The aide said that guys like me were
"in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as
people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible
reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles
and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works
anymore." He continued "We're an empire now, and when we act, we
create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as
you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study
too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all
of you, will be left to just study what we do." – Presidential chief of
staff Karl Rove as reported by Ron Suskind,
“Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” The New York Times Magazine (Oct. 17, 2004)
If Americans are largely
illiterate about how their government operates, their level of informedness
about the actual operations of that government is even more abysmal. The spell
cast by mass media has long been capable of shaping American understandings of
their candidates during elections and of their officials once elected. But the
devolution of any semblance of an informed public into a number of poorly
informed competing tribes holed up within hermetically sealed echo chambers of
the like-minded has been accomplished by three major turning points in the past
three decades.
Corporate Pinocchios: Legal Fictions Come
Alive
The first occurred in the 2010
landmark case of Citizens United v.
Federal Elections Commission. There the US Supreme Court ruled that the
First Amendment’s freedom of expression clause protected campaign propaganda
produced by independent organizations not officially affiliated with campaigns.
Such spending was ruled to be outside federal law limiting and accounting for campaign
spending.
Striking down any spending restrictions
on independent organizations engaging in advertising, the vast majority of it taking
the form of attack ads, the Court insured that campaigns would thereafter be negative. The
decision opened the floodgates to a tsunami of negativity with no checks
for truthfulness or accuracy and no requirement to identify the sources of
funding for the same.
While liberal groups have been
able to fill at least a part of the airwaves and internet bandwidth with
negative propaganda of their own, it has been disproportionately conservative moneyed and corporate interests which have
proven to be the beneficiaries of this rule. According to the League of Women Voters,
Independent expenditures are made by a very small group of
people. Since the Supreme Court decided Citizens United in 2010, $1 billion has
been spent through super PACs, and 60 percent of that was given by only 195
individuals and their spouses…In 2014, in contested US Senate races, 8 of the
10 races saw outside groups outspend candidates and political parties.
Indeed, the appellants in Citizens United would make a claim
previously seen as outrageous that corporations were actually people entitled
to First Amendment rights to free expression like flesh and blood human beings.
Outrageous, but the corporate Court’s justices would buy it. And four
years later, the Court would rule that corporations had First Amendment rights
to freedom of religion as well in the Burwell v.
Hobby Lobby decision.
Ironically, corporations are
defined in most jurisdictions as “legal fictions.” That’s a long way from
personhood. Indeed, the very purpose of laws classifying corporations as legal
fictions was specifically to limit the liability of real persons.
But such stretches have not
stopped this Court previously which insured the accession of George W. Bush to
the White House by stopping the recounts in Florida in 2000 in a case so blatantly political that the Court said its own decision could never be used as a precedent in other
cases. The same court would later create an individual right to carry firearms out of whole cloth in
the face of two centuries of jurisprudence to the contrary.
Such conservative judicial
activism is hardly surprising given the stacking of the Supreme Court with
pro-business conservatives over the past three decades. In many ways, it is the
best Court corporate moneys could buy – Lewis Powell’s dream come true. And it
is the ongoing stacking of the Court with Trump nominees - who will no doubt
make even the late irascible demagogue Antonin Scalia look tame – that insures
corporate domination of this land and its people and the end of anything resembling a
democratic republic.
It is important to note that
the inordinate sums of money now being spent in these elections is what Jane Mayer calls dark money. In addition to the fact that Citizens
United opened the floodgates for unlimited spending by legal fictions now seen
as persons for purposes of the First Amendment, the largely secret organizations
inevitably bearing noble names (like Citizens United, a PAC funded by the Koch Brothers to represent corporate interests) do not have to disclose the sources of their
money. In the 2016 election, dark money increased 10 fold over expenditures in 2012 to nearly a
half billion.
What this means is that
elections will increasingly be dominated by negative advertising paid for by
unidentified moneyed sources whose interests are furthered by that advertising. Not
only does such negativity tend to dampen electoral engagement of the populace,
it essentially insures that those who do engage the process will likely do so
poorly informed at best, disinformed at worst.
As such, a major prerequisite of
the functioning of a healthy democracy – an informed electorate - cannot be
met.
We Disinform, You Imbibe….
"And that brings us to tonight's
word: Truthiness. Now I'm sure some of the word-police, the
"wordanistas" over at Websters, are gonna say, "Hey, that's not
a word!" Well, anybody who knows me knows that I am no fan of dictionaries
or reference books. They're elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn't true,
what did or didn't happen..."I don't trust books. They're all fact, no
heart. And that's exactly what's pulling our country apart today.
Because face it, folks, we are a divided
nation. Not between Democrats or Republicans, or conservatives and liberals, or
tops and bottoms. No, we are divided by those who think with their head, and
those who know with their heart..."The 'truthiness' is, anyone can read
the news to you. I promise to feel the news...at you." --Stephen Colbert,
The Colbert Report (Oct. 17, 2005)
A second turning point in the
past three decades that has impacted the ability of Americans to inform
themselves is the shift in the news media from information to entertainment.
With the rise of cable television, viewers now had up to 1000 cable channels
from which to choose as well as a host of internet streamed sources.
The fierce competition for
viewership has increasingly impacted the willingness of news media to broadcast
reporting which critically assesses the world it brings into American homes.
Gone are the days of daring Watergate reporting that would eventually bring
down a corrupt Nixon administration or reporting on-site in Vietnam which would
generate an anti-war movement forcing an end to the war. In its place came
talking heads across a spectrum of ideological perspectives beginning with the
rise of the Rupert Murdoch empire and its ideologically conservative Fox “News.
“
Under the rubric of “We
inform, you decide,” Fox would quickly become the least factual reporting
outlet on the cable. About 60% of Fox’s reporting would be rated by Politifact as “mostly false” or worse, the least reliably truthful
reporting of any of the news media. At the same time, Fox viewership leads all other contenders, a fact which is hardly
surprising given the findings by the Pew Research group that Fox viewers are
the most ideologically monolithic with 60% self-identifying as conservative.
Increasingly viewers have come
to see themselves as consumers of ideological programming that largely confirms
the biases they bring to the viewing. In trading in their duties to be
educated, informed citizens for perceived entitlements to passive
entertainment and confirmation bias, Americans have increasingly made democratic self-governance
impossible.
Other developments in the news
media itself have expedited the slide from news reporting into infotainment. With the end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, one of
democracy’s major casualties from the Reagan Revolution, broadcasters were no
longer required to make available airtime to public affairs programming and to
insure that opposing views were presented.
Another factor in this
development has been the increasing monopolization of corporate ownership of
mass media. In 1983, 90% of all
American media was owned by 50 different competing companies. By 2012, that
number had shrunk to six corporate entities. The big six had come to control
local media outlets including printed media and 70% of all cable outlets. With
the acquisition of NBC by Comcast, the newly merged corporate entity would
control one out of every five hours of television broadcasts.
This corporate hegemony would also
result in the reduction of local radio stations which increasingly have little
local reporting as syndicated “news-talk” shows dominate the air waves.
Similarly, local newspapers, facing loss of readership in a culture where
online sources increasingly dominate the interests of Americans who actually
continue to read (one of four Americans report not reading a book within the past year) have cut back
reporting staffs, turned increasingly to syndicated wire copy and entertainment
“news.” In many cases, reporting cut-backs were engaged as a means of avoiding
the shuttering of the newspaper entirely.
The shift to online sources
for informing oneself presents its own problems. Studies of the human brain show that online readers tend to skim
and jump all over the screen. Non-linear approaches avoid a concentrated
approach to reading for understanding. In particular, dense texts which require
concerted reading and reflection tend to be avoided.
Non-linear approaches to
online reading readily serve the pursuit of infotainment high on imagery and
low on text which frequently contains little depth and demands little sustained
attention. But when electoral issues become reduced to sound bites and
candidates become reduced to caricatures, the requirement of an educated,
informed electorate simply cannot be met.
Your Own Personal, Unique Universe of Information
No longer are we holding opinions
different from one another; we’re also holding different facts….the creeping
partisanship has begun to distort our very perceptions about what is ‘real’ and
what isn’t. Indeed, you can go so far as to say we are now fighting over
competing versions of reality. And it is more convenient than ever before for
some of us to live in a world built out of our own facts. – Farhad Manjoo, True Enough: Learning
to Live in a Post-Fact Society (2008),
p. 2.
The third development which
played an enormous role in the 2016 election was the rise to dominance of social
media in informing voters. Through the use of algorithmic filters, social media
has the potential to personally tailor any individual’s search results. Google
has 57 signals it looks for. The result, according to media scholar Eli Pariser, is a “filter bubble”
…your own personal, unique universe of information that you
live in online. And what's in your filter bubble depends on who you are and it
depends on what you do. But the thing is that you don't decide what gets in.
And more importantly, you don't actually see what gets edited out. So Facebook
isn't the only place that's doing this kind of invisible algorithmic editing of
the web. Google's doing it, too….Think about it for a second. There is no
standard Google anymore. And where this - this moves us very quickly toward a
world in which the internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but
not necessarily what we need to see.
The creation of filter bubbles
for individuals serves to steer us into social media echo chambers with a cast
of thousands of our like-minded friends. Echo chambers serve to confirm the
biases with which we arrived while suppressing the presence of any disaffirming
others. Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein warns that it is almost always within the circled wagons
of the like-minded that the natural tendencies of polarization readily become
radicalized.
It is precisely in this
context that the appearance of false news sources have come to play a dominant
role. The rapid and repeated circulation of false news within the echo chambers
of the like-minded and their routine presence within individual filter bubbles
can lend the appearance of authenticity to outrageous stories made up of whole
cloth.
In the 2016 election, fake news stories drew more viewers on online sites than authentic
news. Within days of the election, a Stanford University study reported that most high school and college students are
unable to distinguish fake news sites from authentic news. While young people
are skilled in finding data, they are virtually handicapped in critically
assessing what they have located. The study reported "Despite their
fluency with social media, many students are unaware of basic conventions for
indicating verified digital information."
An uneducated, poorly informed
public who derive the majority of their information through filter bubbles and
demonstrate little propensity for critically assessing the same are a very poor
bet for democratic self-governance.
The Rejection of Reason
The rise of Trumpland came in
a post-fact society. In such a
world, truth is seen as endlessly malleable. The decline of critical news
reporting, the rise of infotainment cable, the retreat of filter-bubble
Americans into echo chambers all pointed toward a failure of the American
experiment in democratic self-governance. And the domination of electoral cycles by
the negative advertising of dark money organizations and the rise of fake news
sites to prominence all suggest that elections in the former United States of
America may increasingly become little more than attempts to legitimate
foregone conclusions.
It is the
rejection of reason as the basis for voting that drives the final nail into the
coffin of democratic self-governance. Critical reason and reasoned arguments were the staples of the
Enlightenment thinking that informed the Framers of our republic who presumed them to be conditions precedent for the ongoing experiment in democratic self-governance.
But reason
was in scarce supply in the last election.
If there should have been a
warning sign to the American republic that its days were numbered, it came on
January 23, 2016. Candidate Donald Trump told a campaign rally that "I
could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose
voters." The CNN story reporting
the comment continued with the statement “After the event, Trump declined to
answer when asked by CNN to clarify his comments.”
That such an outrageous
comment could be made by a presidential candidate reflected the devolution of
American politics to a long running reality television program. That it would
go uncontested by a news media more intent on entertaining their viewers than critically
informing them was even more egregious. But it was the fact that the statement
ended up being true - Trump didn’t lose many voters despite this
kind of repeated irrationality - that reveals that whatever other basis voters
might be using to elect their presidents, critical reason is not among them.
That a
democratic republic could not survive among a populace which sees itself as
consumers, not citizens, whose residents crave entertainment rather than
critically informing themselves and who have little regard for fact, truth or reason is not surprising. That corporate interests which currently dominate the electoral process to their own benefit at the expense of that populace have every interest in maintaining that status quo is also hardly surprising.
The question that those who would give birth to a New America from the ruins of Trumpland's inevitable crash and burn must answer is whether they care enough to make the fundamental changes necessary for a new experiment in democratic self-governance to be undertaken. Such changes will not only require a ruthlessly critical assessment of the attitudes and behaviors that have given rise to Trumpland, it will also require an enormous amount of unflinchingly critical self-scrutiny and a willingness to make changes in our own daily behaviors that we currently accept as a given.
Truth be told, it doesn't look very promising on this eve of Trumpland's accession to power.
[Continued with Part IX]
Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
frharry@cfl.rr.com
harry.coverston@knights.ucf.edu
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.
For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)
© Harry Coverston, 2016
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1 comment:
thought provoking .......
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