Is This The Year Of The Conspiracy Theory?
Journalists think every year is. That’s part of the problem.
To finish off 2018, Jane Coaston wrote at Vox that “2018 was a highly conspiratorial year.” This is a vague claim — highly conspiratorial as compared to what? Maybe to 2017, which journalists also called “the year of conspiracy theories.” Coaston goes on to call 2018 “extremely” conspiratorial, but this doesn’t really provide any more detail.
Reporters are always asserting that now is the era of the conspiracy theory. Al Jazeera journalist Hamid Dabashi claimed in 2018 that “today conspiracy theories have become the true ‘opium of the masses.’” In 2013, the editor of The New York Times, Andrew Rosenthal, summed up a poll he saw on U.S. conspiracy beliefs with five words: “No Comment Necessary: Conspiracy Nation.” In 2011, Annie Jacobsen at The New York Daily News declared that “America is becoming a conspiratocracy. … Conspiracies have never spread this swiftly across the country. They have never lodged this deeply in the American psyche. And they have never found as receptive an audience.” In 2010, columnist David Aaronovitch argued that the West was “currently going through a period of fashionable conspiracism.” In 2004, The Boston Globe suggested that we were then living in the “golden age of conspiracy theory.” In 1994, The Washington Post claimed that Bill Clinton’s first term “marked the dawn of a new age of conspiracy theory” when in 1991 the Post had said that we were living “in an age of conspiracy theories.” The Los Angeles Times in 1977 believed that the U.S. had “become as conspiracy prone…as the Pan-Slav nationalists in the 1880s Balkans,” and in 1964 The New York Times was sure that that was the year of conspiracy theories because they had “grown weedlike in this country and abroad.”
There are more examples, but you get the point. It’s always fashionable to report a conspiracy panic, even if based on little more than feelings and best guesses. For example, how can anyone know that the U.S. has become as conspiracy-minded as the Pan-Slav nationalists in the 1880s? Given there are no polls of Pan-Slav nationalists attesting to their conspiracy-mindedness, what existing data can possible support such a claim?
Further, claims about the ebb and flow of conspiracy theories in the public come without any precision. They confuse and conflate the number of conspiracy theories, the number of people who believe those theories, the willingness of people to believe, and the salience of those beliefs. An increase in any one of these would indicate something different, and would have to be measured differently.
Was 2018 an “extremely conspiratorial year” because of the public’s beliefs, because of Trump’s tweets, or because of the media attention to conspiracy theories? It’s never quite clear, but journalists have been quick to authoritatively declare that the U.S. is always becoming more conspiratorial.
Vox’s claim that “2018 was a highly conspiratorial year” relies largely on news reports from other journalists about conspiracy theories. This is a problem for two reasons. First, many of the theories that supposedly made 2018 so conspiratorial — conspiracy theories about 9/11, Obama’s birthplace, immigration, Jews, George Soros, false flags, Satanic sex trafficking — have been around for years and some have existed in different forms for centuries.
But second, unless there is real evidence involved — perhaps a poll — it is impossible to tell just from journalists’ subjective judgments if conspiracy theories individually or writ large have become more popular. How can they possibly know? Case in point, the Q Anon conspiracy theory received sustained international coverage this past August. While journalists asserted that the conspiracy theory had become big, there were no polls attesting to that. Instead, the coverage seemed to be sparked by internet chatter and a dozen or so people wearing “Q” t-shirts at a Trump rally in Florida.
When a poll was finally commissioned (by me), the evidence showed that the Q Anon conspiracy was neither well-known nor well-liked. In fact, Q was only slightly more popular in Florida than Fidel Castro. (Floridians danced in the streets when Castro died, by the way.) News coverage of belief in this theory far outpaced actual belief.
I have been running a Google Alert for the past seven years on “conspiracy theory” and several other related terms — every day I receive a list of news items and blog posts containing those terms. When I started this, I would get back between 0 to 5 hits each evening; more recently I receive between 25 and 100 on average. Journalists, reporters, and bloggers are writing far more about conspiracy theories than a few years previous, but again, there is yet to be evidence presented that mass belief in conspiracy theories has risen during this time span.
Of course, it could be the case that beliefs in conspiracy theories has risen, but the people who do the polling (such as myself) don’t yet have evidence to show it. Maybe that evidence is forthcoming. But for now belief in conspiracy theories appears to be rather stable. And it seems dubious for journalists to label a year very conspiratorial just because they chose to write about conspiracy theories.
Coverage of conspiracy theories in the past three years seems to have spiked in response to the rhetoric of political elites, most notably Donald Trump. Journalists almost have to report on conspiracy theories because conspiracy theories are the means through which he communicates to his base of supporters. But we should not infer that either Trump’s conspiracy theorizing or the media coverage of conspiracy theorizing are indicative of the public’s more conspiratorial worldview. For that we need more direct evidence.
In my book American Conspiracy Theories, co-authored with Joseph Parent, we sought to measure belief in conspiracy theories going back to the 1890s. Unfortunately, polling was not in use for much of this time, and very few polls asked about conspiracy theories in a way that could provide reliable comparisons over time. So, we turned to the letters to the editor of The New York Times, reading through a sample of 120,000 letters over 120 years.
We found that since the Red Scare of the 1950s, fewer people published letters about a conspiracy theory, which indicates that conspiracy beliefs in the public were coming down, albeit very slightly. Our data collection ended in 2010, so perhaps things have changed in the last eight years. But, the best way for us to know is to start gathering all of the copious polling data and looking for upward overtime trends.
Until that happens, here’s to 2019. A year from now I am sure we will be reading that it was the most conspiratorial year ever.
