“A Political Economy of the Origins of Asymmetric Propaganda in American Media” By Yochai Benkler: Important Quotes + My Response

-Sienna Strickland

This chapter notes a disparate use and consumtpion of media channels (social media, telelvision, radio) between the two parties. It particularly notes peculiar consumption patterns amongst the right, which has insulated itself from utilizing a wide array of sources (from what I gathered, due to its inherently more monolithic political identity which the “right” mediascape capitlized on by validating, whereas mainstream media shamed beliefs that come with such an identity). It discusses the technological/socio-cultural conditions that made the propogation of such outrage culture in this particular group of people possible and popular. Meanwhile, those who are left-leaning are more likely to be open to using different sources.

While reading this, I was reminded of a lecture I saw given by Psychologist Jordan Peterson, who talked about the psychology of political affiliations. He talked about the right being more traditionalist and orderly, and the left being more open-minded and progressive. In other words, right-leaning folks tend to have personality traits that indicate they like predictability anbd order to color their routines and lives. Left-leaning folks possess personality traits that, similarly, help contextualize their overall ideology and specifically in this case, their media consumption. I think researching psychological studies on this is a super interesting way to understand the phenomenon.

This assymetry in media consumption amongst party lines has ramifications for percentages of these populations who believe in conspiracy theories; the left is generally less likely to believe in conspiracy theories, positively correlating with the individual’s polticial knowledge, while a significant subgroup of old (65+) conservatives (8%) do believe in radical conspiracies. This is part of the epistemic crisis the author posits and ponders. I do wonder what other observable, specific, and empirical ramifications this crisis has other than this, and a general lack of political knowledge; in other words, what else is making thus a “crisis?” The overall level of incivility in discourse? The collapse of trust/faith in our institutions?

On the Conventional Understanding of the Epistemic Crisis in the Consumption of Political Media:

“Throughout the first year after the 2016 US presidential election, the leading explanations of epistemic crisis offered by academics, journalists, and governments focused on technology. Some focused on political click- bait entrepreneurs, who had figured out how to get paid through Facebook’s advertising system by using outrage to induce readers to click on “fake news” items. Others focused on technologically induced echo chambers (where endless options for news allow us to self-segregate by our own choices into separate communities of knowledge) or filter bubbles (where companies use algorithms that feed us divergent narratives in order to trigger our persistent interest), suggesting that the epistemic crisis was the result of social media.” — 43

This is the “conventional” understanding of our current crisis, and it is one that before reading this, I would say I ascribed to as well. It is easy to put all the blame on social media. I still believe the internet/social media plays a polarizing role, but not that it was the nexus of this isue. A question, what is the distinction between “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers” being made here?

On The Asymmetric Media Consumption and Usage:

“There are very few sites that are observationally “center-right”; the most notable include historically right-wing publications such as the National Review, the Weekly Standard, and Reason, who did not endorse Trump. These outlets received little attention over the period we studied” — 45

“Moreover, on the right, the sites that rise to particular prominence using social media metrics, whether Twitter or Facebook, quickly move from partisan media with some of the trappings of professional media, like Fox News, to conspiracy-mongering outrage producers like the Gateway Pundit, Truthfeed, TruePundit, or InfoWars. While we observed some hyperpartisan sites on the left, such as Occupy Democrats during the election or the Palmer Report in 2017, these are fewer and more peripheral to the left-oriented media ecosystem than the hyperpartisan sites oriented toward the right.” — 45

Right media sites are less centrist/moderate, supporting author’s claim that right-wing media is particularly “outrageous.”

“While the left-oriented sites are moderately less tightly connected to the center and center-left sites when measured by audience attention than when measured by the attention of other media producers, the right-oriented sites are much more clearly separate from the rest of the media ecosystem.” — 45

I wonder if the bubble charts we looked at would corroborate this info.

“A Pew survey right after the 2016 election found that Trump voters concentrated their attention on a smaller number of sites, in particular Fox News, which was cited by 40 percent of Trump voters as their primary source of news. The equivalent number of Clinton voters who cited MSNBC as their primary source was only 9 percent.” — 46

“Two distinct populations: one that trusts news it gets from PBS, the BBC, and the New York Times, and the other which locates Hannity, Limbaugh, and Beck in the same place of trust (the summary of the findings from 2014 PEW Research Study)…It seems clear that the business models and institutional frameworks of these two sets of sources will lead the former to be objectively more trustworthy than the latter, and that a population that puts its trust in the latter rather than the former is liable to be systematically misinformed as to the state of affairs in the world.” — 46

What specifically are these “business models and institutional frameworks” that make the mainstream media a better resource and exempt from this criticism? I think the death of journalism and abolition of the Fairness Doctrine would neagtively impact all of the media, not just amongst partisan lines.

“The more knowledgeable respondents are about politics, the less likely they are to accept conspiracy theories or unsubstantiated rumors that harm their ideological opponents. For Republicans, more knowledge results, at best, in no change in the level with which they accept conspiracy theories, and at worst, increases their willingness to accept such theories.” — 46–47

This makes sense. Is there any data on conspiracy theories in general, not just those that are harmful to opponents?

“The asymmetric pattern in radio and cable news, however, long precedes the significant rise in commercial internet news sites, and it shaped the competitive environment online, making it basically impossible for a new entrant into the competition for right-wing audiences to escape the propaganda feedback loop.” — 57

On the Propaganda Feedback Loop of the Right:

“On the left, leading media quickly debunked the anti-Trump story, finding that the lawsuit in which the allegations had been made was backed by an anti-Trump activist, and the story died shortly thereafter. By contrast, the Clinton pedophilia story originated on Fox News online, and was quickly replicated and amplified across the right-wing media ecosystem.” — 48

“When mainstream media reported a false story, the errors were found by other media within the mainstream, and public retractions followed in all but one of the cases we studied. Reporters were usually censured or fired when they made false factual assertions. By contrast, in right-wing media reporting, falsehood was never fact-checked within the right-wing media at large (only by external fact-checkers), retractions were rare, and there were no consequences for the reporters.” — 48

Are reporters still held as accountable?

“In effect, we see two fundamentally different competitive dynamics. On the left, outlets compete for attention, often aiming to stoke partisan outrage through framing and story selection, but always constrained both by the fact that audiences pay attention to a broad range of media and by a mainstream professional media delighted to catch each other out in error. As a result, the tendency to feed audiences whatever they want to hear and see is moderated by the risk that an outlet will lose credibility if it is found out in blatant factual error. In addition, reporters suffer professional reputational loss when their stories turn out to have been false.” — 48

I never considered this, but it strikes me as true. The acverage left-leaning listener has a larger array of tools in their toolkit to diacern for themselves what is beleivable based on what else they know. They seem to have more discernment at their disposal. However, even though this person may be better equipped, would cognitive bias would still be at work here?

“Things are different on the right. Here, there is no tension between commercial and ideological drivers and professional commitment to factual veracity. We see a propaganda feedback loop with an absence of correction mechanisms which results in the unconstrained propagation of identity-consistent falsehoods. Media outlets police each other for ideological purity, not factual accuracy. Audiences have become used to receiving belief-consistent news, and abandon outlets that insist on facts when these are inconsistent with partisan narratives. The phenomenon is not new, and was lamented as early as 2010 by the libertarian commentator Julian Sanchez, who described it as “epistemic closure” on the right.” — 49

I strongly agree with what is in bold.

“But in our observations of specific factual claims, as opposed to both broad ideological framings, and specific, emotional appeals aimed to stoke outrage, we saw the tension between professional norms and commercial drivers played out as a reality-check dynamic. And that tension moderates the prevalence and survival of audience-pleasing, bias-consistent, outrage-inducing narratives that are factually false. Because of this dynamic, mainstream media, for all its systemic limitations, does not pose the same acute threat to democratic practice as the present right-wing outrage industry.” — 49–50

Is the author arguing that mainstream media is exempt from this societal trend, or merely the blame for the negative effects of partcipating? Because I think it is obvious that they are guilty of these things as well. I could concede that right wing media outlets are particularly dependent on this dynamic because of the nature of their audience, but not that mainstream media does not pose a threat to democratic discourse.

“Within half a decade of its launch, Fox News had become the most watched network, offering its audience the same mixture of identity confirmation, biased news, and attacks against those who do not conform to the party line, that Limbaugh had pioneered.” — 56

On the Political Economy and the Formulation of the Modern Day Outrage Mediascape (Particularly on Right):

“Like their left-oriented counterparts, these mid-century conservative outlets could not overcome the structural barriers to competing in con- centrated media markets. The three networks dominated the news. Radio, under clear ownership limits, had to operate in ways consistent with the fairness doctrine, which made nationwide syndication costly. Local news- paper ownership was fragmented, and local monopolies benefited by serving all readers in their markets. It was simply too hard for either side to capture large market shares... This had changed drastically by the 1980’s. The mosty distinctive feature of present-day right-wing media is that it is very big business… And it is that fundamental shift shift from the non- or low-profit model to the profitable business model that has created a dynamic that forces all the participants in the right-wing media ecosystem to compete on the terms set by the outrage industry.” — 51

“What happened on the right, and why didn’t it happen on the left? Why in 1988? […] The short version of the answer is that changes in political culture created a large new market segment for media that emphasized white, Christian identity as a political identity; and that a series of regulatory and technological changes opened up enough new channels that the old strat- egy of programming for a population-wide median viewer, and hoping for a share of the total audience, was displaced by a strategy that provided one substantial part of the market uniquely-tailored content. And that content was the expression of an outraged backlash against the civil rights move- ment, the women’s movement, and the New Left’s reorientation of the moral universe inward, to the individual, rather than to the family or God. The left, by contrast, was made up of a coalition of more diverse demo- graphic groups, and never provided a similarly large market to underwrite a commercially successful mirror image.” — 51

This is probably the part of the author’s argument that I find most interesting. It reminds me of when I stumbled across a youtube video talking about how Fox News stokes something called “white fear,” and played clips of a news anchor talking about how America is being lost to immigrants.

Channel Expansion #1:

“The first channel expansion came from UHF television stations in the 1960s. The All Receiver Act in 1961 required television manufacturers to ship televisions that could receive both UHF and VHF stations. Before the Act, because few televisions received UHF, few stations existed, and because few stations existed, few consumers demanded all channel televisions. This regulatory move allowed the technical base for a larger number of channels to emerge. Complementing this move, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) changed its rules regarding the public interest obligations of broadcasters, and permitted broadcasters to count paid religious broadcasting against their public interest quota. This change permitted Evangelical churches, who were happy to pay for their airtime, to crowd out and displace mainline Protestant churches that had previously been the dominant religious broadcasters and had relied on what the FCC called “sustaining” (free) access to the airwaves. Pat Robertson’s purchase of an unused UHF license in 1961, and his launch of the 700 Club in 1963, epitomize these two pathways for the emergence of televangelism. And televangelism, in turn, forged the way for the emerging right-wing media ecosystem.” — 51–52

Channel Expansion #2:

“The shift in direction toward deregulation, which swept across trucking, airlines, and banking in the 1970s, reached tele-communications as well (I’ll return to the question of why the 1970s in the last part of the chapter), and the FCC increasingly removed constraints on cable companies and cable-only channels, allowing them to compete more freely with over-the-air television. At the same time, development in satellite technology to allow transmission to cable ground stations allowed the emergence of the “superstation.” — 52

Channel Expansion #3:
“The final piece of the media-ecosystem puzzle came from developments in an old technology — radio. During the 1970s, FM radio, long suppressed through sustained litigation and regulatory lobbying gamesmanship, came into its own, and its superior quality allowed it to capture the music market. AM radio broadcasters needed a new format that would not suffer from the difference, and were ready to adopt talk radio once it was unleashed. And unleashed it was when, after spending his entire tenure pursuing it, Ronald Reagan’s FCC Chair, Mark Fowler, succeeded in repealing the fairness doctrine in 1987. Liberated from the demands of response time, radio stations could now benefit from a new format, pioneered by Rush Limbaugh. In 1988, within months of the repeal of the fairness doctrine, Limbaugh’s three-hour-a-day program became nationally syndicated, using the same satellite technology that enabled distribution to ground stations and made cable networks possible. His style, based on strong emotional appeals, featured continuous criticism of mainstream media, systematic efforts to undermine trust in government whenever it was led by Democrats, and policing of Republican candidates and politicians to make sure they toed the conservative line defined the genre. For the first time since Father Coughlin in the 1930s, a clear right-leaning, populist and combative voice emerged that was distinct from the ideologically committed but market-constrained efforts of the Manion Forum or the National Review, and became an enormously profitable business. The propaganda feedback loop was set in motion.”

Central Claim(s):

“These findings provide strong reason to doubt the technological explanation of the perceived epistemic crisis of the day. At baseline, technology diffusion in American society is not in itself correlated to party alignment. If technology were a significant driving force we should observe roughly symmetric patterns.” — 47

“Technology and institutions alone cannot explain the market demand for the kind of bile that Limbaugh, Hannity, or Beck sell. For this we must turn to political culture, and the realignment of white, Evangelical Christian voters into a solidly, avidly Republican bloc. The racist white identity element of this new Republican bloc was a direct response to the civil rights revolution.” — 54

Is this a subgrouop of republicans? What percentage of Republicans would identify this way?

“The founding of the Moral Majority in 1979, the explosive success of televangelism in the 1980s, and Ronald Reagan’s embrace of Evangelicals, all combined to create what would become the most dedicated and mobilized part of the Republican base in the coming decades. The two elements that defined these audiences, predisposed them to reject the authority of modernity and its core epistemological foundations –science, expertise, professional training, and norms. For Evangelicals, the rejection of reason in favor of faith was central to their very existence. For white southerners, and those who aligned with them in anxiety over inte- gration, the emerging elite narrative after the civil rights revolution treated their anxieties as anathema, and judged their views as shameful, rather than a legitimate subject of debate…This substantial population was shut out and alienated from the most basic axioms of elite-controlled public discourse, be it in mainstream media, academia, or law and policy.” — 55

“It’s important to clarify here that I am not arguing that the Internet and social media have no distinctive effect on political mobilization by mar- ginalized groups. My focus has been on disinformation and the formation and change of beliefs at the population level, not for individuals and small groups. There is no question that by shifting the power to produce information, knowledge, and culture, the Internet and social media have allowed marginal groups and loosely connected individuals to get together, to share ideas that are very far from the mainstream, and try to shape debates in the general media ecosystem or organize for action in ways that were extremely difficult, if not impossible, even in the multi- channel environment of cable and talk radio.” — 57

I appreciate this distinction, had it not been made I would have criticized the argument for not conceding/including this point.

“Our experience of epistemic crisis today cannot be separated from the much broader and deeper trends of loss of trust in institutions generally associated with that collapse.” — 59

The loss of trust in institutions is a complex phenomenon that I am sure is relevant to the peculiar kind of polarized political discourse we have today.