From Nixon to Trump: Tracing the Disintegration of Shared Reality
On Oct. 30th, 1973, Richard M. Nixon, then President of the United States, was formally subjected to an impeachment inquiry. The inquiry came as a result of the Nixon administration’s efforts to cover up their involvement with an attempted break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C., located in the Watergate complex.
Reporting on the scandalous event was largely led by the work of Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who in turn received most of their information from a confidential informant codenamed “Deepthroat” — later revealed to be then FBI deputy director William Mark Felt. It was a scandal of massive proportions that rocked the nation to its core, ultimately resulting in Nixon’s resignation from the presidency before the impeachment process was completed.
Since that poignant moment in the nation’s history, the U.S. has seen several more major political scandals. In the 2016 election, questions surrounding then Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server during her time in office became the focus of public attention. This was on top of the leakage of several thousand pages of emails between her, John Podesta (Chair of Clinton’s Presidential Campaign), and other campaign associates by Wikileaks.
Despite that leak illuminating very little new information and an FBI probe into the server finding no clear evidence of criminal wrongdoing on Clinton’s part, the debacle left a deep scar on the Clinton campaign, one that likely played a role in her eventual loss in the general election against Donald Trump.
In 2019, after a nearly 2-year long investigation, special consul Robert Mueller released his report — which looked into interactions between the Russian state and the Trump campaign to ascertain whether there had been knowing collusion by the campaign with foreign nationals in order to gain assistance from Russia during the 2016 election — to Attorney General William Barr. Barr in turn produced a 4-page summary of the 448-page report to congress, which later received criticism from members of the legal community who perceived the summary as not adequately representing the content of the report after a redacted version was released to the public.
That same year, the House of Representatives adopted two articles of impeachment against Donald Trump, one for abuse of power and the other for obstruction of Congress. His impeachment was predicated on a whistle blower complaint alleging that Trump had pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate his political rival, Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter Biden, in exchange for already congressionally approved military aid.
The House inquiry revealed a pattern of behavior by Trump and his associates, highlighting efforts to withhold aid to Ukraine and obstruct Congress’s investigation into the matter. Despite Trump’s vehement denials and claims of a “witch hunt,” the evidence presented during the impeachment hearings led to a decisive vote in the House, making Trump the third president in U.S. history to be impeached.
The subsequent Senate trial acquitted Trump of both charges, with votes largely falling along party lines, cementing a deeply divided political landscape and raising questions about the balance of power between the executive and legislative branches.
All of these events left significant marks in the psyche of the U.S., but the latter 3 were received by the public in a manner much different than Watergate was. This is because, in the decades between Watergate and the 2016 election, the character of our information landscape has changed in fundamental ways. Ones that have facilitated the cascading spread of disinformation and fracturing of the collective mirror we once called reality.
In order to understand what exactly caused those shifts and how things came to be as they are now, we must first take stock of how they used to be.
Institutional Media In The 20th Century
Looking back once again to the 1970’s, when the ever-evolving details of the Watergate Scandal was dominating the attention of the country at large, we can identify a media environment that differs meaningfully from the current informational status quo. Congressional polarization was less pronounced with Republicans such as Barry Goldwater even reportedly playing a significant role in the pressure that eventually resulted in Nixon’s resignation. Public trust in the media was high — ranging between 68% and 72% according to Gallup polling at the time and the airwaves were dominated by 3 networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS) all of which largely presented the public with the same set of facts.
This atmosphere of greater faith in institutional media wasn’t a coincidence, but the result of an industry that had taken active steps to professionalize itself away from its yellow press origins in the early to mid-20th century and their de facto role as gatekeepers to the public discourse due to the limitations of access to information at the time. The central narrative by which the field pursued raising its professional status was the promotion of a commitment to objectivity, working to establish the profession’s vital societal role of being a trusted source of information among the public.
The ability for the journalism industry to do this was in part facilitated by the unusually constrained competitive pressure of the time. Much of the country had slipped into a pattern of local newspaper monopolies or duopolies — outside of limited cases in the largest cities — and at the onset of broadcast news’s entrance into the media sphere was an oligopoly of three networks compelled by the Fairness Doctrine to air opposing views on matters of opinion. This resulted in a largely commercially stable environment which allowed for the development of broader professional commitments to “disinterested objectivity”.
Even during this period of high public trust in the media, cracks that would evolve into the fissures that define the current media ecosystem were present and beginning to grow. As early as the mid-1980’s, you saw republican lawmakers like Jesse Helms accusing CBS of having a liberal bias while asking his supporters to contribute money to buy the network.
The emergence of the journalist as a celebrity, like in the case of the public recognition garnered by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in regard to their reporting on Watergate, led to more and more media figures aiming to gain said success via bombastic and sensational engagements with more ideological arguments.
The media space also started to see rising levels of competition in the form of new, emergent networks like Fox in the mid-80’s and the explosion in popularity of conservative talk radio in the aftermath of the Fairness Doctrine being struck down. This ultimately increased the number information vectors available to the public, slowly forming small fractures in the country’s shared image of reality.
Information Abundance and Cognitive Overload
This fracturing was a prelude to what would come as the internet forever transformed the landscape. With its rise there was a fundamental shift in the level of access to information as well as the sheer number of options for venues to consume said info.
In someways, this has been helpful, for instance the protests in relation to the Arab Spring would have been far less likely to receive the level of international attention it did if it wasn’t for the ability for any individual with a cellphone to record the on the ground events and rapidly disseminate them to the eyeballs of millions.
However, radical information abundance isn’t necessarily always, or even often, a good thing. People would like to think that they are absolute truth seekers capable of objectively analyzing information and “doing their own research”, but this just isn’t the case.
We are all subject to cognitive biases which distort our perceptions of what is real, we look for information that reaffirms our priors, avoid things that cause dissonance in our macro worldviews to emerge, and have our beliefs largely shaped by the social groups we find ourselves inhabiting.
In it of itself, this is nothing new, these problems have existed since the dawn of humanity. The major change here has been in where the general public (or perhaps here it would be more apt to describe them as publics plural) looks to as authorities for information and how it is contextualized, as well as a shift in the sheer amount of info available to us. In the Watergate era, you had legacy papers — like the Washington Post — which enjoyed significant levels of public faith as an institution.
Now — in the age of the internet — those same institutions have waned significantly with regard to the public’s trust for them, and with the capacity for anyone to access these large repositories of information, it has made it easy for individuals to cherry-pick select pieces of the total picture of events in order to present a narrative that is palatable to certain sections of the public. This isn’t even to mention the expansion in the ability to target with near surgical precision who said info is being presented to.
There’s also the matter of the public engaging with more and more complicated systems, making them into black boxes which are easy to affix convenient narratives to any time they aren’t working the way people think they should. If someone wants to argue that the government fabricated the fact that scraping two stones together in front of a pile of dry wood can create a campfire, that’s something trivially easy to disprove; the underlying mechanism is simple and easily demonstrable.
However, if someone wants to argue that brokerage funds were protecting corporate interests by pausing people’s ability to purchase shares of GME (Game Stop), combatting that idea requires a far more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between consumer side trading, how brokerage fund’s front capital to allow for ease and low friction in those trades, how volatility affects a brokerage fund’s ability to meet the margin requirements of clearing houses, and on and on and on. The simple but incorrect narrative has an advantage over the more complex but accurate one.
People broadly don’t have the cognitive bandwidth to investigate in depth every individual event our ever more complicated world presents us with. As a result, we offload much of that work onto third parties. This is to be expected, you don’t check every part of your car after it comes back from the mechanic, generally you trust their expertise to have things in working shape. However, when it comes to our media information space, the exponential growth in information sources brought with it an equivalent divergence in the worlds people inhabit.
A Shattered Mirror
Very few people have read all of Hillary’s leaked emails or the full Mueller Report, or even watched all of the House or Senate impeachment hearings for Donald Trump. Instead, they rely on others to present them with narratives, largely ones that play into their prior leanings and beliefs, causing the formation of incommensurate shattered realities.
These shards aren’t just epistemic bubbles either (here defined as spaces in which people share a limited body of information) instead they become echo chambers which function more like cults in their adherence to completely distinct epistemic authorities, in turn leading them to not be necessarily avoidant or naive of outside information, but instead actively adversarial and dismissive of it.
As a result, malevolent actors find themselves in the perfect storm for shaping division and controversy. It’s not that these actors on their own necessarily flood the ecosystem with bad information (though with the rise of bots and A.I. powered content generation this becomes a factor as well). In fact, they only need to introduce a modest amount of false information into the space.
From there once this information is encountered by individuals predisposed to believe it — whether due to ideological alignment, cognitive biases, or social influences — it triggers a cascade effect. These individuals, acting as accelerators in the information flow, share the false information with their networks, thereby increasing its velocity within the system.
All of this slots cleanly into explanations of why the public response to political scandals have shifted as much as they have since the Watergate era. Hillary Clinton was already a politically divisive figure and the mass release of emails allowed people to construct whatever colorful narrative they wanted about her character and actions, regardless of the actual content of the emails.
Similarly, the Mueller Report and the impeachment hearings surrounding Donald Trump became battlegrounds for competing narratives, with each side selectively interpreting information to fit their preconceived notions and the actual content being treated as beside the point. Very few people are likely to do the work of digging through the entirety of the underlying information that would be necessary to combat these inaccurate characterizations, and even in the cases where a given journalistic body does do the work, a lack of institutional authority limits their capacity to convince people in a compelling manner.
It is under these conditions that terms like “post-truth” and “truth decay” gain their relevance, encapsulating the erosion of shared reality and the blurring of lines between fact and fiction in public discourse. Any given event becomes nothing more than an opportunity for different actors to shape the facts to whatever ideological end suits them. In such a climate, the pursuit of truth becomes increasingly challenging, as individuals are bombarded with conflicting narratives and dubious information from various sources.
Such an information ecosystem is anathema to a healthy democracy where compromise and communication are paramount for the running of society. For how is one to communicate with others without starting from some basic shared framework of what reality is in first place?
Bringing ourselves back from the edge requires a reforging of that underlying mirror. The only question now is how?
