Freedom of the Press has become a slight misnomer, as it becomes increasingly difficult to experience that unique blend of pulp paper and ink that accompany a real printed newspaper. Spies no longer peep at us from behind the folds of a printed broadsheet, as in the old Hitchcock movies—but they do publish false news stories online to confuse and frighten us. Sadly, fewer than one in five of us reads a newspaper any more.
The “press” has removed itself, to an increasingly large extent, to the digital medium, so while it was a literal reference point for 480 years, in the 21st Century the word has taken on metaphorical hues. And though we still print books, most of them are also available on Kindle.
This shift is far more than a mere technological phenomenon. In fact, there is no such thing as mere technological phenomena. One of the points I try to hammer as often as possible, to the dismay of many current and former students, is that technological advance is never a neutral game. Each technological advance actually changes the game, creates its own environment, its own operating habitat if you will, and in order for us to access it, we must bow the knee to its demands. This is usually a gradual process, but before we know it, most of us become willing and even adoring slaves of the new thing. Not long ago, the thought of paying $1000 for a phone would have had people laughing themselves silly.
The printed book is a case in point. Before the 1500s, literacy wasn’t really a thing. The noun “literacy,” wasn’t even a word until just before the 20th century. A literate person, until recently, was a well-read, well-educated person, not someone who had just acquired their ABCs. Access to the printed book made widespread education not merely possible, but before a generation had expired, education began to become compulsory. The Protestant Reformation, a movement with direct connections to the printing press, championed compulsory education almost from its beginning. The Puritans brought it over to this part of the world with them. So, if you’re looking for someone to blame for the drudgery of your high school years, blame Martin Luther.
The birth of an independent news entity, what we fondly refer to as Journalism, was directly connected to the advent of the printing press, as well as to the commercial expansion of European colonies in East Asia, Africa and the New World, which also gave rise to the popularity of coffee and tea. I don’t have time to tease out all of those, but basically, just as people go to sports bars today to watch big games and prize fights, back in the day, men of education and means went to coffee shops to enjoy a refreshing dish of coffee and to read---and discuss—the latest doings in the freshly printed newspapers available at the bar. So, yes, a growing sophistication in the brewing of coffee had a direct influence on the development of the very idea of the Free Press.
But times have changed, and we are now the slaves of new technologies. These technologies have forever altered the way in which we receive important information—that which we refer to as The News. Just 30 years ago, established journalism outlets supplied most of the news. These were national and international newswire services, big city newspapers, a few news magazines, and news on radio and television provided by a handful of broadcast networks. News providers and distributors had evolved from the 1920s into a fairly homogeneous, even-minded group of college-educated practitioners most of whom had run the gauntlet of a robust working apprenticeship--“paid their dues,” so to speak--and settled in to work in an unglamorous industry about which they had no illusions. Journalism was a crusading labor of love, long on labor and short on love. As an industry, it was largely self-regulating, with a broadly accepted code of ethics. The idea was that it was essential for a free press to be a responsible press. This didn’t mean they always got it right, but it did mean there was a pretty high level of accountability. Why? Because they saw themselves as the Fourth Estate—an essential check and balance on other power elements in the public sphere, such as Government and Big Business. The Press was the Watchdog and we needed them to be free and independent from undue influence so they could keep us, the people, properly informed.
But Watergate and the fall of President Richard Nixon altered the scene in the early 1970s. At no time in our history did the Free Press feel more justified in its existence. And, though we now know that the press may have taken too much credit for what happened, the end of the Vietnam War and the fall of a corrupt government are viewed by many as the Free Press’ finest hour. But it came at a tall price. Journalists suddenly joined the celebrity culture, and a subtle shift took place—the Holy Grail for the profession suddenly became THAT investigative story that would springboard you into national notoriety. Maybe you, too, could be played by Robert Redford in the movie version. In 1981, the first multi-million-dollar news anchor deal was cut for a recognizable Watergate reporting face, Dan Rather, provoking a race among other networks for similar star power. Within a decade, news bureau budgets everywhere were slashed and hundreds of hard-working and highly informed on-the-scene reporters were let go in favor of paying a small number of high-priced celebrities to present the news in that magical news hour just before prime time. Network news anchors ceased to be ordinary Americans, and as budgets were absorbed by their ever-larger salaries, even investigative journalism began to dry up.
Then came cable news, making “news” available twenty-four hours, seven days a week, and the face of journalism shifted yet again. Standards and news values that had been sacred for more than sixty years began to slide as the demand for copy—and especially video—became paramount. Lots of broadcast hours meant lots of fresh new attractive faces and attention-grabbing shows became necessary, so the money shifted even further away from news gathering and towards on-air talent. Journalism in the minds of many became much less about carrying a notepad and recorder into city hall and more about having the right haircut, vocal range and on-air presence for broadcast. In this scheme, there was no actual intent to neglect the news, it was simply that the economic model for 24-7 broadcast news dictated a visually and emotionally stimulating approach.
As cable news services proliferated, what they actually covered began to fall into two categories: first, prediction and/or “in depth” analysis of something that hadn’t happened yet; and second, rushing to put the high-dollar talent on the scene for a developing event, reporting “live” for the next couple of days on a story that would have merited a special bulletin or gotten prime coverage in the morning and evening news in the old days. Sensing the threat by cable news’ ability to keep their people reporting live from an important scene around the clock, Dan Rather was a pace-setter here, too, being among the first to get his network to foot the bill to send him to “report” from the scene rather than rely on less expensive, on-the-ground resources. Within weeks, everyone else followed suit, and anchors, who once remained firmly entrenched at The Desk, now began jetting everywhere from Boston to Baghdad. For those who wanted in-depth coverage, you once read the newspaper. But now, who needed a newspaper when you could just turn on your TV and catch Brian Williams reporting live from a chopper in Mosul?
Twenty-four-hour news also intensified an existing priority: Immediacy. Getting the story first had always been a priority for competing news outlets. But getting it first also meant getting it right. The hurdles of accountability an average story had to go through to get to publication were, once upon a time, admirably formidable. But the churning gristmill of 24-hour news dictated not merely the need to have stuff in front of viewers as soon as possible, it also eviscerated the once rigorous review process in the interests of speed, and so you began to see more stories rushed to broadcast with less accurate content. For a while, cable news retained some level of discipline by relying on the much more reliable newspaper and wire services as the source of much of their material. So, newspapers still served the vital function of providing solid content. They also set the record straight by supplying the kind of in-depth coverage the broadcast outlets simply never could touch. So, while the Free Press was not as news centered as it once was, it was still news. It was less good, but it was still good. It was less responsible, but it was still responsible. This lasted for almost two decades.
When it comes to what we think of as The News these days, the Internet changed everything. And by everything, I mean everything. Trends that began in the late 90s took hold with the dawn of the new millennium and what we have today bears no resemblance to the Golden Age of News that began in the 1920s. It’s a sad commentary to note that responsibly gathered and curated news, as a genuine lifeline for the survival of a democratic society, only survived about 75 years in this country. (Before the 1920s, American journalism was grievously hobbled by fierce partisanship or commercially attractive sensationalism. Sound familiar?)
The beginnings of the demise of traditional news media arise from the new power struggles between
- network news represented by organizations like CBS
- cable news represented by outlets like FOX News
- alternative-news radio represented by people like Rush Limbaugh
- the emerging amateur-citizen news of people like Matt Drudge.
First came the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, a Reagan-era deregulation of the single broadcast restriction that once required that public airwaves not be permitted to run controversial opinion without equal time provided for an opposition voice. While challenges to the regulation made sense, the unforeseen effects of this deregulation have been nothing short of catastrophic.
The most immediate effect was right wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh. I first heard Limbaugh (a college dropout whose only prior professions had been that of sports announcer and small-market disc jockey) in 1988, during a long drive across California, blissfully ignorant of the fact that I was witnessing, by ear, the birth of the future. But the show did everything for me that day that it has done for so many millions of people since then. It was a stimulatingly-paced, provocative, status-quo challenging solid block of listening time--the radio advertisers dream. Limbaugh’s stock in trade, then as now, was to challenge the prevailing narrative as he championed, with overcharged ego and machismo, what he labeled as conservative ideology. He was among the first to engage in unbridled—and unanswered—attacks on public figures he deemed as liberal. Few people in the national media scene have experienced such a meteoric and lucrative rise as Limbaugh—in fact, with a current estimated net worth of half a billion dollars, he may have no rivals in that regard. But he helped lay the groundwork for three things:
- a general skepticism regarding the work of traditional news outlets
- the fostering of alternative narratives, or counter-narratives whose only standard was that they line up with the agenda-setter’s point of view
- a not-terribly new but immensely profitable commercial commodity—popular nationalist outrage.
CBN’s Pat Robertson and others had been working along these lines for decades. But Limbaugh took his product to a whole new level, chiseled out a whole new demographic of consumers, and basically threw wide the gates for opportunists eager to exploit this relatively untapped national market. He had hit the mother lode.
The first to cash in on a big scale was Australian Rupert Murdoch, who launched FOX News in 1996. As a large footnote, Murdoch already owned 20th Century Fox movie studio, the Fox TV Network, Harper Collins books, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, The New York Post and the Star tabloid, not to mention billions of dollars-worth of media holdings in Australia and Great Britain.
FOX News did something the other cable news people, mainly CNN, had simply missed, and they’ll never forgive themselves. While catering to the undeniably important outraged nationalist demographic discovered by Limbaugh, FOX made cable news exciting and sexy. It wasn’t hard to do. Warm colors, testosterone-fueled men and bold, attractive (mostly blond) women, none of whom gets to wear slacks—basically an Ayn Rand dream world. All this plus strategic interruptions by dramatic music and dynamic graphics, made CNN's stolid Wolf Blitzer look suddenly very old fashioned. With news interspersed with high-octane issues-oriented shows that featured well-dressed people on brightly lit sets speaking strenuously to one another, the other cable networks were simply blown out of the water in short order.
Early on, FOX News simply made more entertaining and visually stimulating the cable news behaviors that were already in place. But in time it began to diverge from reporting the news, so that most of its shows, including the ones purporting to be strictly news broadcasts, became politically charged, and their key demographics, which came to include a significant percentage of evangelical Christians along with an indeterminate number of perfectly profane secular white nationalists, tuned in and cheered them on. In fact, the average FOX News viewer is Rush Limbaugh—a white male without a college degree aged 67. The effect is that while people who primarily use FOX News feel strongly about things, they have the lowest level of acquaintance with actual hard news events than consumers of other national news sources. The next closest to the bottom is Twitter, followed by Facebook, Google News and Yahoo News—all for similar reasons, as I will explain momentarily. By comparison, those who use NPR as their primary source of news scored 15 percentage points higher on a news events quiz.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
We need to talk about Matt Drudge. I am using Drudge to address a phenomenon that grew much bigger than him within a matter of a few years. Even so, his website, started in 1997 during the heyday of the Clinton scandals, still boasts 3 million visits a day. Matt Drudge was the first notable citizen journalist to employ the Internet to fact-check and undermine the dominant narratives in traditional news. Using the same sensationalistic tactics as the tabloids, the Drudge Report ran gossipy stories on celebrities and public figures, alarming news stories meant to terrify and titillate the readers, but also in the mix were some salaciously fascinating off-the record or on-background leaks from within the offices of not just public servants but major news outlets, many of which caused scrambling denials and great embarrassment. I was an avid follower of the Drudge Report when it first went live online, and a lot of us laughing up our sleeves at the regular exposés. But traditional news outlets united in their hatred of Drudge and vilified him in every way they could think of. Their visceral reaction turned out to be a bad miscalculation. Drudge had discovered the proverbial chink in the armor. Traditional news outlets were not merely fallible—they had cause in certain contexts to hide the truth. It played right into the growing suspicions fanned by right-wing talk radio and FOX News.
Then the dike broke, and a new age was born—the precursor to where we are today. The key player in the Tragedy of Traditional News was none other than Dan Rather, the man who presided over the celebrity-grooming of network news in 1980. Fast forward to 2004. George W. Bush is running for his second presidential term. Dan Rather, still the revered centerpiece at CBS News, runs with a story with sketchy documentation and flimsy support, a story that, if true, would utterly sink Bush’s campaign for office. Rather, the man who broke JFK’s death to the world, the lion of Watergate, “Gunga Dan” himself, would be relevant again. CBS was lagging behind the other prime-time network news outlets and was losing chunks of audience to the cable news interlopers.
Turned out the story was no good. But it wasn’t traditional news that undid Rather. It was the Internet. One of the very first ground swells of Internet response turned into a revolt against the Dan Rather crusade. Traditional media hesitated, but the Internet didn’t, and conservative citizen researchers went after the story with a vengeance, leaving it in tatters and Dan Rather’s vaunted 44-year career in ruins. Not only had the mighty fallen, but the once-assumed reliability of network news, the trust that Rather's predecessor Walter Cronkite had sculpted so carefully, began its rapid deterioration.
The last piece of this picture, before we tie all this together to describe our current desperate state, involves the subsequent rise of social media as not merely the contemporary equivalent of the 18th Century coffee shop—without the coffee. It has also become a primary and urgent source of the news itself. Social media have also therefore elevated disinformation to the level of news, entirely corrupted our sense of what is actually newsworthy, and now threatens to suffocate the culture by rendering authentic information so difficult to obtain that millions of people are simply giving up on the idea of the verifiable truth.
Like almost all communication technological advances, the vast new phenomenon of social media began well. It brought hope and light. Glowing praise accompanied its early years as the notion of a genuinely democratic voice seemed to be possible at last. People grew teary-eyed talking about the levels of personal liberation created by Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and others. The marginalized and the voiceless would at last have a voice.
And at first it was glorious. Totalitarian regimes in eastern Europe and the Middle East collapsed largely thanks to the aggregation of revolutionary voices on social media. People with common cause could no longer be intimidated into silence through isolation. Now they cried out as one and made their voices heard to millions and overthrew their oppressors. Some people began to hope that democracy itself was evolving into something altogether new and enlightened, thanks to digital communication technology.
But then the true face of social media began to show itself as it became increasingly evident that too many social media users have no great noble agenda. In fact, for all its wonders, social media have become a perverse new source of abuse and bullying. And social media became yet another glittering commodity attractive to buyers and sellers the world over. As a vast, virtually unregulated entity, everything--good and bad--soon found its niche within the unfocused boundaries of the medium. For many of us, social media have become more about a new form of self-realization, in which the powerful lure of marketing new selves through multiple packaged personas is like a heady new drug. Public discourse, for which there had been such high hopes, has descended rapidly into a fetid swamp of shrill claims, counterclaims, insults and hatred. And the News, once a commercial, though proudly independent institution, finds itself subservient to new, dominant communication technologies that privilege trivia over essentials.
Here’s how it works. Social media, which people think answers to them, actually dictates what the user will see. Yes, robots have literally taken over. This is not Science Fiction, this is fact. If your primary interface with the Internet, and the key medium through which you obtain information about the wider world, is filtered through your social media connections, the chances are very strong that you live inside an informational echo chamber and are not even aware of it.
Social media, like all media, is about maximizing pleasure and convenience while making somebody else a bundle of money. Forbes just published its rankings of who the richest people are, and in the top list are Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Evan Spiegel of Snapchat. At 27, Spiegel is the youngest billionaire in the nation, worth $3.2B.
According to Pew Research last year, Indications are that if you are over 50, 72% still like TV news, and just under half of those prefer network over cable news. But if you are under 30, the numbers are reversed. Only 27% like their news from TV, and only 5% read a newspaper. So, the rest, that’s most of the people in college today, get the vital flow of their society’s life’s blood from online sources, 70% of them get any or all of it off of their phone. And as of this year, almost 70% of all adults say they get at least some of their news from social media, with Facebook dominating in that category.
Here’s the problem. Zuckerberg and Spiegel and all the other billionaires in the social media industry make their money off of us, the consumer, by getting us to click on things we find interesting. Bots are busy every nanosecond of every single day processing, analyzing and reporting on everything we do on social media, from the words we type in to the length of time we have a particular window, story or comment open on our screens. That information gets sent, at the speed of light, to advertisers, marketers, and even news providers and, believe it or not, a digitized version of you, basically a digital personality that consists of all your likes, your dislikes, even the breadth of your vocabulary, exists in the fiber optic world. That version of you gets sent out into the cyber-verse, and while you’re in class or sleeping soundly (or both), you are actually busy pushing thousands of little data buttons for the stuff that’s available out there, stuff that’s for sale, including the news, so the next time you go online, the benevolent cyber-bots, eager to please you, as well as to take your money, serve up to your eyes a lovely smorgasbord of things that your digital personality told them you want to see and consume. And so, whether you want it or not, if your mobile device is your primary news tool, you have unwittingly customized it through all the little choices you have made while using it, and the obliging digital worker bees are busy fashioning for you the most pleasing experiential reality they can possibly create. And in this way, they build around us an informational echo chamber in which the only things we hear and see and therefore think actually cater to our expectations.
The rapid result of this partitioning of reality is that everyone is utterly convinced that their view of the world is the real one. Only it probably isn’t. It’s just a piece of it—the piece that confirms their own privately held suspicions and prejudices. So, when we begin to believe things that just aren’t true, that are demonstrably false—such as the unbelievably absurd notion that traditional news is busy making up stuff about Donald Trump—something that 46% of the American public actually believes—then our online behavioral choices will do their utmost to confirm those suspicions and feed us what we want to hear about it. And we won’t stop to consider whether it’s factual or not because, hey, I just read it right here on my phone and it says its news, so there. And we tell those who think otherwise that they’re the victims of fake news. And we feel sorry for them for being so gullible and misguided.
So that’s it in a really big nutshell, and if you want to know my expert assessment of things as they stand, it’s very simple. We’re toast.
Unless something changes. Can it change? Yes. These things always evolve. As indicated earlier, the Free Press in this country has, in earlier times, been a seedbed for partisan rancor and commercially driven falsehoods. Perhaps the pendulum is swinging that way again, only to come back to the notion of responsibility sometime in the hoped-for future. But if we want to encourage the pendulum to start back toward restoring the importance of facts over sales and propaganda, we have a lot of work to do.
Here is some more Pew Research data that play into these ideas that you may find interesting:
A shortened version of these remarks was presented at the Lee University School of Religion Roundtable: "Freedom of the Press & Fake News," October 19, 2017 in the Jones Lecture Hall.
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