Journal of Free Speech Law: "The New Gatekeepers?: Social Media and the 'Search for Truth,'" by Prof. Ashutosh Bhagwat

Just published as part of the symposium on Media and Society After Technological Disruption, edited by Profs. Justin "Gus" Hurwitz & Kyle Langvardt.

The article is here; here are the Introduction and the start of Part I:

What is the role of "Trusted Communicators" in disseminating knowledge to the public? The trigger for this question, which is the topic of this set of chapters, is the widely shared belief that one of the most notable, and noted, consequences of the spread of the internet and social media is the collapse of sources of information that are broadly trusted across society, because the internet has eliminated the power of the traditional gatekeepers who identified and created trusted communicators for the public. Many commentators argue this is a troubling development because trusted communicators are needed for our society to create and maintain a common base of facts, accepted by the broader public, that is essential to a system of democratic self-governance. Absent such a common base or factual consensus, democratic politics will tend to collapse into polarized camps that cannot accept the possibility of electoral defeat (as they arguably have in recent years in the United States). I aim here to examine recent proposals to resurrect a set of trusted communicators and the gatekeeper function, and to critique them from both practical and theoretical perspectives. But before we can discuss possible "solutions" to the lack of gatekeepers and trusted communicators in the modern era, it is important to understand how those functions arose in the pre-internet era.

[I.] The Old Gatekeepers

Underlying the concept of trusted communicators is the question of "Who to trust?" But underlying that question is yet another, more foundational one: "Who decides who to trust?" Ultimately, of course, each person must decide for themselves who to trust. But for a societal consensus on this question to emerge, some common source of authority must exist. If there is one lesson that can be drawn from the modern era of social media, it is that robust, public discourse alone cannot be expected to generate an automatic consensus on who can be trusted (or on trustworthy facts). The quest for trusted communicators, then, is in truth a quest for authoritative sources of trust—which is to say, a quest for authority. In the internet era, centralized control over information flows has fragmented and, consequently, so too has the authority to identify trusted communicators. Before seeking to recreate such authority, however, it is important to understand how and why such authoritative sources of information emerged in the pre-internet era, when modern expectations about trust and a factual consensus developed—which is to say, during the first six or seven decades of the twentieth century.

Who were the creators and designators of trust during this period? In short, it was the institutional media. Moreover, through most of the twentieth century, institutional media acted as the gatekeepers of knowledge and news as well. Just who constituted the institutional media gatekeepers, however, changed over time. During the first part of the century, perhaps the crucial period in the development of gatekeepers and trusted communicators, it was major daily newspapers, especially those associated with William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, as well as Adolph Ochs's New York Times. As we shall discuss in more detail, in many ways it was cultural clashes between Hearst and Pulitzer on one side and Ochs on the other that generated the dominant gatekeeper/trusted-communicator model.

After the First World War, while newspapers certainly maintained their importance, commercial radio broadcasters emerged as another crucial—and soon more popularly accessible—media institution. The first commercial radio station began broadcasting in 1920 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Four years later, 600 commercial radio stations were broadcasting in the United States. In 1926, the first national radio network, NBC, was formed. As evidenced by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's fireside chats during the Great Depression, radio quickly emerged as a widely available, popular means for institutional media—and those trusted communicators to whom they provided airtime, such as FDR—to reach mass public audiences.

Finally, around the mid-century, at the beginning of what many considered the Golden Age of the institutional media, television broadcasters began to complement and eventually supplant radio (and newspapers) as the key institutional media….