Last year I listened to a fascinating podcast discussion between Ezra Klein and Sean Illing on how democracies are influenced by the dominant media environment of the moment.
Drawing heavily from mid-century media theorists Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, Illing and Klein discuss that media technologies change not only how we consume and comprehend news and politics, but also the content itself. As Illing puts it, "the medium is the story."
Illing and Klein trace a fascinating history of how US and world politics has adapted to the media by which it is consumed. For instance, JFK was the first “TV president” to effectively utilise his personality and appearance to generate popularity through the new medium. From the 1970s “news and politics because it relied on TV had to ape the mechanics and logic of TV. It had to be entertaining.” Ronald Regan perfected this (almost literally a TV president) and demonstrated the power of performing to the camera (more recently followed in the professional, if not political, footsteps by Volodymyr Zelenskyy who famously played a president on TV first).
Radio helped Churchill’s orations enter into people’s homes the way written media could not. By some accounts Abraham Lincoln, for all the fame of his great addresses, was morose and uncooperative in many environments and may have struggled to win hearts and minds had he been caught with a doorstop interview or put up for a live televised debate.
As Klein and Illing note, it isn’t just that these leaders were able to harness the new dominant medium, they are the product of the medium.
So what does this mean in our current social media dominated environment? The podcast only briefly touches on it, so I was keen to dig deeper. A recent online exchange with a friend about the current front runner US presidential candidates offered a useful case study…
1. Snark attack
The old newspaper adage "if it bleeds, it leads" might be transformed in the social media age to "if it shits on, it gets clicked on".
On the day of Joe Biden’s announcement back in April that he would run for re-election in 2024 a friend commented “if I was China or another global competitor seeing Trump and Biden line up as two octogenarians who can barely make a coherent sentence … I’d be pleased”.
I objected to my friend overstating the candidates’ lack of verbal capabilities (on behalf of both Biden and Trump - you’re welcome). To be fair, it probably wasn’t intended to be taken literally in the way I did, but it is exactly the sort of sentiment (or “meme” in the original Richard Dawkins sense) that gains traction in the social media environment. Claims that that Biden has dementia, for example, or that Trump has an IQ of around 70, have had plenty of currency thanks to the outrage and reaction they generate on both sides, but both have been shown to be false (see here and here).
You see, I don’t care if someone thinks that Biden overdid the COVID stimulus and is therefore responsible for high inflation. Or that Trump was wrong to pick a trade war with China. Those are positions of policy preference that can be argued with. That’s healthy for democracy. But if you’re going to make personal attacks, I think you are missing the point.
Snark is designed to get nods, likes and laugh emojis from those who agree with you, whilst pissing off those that don’t. Either way we don’t learn anything and no one changes their mind.
Sure, my friend’s comment wasn’t the worst example, but it does illustrate how off-hand comments can feed into jaundiced views that can reinforce the dominant position in social and information bubbles.
And the tone extends to elected representatives too. Illing and Klein highlighted in the podcast, many politicians today (in the US at least) have become “professional shit posters”, saying things solely to generate engagement and trend. It doesn’t seem to hurt their popularity either.
2. Performance anxiety
Generously ignoring the underlying snark in my pushback to his somewhat snarky comment, my friend responded that both Trump and Biden struggle in front of a crowd when not reading from a script, and that neither are great performers.
I conceded the point, both are a bit prone to a rambling word salad. But rolling home from work later that day I realised why that bothered me too: who says that the best leader and decision-maker has to be the best performer? And what sort of ‘performance’ are we incentivising? Capability to decide good policy and enact it for the public good? Or appearance in a 10 second video clip?
Yes, there is some value in the charismatic leader in bringing an issue to the people, or rallying the population to a cause, but I’m not convinced there is a direct link between performing, charisma and good governance.
And yet in an increasingly visual media world, online performance is how we access, understand and assess those who stand for office. This was true for televised democracy, and it is even more true for social media democracy. The media through which we understand their leaders and decide about them incentivises the appearance of performance. And in democratic systems, like all systems, incentives rule.
Furthermore, by prioritising performance we seem to have a decreasing tolerance for ambiguity or uncertainty - even in the face of the most complex and uncertain problem - let alone personal vulnerability and fallibility. There is very little space for a politician to say ‘I do not know’ even when for complex problems which require adaptive solutions, that is the often the most logical answer. (For a great take on the lack of nuance in political discourse I recommend this week’s post from the Weekly Dish).
As Susan Glasser says in her excellent recent New Yorker article comparing the flaws and gaffs of Biden and Trump:
American politics is never about finding the perfect President. It’s about choice. The history of the Republic is one long story about having to pick between two inevitably flawed candidates.
Public accountability is an essential part of any democracy, but if this descends into a pile-on for any perceived slip-up the only people left willing to stand for office are those with overconfidence in their own opinions (and we know that overconfidence can be a good indicator that you are wrong).
3. Rules? Where we are going we don’t need rules…
Unlike Susan Glasser with the New Yorker’s famous team of fact checkers, neither my friend’s original comment, nor my reproduction of it in this Substack has anyone checking its accuracy at all.
In a democratised media environment everyone can be a publisher. But what this gains in egalitarian content creation it loses in checks and balance (this occasional newsletter included).
An absence of institutions for editing, review, fact checking can still make for good content. But not verified content. There are worthy attempts to fill these gaps with self-generated and community-sourced fact checking: for example Twitter’s (or now X’s) algorithm-led fact checks under its previous administration, and ‘community notes’ in its current, both of which have been met with deep suspicion.
Social media is incentivised for reaction and interaction, which is not well aligned to facts. It is no wonder over 60% of Republicans in the US still believe Trump won the 2020 US election.
Commentator Sam Harris summarised this well in another recent podcast: “Substack and Spotify and YouTube and Twitter are not substitutes for universities, or scientific journals or government organisations that we can trust” (see also Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch).
What next?
It is there a silver lining to the rising cloud of a stinking media environment?
Well the good news is that the examples I’ve given are not the only media that is flourishing. Podcasts continue to grow worldwide at over 50% per year. Substack is leading user-generated long-form, subscription based media which seeks to incentivise quality not reaction (disclaimer: I did buy a small share in the recent crowd funding round).
The bad news is that the social media age might be about to come to and end, replaced by an AI dominated media world.
But that’s for another newsletter…
Further reading
Ezra Klein and Sean Illing podcast: Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Sean Illing - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Sean Illing and Zac Gershberg: The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion, Gershberg, Illing (uchicago.edu)
Jonathan Rauch has an excellent book on the “Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth” see also Articles by Jonathan Rauch