New Media Changed The World And We Aren't Immune

It would be weird if it upended whole societies, exacerbated mental-health crises, and crushed attention spans, but had no effect on U.S. politics

(Photo Illustration by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 on the strength of a media feeding frenzy over emails, it dawned on me that either my intuitions about partisan politics had been wrong, or something fundamental had changed. With the benefit of hindsight, I soon came to see the 2014 midterm campaign as a precursor. Republicans back then turned a closely fought election into a blowout in the final stretch by fanning a different media feeding frenzy—this one over a far-off outbreak of Ebola.

That election wasn’t quite as pivotal as 2016, but the two had a domino effect. Without 2014, Barack Obama would’ve been able to appoint a third Supreme Court justice; the vacancy of the Scalia seat allowed Trump to juice evangelical turnout, and its ultimate theft allowed Republicans to commandeer the Court for a generation. 

All of this happened because Republicans situated themselves to win an information war in 2014, then situated themselves to win another information war in 2016. I had simply been underestimating the effectiveness of their antics.

What happens in the real world was and is obviously still important. The suffocating reality of Trump’s awfulness helped Democrats win back the House in 2018, and the presidency in 2020. But these victories were themselves grounded in contagious ideas more than material conditions. People were happy with the economy in 2018; they were simply distressed over what they saw and heard from Trump’s administration. The horrible realities of 2020 cost Trump the presidency, but relentless propaganda allowed him to increase his vote share from 2016 despite COVID-19 and brutal economic conditions—a testament to the power of narrative even in defeat. Economic sentiment collapsed; Trump’s appeal among the electorate went up.

Many liberals in my cohort have been resistant to the implications, and I think it’s in large part because their intuitions about politics were also too heavily shaped by previous elections. A huge recession in 2008 drove the incumbent party from power, just as theory would’ve predicted; the slow recovery fed a big backlash in 2010, allowing Republicans to swiftly regain a toehold on power. Barack Obama won re-election in 2012, matching theory once again (the economy was growing). But that campaign also unfolded anomalously as a true contest of policy ideas: the more popular agenda (Obama’s incrementalist safety-net liberalism) defeated the less popular one (Mitt Romney’s regressive, plutocratic conservatism).  

Liberals rightly think that’s how elections should go. But they don’t usually. They certainly haven’t in the past decade. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that 2012 was the last presidential election we had before social media overwhelmed more traditional forms. 

THRIVING UNDER THE INFLUENCERS 

If you want a feel for how things have changed, think back to the role the economy, and news about the economy, played in 2012 compared to now. Back then, Republicans were just as invested in spreading doom and gloom as they are today, but they had fewer tools to work with. Mainstream news outlets still viewed economic data principally through the lens of horserace politics, but they were more or less on the same page about what metrics were important: how many jobs the economy created on net, the unemployment rate, GDP. Every month, journalists would wait on tenterhooks for the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ first-Friday report because they understood the economy’s centrality to the election. But when the reports came out, there was no sustained gainsaying of the numbers. If the economy created 200,000 jobs, and the unemployment rate dropped to 5.1 percent, that was the news—a boon for the Obama campaign. If the economy created only 100,000 jobs and the unemployment rate ticked up, a pall fell over the Democratic Party. 

Today, it’s much less clear if and how regular people distinguish news media from every other kind, and (I think by no coincidence) wide swaths of the population believe we’re in recession when we’re not; think inflation remains out of control, when it isn’t; think gas prices are high, when they’re low.  

Our collective media literacy has generally been weak, but it must now contend with an oceanic glut of “content,” rather than a few newspapers, television stations, and national magazines. Within that glut, the lines between professional journalism and all other media have blurred, and liberal political elites were unprepared for it. 

I don’t totally blame them, because the change has been radical. First there were pamphlets, then newspapers, then newspapers and radio, then newspapers, radio, and television. Then newspapers, radio, television, and the outlets’ websites on the open internet. That covers hundreds of years, bringing us to the millennium. Then there were blogs. Then microblogs. Then the same basic fragmentation of audiovisual media. Then most of that content became directed by algorithm to people based on their demographic traits and internet histories. 

Now it’s how billions of people occupy their time. We’re acting out Zeno’s paradox in virtual space, trying to cram infinite units of infinitesimal content into our finite minds every day before the clock strikes midnight. 

But there have not been commensurate enhancements in civic education or in the quality of citizenship to make people wary of content they encounter from non-journalists. I wrestle with this myself whenever I delve into media outside my realms of expertise. During the acute phase of the pandemic, I sought out home-exercise routines from certified trainers on Instagram. Over time, I found a handful of reasonably trustworthy “fitfluencers” who are transparent about their income sources and measured in their guidance, and the work they did was very valuable to me when I needed it. But I had to separate them as wheat from the chaff of health and wellness content creators, many of whom are charlatans or regurgitators of faddish nonsense. And in these large subcultures, tons of political misinformation—about everything from Biden to Trump to vaccines to inflation—flourishes unchecked.

I’m lucky to have a professional background in media literacy, or today I could easily be someone who’d been taken in by a carnivore-diet evangelist or a seed-oil scaremonger, and their meme-driven politics. But most people don’t work in journalism.

And so in most cases the best we can hope for is that our news-savviest fellow citizens continue to nourish good mental habits as they scroll each day between journalism and entertainment and advertisement and propaganda. But many of those people have seen their mental habits degraded by life online, and basically everyone just a bit younger than me has only known this world. They never experienced the simpler, gatekept world where journalism was more clearly demarcated, and (for all its flaws) committed to real professional standards.

And here’s the thing: all of the digital components of that change (the stuff that shattered media into billions of pieces) arose in the last 15 years or so. The term “attention economy” predates the internet by several decades, but our application of it in modern discourse to the mass competition for our eyeballs—for maximizing the amount of time we spend staring at screens, and toggling between content platforms—is only a few years old.  

In that time, and despite all the navel-gazing we’ve done about the harms of screen addiction, the effects social media and doom scrolling have had on our collective mental health, the ways evil people have exploited algorithmic media to manipulate populations and commit atrocities… we’ve done almost nothing to assess whether and how it has changed relationship between real, domestic political developments and public opinion. 

While we weren’t paying attention, Republicans created a politics for the attention economy. Democrats are doing politics like it’s 1999. More generously, they’ve built politics around the insight that “the internet isn’t real life” and stuck with it for many years, even as the assumption itself has become less and less true.

THE BLOGS OF WAR

Even before Republicans became terminally online, Democrats were no great visionaries about the power of the internet. When I began my career in online journalism almost 19 years ago, Democrats on Capitol Hill were quicker than Republicans to make small adjustments for it. But they were very small and very reluctant. It was common practice for Democrats to leave their standard communications operations intact, but create tiny, isolated digital-media outreach teams to contend with their online critics and allies. Real news and information was for the capital-J Journalists; “bloggers” (emphasis always on the “blah”) had to contend with the 22-year old staffer who had an RSS feed and no useful information to share. Over many years and under a lot of pressure, these teams typically became integrated. But the disdain lingered—many of the same people run the Democratic Party today. And under their watch, Republicans became savvier about the online world and overtook the left.

Now think about how the modern professional news industry, so central to liberal politics, fits into this new attention economy. For one thing it’s now only a small slice of media all told. For another, it’s not all relaying the same information. Some of it is Fox News and other right-wing “news” channels peddling actionable slander. A comparable portion is mainstream news, which is fact-bound but also devoted to a professional code that makes fearless truth-telling difficult when the truth favors one political party. A tiny sliver is progressive media, but Biden-friendly progressive media is not like Fox News, and much of progressive media is actively hostile to Biden. And that’s before the content they generate gets further distorted in the terrifying funhouse of social media.  

It would be remarkable, given all this, if more Americans had an accurate sense of the world around them or a positive sense of a president who’s largely invisible online except insofar as influential media figures like to mock and slander him.

And this is ultimately why I’m not so sanguine about Republicans voting to formalize their baseless Biden impeachment inquiry. It’s why I suspect media is largely responsible for breaking the relationship between economic fundamentals and public sentiment, and why I don’t take it for granted that happier tidings will wash over the public in the coming months (though, of course, I hope they do). 

Most liberals see factual realities—of Biden’s unimpeachable conduct, or the economy’s resiliency—and assume they must break through to the masses at some point. I see artifacts of yet-more information wars that could cost Democrats a fateful election once again.