Media Fragmentation and the Manufacture of Reality

The last great crisis of American democracy concluded with a whimper rather than a bang. On August 9th, 1974, Richard Nixon resigned the office of President of the United States, four days after the public release of the Watergate “smoking gun” audio recording. The tape confirmed that Nixon had personally ordered the coverup of the Watergate break-in, which had been the subject of congressional and special prosecutor investigations. The episode partially vindicated the checks and balances of the American political system, forcing Nixon to resign in the face of overwhelming public and political opposition. Yet it also served as a rare demonstration of the fragility of our republic. Public opinion moved sharply and uniformly in favor of impeachment only after the public release of the smoking gun tape. In the event that this crucial piece of evidence had been destroyed or was never produced, a far more drawn out constitutional crisis could have extended the national nightmare.

Public opinion concerning President Nixon and the issue of impeachment during Watergate was crucial to its resolution. With an accumulation of damning evidence and polls moving in favor of the presidents’ removal, members of Congress were not blind to which way the wind was blowing, and even Nixon’s strongest allies turned their backs on the previously popular president. This consensus reached among the American people was built largely in part by the media landscape of the time. In the 1970s, the “big three” networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—enjoyed what amounted to an oligopoly on news broadcasting. It was far easier then for the American public to share common narratives on the events of the day because all three networks operated under similar standards of reporting. In the case of Watergate, the story was the same regardless of where people got their news from: the Watergate break-ins had occurred, there was a coverup, Nixon had ordered the coverup, and Nixon’s actions were serious enough to warrant his impeachment. 

This media environment no longer exists. The dominance of the big three networks over television news has slowly but surely evaporated. The fact that these three large institutions were so deftly capable of creating political storylines was not lost on the Nixon administration, whose opposition to their monopoly eventually gave birth to Fox News. Members of President Nixon’s inner-circle believed that a GOP-friendly network with a conservative outlook could satisfy a niche in the market and break the monopoly of the big three. Such a news network would have muddied the uniform narrative of the established media by circulating conservative talking points into the political ether. While Nixon was never able to reap the benefits of a friendly news network, former President Donald Trump has enjoyed near universally positive coverage from Fox News, with its primetime hosts essentially acting as surrogates for his administration and campaign. 

Fox News has proved itself complicit in Mr. Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which stands as our current crisis of American democracy. The largest cable news network in the U.S. has acted as a megaphone for Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of massive voter fraud. In April, Fox News was forced to settle a $787 million lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems after the network promoted falsehoods implicating Dominion in an effort to rig votes in the 2020 presidential election. As a result, Fox parted ways with its former primetime star, Tucker Carlson, who himself pushed Trump’s rendering of a democracy hijacked by the deep state. Carlson produced a three-part “documentary” series, Patriot Purge, implying that the January 6th capitol riots were part of a plot within the federal government and its intelligence agencies to bring down Mr. Trump and his supporters. Just as Nixon’s allies once dreamt of, the propagation of the Trump campaign’s talking points by a major American news network has worked to prevent the formation of a uniform public consensus. Mr. Trump’s approval rating remains almost unchanging at 40%, while public opinion only slightly favors the efforts to indict the former president. In comparison, Nixon’s approval rating fell to 24% by the time he resigned, with over 60% of Americans favoring his impeachment.

The relationship between Fox News and Mr. Trump is a microcosm of the modern media landscape. The number of sources which the American people can glean their news and analysis from has increased exponentially. Instead of Americans consuming news from the three same television networks who largely share a common narrative thread, the majority of Americans get their news online, with a substantial portion of that being sourced from social media websites. The actors on these online platforms vary wildly in their reporting practices, their outlooks, and now, their facts. As long as there exists an audience, this landscape allows for the construction of any claim, any viewpoint, or any narrative.

The decentralization of news media and the platforming of all perspectives has made “reality” more subjective than ever. The flooding of the digital public square with an endless deluge of information, truthful or not, has shattered our collective reference frame. Reasonable and measured political discourse is made nearly impossible when those participating in discourse fail to agree on what counts as “truth” in the first place. Social media websites were never designed to be news platforms and their algorithms intended to maximize user engagement have worked to monetize outrage and further incense their users by amplifying misinformation. Our use of social media as a news source and as a platform for political debate and communication polarizes, increases the appeal of populism, and erodes faith in democracy. 

The danger is growing. The advent of publicly accessible advanced artificial intelligence and deepfake technology will not simply allow bad-faith actors to continue to distort our reality, they will be enabled to manufacture reality. Platforms such as ChatGPT will make the utilization of bots to spread misinformation and sew discord easier than ever before. Deepfake technology poses an especially unique risk, endangering not only reality, but national security as well. It will be made nearly impossible to place our faith in photographic or videographic evidence when deepfake technology advances to a point where even the most well-trained human eye is incapable of distinguishing the production of an artificial intelligence from the production of a camera. In her 2018 essay “The Digital Maginot Line”, Renée DiResta, a research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and advisor to the U.S. Congress on misinformation campaigns, painted a stark image of the status quo: “There is a war happening…an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological extremists leverage the social infrastructure underpinning everyday life to sow discord and erode shared reality.” Unless action is taken, democracy will lose in the Information World War. 

In his 2022 essay, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid”, NYU professor of ethical leadership and social psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, called for simple yet meaningful reforms to help repair our faltering democracy. His premier recommendation was the requirement of ID verification for the creation and use of accounts on social media platforms. While users would still be able to post anonymously if they so choose, the verification process would eliminate millions of bots and fake accounts, many of which are used to disseminate misinformation and poison our discourse. Haidt makes it clear through his research that “antisocial behavior becomes more common online when people feel that their identity is unknown and untraceable,” suggesting that ID verification could decrease incivility online and work to clean up the digital public square.

Congress should also continue its exploration of regulating AI and work to implement the White House’s proposed AI Bill of Rights. Government cooperation with industry leaders in the field of tech and AI can work to prevent the harms from such technology while also making sure that America remains the global leader in its ethical development. The FEC has begun to consider passing national regulations similar to those adopted in Texas and California, which have banned the use of deepfake technology in political campaigns. Other agencies, such as the FTC and FCC, should continue to investigate the regulation of social media websites and the standards of conduct on their platforms concerning the spread of misinformation.

Democracy is poised with an existential crisis, and action must be taken to rise to the challenge. At the heart of our great crisis lies a complicated truth that “reality” no longer exists in the way that it once did. With the destruction of our collective reference frame and the proliferation of misinformation campaigns, the American people are losing faith in government and the concept of democracy itself. Beyond immediate concerns of the 2024 election season and the legal troubles of former President Trump for his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, the problems of decaying public discourse and the collapse of reality will continue to produce more crises and endanger our republic even after figures like Mr. Trump are gone. For the sake of our democracy and the restoration of our collective reference frame, our media and digital landscapes must be subjected to far-reaching reforms and regulations.