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Making and Circulating the News in an Illiberal Age

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Making and Circulating the News in an Illiberal Age Making and Circulating the News in an Illiberal Age Nancy F. Cott Author’s note: Rather than aiming to keep up with extraordinarily fast-changing news from and about the White House, I have kept this essay essentially as I delivered it during the early days of Donald J. Trump’s presidency. Te 2017 Organization of American Historians conference theme of “circulation” had the virtue of capaciousness, evoking many diferent potential applications, tangible and intangible, natural and constructed, operating at various scales. Roads around a city, ideas around the world, blood through the body, rumors through a community—all of these circulate. So does news. Circulation is intrinsic to news. Tat is my topic tonight because we have been living through a transformation in the ways that news is made and promulgated. Digital platforms for breaking news, commentary, and scandal have multiplied—and their potential to propagate access to varied sources of information and misinformation is obvious. Te essential network aspect of the “web” means that any in- formation easily reproduces itself and generates links that connect it to similar or related information. Te making and the promulgation of news are tied together perhaps more tightly than ever before, in that whatever becomes most intensely circulated and repli- cated through instantaneous media becomes the most pressing “news.” Tus circulation makes the news, more than simply transmitting it. We now face a proliferation—I might say a plague—of news sources and modes of circulation. Tis multiplication and fractionalization leads away from the creation of “common knowledge” and toward division of the populace into “niche” publics whose knowledge-worlds intentionally seek replenishment from sources that reinforce accus- tomed attitudes and partisan leanings. Tis is all quite recent; it has taken place over about twenty-fve years, in two phases. In the frst phase, in the 1990s, cable news chan- nels broke through the hold of the three major national networks. (Public tv and radio had begun to create alternatives much earlier, but their audiences were relatively small.) Te frst cable news network, cnn, was an outlier when it was founded in 1980. Te net- works that changed the landscape—Fox News, msnbc, Bloomberg News, and cnbc—all started in the 1990s. Teir quick rise answered the swing to the right and the increased polarization of public opinion between left and right that had been developing at least Nancy F. Cott is the Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University. Tis article is the presidential address delivered at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in New Orleans, Louisiana, on April 8, 2017. doi: 10.1093/jahist/jax310 © Te Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. December 2017 Te Journal of American History 599 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/104/3/599/4655062 by Periodical Record user on 29 January 2018 600 Te Journal of American History December 2017 since the Reagan years. By the turn of the millennium, then, one could turn to one or another sources of news infected by contesting points of view. Te more recent second phase, since about 2004, began with the rise to prominence of the Google search engine and the founding of Facebook (2004) and Twitter (2006), which intensifed network ability to circulate a given article or story exponentially in a few seconds. Very tailored sites for news and views popped up rapidly between 2004 and 2007, including Hufngton Post, Politico, Breitbart News, and Gateway Pundit. Facebook has become a major, possibly the major, force in circulating references to news and views produced on these sites. Even more recently, since 2010, came additional messaging apps (such as Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat), adding to means of circulation, and the in- vention of “bots”—robotized algorithms that can circulate tens of thousands of copies or links instantaneously, giving the impression of a frestorm of enthusiasm for a particular content, without revealing that sentient human beings are not involved.1 Before 2015, while these transformations were taking place, no one particularly an- ticipated the possible political success of Donald J. Trump. But since Trump became president, anyone attuned to American politics has had to recognize the connections between these shifts in modes of news circulation and his surprising election. Breitbart News, for example, was shockingly efective in creating, to candidate Trump’s advantage, a “distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper- partisan perspective to the world.” (Tis is the conclusion of a Columbia Journalism Review summary of a recent study of more than a million and a quarter stories published online between April 1 and the election).2 I am completing a book on an earlier era of reorientation in news media, in the 1920s and 1930s, and so am interested in parallels between that period and our own. Journalists in those decades experienced the transition to modern news gathering and circulation; we are seeing—or sufering—the takeof of postmodern news. Each era was transformative. Ten and now, thoughtful commentators often turned their attention to the close con- nection between the maintenance of democracy and the availability of public knowledge through a free press. Ten and now, transformations taking place in news media raised alarms when they seemed to constrain or direct public knowledge in unusual ways and thus threaten democratic voice. Trough the 1920s and most of the 1930s, getting the news meant reading the printed page. (Te newspaper industry fought to keep radio from broadcasting breaking news until the late 1930s). Newspapers were everywhere, various and numerous. Te aggregate circulation of daily papers—to say nothing of weekly papers and magazines—was about 35 million, exceeding the number of American households by 10 million. Most towns had a daily paper; large cities typically supported more than one; the largest had three, 1 Amanda Hesser, “On Twitter, a Battle among Political Bots,” New York Times, Dec. 14, 2016, https://www .nytimes.com/2016/12/14/arts/on-twitter-a-battle-among-political-bots.html?rref=collection%2Fbyline%2Fama nda-hess&action=click&contentCollection=undefned&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest& contentPlacement=5&pgtype=collection. 2 Te quotation is from a summary of a study of more than a million and a quarter stories published online between April 1, 2016, and the election. See Yochai Benkler et al., “Study: Breitbart-Led Right-Wing Media Eco- system Altered Broader Media Agenda,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 3, 2017, http://www.cjr.org/analysis/ breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php. See also Sue Halpern, “How He Used Facebook to Win,” New York Re- view of Books, June 8, 2017, pp. 59–61. In May 2017 Evan Williams, who created Blogger (making it easy for in- dividuals to establish their own blogs) and also founded Twitter, expressed profound regret that these tools of com- munication he imagined would improve the world had lent themselves to pernicious uses: “I think the Internet is broken,” he said. David Streitfeld, “‘Te Internet Is Broken,’” New York Times, May 21, 2017, business section, 1. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-abstract/104/3/599/4655062 by Periodical Record user on 29 January 2018 Making and Circulating the News in an Illiberal Age 601 four, fve, or ten morning and evening dailies. “No other institution approaches the news- paper in universality, persistence, continuity of infuence,” fretted a critic.3 Te modernization of newspapers in the early twentieth century showed up in news formats, in circulation wars and syndication, and in aggressive competition that led to chain consolidation. As advertising in newspapers boomed, newspapers became a big business; owners of one proftable paper bought up others, and news chains consolidated. In an economist’s terse phrasing, “News became a commodity and was sold in competi- tion like any other commodity.” Chains created a nationally homogenizing trend, as did syndication, which sent the same features, cartoons, columns, star gossip, or political commentary to any paper that subscribed. (At the same time, urban locales might have many small newspapers addressing ethnic groups or other specialized communities.) Not until the 1920s and 1930s did newspaper design evolve into the format for presenting news that seems to us obvious and inevitable, giving readers the shape of their social and political world as soon as they began to look at the paper. Modern format placed the most important current items on the front page, subordinated lesser items farther back, var- ied headline size to indicate relative importance, and segregated columns and features to their own pages and eventually their own sections. (Earlier papers often used page one for classifed ads.) Besides the standard modern format in urban dailies, the tabloid arrived as an alternate modern format. Both formats meant to distill and sort the news, to provide guideposts for a mass readership because modern life was more complicated and intercon- nected over a larger geographical area, and communication capacity enabled a phenom- enal onrush of news.4 Most important, journalists had to respond to a storm of controversy over newspa- pers misinforming and misleading the public. Scrutiny of the press arose in retrospective examination of the shaping of popular views during the Spanish-American War and the world war. Critics skewered newspapers’ ability to warp the horizons of their readers. A wide swath of intellectuals deplored journalistic overreach, highlighted how gullible the populace was, and lambasted publishers for caring mainly about the bottom line. News- papers looked highly authoritative to the reader, critics charged, while they printed items that were partisan, or haphazard, or purely beholden to advertisers.
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