There’s a fairly straightforward narrative about media and cultural hegemony in the United States that most scholarly observers have come to largely agree on (with the usual spectrum of variations in emphasis), but that more of the public ought to be aware of. It accounts for how we got here, into this situation where media is recognized to be a key causal factor shaping the deep polarization of a country experiencing a state of civil crisis — not quite civil war (yet), but something that has edged perilously close to it.
The narrative runs something like this.
We used to have a relatively unified spectrum of political opinion, which stretched from left to right, with different points on the spectrum competing to shape the “common sense” of the nation, but with the bias of the spectrum, its center of gravity, being more or less in the “balanced” center. This model saw its heyday in the decades after WW2. The infrastructural core of the model was made up of the major print and broadcast media, especially the three dominant television networks (CBS, NBC, ABC) and the leading newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, et al.) and news organizations (AP, UPI, et al.), with magazines and to some extent radio picking up the slack.
This hegemonic “center” held because it was strong and large, even when it experienced the deep bifurcation of the 1960s — arguably its first major and longlasting crisis. Perhaps its most visible symbolic embodiment was news anchor Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America” and the paragon of its “common sense.”
Since then, the center itself may have shifted notably to the right on economic matters (which accounts for what’s now called neoliberalism), and arguably to the liberal left on social matters (which accounts in part for the conservative reaction fueling Reaganism, the Bush years, and now Trump), but it continued holding.
Until it didn’t. From the late 1970s the U. S. media system has been gradually, but radically, altered by a series of technological and policy shifts that have undercut the center and ultimately fractured the cultural-political landscape of the country. As Benkler et al summarize it in the book I’ve touted here before,
The deregulation of cable and elimination of the fairness doctrine in broadcast in the 1970s and 1980s created the institutional conditions for divergent organizational strategies to explore the markets for listeners and viewers. The increased channel capacity provided first by AM radio, then cable, and finally the internet meant that strategies focused on intense engagement of large but still minority audiences became a viable market strategy. Audiences who made up the emerging conservative movement proved a lucrative market for merchants of angry, ideologically pure messages that expressed a shared sense of outrage and loss in the fast-moving, fast- changing world. Rush Limbaugh was the first major commercial success at selling this kind of sentiment since Father Coughlin was forced off the air at the beginning of World War II.
Fox News followed, and deregulation allowed Clear Channel to consolidate both radio stations and right-wing outrage content into a seamless distribution network for these messages, around the clock, in every corner of the country, to tens of millions of listeners. These outlets offered an ideological coordination point, a cathartic experience of shared anger, and a platform for disciplining political elites who did not hew to the pure message produced by these new right-wing media.
Democrats, by contrast, never developed a sufficiently large and homogenous group to form the basis of a similarly successful strategy focused on ideological purity.
(Network Propaganda, pp. 382-383, paragraphing added)
Instead, the center and left held more or less together (the center reining in the left’s tendencies toward its own edges), while the right — itself a strategic, but now thoroughly steeped, fusion between Evangelical Christian nationalists and economic conservatives — peeled itself off like a second skin from the mainstream media system. The result, as the authors document quite rigorously, is the separation of a right-wing media ecosystem from the center-left remainder, with increasingly less information and fact-checking occurring between the two systems.
Finally, the massive growth of the largely unregulated digital media sector allowed for the turbocharging of these rival political worlds (and the asymmetric polarization surrounding the former) to the point that they are now truly distinct nations.
This accounts for the fact that what we saw in last week’s “Stop the Steal” insurrection was not a fringe group of extremists. It was, instead, the most activated ground troops representing the views of a certain half of the country. This “certain half” is not demographically half — Trump’s support has generally hovered around the 40% mark, and the independents that add to it are not necessarily reliable supporters (which is why Republicans aren’t likely to win the popular vote anytime soon). And the images of mob violence at the Capitol are prompting a bifurcation even within that “certain half,” at least temporarily.
But culturally speaking — in terms of the core ideas and beliefs shared by it via the media that threads it together — I think it makes sense to speak of Trumpism, in the virulent form we have seen recently, as an attempt to speak for half of the country. If the United States were a marriage, this would be one of the partners (the strict and abusive male, if you will) coming to believe his own “alternative facts” of how it is he who is abused by his domineering wife’s family, and must retake rightful control of the family.
The point I want to emphasize is that the media are absolutely central to the makeup of the nation and to the cleavage it is undergoing today. Understanding the history and political economy of media is essential to understanding what is going on.
In Ecologies of the Moving Image, I wrote that
As historian Benedict Anderson has demonstrated, the sovereign nation-state could not have emerged without print media. It was the reproduction and dissemination of historical narratives, newspapers, and educational materials within a national and territorial space that bound together the community of speakers that made up the modern nation. While nation building is complicated, one could simplify the process, without doing too much violence to it, into this equation: Territory + Narrative + Media = Nation. (p. 89)
In that book, I focused on the ways that visual and especially moving images altered this formula to complicate the “media” element. The latter (moving images) have also contributed to the globalization of the formula (with ecological potentials, which I tried to draw out).
What is happening now is that the digital media that make up our new media regime are deepening the divisions within nations even as they draw together those divisions into transnational alliances. That seems especially true of the primary cleavage between liberal-left democracy (in its variegated forms) and the “illiberal,” socially conservative right-wing nationalisms that have been so prominent in recent years.
This cleavage and its globalization can be expected to continue until the new media regime (which is an economic, technological, and political regime) is reined in by democratically accountable institutions, at both national and international levels. As it continues, it will likely make it nearly impossible for us to solve the other pressing issues of our time: climate disruption, ecological destabilization, resource conflict, and massive inequality.
