A Crisis of Information: What Fragmented Narratives Mean for Western Democracies
By Paolo Stohlman
An Evolving View of Media
The concept of the ‘marketplace of ideas’ has been at the core of the operational structure of liberal democracies for decades. Stemming from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), the author presents the notion as being based on two key principles: first, government intervention in the formation of individual opinions should be very limited, and second, free speech should emulate to a certain extent the functioning of the free market.. This worked for a long time, with trust in mass media reaching 72% amongst all Americans in 1976. The objectivity that newscasters like Walter Cronkite, often called ‘the most trusted man in America’, were thought to communicate was seen as a kind of basis off of which public discourse could commence. Yet, according to Gallup polling, things took a turn beginning in the 1990s when voters decidedly began to shift their views against mass media.
There were credible and concrete reasons to distrust these news organizations. In a provocative book titled Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), philosopher Noam Chomsky and economist Edward Herman presented a very convincing argument as to why citizens should be highly skeptical of the ‘corporate media’. In their analysis, large media companies were not to be trusted precisely because they adopted the principles of the free market to near perfection. This had made these companies unreliable, as their allegiance was no longer to the truth and to their readers but to advertisers and shareholders. In other cases, when these media companies were not large enough or were created as a ‘public good’, they would be supported by government funding — which also contaminated the ‘spin’ of their news coverage. Thus, the interest of these media giants was not in line with the public interest of truthful information in service of educated and reasoned decision-making by citizens. Instead, these companies created hegemonic narratives which served their growth and survival, promoting the interest of political and business elites.
With the rise of the internet and social media, mainstream news sources and journalists had to adapt to a new media model which no longer provided them with the same position of power. Furthermore, citizens in countries which did not have a tradition or policy of free speech and freedom of the press began to make use of non-traditional outlets in order to express their opinions. This gave rise to what sociologist Larry Diamond called ‘liberation technology’, that is any kind of ICT tool which allows for greater expression of social, political and economic freedom.
An excellent example of technology as a tool for the oppressed to be able to voice their struggle is the Arab Spring of 2011, during which the majority of Tunisian and Egyptian protestors used Facebook and Twitter to organize protests. Following this, the organizational and communicative power of these new digital tools became increasingly clear — not only to protestors but to politicians, as the Brexit and Trump campaigns exemplified clearly in 2016. These two campaigns, possibly more than anything else, showed citizens across liberal democracies the power of social media and the dangers of a ‘marketplace of ideas’ without controls and regulation. What has become immensely clear in the past years of global conflict is that while we may have reduced the role of business and political elites in the process of story-shaping by diversifying beyond mainstream media, consumers of information still require narratives.
Conflicts and Images: The New Media Challenge
Today, however, these kinds of conversations concerning the role of media and news organizations and their biases in forming public opinion seem almost quaint. As Harvard scholar Aviv Ovadya put it, “the next threat — the distortion of reality itself — is fast approaching.”. As a consequence of the ever growing use of social media platforms as a source of information, those same hegemonic forces which Chomsky and Herman decried when calling out the role of mainstream media in covering up the atrocities of the Vietnam War have been placed in the hands of a new group of corporate giants. In 2022, The Guardian published an article titled ‘TikTok was “just a dancing app.” Then the Ukraine war started’, which began to shed light on the growing role of Instagram and TikTok as information sources for global conflicts. We have not yet escaped those ‘framing’ issues discussed in the 1980s; we still have sort through information with a critical eye towards shareholder influence. Yet, we could argue things have gotten worse.
Furthermore, the diversification and deconstruction of mainstream media does not only take the form of short Instagram and TikTok videos that provide very limited information at best, but also the tailored, in-depth production of information through new information channels such as Substack and Twitter. The algorithmic tools employed on such platforms have dehumanized the process of narrative-creation, internalizing the role played by newsroom biases and making billions from it. Even more troublesomely, not only have these multi-billion dollar companies largely succeeded in taking over the information space, they have done so in a way which allows them to appear as competitors to mainstream media whom most citizens continue to profoundly distrust. Stanford Internet Observatory researcher Renée Diresta made this claim with great clarity, writing: “It seems likely that at least some of the audience believes that they have escaped propaganda and exited the Matrix, without realizing that they are simply marinating in a different flavor”. There is little reason to believe that this new class of ‘information influencers’ will be able to put aside their interests in pursuit of the public good, preferring to create exclusive communities of followers — splintering society into a multitude of ‘truths’.
As we see the terrible images of the most recent conflict between Israel and Hamas, and the gruesome stories coming out of Gaza, it is once again a reminder of the immense challenge that is gathering objective information. The proliferation of narratives and of ‘truths’, paired with the use of AI imagery, has transformed social media into a battleground in its own right. Moreover, the ambition to score the highest number of clicks, likes and shares has reached the highest levels of our media and politics, with examples coming from the New York Times and White House’s communications of the events unfolding in Israel and Gaza.
Without a common basis of facts, there is little hope for productive communication — let alone a good-faith discussion. As there is no turning back on the digitalization of media and information, what is needed is a truly democratized and regulated network, in which governments listen to civil society in a process of integrated deliberation on digital platforms. Bridging these diverging narratives is possible, and it requires finding innovative and productive uses of the digital space as shown by projects like Polis — “the Computational Democracy Project” — which collects data and highlights consensus in digital public discourse to create a shared narrative. As famed communication scholar Walter Fisher wrote, “no matter how strictly a case is argued — scientifically, philosophical, or legally — it will always be a story, an interpretation of some aspect of the world that is historically and culturally grounded and shaped by human personality”.
Paolo Stohlman studied towards a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy, International Studies and Economics at Ca’ Foscari University. He is currently in his second year of a Master’s in European Studies at UCLouvain, in Belgium, and will be spending this year undertaking an Erasmus+ at Sciences Po Paris.
