FEEDBACK IN THE MEDIA: BALANCED TRUTHS OR SNOWBALLING LIES?

What’s the difference between Walter Cronkite and Tucker Carlson? I wish I had a funny punchline for that question, but the sad answer is that Tucker would probably trounce Walter in a ratings battle today, despite the fact that Carlson’s former employer, Fox New, once mounted a legal defense maintaining that no reasonable viewer would take Carlson’s reporting seriously. What on earth has happened to the fourth estate, that once-trusted purveyor of objective truth? For  insight, we must return to our by-now familiar distinction between positive and negative feedback.

Last week, the multi-post series I am calling The Most Important Technical Distinction in the World considered the workings of one modernity’s most wildly successful institutions: natural science. I argued that the tremendous power modern science has to distinguish objective truth from error comes down to the fact that, while individual scientists are encouraged to toss out novel theories—even theories as wild as Einstein’s proposition that space and time can bend—the scientific method adds discipline to this creative endeavor by means of two negative feedback mechanisms. First, once a researcher has proposed a theory, the scientific method requires that the scientist to return to observation and test the theory against the empirical data, ideally by running experiments specifically designed to tease out whether a theory’s predictions are, in fact, borne out by nature. Second, once a theory has withstood this initial round of testing, the scientist publishes it, at which point other scientists can submit it to their own barrage of experiments. And because these other scientists have multiple incentives to knock down an accepted theory—prestige, funding, career advancement—they will generally subject the theory in question to the most stringent testing they can dream up. It follows that any theory capable of surviving all this testing will likely have some degree of objective truth, even if future observations may require it to be further refined.

As we turn to this week’s topic of the contemporary news media, the thesis I’ll be advancing is straightforward. Journalism, as traditionally practiced—and as still practiced by some media outlets, particularly in what the populist right had derisively dubbed “the mainstream media”—loosely modelled itself after modern science insofar as it adopted its own version of science’s twin negative feedback mechanisms. This has not meant that journalists never advance false claims, any more than scientists always get their proposed theories right. As in the case of the scientific method, however, traditional journalist standards tend to reel in those claims that stray too far from the truth, thereby preserving a rough equilibrium between what happens in the world and what the media reports. Over the past several decades, however, some media companies have adopted a new business model that encourages them to trade the negative feedback mechanisms of traditional journalism for certain positive feedback loops that are highly effective at winning viewers and generating advertising dollars, but tend to repeat and amplify false claims. 

To dive into our topic, let’s start with journalism as traditionally practiced. News reporting, to be sure, has never had the rigor of modern science. Nevertheless, the journalists of the past few centuries cobbled together a sort of “journalistic method” roughly analogous to the modern scientific method with respect to the self-correcting checks it imposes on itself. The first step in responsible reporting, according to this method, is to investigate the facts. Naturally, the particular facts a journalist pursues must be newsworthy: relevant to the lives of readers or viewers, or at least interesting. But according to the professional ethic taught at every journalism school in the country, these facts must also be true; they must be real facts. To ensure their veracity, any facts uncovered should be corroborated, ideally by multiple sources.

When a journalist then feels she has collected enough verifiable facts to make a story, she may pitch the idea to her editor. Editors typically report to a new organization’s business office, if not directly to its owners, and all these players have a strong interest in protecting the news organization’s long term credibility, since this affects the company’s profitability: consumers will not stick with a news outlet that persistently gets its facts wrong. Accordingly, an editor will typically vet proposed stories very carefully, attempting to poke holes the reporting. But if a story survives this initial round of scrutiny, the editor may decide to publish it, at which point a second round of fact-checking begins. The publication of the story, that is, becomes a news item in itself that other journalists at other new organizations can investigate, knowing that—having been scooped on the initial story—it would be an even bigger scoop if they could identify any errors, or perhaps even willful deception, on the part of a journalistic rival.

When these twin negative feedback mechanisms are functioning properly, it does not really matter whether individual journalists, editors, or media company owners are personally motivated more by a disinterested love of truth, a sense of professional duty, or a desire to make money and win public acclaim. Given the checks in place, all these motives incline journalists to pursue the same end: the objective truth. Without doubt, journalism can be messy, and the intense competition and tight deadlines that pervade every level of the media ecosystem ensure that occasionally false or misleading stories will be published. Still, the checks journalists place on one another generally ensure that the truth will come out in the end, with news outlets that are irrefutably shown to have published false stories typically offering retractions in hopes of salvaging at least part of their credibility. And when the journalistic community as a whole disciplines itself in this fashion, it can serve as a credible check on politicians and other public figures, investigating the claims they make and exposing any false or misleading statements, thereby fulfilling journalism’s crucial role as democracy’s “fourth estate.” 

As this account suggests, journalism’s self-regulating mechanisms all assume that the key players involved—to include journalists, editors, and news organization owners, but also news consumers, public figures, and the larger democratic society— all share a common interest in arriving at the objective truth. For at least the past several decades, however, this assumption has been severely tested. Many factors underlie this change in the American media landscape, but likely the most consequential has been the fragmentation of the media market.

To focus on television, for much of this medium’s lifetime, the American television market featured three major broadcast networks: ABC, NBC, and CBS. With broadcasting depending on a limited public resource—transmission frequencies—the government could and did regulate their use in the public interest, such as by requiring that new programs give equal time to all major candidates when covering political campaigns. Though an important balancing factor, such legal requirements were in some ways superfluous, since the networks had their own interest in remaining politically balanced: with only three networks competing for the entire national television audience, none of them wanted to risk offending half their potential viewers by overtly favoring one political viewpoint over the other. This was the calculus that began to change as communications technologies continued to evolve over the final decades of the twentieth century.

In 1980, Ted Turner launched the Cable News Network, thus providing consumers with a news option free from both the technical and legal restraints of the public airwaves: with there being no limit to the number of cable stations that can operate at the same time, the rationale for government oversight of their content dissolved. Turner nonetheless chose to pursue a business strategy similar to that of the legacy networks, both observing traditional journalistic standards and self-imposing a degree of political balance in the interest of attracting a broad-based national audience. The cable medium’s open landscape, however, also suggested the possibility of an alternate business strategy, namely, abandoning the quest for a universal viewership and instead targeting particular niche audiences, whether nature lovers, cooking show enthusiasts, or groups of viewers having similar political leanings.

Appealing to this latter group was an approach that had already been pioneered on AM radio, most notably by conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, whose show began national syndication in 1988. Utilizing cheap AM transmission frequencies that travel long distances over open rural areas, Limbaugh made no attempt to attract a broad audience with his opinionated commentaries. On the contrary, he set his sights on one particular profile of listener, then attempted to corner this market, in no small part by making provocative claims designed to offend and outrage everyone falling outside his target audience. Whether or not Limbaugh’s harangues were grounded in verifiable facts was largely beside the point; it was their very outrageousness that delighted his listeners.

Picking up on this strategy, in 1996 Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News as a cable outlet designed to appeal to viewers with conservative leanings. The young network adopted the motto of “Fair and Balanced,” but its presentation of the news was never intended to be balanced per se. It was rather meant to be balancing, serving as a counterweight to CNN, the legacy networks, and most of the country’s major newspapers—the mainstream media—which conservatives had long suspected of harboring a liberal bias. Murdoch knew, of course, that his slanted approach would alienate many potential viewers. But he was not banking on a universal viewership. Rather, he correctly surmised that, in the fragmented media market the cable medium was spawning, the number of viewers who wanted a specifically conservative presentation of the news, though finite, would nonetheless be large enough to turn a healthy profit.

In theory, this introduction of an overtly conservative news outlet might have served the cause of objective truth by providing an additional check on the mainstream media—especially if most journalists really are as liberally biased as conservatives charge. As it turns out, however, targeting a niche market based on political leanings is a business strategy that generates it own dynamic in news reporting, this one driven more by positive feedback than negative feedback, with results that are by now predictable to us.

Comedian Jon Stewart of The Daily Show was particularly incisive in revealing how the internal checks news organizations had traditionally placed on their own reporting came to be replaced by a positive feedback loop at Fox. With the company having given a nod to traditional journalistic practices by dividing its on-air personalities into a news division and an opinion division—quickly giving the opinion side all the primetime slots—an opinion host might muse something long the lines of, “Does Barack Obama beat his dog? Reporters are not allowed into the president’s private residence at the White House, so we don’t know!” The next morning, a Fox news anchor might report, “In the latest scandal to plague this administration, people have begun asking questions about whether President Obama beats his dog.” Later in the day, a conservative congressperson might tell reporters, “I’ve been hearing reports that the President beats his dog. I will be calling for congressional hearings into this grave matter.” Then, to close the loop that evening, the same opinion host would breathlessly effuse, “See? Last night, I told you there were questions about whether the president treats his dog. Now we are seeing that even elected officials are corroborating my suspicions. I was right!”

At some point, if a story of this sort managed to generate sufficient buzz, the larger journalistic community might step in, with CNN and the legacy networks calling out Fox for levelling an incendiary charge against a public official without any supporting evidence. Fox executives understood, however, that neither the network’s long term credibility nor its bottom line were seriously threatened by this check that other news organizations were attempting to place on it. For one thing, many Fox viewers made a point of avoiding the mainstream media, so these viewers would probably never even know Fox’s reporting had been challenged. Yet, even if some Fox viewers channel surfed, they had long been assured by AM talk show hosts, conservative politicians, and Fox’s own commentators that the mainstream media was hopelessly biased against conservatives. Accordingly, when these dedicated Fox viewers saw the network’s reporting being fact-checked by other outlets, they were primed to regard this counter-reporting, not as evidence that Fox had strayed from the truth, but as confirmation of the mainstream media’s anti-conservative bias.

By the mid-2010s, not only were conservative talk radio and Fox News still going strong, but several other cable news channels had launched that were even more stridently conservative than Fox, while the conservative social media sphere had fully come into its own, thus becoming an even more important source of news for many consumers than either broadcast or cable television. The resulting conservative information ecosystem has been described as an echo chamber, which is an apt metaphor insofar as the players comprising it, far from offering an objective check on one another’s reporting, tend to repeat each other claims uncritically. In an actual echo chamber, however, even the loudest noise will eventually die out, losing a fraction of its energy with each repetition. Given the positive feedback mechanisms that have come to dominate the conservative media ecosystem, however, false claims not only tend to gain credence as consumers hear them repeated by ever more voices, but these falsehoods are likely to be embellished with each telling as different voices compete with one another for listeners, viewers, or clicks.

Given the chasm that has developed in American journalism between the mainstream media and the conservative media—the former continuing to gravitate toward objective truth by disciplining itself through a number of negative feedback mechanisms, the latter fostering the sorts of positive feedback mechanisms that tend to produce and amplify falsehoods—it is not difficult to see why President Trump chose to appear frequently on conservative outlets like Fox, while shunning and vilifying the mainstream media. Not only was Trump’s base already tuned into Fox, thus making this the natural place to connect with his supporters, but given the president’s own propensity to indulge in untruths, the mainstream media’s constant fact-checking and general insistence on serving as the fourth estate came to be a source of annoyance for Trump. It was far more pleasant to sit down and chat with conservative commentators who were only too eager to host him—knowing this would approve their ratings—tossing the president softball questions and declining to push back when he made demonstrably false claims, up to and including the lie that the 2020 election had been stolen.

None of this analysis should be taken to imply that pre-cable television news was paradisical land of unbiased, perfectly balanced truth. Whether or not political bias was rife, one thing Walter Cronkite had in common with virtually every other TV news anchor, producer, and editor up to that point in history is that they were White men. Even if many of these journalists may have earnestly tried to fact-check one another as they reported on the civil rights movement or the women’s rights movement, they could not very well check one another on the implicit biases they all shared. Since this time, most news outlets—including even Fox—have made some attempt to address this particular form of distorting imbalance in their reporting. Convincing these hugely profitable enterprises that they should value truth over ratings will likely be an even bigger nut to crack, but if we can distinguish journalism driven by negative feedback from that driven by positive feedback, this can at least help us to be more responsible in our personal news consumption decisions.