Old fights about radio have lessons for new fights about the Internet.
(photo: Oliver Monday/The New Yorker)
The Fake-News Fallacy
By Adrian Chen, The New Yorker
01 September 17
Old fights about radio have lessons for new fights about the Internet.
On the evening of October 30, 1938, a seventy-six-year-old millworker in
Grover's Mill, New Jersey, named Bill Dock heard something terrifying on the
radio. Aliens had landed just down the road, a newscaster announced, and
were rampaging through the countryside. Dock grabbed his double-barrelled
shotgun and went out into the night, prepared to face down the invaders.
But, after investigating, as a newspaper later reported, he "didn't see
anybody he thought needed shooting." In fact, he'd been duped by Orson
Welles's radio adaptation of "The War of the Worlds." Structured as a
breaking-news report that detailed the invasion in real time, the broadcast
adhered faithfully to the conventions of news radio, complete with elaborate
sound effects and impersonations of government officials, with only a few
brief warnings through the program that it was fiction.
The next day, newspapers were full of stories like Dock's. "Thirty men and
women rushed into the West 123rd Street police station," ready to evacuate,
according to the Times. Two people suffered heart attacks from shock, the
Washington Post reported. One caller from Pittsburgh claimed that he had
barely prevented his wife from taking her own life by swallowing poison. The
panic was the biggest story for weeks; a photograph of Bill Dock and his
shotgun, taken the next day, by a Daily News reporter, went "the 1930s
equivalent of viral," A. Brad Schwartz writes in his recent history,
"Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake
News."
This early fake-news panic lives on in legend, but Schwartz is the latest of
a number of researchers to argue that it wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
As Schwartz tells it, there was no mass hysteria, only small pockets of
concern that quickly burned out. He casts doubt on whether Dock had even
heard the broadcast. Schwartz argues that newspapers exaggerated the panic
to better control the upstart medium of radio, which was becoming the
dominant source of breaking news in the thirties. Newspapers wanted to show
that radio was irresponsible and needed guidance from its older, more
respectable siblings in the print media, such "guidance" mostly taking the
form of lucrative licensing deals and increased ownership of local radio
stations. Columnists and editorialists weighed in. Soon, the Columbia
education professor and broadcaster Lyman Bryson declared that unrestrained
radio was "one of the most dangerous elements in modern culture."
The argument turned on the role of the Federal Communications Commission,
the regulators charged with insuring that the radio system served the
"public interest, convenience and necessity." Unlike today's F.C.C., which
is known mainly as a referee for media mergers, the F.C.C. of the thirties
was deeply concerned with the particulars of what broadcasters put in
listeners' ears-it had recently issued a reprimand after a racy Mae West
sketch that so alarmed NBC it banned West from its stations. To some, the
lesson of the panic was that the F.C.C. needed to take an even more active
role to protect people from malicious tricksters like Welles. "Programs of
that kind are an excellent indication of the inadequacy of our present
control over a marvellous facility," the Iowa senator Clyde Herring, a
Democrat, declared. He announced a bill that would require broadcasters to
submit shows to the F.C.C. for review before airing. Yet Schwartz says that
the people calling for a government crackdown were far outnumbered by those
who warned against one. "Far from blaming Mr. Orson Welles, he ought to be
given a Congressional medal and a national prize," the renowned columnist
Dorothy Thompson wrote.
Thompson was concerned with a threat far greater than rogue thespians.
Everywhere you looked in the thirties, authoritarian leaders were being
swept to power with the help of radio. The Nazi Ministry for Public
Enlightenment and Propaganda deployed a force called the Funkwarte, or Radio
Guard, that went block by block to insure that citizens tuned in to Hitler's
major broadcast speeches, as Tim Wu details in his new book, "The Attention
Merchants." Meanwhile, homegrown radio demagogues like Father Charles
Coughlin and the charismatic Huey Long made some people wonder about a
radio-aided Fascist takeover in America. For Thompson, Welles had made an
"admirable demonstration" about the power of radio. It showed the danger of
handing control of the airwaves over to the state. "No political body must
ever, under any circumstances, obtain a monopoly of radio," she wrote. "The
greatest organizers of mass hysterias and the mass delusions today are
states using the radio to excite terrors, incite hatreds, inflame masses."
Donald Trump's victory has been a demonstration, for many people, of how the
Internet can be used to achieve those very ends. Trump used Twitter less as
a communication device than as a weapon of information warfare, rallying his
supporters and attacking opponents with hundred-and-forty-character
barrages. "I wouldn't be here without Twitter," he declared on Fox News in
March. Yet the Internet didn't just give him a megaphone. It also helped him
peddle his lies through a profusion of unreliable media sources that
undermined the old providers of established fact. Throughout the campaign,
fake-news stories, conspiracy theories, and other forms of propaganda were
reported to be flooding social networks. The stories were overwhelmingly
pro-Trump, and the spread of whoppers like "Pope Francis Shocks World,
Endorses Donald Trump for President"-hardly more believable than a Martian
invasion-seemed to suggest that huge numbers of Trump supporters were being
duped by online lies. This was not the first campaign to be marred by
misinformation, of course. But the sheer outlandishness of the claims being
made, and believed, suggested to many that the Internet had brought about a
fundamental devaluing of the truth. Many pundits argued that the
"hyper-democratizing" force of the Internet had helped usher in a
"post-truth" world, where people based their opinions not on facts or reason
but on passion and prejudice.
Yet, even among this information anarchy, there remains an authority of
sorts. Facebook and Google now define the experience of the Internet for
most people, and in many ways they play the role of regulators. In the weeks
after the election, they faced enormous criticism for their failure to halt
the spread of fake news and misinformation on their services. The problem
was not simply that people had been able to spread lies but that the digital
platforms were set up in ways that made them especially potent. The "share"
button sends lies flying around the Web faster than fact checkers can debunk
them. The supposedly neutral platforms use personalized algorithms to feed
us information based on precise data models of our preferences, trapping us
in "filter bubbles" that cripple critical thinking and increase
polarization. The threat of fake news was compounded by this sense that the
role of the press had been ceded to an arcane algorithmic system created by
private companies that care only about the bottom line.
Not so very long ago, it was thought that the tension between commercial
pressure and the public interest would be one of the many things made
obsolete by the Internet. In the mid-aughts, during the height of the Web
2.0 boom, the pundit Henry Jenkins declared that the Internet was creating a
"participatory culture" where the top-down hegemony of greedy media
corporations would be replaced by a horizontal network of amateur
"prosumers" engaged in a wonderfully democratic exchange of information in
cyberspace-an epistemic agora that would allow the whole globe to come
together on a level playing field. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the rest
attained their paradoxical gatekeeper status by positioning themselves as
neutral platforms that unlocked the Internet's democratic potential by
empowering users. It was on a private platform, Twitter, where pro-democracy
protesters organized, and on another private platform, Google, where the
knowledge of a million public libraries could be accessed for free. These
companies would develop into what the tech guru Jeff Jarvis termed
"radically public companies," which operate more like public utilities than
like businesses.
But there has been a growing sense among mostly liberal-minded observers
that the platforms' championing of openness is at odds with the public
interest. The image of Arab Spring activists using Twitter to challenge
repressive dictators has been replaced, in the public imagination, by that
of ISIS propagandists luring vulnerable Western teen-agers to Syria via
YouTube videos and Facebook chats. The openness that was said to bring about
a democratic revolution instead seems to have torn a hole in the social
fabric. Today, online misinformation, hate speech, and propaganda are seen
as the front line of a reactionary populist upsurge threatening liberal
democracy. Once held back by democratic institutions, the bad stuff is now
sluicing through a digital breach with the help of irresponsible tech
companies. Stanching the torrent of fake news has become a trial by which
the digital giants can prove their commitment to democracy. The effort has
reignited a debate over the role of mass communication that goes back to the
early days of radio.
The debate around radio at the time of "The War of the Worlds" was informed
by a similar fall from utopian hopes to dystopian fears. Although radio can
seem like an unremarkable medium-audio wallpaper pasted over the most boring
parts of your day-the historian David Goodman's book "Radio's Civic
Ambition: American Broadcasting and Democracy in the 1930s" makes it clear
that the birth of the technology brought about a communications revolution
comparable to that of the Internet. For the first time, radio allowed a mass
audience to experience the same thing simultaneously from the comfort of
their homes. Early radio pioneers imagined that this unprecedented blurring
of public and private space might become a sort of ethereal forum that would
uplift the nation, from the urban slum dweller to the remote Montana
rancher. John Dewey called radio "the most powerful instrument of social
education the world has ever seen." Populist reformers demanded that radio
be treated as a common carrier and give airtime to anyone who paid a fee.
Were this to have come about, it would have been very much like the early
online-bulletin-board systems where strangers could come together and leave
a message for any passing online wanderer. Instead, in the regulatory
struggles of the twenties and thirties, the commercial networks won out.
Corporate networks were supported by advertising, and what many progressives
had envisaged as the ideal democratic forum began to seem more like Times
Square, cluttered with ads for soap and coffee. Rather than elevating public
opinion, advertisers pioneered techniques of manipulating it. Who else might
be able to exploit such techniques? Many saw a link between the domestic
on-air advertising boom and the rise of Fascist dictators like Hitler
abroad. Tim Wu cites the leftist critic Max Lerner, who lamented that "the
most damning blow the dictatorships have struck at democracy has been the
compliment they have paid us in taking over and perfecting our prized
techniques of persuasion and our underlying contempt for the credulity of
the masses."
Amid such concerns, broadcasters were under intense pressure to show that
they were not turning listeners into a zombified mass ripe for the Fascist
picking. What they developed in response is, in Goodman's phrase, a "civic
paradigm": radio would create active, rational, tolerant listeners-in other
words, the ideal citizens of a democratic society.
Classical-music-appreciation shows were developed with an eye toward uplift.
Inspired by progressive educators, radio networks hosted "forum" programs,
in which citizens from all walks of life were invited to discuss the matters
of the day, with the aim of inspiring tolerance and political engagement.
One such program, "America's Town Meeting of the Air," featured in its first
episode a Communist, a Fascist, a Socialist, and a democrat.
Listening to the radio, then, would be a "civic practice" that could create
a more democratic society by exposing people to diversity. But only if they
listened correctly. There was great concern about distracted and gullible
listeners being susceptible to propagandists. A group of progressive
journalists and thinkers known as "propaganda critics" set about educating
radio listeners. The Institute for Propaganda Analysis, co-founded by the
social psychologist Clyde R. Miller, with funding from the department-store
magnate Edward Filene, was at the forefront of the movement. In newsletters,
books, and lectures, the institute's members urged listeners to attend to
their own biases while analyzing broadcast voices for signs of manipulation.
Listening to the radio critically became the duty of every responsible
citizen. Goodman, who is generally sympathetic to the proponents of the
civic paradigm, is alert to the off notes here of snobbery and disdain: much
of the progressive concern about listeners' abilities stemmed from the
belief that Americans were, basically, dim-witted-an idea that gained
currency after intelligence tests on soldiers during the First World War
supposedly revealed discouraging news about the capacities of the average
American. In the wake of "The War of the Worlds" panic, commentators didn't
hesitate to rail against "idiotic" and "stupid" listeners. Welles and his
crew, Dorothy Thompson declared, "have shown up the incredible stupidity,
lack of nerve and ignorance of thousands."
Today, when we speak about people's relationship to the Internet, we tend to
adopt the nonjudgmental language of computer science. Fake news was
described as a "virus" spreading among users who have been "exposed" to
online misinformation. The proposed solutions to the fake-news problem
typically resemble antivirus programs: their aim is to identify and
quarantine all the dangerous nonfacts throughout the Web before they can
infect their prospective hosts. One venture capitalist, writing on the tech
blog Venture Beat, imagined deploying artificial intelligence as a "media
cop," protecting users from malicious content. "Imagine a world where every
article could be assessed based on its level of sound discourse," he wrote.
The vision here was of the news consumers of the future turning the
discourse setting on their browser up to eleven and soaking in pure fact.
It's possible, though, that this approach comes with its own form of myopia.
Neil Postman, writing a couple of decades ago, warned of a growing tendency
to view people as computers, and a corresponding devaluation of the
"singular human capacity to see things whole in all their psychic, emotional
and moral dimensions." A person does not process information the way a
computer does, flipping a switch of "true" or "false." One rarely cited Pew
statistic shows that only four per cent of American Internet users trust
social media "a lot," which suggests a greater resilience against online
misinformation than overheated editorials might lead us to expect. Most
people seem to understand that their social-media streams represent a heady
mixture of gossip, political activism, news, and entertainment. You might
see this as a problem, but turning to Big Data-driven algorithms to fix it
will only further entrench our reliance on code to tell us what is important
about the world-which is what led to the problem in the first place. Plus,
it doesn't sound very fun.
The various efforts to fact-check and label and blacklist and sort all the
world's information bring to mind a quote, which appears in David Goodman's
book, from John Grierson, a documentary filmmaker: "Men don't live by bread
alone, nor by fact alone." In the nineteen-forties, Grierson was on an
F.C.C. panel that had been convened to determine how best to encourage a
democratic radio, and he was frustrated by a draft report that reflected his
fellow-panelists' obsession with filling the airwaves with rationality and
fact. Grierson said, "Much of this entertainment is the folk stuff . . . of
our technological time; the patterns of observation, of humor, of fancy,
which make a technological society a human society."
In recent times, Donald Trump supporters are the ones who have most
effectively applied Grierson's insight to the digital age. Young Trump
enthusiasts turned Internet trolling into a potent political tool, deploying
the "folk stuff" of the Web-memes, slang, the nihilistic humor of a certain
subculture of Web-native gamer-to give a subversive, cyberpunk sheen to a
movement that might otherwise look like a stale reactionary blend of white
nationalism and anti-feminism. As crusaders against fake news push
technology companies to "defend the truth," they face a backlash from a
conservative movement, retooled for the digital age, which sees claims for
objectivity as a smoke screen for bias.
One sign of this development came last summer, in the scandal over
Facebook's "Trending" sidebar, in which curators chose stories to feature on
the user's home page. When the tech Web site Gizmodo reported the claim of
an anonymous employee that the curators were systematically suppressing
conservative news stories, the right-wing blogosphere exploded. Breitbart,
the far-right torchbearer, uncovered the social-media accounts of some of
the employees-liberal recent college graduates-that seemed to confirm the
suspicion of pervasive anti-right bias. Eventually, Facebook fired the team
and retooled the feature, calling in high-profile conservatives for a
meeting with Mark Zuckerberg. Although Facebook denied that there was any
systematic suppression of conservative views, the outcry was enough to
reverse a tiny first step it had taken toward introducing human judgment
into the algorithmic machine.
For conservatives, the rise of online gatekeepers may be a blessing in
disguise. Throwing the charge of "liberal media bias" against powerful
institutions has always provided an energizing force for the conservative
movement, as the historian Nicole Hemmer shows in her new book, "Messengers
of the Right." Instead of focussing on ideas, Hemmer focusses on the
galvanizing struggle over the means of distributing those ideas. The first
modern conservatives were members of the America First movement, who found
their isolationist views marginalized in the lead-up to the Second World War
and vowed to fight back by forming the first conservative media outlets. A
"vague claim of exclusion" sharpened into a "powerful and effective
ideological arrow in the conservative quiver," Hemmer argues, through
battles that conservative radio broadcasters had with the F.C.C. in the
nineteen-fifties and sixties. Their main obstacle was the F.C.C.'s Fairness
Doctrine, which sought to protect public discourse by requiring
controversial opinions to be balanced by opposing viewpoints. Since attacks
on the mid-century liberal consensus were inherently controversial,
conservatives found themselves constantly in regulators' sights. In 1961, a
watershed moment occurred with the leak of a memo from labor leaders to the
Kennedy Administration which suggested using the Fairness Doctrine to
suppress right-wing viewpoints. To many conservatives, the memo proved the
existence of the vast conspiracy they had long suspected. A fund-raising
letter for a prominent conservative radio show railed against the doctrine,
calling it "the most dastardly collateral attack on freedom of speech in the
history of the country." Thus was born the character of the persecuted
truthteller standing up to a tyrannical government-a trope on which a
billion-dollar conservative-media juggernaut has been built.
Today, Facebook and Google have taken the place of the F.C.C. in the
conservative imagination. Conservative bloggers highlight the support that
Jack Dorsey, the C.E.O. of Twitter, has expressed for Black Lives Matter,
and the frequent visits that Google's Eric Schmidt made to the Obama White
House. When Facebook announced that it was partnering with a group of fact
checkers from the nonprofit Poynter Institute to flag false news stories,
conservatives saw another effort to censor them under the guise of
objectivity. Brent Bozell, who runs the conservative media-watchdog group
Media Research Center, cited the fact that Poynter received funding from the
liberal financier George Soros. "Just like George Soros and company
underwrote the Fairness Doctrine several years ago," he said, "this is about
going after conservative talk on the Internet and banning it by somehow
projecting it as being false."
One lesson you get from Hemmer's research is that the conservative
skepticism of gatekeepers is not without a historical basis. The Fairness
Doctrine really was used by liberal groups to silence conservatives,
typically by flooding stations with complaints and requests for airtime to
respond. This created a chilling effect, with stations often choosing to
avoid controversial material. The technical fixes implemented by Google and
Facebook in the rush to fight fake news seem equally open to abuse,
dependent, as they are, on user-generated reports.
Yet today, with a powerful, well-funded propaganda machine dedicated to
publicizing any hint of liberal bias, conservatives aren't the ones who have
the most to fear. As Facebook has become an increasingly important venue for
activists documenting police abuse, many of them have complained that
overzealous censors routinely block their posts. A recent report by the
investigative nonprofit ProPublica shows how anti-racist activism can often
fall afoul of Facebook rules against offensive material, while a post by the
Louisiana representative Clay Higgins calling for the slaughter of
"radicalized" Muslims was deemed acceptable. In 2016, a group of
civil-rights activists wrote Facebook to demand that steps be taken to
insure that the platform could be used by marginalized people and social
movements organizing for change. There was no high-profile meeting with
Zuckerberg, only a form letter outlining Facebook's moderation practices.
The wishful story about how the Internet was creating a hyper-democratic
"participatory culture" obscures the ways in which it is biased in favor of
power.
The online tumult of the 2016 election fed into a growing suspicion of
Silicon Valley's dominance over the public sphere. Across the political
spectrum, people have become less trusting of the Big Tech companies that
govern most online political expression. Calls for civic responsibility on
the part of Silicon Valley companies have replaced the hope that
technological innovation alone might bring about a democratic revolution.
Despite the focus on algorithms, A.I., filter bubbles, and Big Data, these
questions are political as much as technical. Regulation has become an
increasingly popular notion; the Democratic senator Cory Booker has called
for greater antitrust scrutiny of Google and Facebook, while Stephen Bannon
reportedly wants to regulate Google and Facebook like public utilities. In
the nineteen-thirties, such threats encouraged commercial broadcasters to
adopt the civic paradigm. In that prewar era, advocates of democratic radio
were united by a progressive vision of pluralism and rationality; today, the
question of how to fashion a democratic social media is one more front in
our highly divisive culture wars.
Still, Silicon Valley isn't taking any chances. In the wake of the recent,
deadly white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a slew of tech
companies banned the neo-Nazi blog the Daily Stormer, essentially
blacklisting it from the Web. Responding so directly to appeals to decency
and justice that followed the tragedy, these companies positioned themselves
less as neutral platforms than as custodians of the public interest.
Zuckerberg recently posted a fifty-seven-hundred-word manifesto announcing a
new mission for Facebook that goes beyond the neutral-seeming mandate to
"make the world more open and connected." Henceforth, Facebook would seek to
"develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a
global community that works for all of us." The manifesto was so heavy on
themes of civic responsibility that many took it as a blueprint for a future
political campaign. Speculation has only grown since Zuckerberg embarked on
a fifty-state tour this summer to meet American Facebook users, posting
photos of himself with livestock and unhealthy local delicacies. Those who
think that Zuckerberg is preparing for a Presidential bid, however, should
consider the emerging vectors of power in the digital era: for the man who
runs Facebook, the White House might well look like a step down.
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