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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….
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” . . . 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?”
I was thinking the encyclopedias that many homes and libraries had on their shelves.
Almanacs too.
Trust? Hearst? These problems were old when Citizen Kane was made. When Citizen Kane takes place.
“Kane caught in love nest with, quote, singer, unquote.”
“I’m gonna send you to Sing Sing, Geddes! Sing [honk]”
“A declaration of principles…”
Etc. x 100
And, of course:
2020.
“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). ”
You lost me there.
While it’s true that robust public discourse isn’t guaranteed to generate consensus, your ‘source of authority’ doesn’t create a consensus, either. It imposes a fake consensus.
Back when media were so consolidated that Walter Cronkite was essentially calling the shots, we didn’t actually have agreement, as such, on a wide range of issues. What we had was preference falsification. The media were generating an illusion of agreement by suppressing alternative views, so that people who had quite common opinions would keep quiet about them, thinking they were outliers.
When the internet came along and shattered that system, it’s not that consensus disappeared. The illusion of consensus was shattered. We saw a number of ‘preference cascades’ occur, on topics such as gun control, where actual elite consensus clashed with public opinion, which opinion could no longer be concealed.
I really do not think you can put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
This is as insufferable as tankies posting about ‘Manufacturing Consent.’
You have a right to say whatever you want. You don’t have a right to be taken seriously. And you certainly don’t get to invoke anti-elitist populism based on being unpopular.
Brett, *you are an elite.* Just about everyone posting here is.
You have zero evidence of causality on guns.
It is not a media conspiracy when your or my idiosyncratic views don’t catch fire with people, it’s just the way it is sometimes.
“And you certainly don’t get to invoke anti-elitist populism based on being unpopular.”
If you think that’s what I’m doing, you don’t understand a word I’m saying.
I’m saying that the former media enforcement of consensus that the OP looks back on fondly wasn’t enforcing public consensus, it was enforcing elite consensus, in order to keep public consensus from realizing its own existence and acting.
A lot of elite consensus isn’t popular at all.
Mind you, we have sort of the opposite problem from fake consensus induced preference falsification today. The way the internet allows people to self-sort into bubbles of like minded people, people with genuinely outlier views end up with the impression that they ARE the majority, and entitled to act like it.
“. . . self-sort into bubbles of like minded people . . . . ”
And then there’s us goofballs at the VC.
Ok, now I want to know:
Who do you think the ‘elite’ in US society are? What criteria would one use to identify them?
Plenty of clingers invited to this party . . . has Heterodox Academy issued its statement denouncing the against-the odds, homogeneous slant yet?
Bhagwat seems an outstandingly well qualified law professor. As a historian of American media he is unqualified, and indulges in counter-factual suppositions, apparently because he supposes they sound plausible.
During what Bhagwat rightly terms the golden age of American media, there were not fewer institutional media organizations than now, there were far more. And if you define those organizations as the ones which practiced systematic news gathering, and disseminated their findings to discreet audiences identified by shared interests, those media offered far more news-coverage variety than present internet media do.
It is not for nothing that prior to the internet there were thriving foreign language newspapers, built around systematic news gathering, serving specialized community interests, in places great and small across this nation, from New York City to New Prague Minnesota.
It should not go unremarked that entire classes of subject speciality publications, such as Billboard Magazine, practiced systematic news gathering themed for specialized audiences, and thrived doing it.
However obscure the locations and audiences may have been, cities and towns of every size and character across the nation supported news-gathering media. Often they had to compete to do it, even in the smallest locales.
The OP tells an entirely different story, and it is a mistaken one.
By the 2010s, the importance of social media in displacing traditional media as the primary engine of public discourse was evident—so much so that by 2017, that most hidebound of American institutions, the United States Supreme Court, recognized social media as “the most important places . . . for the exchange of views.” Every citizen became a potential publisher and people suddenly possessed a plethora of choices regarding what voices to pay attention to, ending once and for all the gatekeeper function of the institutional media. And for the same reason, the range of opinions expressed publicly became massively more diverse, ending the media’s role in creating consensus around a common set of facts and beliefs. The Murrow-Cronkite Effect had vanished.
What a sorry mess of misunderstanding that paragraph presents. Anyone who supposes that uninformed opinion, absent any facts about which to opine, can become, “the primary engine of public discourse,” is lost at sea. Elsewhere, Bhagwat not only concedes that social media does not supply journalism, but hypothesizes that it will prove impossible to train social media operators to supply journalism. That does not even address the question whether wildly prosperous social media operators would want to bother with journalistic efforts at all, given daily proof they can get richer without them.
But Bhagwat nevertheless supposes that folks might usefully entertain opinions—I suppose about each others’ empty opinions. Bhagwat overlooks that almost every fact or issue capable to draw focus got into online discourse courtesy of legacy media reporting—reporting operating on other principles, and supported by business models which Bhagwat calls obsolete and pointless.
Here is a problem worth considering. After the last of those legacy media information suppliers goes out of business, how will anyone on the internet know anything at all?
Bhagwat makes the mistake to suppose that the internet enabled every citizen to become a publisher. That proves (at best) only that Bhagwat has zero insight to offer anyone with interest to understand publishing activities as ongoing social, commercial, or expressive phenomena.
Like millions of ordinary internet utopians, Bhagwat seems clueless about everything relating to publishing—except what folks see across their keyboards. Bhagwat shows no insight into what a publishing enterprise does, or why you cannot have an online media business without a publisher.
Professor Bhagwat, who performs the necessary publishing activity to assemble an audience? Who undertakes the activity to curate the audience? Who puts in place and operates the machinery which enables distribution of content to audience members? Who raises money to pay for those various kinds of indispensable publishing activities, by monetizing the attention of the audience? Do you suppose any of that is being done by internet opinion contributors?
More generally, how can there even be a notion of press freedom, if there is no such thing as a publishing enterprise (call it an institutional media member) to organize and perform the publishing activities which internet opinion contributors are almost always incapable to perform? Absent the money those publishing activities bring in, why won’t the party which supplies money to make the enterprise operate control everything, and leave press freedom to languish?
Whether that controlling party is government, or some overweening private interest—perhaps with an eye to manage public discourse—how can there be press freedom, or a marketplace of ideas, under circumstances which imply a controlling financial interest operating with impunity, beyond the reach of public influence?
The only safe harbor ever found for press freedom has been public policy to foster diversity and profusion among private institutional publishers. Those must be independent business enterprises, with the energy and talent to raise from publishing activities the revenue necessary to pay for all needful publishing operations, including news gathering, and editing for accuracy.
Each such private publisher must be left free to proceed according to its own lights. All of them together furnish by their mutually competitive enterprise the diversity of information, and the variety of opinion, which supports a healthy public life for the nation.
In short, these critics want social-media platforms to become the new gatekeepers, replicating the role of the twentieth-century institutional media in deciding what information and sources of information the public should be exposed to. Their logic appears to be that, because a small number of social-media platforms now host such a large portion of public discourse, the owners and controllers of those platforms should therefore ensure that the flow of information to individuals is accurate and “clean,” just as the twentieth-century institutional media did when it held a similar bottleneck position. And in fact, given their dominant market positions, the “big four” owners of the key social-media platforms on which political discourse occurs—essentially Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), Twitter, Alphabet (formerly Google, which owns YouTube), and ByteDance (which owns TikTok)—might well jointly possess the power to shape discourse akin to the three broadcast television networks of the twentieth century. But should they?
Of course a few media platforms should not wield power to control public discourse. It is because unwise public policy has encouraged that outcome that so many folks are unhappy with the current internet media regime. But because Bhagwat so grievously misunderstands the former media reality, and because he does not understand how publishing institutions work, he is led to his destructive conclusion that what exists now is perhaps the best solution available.
Bhagwat does not understood that the actual 20th century media situation did not pit a few, “gatekeeper,” media against the public, as he claims. It instead mobilized literally tens of thousands of local media organizations, together with a very broad range of other media institutions featuring multi-market reach, and included a few which commanded national reach. But everywhere, it also featured extremely low barriers to entry for would-be new publishers.
A talented would-be publisher during the second half of the 20th century could, with little more than pocket change, launch a new media organization with at least a puncher’s chance to compete anywhere. That was a regime where under-served media markets, or incompetently managed publications, invited upstart competition. In short, it was more or less the opposite of the situation which prevails now, and very much the opposite of what Bhagwan supposes the past was like.
The solution to the present media malaise would begin with public policy to sharply downsize the scale of present internet media giants. That scale should be measured not by the number of opinion contributors they command, but by the share of national publishing revenues they command.
There is a great deal more insight necessary to fully detail what is wrong with the nation’s present media policy. It does not help to begin with misleading claims about what happened in the past.