How post-fair became post-fact
Aside from chronicling the first hundred days of the Trump administration, another motivation for having started this 100x100 project when…
Aside from chronicling the first hundred days of the Trump administration, another motivation for having started this 100x100 project when I did is that in around 100 days time, I’m due to submit a 100-or-so page thesis to complete my graduate degree at MIT. The central focus of my thesis research is how Donald Trump took advantage of today’s curious hybrid media landscape, to secure enough attention and support to win both the Republican nomination and ultimately the presidency.
Trump, in my analysis, succeeded in two essential ways. First, he utilised his existing fame on Twitter to dominate the platform as a candidate, deploying a slew of provocative tweets which – though they alienated many – allowed him to set the news agenda in a way that was as unprecedented as it was unpresidential. Second, and partly as a result, he secured a massively disproportionate amount of attention in the mainstream media, with wall-to-wall coverage of his rallies and press conferences.
At present, I’m putting the finishing touches on the first chapter of my thesis, which looks at the historical background to Trump, in particular focusing on how “paranoid populists”, as I call them, utilised emerging media platforms and systems to gain new audiences. As part of this research, today I read What’s Fair on the Air?: Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest by my thesis supervisor Heather Hendershot. Heather’s insights have been invaluable throughout my research, but what was especially useful in What’s Fair on the Air? is her history of the Fairness Doctrine, a set of regulations formalised in 1949 in response to the rise of controversial radio broadcasters espousing views considered perilous to the public interest, after a decade in which fascists like Hitler and Mussolini were dominating the airwaves overseas.
Several lessons of the history of the Fairness Doctrine – which obliged radio and later television corporations to offer multiple points of view on controversial issues – have particular relevance to the present moment. The first lesson concerns the centrality of technological developments to how regulation proceeds. Trump’s unconstrained use of Twitter follows in a long line of figures who sought to get around the Fairness Doctrine by exploiting emerging forms of media, not least the religious right, whose embrace of then-niche cable and satellite technology won a loyal following beyond the reach of regulation.
Yet the Fairness Doctrine itself was suspended in 1987, removing the obligation for multiple points of view to be on the public airwaves. As Hendershot notes, even if the Doctrine were to return today, it would be functionally irrelevant: from cable news to Twitter, the vast majority of political conversation takes place on platforms not traditionally subject to the Fairness Doctrine.
Yet the suspension of the doctrine still had substantial implications. Hendershot points to the more recent rise of the Tea Party, fuelled by channels like Fox News and radio figures like Rush Limbaugh not subject to an obligation for fairness or balance. Though the central narrative of Hendershot’s book is an account of the gradual moderation of the extreme right into a movement that was philosophically acceptable to the majority of Americans who backed Ronald Reagan in 1980, she leaves open the possibility that the Tea Party represents something different. In short, it is possible that the lunatics of the far right took over the asylum.
The nature of Trump’s win would seem to validate the latter possibility. Unlike movement conservatives like Reagan and George W Bush who couched right wing policy in traditional, inclusive rhetoric, Trump, from his tweets espousing ‘birtherism’ to his firebrand inauguration speech, has embraced the sort of paranoid, nationalist tropes that would not have seemed out of place at the height of McCarthyism.
The first days of Trump’s presidency have only deepened this perception. Trump’s new Press Secretary yesterday launched an incredible assault on the media for misreporting, he alleged, attendance of Trump’s inauguration ceremony. Today, in an appearance on Meet The Press his advisor Kelly Anne Conway said that the falsehoods Spicer had offered were merely “alternative facts”. Such a claim is straight out of the paranoid playbook: Hendershot argues that “cold war extremists were information packrats”, noting how events like the civil rights movement “could be systematically rebutted [by the right] with counterfacts [emphasis mine]”.
Thirty years after the suspension of the Fairness Doctrine, it should be no surprise that today’s generation of journalists have even caught wrong footed by a candidate – now president – with a historic propensity to lie and mislead. But if our post-fact problem can be explained in part by the abandonment of the Fairness Doctrine – a regulatory regime designed to keep political power away from dangerous demagogues – the solution might therefore lie in the values embodied by it.