I’ve just begun teaching a media course, entitled Media Ecologies and Cultural Politics, which I designed several years ago but have revised this year to focus on the issues of our current moment: the upcoming election, the Covid-19 pandemic, the crisis of racial justice, and what some have called the “crisis of information.”
Preparing for the course allowed me to review dozens of books, reports, handbooks and field guides that have come out in the last few years (mostly since the 2016 U.S. election), which have attempted to analyze and assess the factors contributing to our current informational malaise — that is, to what’s casually called “fake news,” disinformation, the “post-truth” condition, and all of that.
If I had to choose one of these readings to wholeheartedly recommend, especially in the months before the November U.S. elections, that choice would be an easy one. It’s a book by media scholars Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts entitled Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics, published by Oxford University Press in 2018. The authors are, respectively, Faculty co-Director, Research Director, and Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
The reasons why this book hovers above all the others are several. The publisher has kindly made the book open-access, which is highly unusual for a scholarly volume like this — which means anyone can read it online or download it by simply clicking on the “Open Access” link at the top right corner of the publisher’s page here. Several other reports are open access and provide excellent tools for making sense of the online informational landscape, but Benkler et al’s writing is crystal clear, their argument is well rounded, and it is entirely topical in the context of U.S. politics today. The elements of the “information ecologies” they highlight are visible in the news I read almost every day: on Fox News, in Trump’s tweets, on Facebook, in the liberal media, et al.
Perhaps as importantly, however, their analytical methodology is incisive, convincing, and rendered in beautiful detail (including full-color data maps, charts, and graphs). The book is an example of how sophisticated research can and should be shared, and how “big data” research need not be separated from the other qualitative methodologies that bring rigor to media studies and political analysis.
The overall picture they provide is not one that they looked for (they claim) but one that they discovered through an analysis of the data — specifically, an analysis of “two million stories published during the 2016 presidential election campaign, and another 1.9 million stories about the Trump presidency during its first year.” (They analyzed this data through a platform called Media Cloud, which is open-source and can easily be used to replicate or refute their findings by tweaking the parameters. Their description of those is clear and judicious.)
Their analysis unveiled an “architecture of political communication” in the United States that consists of diverse news sources, the activities of media producers and online actors, and dynamic relationships between these and the structure of political partisanship. That architecture, according to their findings, has changed over the years to create what today consists of two sufficiently different “media ecosystems.” The differences between them is what we all need to know about.
In the United States, a set of technological innovations rolled out since the 1970s, from FM radio, satellites, and cable, through the personal computer, the internet, and social media, have been adopted and adapted by two fundamentally different epistemic communities in two radically different ways. [. . .] In America, “the internet” is really two very different media ecosystems. One […] exhibits all the characteristics of an echo chamber that radicalizes its inhabitants, destabilizes their ability to tell truth from fiction, and undermines their confidence in institutions. The other is closer to the model of the networked public sphere.”
In a sentence, what their analysis shows, persuasively, is that the U.S. political Right, as represented by the core constituencies of today’s Republican Party, has moved away not just from the left and center of the political spectrum, but from the “consensus reality” that a mediated public sphere is still capable of producing when political media play their traditional fourth estate role.
In a sense, the book both updates, significantly modifies, and (for perhaps the first time) provides context, nuance, and overwhelming empirical support to the idea that Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman introduced in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media, which they called the “propaganda model” of media. Chomsky and Herman’s model was not really a (scientific) theory — it was both an open provocation and a framework that could be turned into a theory, but whose elements were not all rigorously theorized or demonstrated apart from a handful of case studies. Benkler et al examine the very different (more divided, for one thing) media ecology of the late 2010s and find that there is propaganda operative now, but that it has to do less with the intent of key political actors and more to do with the feedback loops that either allow for claims to be checked against realities or fail to do that. If a system evolves that rewards its members for not doing that, then it becomes an agent of propaganda. Understanding the nature of that system and its evolution over the last fifty years or so is the undertaking of the book.
The authors’ conclusions didn’t surprise me — they confirm what I knew (or suspected) based on readily available information over the years — and I recognize that confirmation bias is something that needs to be checked against alternative interpretations of data and alternative theoretical frameworks. What my review of the alternatives (the other volumes I’ve looked at from the last few yeas) has convinced me is that Benkler et al largely get it right.
They downplay the roles of foreign agents (whether Russian or any other kind) as well as the built-in flaws of social media technologies more generally, and while the arguments they present here are far from the last word on these topics, they are worth hearing. The book also does not grapple with the global information (dis)order, nor does it offer a great many tools for sifting through information in search of what’s reliable. But as a mapping of the U.S. political media landscape, it is exemplary.
It can be read right here, or ordered from its publisher at the same place.
Oh yes, in case you were wondering about the title… Canadian kids like me growing up in the early 1970s got to be bemused by it on a weekly basis (and later daily when it got syndicated). Alas, the days of such soft and loving propaganda are long gone.
