We Must Guard Against the Politco-Media Complex
In the information age, back-room deals don’t move the world. Mobs and misinformation do
The world was changing rapidly and dramatically in 1961 when President Eisenhower warned us of the rising influence of the “military-industrial complex.” His observation was that the U.S. was maintaining a large, expensive military for the first time, and our society was not structured — and perhaps not ready — for it.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. … [W]e must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
— Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farwell Address
Clearly, we are going through a similar societal dislocation today, and with disastrous results. Our society is fragmenting, our culture appears antiquated or irrelevant to many in the face of new (and old) challenges, and many helpful societal norms are being actively rejected (or undermined) by the punditocracy, politicians, and chattering classes generally.
The rotting fruits of this transformation include
- Rising political extremism
- Tribal and identity politics
- Rising white supremacy
- Increased justification of Socialism and Marxism
- Acceptance of fascist, tyrannical, and nationalist ideals
- Pervasive bias in media and attendant politicization
- Degradation of the norms and institutions which undergird U.S. democracy
- Political dysfunction and paralysis
Cui bono?
To understand both what is happening and why we should ask ourselves “who benefits?”
Politicians and media benefit, and the rest of us lose out.
- Politicians don’t mean to destroy our culture, community, and norms. They do it naturally, and the more corrosive they are willing to be, the more quickly they rise to power. I include their various media and strategy consultants in this. To win elections, politicians need three things: money, votes, and volunteers. All three come from angry, fearful people, ideally (for them) bound together by tribal, defensive, primitive impulses into an identity-based mob mentality. Pols have become adept at creating the kinds of voters who are constantly fearful and angry.
- Nor are media on a (conscious) mission to harm us. They simply need viewers. Insightful analysis still has its place (now sadly relegated to the fringes such as on Medium, Substack, podcasts, and other niche outlets) but to really win the viewership wars, they need enthusiastic followers, not just viewers. Social scientists have proved how outrage drives social media consumption. TV works the same way: Fox News viewership recently dropped by 44% when they played the Jan 6 hearings, rather than pandering to their viewers’ existing biases; Fox viewers are conditioned to literally tune out information they do not agree with. Because the “medium is the message” and today’s media are outrage-based infotainment; media can now only hold viewers by outraging them and by playing to “out-group animosity.” It appears that our tribal hind-brain controls the remote, drives our doom-scrolling, and runs the show.
Let that sink in. Our political opponents are not inherently an “out-group” or an “other,” of course. It’s all in our minds. In truth, we are bound together by our common humanity, shared history, and to a large extent common beliefs. But media and politicians can’t make money by focusing on what unites us. They needed to establish an “other” and create out-group animosity to get the clicks.
Social media are also in the mix and may have tipped us into this dysfunction. Algorithmic content selection — promoting more offensive content through machine learning— arguably first illustrated the power of outrage, before traditional media recognized and fully commercialized it.
The politico-media complex
Hence the “Politico-Media Complex” neologism. Politicians and media need each other and play off each other. Politicians make outrageous statements they know will get play. Media publish and push (and add incendiary titles to) stories that create tribal, easily manipulated voters.
We see how (left-leaning) prestige media now bury content that reflects poorly on Democrats. E.g. it turns out that really was Hunter Biden’s laptop, but you would easily miss that reading WaPo or NYT. And even more starkly how conservative media shamelessly hide and distort any information that harms the conservative cause.
The politico-media complex operates differently than the military-industrial complex or other oligarchic ruling groups. It is a creature of the information age and emerges from a sick system rather than being an expression of a (nefarious) rational will-to-power. It is hapless, organic, and emergent rather than a conscious plot or conspiracy among information gatekeepers.
There is overlap with the outrage-industrial complex, but that is cast as a psychological and media phenomenon, and we also need to understand the symbiosis with our political class.
To be sure, there is some element of explicit collusion between pols and media. Fox News pundits met regularly with Donald Trump and generally did his bidding. David Cameron was in cahoots with Rupert Murdoch. But generally, the politico-media complex is a symbiotic relationship built on mutual manipulation and shared goals.
Outrage media is like COVID —we lack immunity
This new, information-age mechanism subverts many societal mechanisms for good governance and media. Metaphorically, democracies lack an immune system against this new disease.
COVID is, after all, called the “novel coronavirus” because we (all humans) had never been exposed to it. It evolved in a different host (bats) and jumped to humans due to new mutations. At that early phase, it killed far more people as their immune system both failed to respond in some ways and overreacted in others. But less so today. Now that most of us have been exposed to the virus or vaccines our immune systems are ready to react appropriately and effectively.
Eisenhower similarly understood that society is more vulnerable to a new threat (his “military-industrial complex”) than a traditional problem and that we need to periodically re-formulate our democratic system to withstand new threats. From his same farewell address:
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. […] Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
[…]
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system-ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.
We must adapt: individually and societally
Unfortunately, our ability as a society to respond to the new politico-media complexes depends on having a functioning media and government.
To extend the COVID analogy, COVID not only infects cells, but it suppresses and distorts the immune response in multiple ways. Similarly, our outrage epidemic has infected and distorted what we may consider our social and political immune systems — media and government.
Yet there is hope. We are already adjusting and evolving. Fourteen states now require that children be taught media literacy in school, and Media Literacy Now is pushing for more. Organizations are forming to bridge the divide across adult political opponents. A new “Forward” political party just (re-)formed as a merger of multiple groups. Ranked-choice voting is in place in more areas to disrupt political party domination.
But it will be a long, complex process, and we may just as easily next find ourselves in the political ICU as the recovery room.
