Last week the Governor of Kentucky took to Facebook to criticize the states two leading newspapers as “fake news” while he likened their reporters to insects. “Don’t get outraged when I go around you and talk directly to the people” Governor Bevin said during the same post. Reports questioning the purchase price of a home he bought drew Governor Bevin’s ire, and he dismissed allegations that the seller gave him a below market price in exchange for political favors. An ethics complaint has been filed against Governor Bevin, and the results are still pending, but the larger story is a sitting governor bragging about doing an end run around the news media.
Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion, posed a relevant question in 2011: “What if the liberating potential of the Internet also contains the seeds of de-politicization and thus de-democratization?” His fears were well founded. By moving from the news media to social media, elected officials are taking politics out of the equation and replacing it with personalities. Politics is the arena of competing views, but social media allows us to tune out competing views and just focus on the ones we already find agreeable. Personality is often the agency of agreement; from North Korea to Iran dictatorships are really just elaborate and well-armed cults of personality.
In the United States feuds between political figures and members of the media go back to our nation’s founding. Thomas Jefferson often criticized newspaper accounts of world events but he still needed the press to reach mass audiences. Criticism of the media is not new, but now it can be done at arm’s length. Today’s leaders have the internet and with it social media; they can both criticize and go around traditional news media. Underlying the rise of elected leaders turning to social media platforms and away from journalists is a loss of trust in news information by the public. Such lost trust in the media can be dangerous to democracy.
Hanna Arendt explained why in her seminal work The Origins of Totalitarianism: “Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
Today a growing number of elected leaders are choosing to exploit public mistrust in the media rather than trying to fix it. With social media Governor Bevin and at the national level President Trump are creating their own electronic tribes. Electronic tribalism drives a minimalist form of democracy, since to win office a popular majority is no longer needed or even sought. Cynicism is still a refuge, but today it breeds low voter turnouts. To win a candidate need only capture a majority of those who show up, often less than half the total electorate. That was the case for Governor Bevin, since he received more than half of the 30% of Kentucky voters who did show up at the polls. He won by the governorship by receiving the vote of approximately 15% of our state’s electorate.
Supporters of Governor Bevin will fire back--why can’t he use social media if he isn’t getting a fair shake in the news? Because Governor Bevin has criticized the media for presenting opinion pieces as factual reporting, then in the next breath he assures us his own opinions are facts beyond dispute. He and his supporters can’t have it both ways. Elected officials have a First Amendment right to communicate to citizens on social media, but having a right doesn’t always make them right.
What we are seeing with a Facebook posting Governor and a constantly tweeting President is the rise of selfie-propaganda. Individualized and targeted mass communications intended to serve a single official or group, and to ignore all other points of view. What if political candidates can win and keep office by ignoring traditional reporters altogether and just posting their own infomercials online? A simple calculation can tell any candidate for office their win number, which is the minimum number of votes they need to get elected. If social media allows politicians to maintain a support base above that number, then why bother with the rest? Democracy depends on inclusion, but such an approach would be inherently exclusive.
To date neither Governor Bevin nor President Trump have refused to speak to reporters for good; even though both like to bash the media they still talk to reporters regularly. But will America see a day when elected officials forgo media queries completely? If the public doesn’t object now we will and the result will be a severe blow to democracy. Elected officials have a responsibility to help restore lost public confidence in the media not to use mistrust of it for their own selfish political gains.