Note: this is a very long read so in an attempt to assist your consumption I will provide an overview on what I have tried to cover:
- I start with the two big take-aways from: (a) the background of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica imbroglio, (b) Zuckerberg’s appearance at the Congressional hearings a few weeks ago, and (c) the Facebook chats I had at the Festival.
- What then follows is an overview of the main themes at the Festival.
- I then take a “deep dive” into the Facebook skulduggery, a major topic at the conference.
- Then a brief chat on the folly of technical solutionism and why it will not save us from Facebook — or anything else.
- And I end with a piece on the emasculation of American journalism.
I hope you get through it and find it helpful. The series will continue with our video interviews at the festival.
22 April 2018 (Rome, Italy) – There are two big take-aways from the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica imbroglio and Zuckerberg’s appearance at the Congressional hearings a few weeks ago, plus comments at the Festival:
1. The most insidious problem for society is as many people have said: we’ve built an attention economy optimized for clicks.
But it’s not just that the algorithms behind the platform are out of control, from being unable to catch fake news to being unable to recognize “hate speech”. It’s that Facebook’s massive lobbying of congressman and Washington is also highly problematic, on so many levels. It’s as if Big Tech has simply “hacked” the entire political system and the politicians themselves. Zuckerberg’s testimony shows how little American leaders even understand the new world of algorithms, Ad-platforms, and AI. This mismanagement of regulating AI broadly speaking, can continue to spell the decline of the democratic system. Western Big Tech platforms have been weaponized against its own state, and congressmen have no clue for the most part how Facebook even works … while accepting its massive “donations”.
The questions were inane. During the hearings I half expected a Congressman to ask “Mark, I’m confused. Does email have a color?”
And the insidious and incestuous role of governments behind all of this is often forgotten. Robert Mercer, the hedge fund tycoon and computer scientist and major financier behind Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica, is a right-wing product of the military-intelligence complex, owing to his early work on artificial intelligence for the US Air Force Weapons Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. Mercer was able to transform artificial intelligence used for weapons systems to predict winners and losers in the stock market. The programs developed by Mercer made him a multi-billionaire.
Plus, the CIA, the NSA, the British Ministry of Defense and Britain’s MI-6 provided massive funding for projects at the SCL Group of London, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company … to develop the very psychographic, information warfare tools we are now bitching about.
And much of this software dates back to the psychographic tools developed by the Israeli intelligence services in 2006 when they created “Megaphone Desktop Tool”, a software program designed to respond to what was considered anti-Israeli content on the web. Borrowing from the psychographic tools developed by online marketing firms and coupling them with age-old propaganda methods and more modern psychological warfare techniques used by military and intelligence services, the Israelis created the basis for the first psychographic outcome-based warfare … or “POW”.
The commercial applications were obvious and in 2007 Megaphone was re-programmed for commercial use and the revised version was marketed by Collactive, a Silicon Valley firm that was at the center of providing spamming software to unscrupulous on-line marketers. This technology would eventually make its way to the SCL Group, and thereby Cambridge Analytica.
2. The entire business model of data-devouring digital giants make conventional public policy tools ineffective for any real control or regulation.
Before the latest privacy scandal engulfed Facebook, and set people questioning the entire business model of data-devouring digital giants, there had been a rising tide of concern about the market dominance of a few companies, and whether conventional public policy tools can work at all.
There are two distinct views:
- In a widely-cited article, Lina Khan, Director of Legal Policy at Open Markets Institute, argued that standard competition policy was not up to the task of policing the economic power of the GAFAM group (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft).
- Columbia law professor Tim Wu, net neutrality advocate and antitrust expert, argued that competition can effectively topple Facebook.
I am in Khan’s corner. As part of a working paper I am drafting for a law firm client, I am addressing competition policy in the era of digital-winner-takes-all markets.
I will have more details on both these take-away points when I continue the other series I am writing, that one on the Cambridge Analytica harvesting of Facebook user data. You can read Parts 1, 2 and 3 of that series by clicking here.
It was fun (if that’s the right word) to watch Zuckerberg’s testimony and discuss all of this stuff while ensconced in Perugia at the Festival (hereinafter I will sometimes also refer to “the IJF”) with many of the reporters and media companies who have covered Facebook (or partner with Facebook) and write about the impact of artificial intelligence on social media and journalism. So before returning to Facebook, my thoughts on the Festival.
“Ah, complexity”
One hundred trillion. That’s about the size of the global money supply (called “broad money”), and also the bacterial count of the human microbiome, and the number of transistors in a supercomputer. It’s also approximately the number of neuronal connections in the human brain.
Ah, the things you learn at the Festival.
These examples were used to talk about connection which today has an exponential, multiplicative power to create complexity. It’s where the meat of the hardest problems–for example, how the brain adapts to technology–lies. It also makes problems much harder than they first seem to be.
So being totally overwhelmed, unable to cope, our brains have created an environment which rewards simplicity and shortness, which punishes complexity and depth. We grab onto binary thinking (it’s either “good or bad”, or something you either “embrace or reject”).
Stuart Kauffman at the Santa Fe Institute has studied “complexity catastrophe,” in which an organism or natural system is forced by its context to process more information than it can handle. A frequent symptom of this kind of connection crash is fibrillation – a purposeless, resource-expensive quivering that usually culminates in system collapse. I will have more about his studies later in this series.
True, we may never know more than part of anything, as “through a glass darkly”, because all knowledge comes to us in pieces. But we certainly do not help ourselves. We espouse quick solutions. What do we do? We say stuff like:
- If only we get rid of Trump, all will be fine – not addressing the fact that the American political system is fundamentally broken. “Trump is not morally fit to be President” is challenged by “Trump was elected President by the American people”. Yes, I am aware Trump was not “elected by the people” but by the electoral college. But this all raises deeper, more important questions that people don’t want to discuss.
- If only we get rid of the psychopaths then finance will be fine even though we know the financial sector is fundamentally broken.
- American journalists write that American political life is in a horrible state, its common denominator being all the people “living in a bubble” in America. Bubble. Yet another short-form buzzword because the myth of the “real” America is never examined and just won’t go away.
- Or my favorite: if only we get rid of fake news then all will be fine even though we know the very tech firms that funded this Festival (Google and Facebook) have broken journalism’s funding model and in many cases have broken or made journalism irrelevant.
- Note: it must be said that even though G & F sponsored the Festival, it was fascinating to see how issues of privacy and social media manipulation and misinformation were so openly discussed and well-researched. And Campbell Brown, head of news for Facebook, who was scheduled to do a keynote cancelled at the very last minute, likely in part because of the PR firestorm the company is currently caught in. I totally disagree with presenters who opined “the Facebook era is over”. Yes, many media startups and entrepreneurs and thinkers of all kinds are working on ways to do an end run around Facebook and connect directly with users (I invested in one). But many existing media companies whose businesses still rely on it may not have that luxury.
That is why we as bloggers and pundits, who cover these conferences, cannot be merely stenographers. We must be journalists … giving context and meaning to our readers. As I have noted many times before, when you have the intellectual brain power in attendance at an event like the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona or Black Hat in Las Vegas or in Perugia at IJF (but especially IJF) you cannot help but have deep conversations on the complex, multi-faceted aspects of technology and society … discussions you will simply not address at other tech conferences because those are merely trade shows, devoid of anything but selling.
So you must grab these times with their wondrous communication channels, and relish these chats … even if they sometimes wonder off into abstract thought and theory … because they will most definitely affect and impact your commercial ventures and writing (they certainly have mine) but more importantly impact your intellectual ventures, too.
“The Festival”
The IJF volunteers, an incredibly helpful group of
journalism, law and other university students
The word “festival” might seem like an odd term to describe a journalism conference, but as Mathew Ingram, chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review noted at a dinner over the weekend (we did a wonderful video chat with him that is now in our film editing room):
when you are surrounded by buildings that date back to the 13th century and some of the best food in Europe, the word festival somehow seems appropriate
It’s difficult (well, impossible) to sum up the main themes of a conference that runs for five days, with more than 350 sessions + 750 speakers spread out over more than a dozen different venues (yet all neatly clustered so as to be easy accessible). And an event which runs in at least two languages (mostly English and Italian, but several other languages as well). The people of Umbria have a saying: Quando piove non si muove or “when its raining, its best to stay put” and rain we had, but we had no choice but to ignore the advice. After all, this great event happens but once a year and there is so, so much to cover, so many chats to be had.
Memo to self: thou shall not start event days too early when the sessions have not started … but the pasticcerias are in full swing. Mamma mia. And watch out for the dangerously good cheese and prosciutto piadine and pizza torte during those 1 hour lunch breaks. I swear I gained 4 kilos.
We shot some great video interviews during IJF and decided to limit this year’s coverage to:
- How journalists will handle the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming “live” next month.
There were also attorney/journalists at the event who have followed the development of the GDPR as I have (with many from the e-discovery world) and we’ve met and interviewed the same data protection officers. To many “the GDPR will be a big nothing burger, you’ll see”. More on that later on in this series.
Many spoke about how Facebook and other U.S. companies say they will follow the more comprehensive privacy laws in other countries (such as the GDPR) but who have little reason to protect U.S. consumers the same way. And GDPR will certainly not put an end to data slurping.
And many also said the forthcoming EU ePrivacy Regulation will have a greater impact than GDPR, requiring explicit individual consent before a company can track a person’s online activity.
- Some wonderful debates on the value of algorithms and the use of machine learning in “data journalism”. Journalism has been thoroughly disrupted over the past decade. News organizations, especially newspapers, have come under heavy financial pressure, news bureaus have been closed or consolidated and journalists have had to rethink their profession. Yet amidst the rubble a new form of the craft has emerged: data journalism. Rather than pounding a physical beat and cultivating human sources, this new breed immerses itself in statistical data and policy papers.
- Some chats on the extensive use of “off-the-shelf” e-discovery software by journalists for data analytics, and how they have tweaked/modified/augmented that software, and how it is used in the art of story telling and narrative
- Panels on misinformation and “fake news” … taking you through the techniques, the strategies, the minutiae of what companies like Cambridge Analytics do … which will probably be my longest piece in this series.
- Investigating links between governments and organized crime, and the murder of journalists, a follow-up to my piece last year The Panama Papers, e-discovery … and a murder in the afternoon sun.
And every year, without fail, there are key topics, questions, or fears that pop up in the titles of panels or in the conversations in the hotels (and bars) after the official events. As in previous years, these conversations were around blogging and Facebook and Twitter (the latter being indispensable to cover the parts of the festival we missed; a huge hat tip to the folks at Cronycle) and media manipulation, and the difficult future of journalism.
The most frequent conversation (outside of Facebook) I had both in those sessions and in the bars was that in the “Fox News era”, a nation that turned against Nixon’s corrupt rejection of the rule of law may not even exist anymore. I will end this post with a more detailed exposition on the corrosive nature of media manipulation in the U.S.
“Getting cosmic”
This Festival is well known for its “grappling sessions”, the Big Picture presenations and chat fests. These are outside the “transactional mode” sessions of “what-are-the-key-takeaways-from-this-session-that-I-can-apply-to-my-work”. These grappling sessions are deep dives into topics from a systemic level.
For instance:
- In one panel the question was “What are we doing that future generations will completely condemn?”, meant as a challenging thought experiment about blind spots in history, and how do we report it, write about it. The banning of refugees and how the major powers have created it by destroying their home countries which led to the refugee crisis. That was a pretty straightforward and obvious one.
- Or how even journalists fall into the language pit with their writing. “Authoritarian democracies” is an oxymoron, just like “virile impotence” or “obnoxious charm”. Permitting those who misuse the term “democracy” to get away with slapping the label on authoritarian systems is an element typical of fascist propaganda, as well as that of leftist regimes which might plausibly be styled “fascist” in most of their elements.
- Or how “Breaking News!!” is the most masturbatory thing journalists do. And only journalists are interested in it. In terms of how to get people’s attention with the cacophony of information out there, they go for the “quick snap” when what is really necessary is a comprehensive take. Yes, those tl;dr pieces which can require an average of 8 months to put together.
- And just plain perspective. Many American conference-goers seemed shocked not to see more appearances of Trump’s name. And while he was a shadow that hung over the discussions (the Syrian missile strike happened during the conference), he is not even close to being the most dangerous. As talking to journalists from other countries will continually remind you, yes, the U.S. may be a giant on the political stage. But when it comes to electing a demagogue who threatens journalists, Trump is still a piker compared to someone like Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte, or Turkish president Recep Erdoğan or Slovak president Andrej Kiska, or Prime Minister Joseph Muscat of Malta. These are all countries that have seen the outright murder of journalists with no consequences, with scores of journalists in exile and dozens of their former colleagues in prison.
- Oh, and my favorite from a British journalist:
Oh, we certainly fall into the language pit. I mean, look how we talk about Tony Blair. Revisionism insists that Blair has been mistreated by current public opinion, that history will gloss over the Iraq war and tuition fees. But he will remain unpopular, I think.
But the massive wealth Balir has built, especially from real estate—the profiting from a profile built up while claiming to be in the service of the British people. The Blairs have turned profiting from others’ misery into an art form now.
Yet we talk about Blair’s “second career”. Second career? When you are making 10-15 times what you made as Prime Minister? No. Being Prime Minister was an internship, a junior position, to what your real career was going to be. Get real, fellow journalists.
“Facebook”
Mark Zuckerberg started his testimony with the line “Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company”. Certainly “optimistic” in the sense it thought it would get away with its skulduggery. But not very “idealistic” to not tell people their details were surreptitiously lifted, employing armies of lawyers to keep all that secret, and to refuse to talk about it and send your PR minions until threatened with a subpoena.
Mark’s testimony before the U.S. Congress was not so much a referendum on Facebook as a statement on the erosion of America’s digital privacy. It was also the ultimate non-apology.
Much was made about his pale appearance and how he was visibly uncomfortable in a dark suit instead of his regular hoodie. But he stuck closely to company talking points as instructed … that “idealistic” and “optimistic” pabulum:
For most of our existence, we focused on all the good that connecting people can do… It’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm, as well.
You see, Facebook didn’t have bad intentions or deliberately ignore the warnings and critics. It was simply too idealistic and too optimistic to imagine the platform being used for anything other than good.
Look at Uber and its pugnacious co-founder, Travis Kalanick, who also loved the non-apology. Uber engaged in questionable labor practices, bulldozed politicians and regulators, skimped on consumer privacy, and fostered a culture of “brilliant jerks.” The company did this with a ruthless, unapologetic insistence that it alone could foresee and take necessary steps toward a better future. And all we read about when we read about Uber was the “magic of disruption!”
Facebook is now the biggest social-media company/advertising platform/data tracker in the world, with more than two billion users. In 2004, when Zuckerberg built the company, and for years afterward, he was hailed as a behoodied innovator. His motto, “Move fast and break things”, [Mark, a suggestion. How about “Slow down and clean up the mess”] was regarded as youthful insouciance. Anyone who expressed concern about the role of social media in our society … particularly in our politics, and there were many such critics … was treated as a cut-rate Andy Rooney, too curmudgeonly to learn to stop worrying and love the selfies!
It’s now clear that the problem wasn’t the selfies; it was the business model. For years, tech critics warned, “You’re not the customer, you’re the product.” So the business models broke down two ways:
- “We could make a ton of money if we monetized our customers” Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, often said. His point was that Apple’s model was charging for goods and services and was healthier than that of Facebook and Google.
- Because Facebook and Google chose “Business Model #2”: give consumers free things, such as birthday reminders and quick bursts of quantifiable attention, in exchange for their private data, which digital marketers then use to sell them products, ideologies, or candidates.
As Andrew Marantz points out in a forthcoming piece in The Atlantic Magazine, since its inception, Facebook has delivered two contradictory sales pitches:
To the public, it insisted that it is not an editor or a gatekeeper but merely an open platform, neutrally reflecting the world. But no platform is neutral; its algorithms must, by definition, prioritize some things over others. Facebook was designed to maximize attention, so its algorithms prioritize the posts that spur the most comments, clicks, and controversy, creating a feedback loop in which buzzy topics generate yet more buzz. [Andrew notes Time magazine headline from June 2015: “Donald Trump’s Presidential Announcement Sparks Huge Facebook Reaction”]
Meanwhile, Facebook’s pitch to advertisers sounded not unlike Cambridge Analytica’s: “With our sophisticated tools, any advertiser can deliver any message to any microsegment of the market”.
For a long time, this trade-off, if people thought about it at all, apparently seemed worth it. Any potential harm seemed distant and abstract. Then came the Trump campaign. And Brexit. And the resurgence of far-right extremism across Europe and the United States. And the widespread inability to distinguish information from disinformation. Social media didn’t cause these developments, but it certainly facilitated them.
Earlier I mentioned Uber and its “brilliant jerks”. At Facebook, the problem runs deeper. The company is older, the founder more idealistic and defensive, the platform more entrenched. If you can only view your failures as an unforeseen consequence of good intentions, how can you ever really hope to change?
And it was so pathetic how much Zuckerberg lied in his testimony and got away with it. David Dayen in his Intercept piece got it right, unlike so much of the mainstream press that either focused on the Facebook stock price, the way Mark Zuckerberg remained calm, or accepted at face value the Facebook CEO’s lies that they track non-users “only for security”. Every single one of you reading this, even if you never use Facebook has a Facebook “shadow profile” – built from the scooped-up phone contacts of people who know you how do have Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram (all are Facebook) accounts, and the Facebook “Like”, “Share” buttons or the invisible “Facebook Pixel” on nearly every site on the web.
Zuckerberg knows that. Every tech-savvy person knows that. Zuckerberg lied to the faces of the US Senate committee members claiming he had never heard of “shadow profiles.”
But worse, the U.S. Senate acted like they are not the U.S. Senate, the senior legislative body that can actually propose, write, and get passed laws in the US. The body that has enough leverage to get Presidents to sign bills, the body that being “senior”, has a lot of political leverage over the members of the “junior” House. They kept asking Mark Zuckerberg if he would be nice enough to “support” some vague “improvements” they were contemplating, rather than being elected representatives who can make the laws he has to follow.
“Way to go, Mark! Now about that support …”
But it’s important to remember that we are talking about the United States Congress, a powerful reality-distortion field that has left the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants not only clueless about the Net and social media but dynamically anticlueful. This is a Congress with a profound cultural resistance to digital awareness.
I have a very close friend in Washington who runs a project to educate Congressmen on the Internet, social media, etc. Easy opportunities are afforded for members of Congress to get a Web demo and hands-on-learning experience to grasp all the tricky stuff … even the nuances of email and metadata, based on a current attempt to educate them on e-discovery. Is it working? Uh, no. Says my friend:
Almost all of them send their staffers; they find some reason not to come themselves, even when we make it easy, seeing up “floating” event rooms right down the hall from them. Me? Oh, I am pretty cynical. The media environments of the Net are difficult to grasp. So this intransigent “not-getting-it-ness” of Congress is actually a cultural immune response.
Agreed. I’m not too sure it would be a good idea to further inflict the riotous informational fertility of cyberspace upon an organism that evolved in the more temperate zones of the late 18th century. The late John Perry Barlow, the American poet and essayist and cyberlibertarian political activist who I had the pleasure to meet some years ago, noted this “not-getting-it-ness” of Congress:
The late Thomas Jefferson was one of the most prolific letter writers of his time, and he generally produced five or six pieces of correspondence a day. He would have considered it mad to attempt 50 or 60, as I often do, or hundreds, as many Senators would have to. But therein lies the rub, or at least part of it. The political system we’ve got is too tangled in the parasitic undergrowth of the last two centuries to process or understand what is being created for the century to come. It’s maddening.
But politics being politics (with live hearings) grandstanding was in fashion. So to draw the political sting, a pale and studiously deferential Zuckerberg, in sober suit and tie, bowed to 10 hours of public questioning by legislators. No, not enough to change any opinions. And to everybody, his apologies for data leaks were late, and sounded pro-forma. A repeated vagueness fed suspicions that despite his claim to be willing to accept new regulations, he has not yielded ground on any important issues.
The most likely outcome of Facebook’s current scandal continues to be that nothing will happen, for all of the inherent lethargy in our political system noted above.
“Technical solutionism”
And we have seen a flood of commentary that say we have the technology to “fix” Facebook and to combat fake news, that technological “solutionism” will save the day.
Almost all of it is wrong which I will address later in this series. We had 4 sessions at the Festival addressing these technical issues in detail, plus several sessions at the IAPP privacy summit which I will incorporate.
So just a few points right now:
AI is being used to:
- manufacture misinformation (example: deepfakes),
- to target to lookalike audiences with built in tools in Facebook, and
- distribute it (example: the trending algorithms on Google and Twitter amplifying fake news or propaganda.
But even if we get our training data right, that doesn’t mean we can train our AIs the right way. Bias, context and scale can all make things challenging. And the most talented folks will be scooped up by the big companies: Said one presenter: “Be wary of tech solutionism. We have all read the playbook. We know what’s in the pipe”.
And by that he meant propaganda now is automated, data driven and propagated on social media. There are higher, newer layers of artificial intelligence being developed to make it more effective. While we battle “Fake News 1.0” there are folks out there already with “Fake News 3.0”.
AI is neither the solution nor the problem to the pollution of information ecosystems. The spread of misinformation is like an oil spill that creates a hostile environment for information. With regards to propaganda, AI is relevant to content creation, targeting of audiences, and distributing content, e.g. automated generation of content for deepfakes, which can create convincing footage of people saying and doing things they haven’t.
And AIs can target messages that might be impactful to specific audiences. This is already baked into systems, e.g., Facebook’s feature to target lookalike audiences. Is Facebook going to rip out those pipes? Uh, no way.
Dak Martin, a long-time data scientist colleague put it this way:
With regards to misinformation, AI can potentially identify, verify and correct misinformation. But all this work is highly contextual and you need structured databases to train your AIs. Context. Context. Context. Training data can help us evaluate, for instance, whether indicators effectively correlate with credibility, how much annotators agree, and what scalable solutions could look like. But if some AI is developed to go after that “fake news” … well, we just tweak the context and it gets through.
“The emasculation of U.S. journalism”
Two days after Trump was elected, Zuckerberg was asked whether Facebook had “distorted the way that people perceived the information during the course of the campaign.” He replied, “Voters make decisions based on their lived experience.”
But online experience and lived experience become more inseparable every day. If what people see online is supposed to have no impact on what they do in the world, what is the point of social media? Yes, it is hard not to instinctually bristle at this notion. We all like to see ourselves as autonomous, intelligence agents. But we are governed by myriad ideological, social, economic, political, and psychological forces that mitigate the parameters of our knowledge.
A decade ago, the upstart entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley promised to topple the gatekeepers in journalism, business, and politics. They have succeeded. Now, although they go to great lengths to deny it, the former upstarts have become gatekeepers themselves.
For almost a week after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, Zuckerberg remained silent, while his company lost nearly fifty billion dollars in stock value. Then he embarked on another of his “apology tours, which included a media conference call shortly before his Congressional appearance. Alex Kantrowitz, of BuzzFeed, asked whether Facebook would consider making less profit in order to protect users’ privacy. Zuckerberg proceeded to answer a question that he hadn’t been asked, about ad relevance, a standard distraction tactic of his.
Note: if Kantrowitz had a follow-up question, no one heard it. Facebook (and other reporters’ phones) are muted after their initial question. But that is a standard tactic used by companies to “control the narrative” in these media events, not just a Facebook tactic.
It used to be axiomatic. Look at Nixon and Watergate. There was a misdeed, there was exposure, and there was a response. The system ends up being “cleansed” if you’d like.
Now, we have a system seemingly immune to exposure. To many journalists at the Festival, especially American journalists, there was this foreboding, that in the “Fox News era” the nation that once turned against Nixon’s corrupt rejection of the rule of law no longer exists. There is this feeling that if the Mueller investigation shows Trump and his Mafia band guilty of gross malfeasance the pro-Trump media, led by Fox, would give cover, and huge swaths of Americans would be encouraged to believe that the Mueller action was not only unjustified but absolutely unnecessary. Yes, no doubt (at least to me) that Fox News is assaulting America’s constitutional order and the rule of law, while fostering corrosive and unjustified paranoia among its viewers.
So the entire right-wing media machine kicks to life and dismisses the whole Mueller thing as a scam – and conservatives believe them. The conservative base remains committed to Trump, politicians remain scared to cross the base, and U.S. politics remains stuck in partisan paralysis, unable to act on what Mueller discovers.
I no longer live in the United States and return only when I must so I am not barraged by the 24/7 media madness. But there is one thing that blares out at me in all of this political uncertainty: the overall complacency about American democracy by the people in power, which means to sustain democracy in the future you’ll face a much harder task.
Yes, yes. I know. In the brief history of mankind no democracy or republic has ever lasted. Even the U.S. will have its denouement. But I am pretty fed up with all the time spent on defining “fascist”. There are plenty of other nasty kinds of authoritarian regimes. I’ve been in them.
We know by now what can happen when the institutions of representative government become bitterly polarised, when large swathes of the electorate lose the capacity to compromise, when power and wealth pile up in the hands of elites and when those in charge of the state give up the challenge of responding to widespread economic hardship. History is not a one-way street and democracy has turned authoritarian before. Can it happen again? Why not? As the historian Matthew Taylor has said:
Anarchy is dysfunctional by definition, and reliance upon the tyrrany of majorities inevitably leads to the emergence of demagogues, who bend those majorities to create their own versions of authoritarianism. We see that forming now, in early stages, in the United States.
There is alive in the U.S. an organized campaign to discredit the American press. This campaign is succeeding. Its roots are long. For decades the Republican coalition has tried to hang together by hating on elites who claim to know things, like “what is art?” Or: “what should college students be taught?” Or: “what counts as news?” The media wing of this history extends back to Goldwater’s campaign in 1964. It passes through Agnew’s speeches for Nixon in 1969, and winds forward to our own time through William Rusher’s 1988 book The Coming Battle for the Media (which I read this weekend thanks to a recommendation by Jay Rosen), then through the growth of conservative talk radio, and in the spectacular success of Fox, which found a lucrative business model in resentment news, culture war, and the battle cry of liberal bias.
Donald Trump is both the apotheosis of this history and its accelerant. He has advanced the proposition dramatically. From undue influence—that was Agnew’s claim—to something closer to treason: “enemy of the people.” Instead of criticizing The Media for unfair treatment, as Agnew did, Trump whips up hatred for it. Some of his most demagogic moments have been attacks on the press, often by singling out reporters and camera crews for abuse during rallies held in an atmosphere of menace.
And it starts at the top with the President’s almost daily attacks on “the fake news,” and his description of key institutions—the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NBC—as both failing AND corrupt. Contempt thus has two places to settle. As Jay Rosen pointed out at the Festival:
At the bottom of the pyramid is an army of online trolls and alt right activists who shout down stories critical of the President, and project hatred at the journalists who report them.
Between the President at the top and the base at the bottom are the mediating institutions: Breitbart, Drudge Report, Daily Caller, Rush Limbaugh and especially Fox News.
As I have noted in previous posts: the great divide of our times is not left versus right, but true versus false.
The campaign to discredit the American press operates differently on the three major sections of the Trumpified electorate: supporters, opponents, and those who are not in either camp. For core supporters, media hate helps frames the president as a fighter for them. “I will put these people down for you” was one of the most attractive promises Trump made during the campaign. He has delivered on that pledge. They in turn deliver for him by categorically rejecting news reports that are critical of the President, in the belief that biased journalists are simply trying to bring their guy down.
The anger, despair and disbelief that Trump inspires in his most public doubters is felt as confirmation, and consumed as entertainment by his most committed supporters- and his trolls.
I will end this piece with these points, summarising Rosen and Mathew Ingram who I noted at the beginning of this piece:
- There is a risk that Republican elites will fail to push back against Trump’s attacks on democratic institutions, including the press, even though these same elites start their day by reading the New York Times and Washington Post. This too has already happened.
- There is a risk that journalists could do their job brilliantly, and it won’t really matter, because Trump supporters categorically reject it, Trump opponents already believed it, and the neither-nors aren’t paying close enough attention.
- In a different way, there is a risk that journalists could succeed at the production of great journalism and fail at its distribution, because the platforms created by the tech industry have overtaken the task of organizing public attention.
- There is a risk that the press will lose touch with the country, fall out of contact with the culture. Newsroom diversity is supposed to prevent that, but the diversity project has been undermined by a longer and deeper project, which Jay Rosen calls “The View from Nowhere”.
- The press is at risk of losing its institutional footing. For example: In the hands of Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders, the White House briefing has gone to ruin. It was always frustrating, now it’s useless and frequently counter-productive.
My thoughts? Many floors below the surface of journalism there are bedrock attitudes that make the practice possible- and thinkable. There is a risk of erosion there. One example is the shared belief that there exists a common world of fact that can be established through inquiry. That’s dead. When the President of the United States forcefully rejects the premise of a common world of fact, and behaves like there is no such thing, any practice resting upon that premise is in political trouble. This has happened to journalism. And no one knows what to do about it. To me, the real risk is that established forms of journalism will be unable to handle the strain that Trump’s behavior puts upon them. For example: the form we came to call fact checking has had zero effect in preventing him from repeating falsehoods. Zero.
There is a risk that journalists will hang onto these forms way past their sell-by date because it’s what they know. They want things to be normal. Access to confusion and disinformation serves no editorial goal, but “access journalism” remains basic to White House reporting.
I will close with something Jay Rosen said in one of his presentations:
Read the Michael Lewis/Steve Bannon interview from earlier this year: “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon said. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” To this kind of provocation (“The real opposition is the media…”) Marty Baron, editor of the Washington Post, has a succinct reply: “We’re not at war, we’re at work.”
Right now, to me, the U.S. is no longer a democracy but “Government by Hallucinating Mob”, driven mad by the Internet. Little wonder then that the U.S. Presidential election in 2016 felt like a choice between cancers. Politics, as practiced, is pretty tedious fare. Not much of it can get through a machine that runs on the sensational.
I think the journalists at the Festival were correct: if they become the political opposition to Trump, they will lose. And yet they have to go to war against a political style in which power gets to write its own story. There’s a risk that journalists will fail to draw this distinction: between opposing Trump and opposing a political style that erodes their place in the public sphere. Many media critics have been trying to alert them to that danger. So far it is not working.
Coming next in this series
Last year I opened a media center/film production studio in Rome, Italy for Project Counsel Media and the team is up to its … well, film canisters, busy producing the videos we shot at IJF in Perugia, at Infosecurity 2018 in Brussels, the Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona, and FIC International Cyber Security Forum 2018 in Lille. Yes, a busy time.
Next week we will start rolling out the Festival videos.
