âWhat kind of truth is this which is true on one side of a mountain and false on the other?ââMichel de Montaigne, Essays
Planes struck the towers while I was in the shower. A roommate was downtown taking photographs and, in the rudest way, received information about what would later be called â9/11â; he witnessed dozens of people choose the brief terror of jumping over the prospect of burning alive. I was blissfully ignorant for an hour. As I walked from Alphabet City to Washington Square, two miles from the World Trade Center, I missed the relevant informationââchange blindnessâ prevented me from noticing the Twin Towers were missing from the skyline. Even as I witnessed streams of businesspeople walking north, truth eluded me. (Those whose proximity to the collapse had covered them in soot were further downtown.) It was the day of the mayoral primaries, and I interpreted the unusual migration as a trip to the polls. What a turnout, what a day for democracy!
Information about the attack only reached me from fellow students as I arrived at class and even then, much was false: Planes had hit the White House! Another attack was on the way! I tried to call my father, in the Financial District for a conference, but the cell phone network was overwhelmed. Instead, I walked to an apartment near Union Square, where, uncoordinated, friends were converging. There, as most of them walked to a nearby hospital to donate blood (there were too many would-be donors), I saw CNNâs coverage of what had happened two miles away. For billions, the news media would be their only source of information.
I remember the week after 9/11 as an unusual time. Strangers made eye contact and daily interactions were gentler. The stress of daily life was subdued, not augmented, by the mass murder. It was as if the toxic smoke from the ruins were soporific. Parks were filled with spontaneous memorials, chalk drawings, and posters with a theme so common I only found it remarkable later 1 : peace. I saw calls for resilience, understanding, to avoid violent retribution, remembering and honoring the dead by putting an end to violence.
Not so on television. The news was jarring, like entering an alternate universe where mourning and the desire for peace were replaced by rage and the desire for retribution. And fear, pervasive fear. The fear spread by the news media took root across the country, creating a sharp distinction between how New York City and the United States reacted. (Fear even snuck into my apartmentâa month later, I bought gas masks for roommates and myself, should a poison gas attack force us escape across the Williamsburg Bridge.) This was my introduction to the mediaâs power, my first intimation of the difference between mediated and unmediated reality.
There was a question on everyoneâs mind: Why do they hate us? The easiest answer, one found with only a remote control, was freedom. âTheyâ hate âusâ for our freedom. As a college student, I had the time and resources to engage in more effortful searches. The answers I found in books, magazines, the alternative and international press, community radio, and documentaries were less pat than freedom-hatred. These answers attacked my identity, how I saw myself as a member of a nation devoted to justice and democracy. They were answersâtrue or falseâthat never reached more than a small minority of my compatriots.
But why did this information reach me and not everyone? How did so many others around me come to have ideas so different from mine? These questions made me look at ideas anew. What are ideas? Fundamentally: information. Ideas are bits of information generated in or communicated to human minds, which combine, change, and spread. Oneâs beliefs are simply ideasâoften what one was taught as a child. The mind may be mysterious, but it is not magical: it cannot survey all ideas and choose the best. The mind can only embrace ideas it is exposed to by others, or create new ideas from pieces of other ideas. Gore Vidal once put it that Montaigne wrote âabout what he had been reading which became himself.â 2 Who we areâour identities and beliefsâis largely information we absorbed from our environments. Hence the distribution of the worldâs religions: Catholics are disproportionately those whose parents were Catholics, Hindus those who were raised Hindu and so on.
It is not only religious ideas that we hold for reasons of geographical accident. There are few French nationalists among those born and raised in Ethiopia, just as there are few monarchists born and raised in the USA. Our political ideas, like our religious ideas, are powerfully influenced by mere geography.
Why do we believe what we believe about politics? Our parents are a primary influence, as are schools, churches, and friends. And, finally: the books and newspapers we read, the television we watch and internet sites we visit. Outside of these sources, what do we have? The news media provides the majority of us with nearly all the information we have about the world outside of our social circles. Whether that information is worthy of trust depends on the nature of the media system we have access to; citizens of North Korea would be wise to distrust information coming from their media system, while citizens of the United States can be confident that a far greater percentage of the information from theirs trustworthy. After all, the U.S. government does not actively censor the press and journalists are trained to be as objective as possible. Yet there are reasons for doubt. There need not be a conscious, coordinated policy Ă la North Korea for a media system to display a propagandistic character. Unconscious or unintentional mechanisms abound: political-economic pressures, ideological uniformity among the owners of media companies or journalists, and a reliance on government sources for information are candidates. Even âcultureâ is a candidate: norms, routines, common sense, conventional wisdom, and what âit just wouldnât do to sayâ or write. Hence even in relatively free and open media systems, healthy skepticism is required.
Such unconscious mechanisms are capable of producing bias that eerily mimics conscious propaganda. Before and during the second US war on Iraq, the U.S. public largely believed the war justified because Iraq posed a serious threat to national security. Yet the majority of the worldâs people outside of the United States believed the war unjustified. Simply, the U.S. media was more accepting of the U.S. governmentâs position than media systems globally. The result: the U.S. public believed falsehoods and most of the rest of the world did not. 3 What was true on our side of the Pacific and Atlantic was false on the othersâand, as recognized by even Republican candidates for president in 2016, our âtruthâ was false.
Such dependence on the news media strikes us as unpleasant, even embarrassing. The more comfortable and reassuring thought is that we choose what to believe. And we do, but we are not free to accept or reject ideas we never see or hear. Herein lies the power of the news media.
A commonsense rebuttal to claims about a powerful media is that there is no evidence of any conspiratorial cabal using the media to mislead the public; rather, the U.S. media (among others) is composed of fair-minded professional journalists able to write and speak freely; that they are often adversarial toward government and corporations and tend toward the liberal side of the U.S. political spectrum; that the United States is an open society without censorship, in which citizens can read, watch, say, or believe what they please. Therefore, those concerned about media power are likely to be adherents of ideological persuasions outside the mainstream, upset their ideology has failed to gain wider acceptance. Each of these points of rebuttal is correct. Only, they are correct in themselves but do not constitute a rebuttal. This book explains why.
It explains how an âinvisible handâ creates a de facto propaganda system within the American marketplace of ideas. A conspiracy is unnecessary to explain the constricted supply of information within our open society: psychological, commercial, and political pressures suffice. As Adam Smith might put it: âIt is not from the malevolence of the politician, the journalist, the media owner, or the audience that a propaganda system is created, but from their regard to their own interestsâand, from their psychology.â
This book will argue that the news media has a power rivaling any branch of government. It suggests that to be consistent with democracy, the power of media, like the power of government, must be submitted to democratic controlâand not merely to the polyarchic plutocracy of the market. Otherwise, we must admit that ours is a sham democracy disguising an oligarchy. Or, simply a democracy in disrepair.
Explanations for this sorry state can be grouped into two broad categories. The Right insists human nature is profoundly flawed: âout of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made,â according to Immanuel Kant. Our ideal forms of government cannot help but fall short of their goals, because human nature is corrupt, selfish, and tainted with evil. Hence democracy, which Churchill called âthe worst form of government, except for all those other forms,â is failing of necessity. Our fallen nature can do no better, though it could do worse.
On the Left, it is argued that democracy fails only when impeded by external forces. Human nature is suited to self-government and would produce wonderful results if allowed time to flourish under true democracy. The Leftâs diagnosis for the present democratic deficit is the impediment imposed by wealthy individuals and corporations. This, not any failings of human nature, is what is preventing democracy from achieving its potential.
Evolutionary and social psychology have shown that we are animals that evolved to cooperate with members of our groups and compete with other groups. Our brains are designed with biases and prejudices to facilitate this cooperation and competitionânot to think with the rationality and objectivity of philosophers. We know that humanity is crooked timber: far from the liberal ideal of rationality, Homo sapiens has an evolved mind riddled with biases that skew perceptions and political thinking. But while our nature seems fallen by comparison with an imagined, Edenic ideal, it does not warrant the Rightâs pessimism any more than the Leftâs optimism. Our nature is Janus-faced: we have a competitive, selfish heritage from our distant simian forebears and a cooperative, group-focused heritage that emerged when our lineage diverged from that of chimpanzees. What separates our species from our closest relatives is an impressive ability to cooperate, but we still share much of their selfish and competitive instincts.
A diverse array of scientific studies provides an understanding of how the media 4 exerts political power. Unlike in the realm of law, where successful arguments are built on persuasive reasoning and the accumulated authority of judges and legislators, scientific study is constrained only by what we can observe. When a chemist says that two chemicals produce an effect if combined, we are not constrained to believe on the strength of the chemistâs authority; we are invited to see for ourselves. Hence the motto of Englandâs Royal Society: nullius in verba, ânothing in wordsâ or âtake no oneâs word for it.â Not all science is as simple as chemistry, however; more complicated areas of study, like human societies, do not allow for pure experiments. There are always extraneous, uncontrolled factors in even the most careful social psychological experiment. And many social questions do not allow experimentation, in which case âscienceâ refers to its older, broader definition: a systematic study that creates knowledge to explain or predict aspects of the world. Regardless, as much for chemistry as sociology, how we interpret science, and what our interpretations tell us about how we might better organize ourselves socially, politically, or economically, is open to debate. I mean to build here only a prima facie case for the power of media in politics, using the findings of scientists from several fields. Though I have not yet encountered one, a counterargument could be made that reinterprets the same findings, and others, weaving them into an opposing narrative that more satisfyingly explains the whole. (I would welcome such a counterargument, especially if it provides reassurance that democracy, in a form substantially faithful to its ideal of citizens sharing equally in political power, presently exists in the United States.)
To make this argument, first a theory of information in societyâideas, beliefsâis needed. The first chapter explores three such theories: social evolution, which ties social information to broader conceptions of information at the root of physical existence and the evolutionary process; schema theory, which conceptualizes how the human brain absorbs, processes, and stores information; and social representations theory, which explains and explores how large chunks of socially shared information disseminate through a population. These approaches cover three ascending levels, from the individual bit of information, to the information within an individual brain, to the sets of information widely shared within a society. Combining them, the resulting approach...