republicans, and far-left Democrats attempt to weaken that freedom. Before becoming president, Trump showed a willingness to eradicate press protections, making libel cases more difficult for newspapers to win and opening the door for decreased coverage of an issue by dangling legal action above media companies heads. Current debates around the role of social media censorship have some advocates worried that, if protections for moderation by companies is altered, there could be pressure on "social media companies to bias content moderation decisions in [an] administration’s political favour." The combined suppression from the far-left as well as the astounding misinformation on the far-right makes the dilapidation of media thornier. Each camp's partisan pundits punt their most polarized members to even more radical sites, railing against the mainstream media as not being ideological enough or not affirming Trump's misinformation. For the far-left and the right, there is a political stake in keeping the news undemocratic.
One of the first major reasons for increasing distrust in the media is commercial. Large-scale outlets have turned toward partisanship and increased opinion coverage over factual reporting to boost revenue. Because of the now dominant digital nature of news, advertising is based around algorithms, traffic, and the time spent on articles. Pieces that offer more contentious opinions will get traffic, while outlets that offer more boring but highly factual pieces have no means of gaining enough money to survive, despite the public wanting "unbiased media". The use of paywalls can mitigate this effect, but this has more unintended consequences that dethrone journalism from its role as an informer.
Deeply connected with the increased commercialization of media is the increase of technology and its effect on the media. The rapid expansion of technology fundamentally altered how news gets delivered to consumers. Technology has allowed billions of people to post their views online. Instead of these views getting lost in the sea of the internet, they can find an audience and gather a following, allowing more conspiratorial ideas to gain momentum and become threatening. More access to the internet in countries also has the effect of decreasing faith in government, indicating either an awakening to the ills of government or the rampant success of misinformation, which thrives online.
Another changing pattern of the news is an increased reliance on data-driven reporting. Data science jobs are predicted to explode in the coming years, and the presence of polls and statistics in reporting has become ever more prevalent. The seeming failures of the polls in 2016 and 2020 to accurately predict election results gave proof to Republicans doubting the election, who used the polls as evidence for the ineptitude of the media. Reevaluating the reliance of data's place in the news and why we should or should not rely on it, while also clearing up how polls are supposed to be read, would help increase the readability of articles and trust in facts.
Perhaps the most visible shift in the news has been the increased presence of opinion commentary. Where there was once a clear division between comment and reporting in print media, news on the internet is harder to categorize. This has led to consumers taking arguments as fact and becoming ideologically rigid. Pundits like Tucker Carlson and Chris Cumuo proselytize on Fox and CNN, respectively, offering unquestionable political sermons rather than persuasive argument open to debate. An influx of opinion pieces also means an easy argument to parrot is never far out of reach. Citizens, then, are enticed only to repeat arguments they hear on talk shows rather than thinking for themselves. The questioning of "objective" journalism among social progressives and standpoint epistemologist ties into this as well.
To help clear the muddied eyes of the news and the consumers affected by its dilapidation, all of these challenges will have to be dealt with. These threats, however, each have their own difficulties that need careful analysis and innovative solutions to overcome. If trust in the media is to be restored, the news has to make a good faith effort to correct themselves and be more transparent. According to a study by Pew, Americans have indicated that their trust in the media would improve if the news was both more transparent and willing to correct itself. Being more self-reflective and candid with consumers is easy, but only minor, step forward. After that, the American media will have to face philosophical, technological, and economic hurdles to survive and fashion itself as a true pillar of democracy. Any failure to so do would be catastrophic.
