Simulacrum and Cynicism: How New Media Shapes Political Discourse
By covering political matters like tabloid gossip, the establishment networks, and their new parent companies succeeded in imbuing political discourse with broad entertainment value and thus, mass appeal. Source: OurPolitics
As the public adopts media forms, political actors are often presented with new channels to disseminate their message to audiences previously absent from political discourse and engagement. Mediums and the information transmitted through them have and will never be separate entities, as they are inextricably linked in cycles of mutual influence by the nature of their interaction. Political messages and ideas are no different. Since the printing press, emergent mediums have influenced politics by adding new elements to discourse. For example, the use of television as a method of addressing the public introduced the influence of appearance and personality to the political messages being transmitted. However, because new mediums come with new audiences, there is a powerful, second-order effect at work. Pervasive incentive structures impel those creating and producing new media, along with the politicians that use them, to shape their messages to meet the unique demands of a given medium’s audience. The introduction of politics into entertainment media resulted in the creation of a new genre and ensuing paradigm that has since seen the progressive degradation of mainstream political discourse, American politics, and democracy itself — now threatening to sow cultural cynicism on a generational scale.
The permeation of politics into American entertainment media began in the 1980s as popular, nationally broadcasted television and radio talk shows began to discuss political issues and feature politicians as guests. Bill Clinton’s iconic appearance and Ray-Ban-clad saxophone performance on The Arsenio Hall Show in 1992 perhaps marked the irreversible fusion of politics and entertainment media as the stunt became a nationwide sensation, proving both a captivating talk show subject and viable campaign strategy. In the years that followed, the strategy would see widespread adoption among politicians who, like Clinton and his early predecessors, saw entertainment mediums as new opportunities to endear themselves to the public, and critically, to reach a new audience not previously interested in politics or public affairs.
So successful were these crossover appearances that a new political media paradigm was born. In the same decade that saw the acquisition of America’s major news networks by global entertainment conglomerates (see Viacom-Paramount’s 1999 purchase of CBS, Disney’s 1996 acquisition of ABC, and Time-Warner’s 1996 absorption of CNN among others), the terms “infotainment” and “soft news” began to be used to derisively describe the incident-based, personality-centered content that seemed to steadily bleed into the mainstream news media.
Despite plenty of criticism and satirization, the ratings spoke for themselves. By covering political matters like tabloid gossip, the establishment networks, and their new parent companies -alongside the newly launched Fox News helmed by Roger Ailes (the infamous political media consultant and pioneer of soft news segments on NBC) — succeeded in imbuing political discourse with broad entertainment value and thus, mass appeal.
Even today, this new political media paradigm and the incentives structures that inform its operation realize both first and second-order effects to the detriment of political discourse. Why does this happen? Shouldn’t making politics more entertaining and widely consumable ultimately result in a better informed, more engaged public? This might be the case if the paradigm’s incentives were aimed at such altruistic ends.
By merit of their previous disinterest and likely disengagement from civic matters (along with its well-grounded statistical correlates like lower educational attainment) the newly attracted viewers of this blend of political discourse and entertainment bring with them simplistic, black-and-white conceptions of political matters, devoid of nuance or the critical analysis that most deserve. Competition pressures from the increasingly crowded infotainment genre force shows to progressively lower their level of political discourse, relying increasingly on elements like conflict, sensationalization, and humor in an attempt to attract and retain this new class of viewers. This “race to the bottom” of reductionist political discourse is still amplified by the incentives of the politicians using the mediums to engage the public. Facing pressures to win elections, politicians who engage in simplistic, black-and-white political discourse and rhetoric stand to gain significant support from voters newly engaged by the new form of political media.
What does this simplistic discourse look like? As it continues its proliferation in American politics, what are the implications for society and our democratic institutions? There are closely studied causal links between lower educational attainment and political disengagement. Without the knowledge to grasp and digest complex political concepts, less educated citizens are disinterested in nuanced political discourse and its traditional mediums, basing their opinions on partisan cues without any real underlying ideology. Once broadly attracted to politics by its fusion with entertainment media, these citizens are attracted to manners of discourse and politicians that present reductionist conceptions of complex issues. Employing demagogue and populist tactics, these actors claim to have quick fixes to problems that actually require methodical, gradualist approaches to reform. Critically, these leaders reduce partisanship to “us vs. them” conflicts, creating false dichotomies and straw men to belie the important moral and ethical debates at the heart of divergent conceptions of reality and our place in it. This degraded discourse has come to color mainstream politics in many modern democracies, accountable for the hyperpartisanship and apparent “culture war” straining our institutions and social cohesion.
Social media has already begun to usher in perhaps even more drastic revolutions in the political media paradigm. Although, as many point out, the new mediums have created a “post-truth” era in political discourse, emergent technologies offer promising solutions to such impediments. Just as the synthesis of entertainment attracted the previously disinterested, so do social media platforms attract younger generations (their native users) to politics.
If political discourse is itself a representation of public issues and divergent approaches to solving them, then black-and-white, us vs. them, blue vs. red dichotomies are simplistic abstractions of this representation. In engaging in political discourse on social media, younger generations conflate this abstraction with politics itself, rightfully ridiculing the arbitrary nature of identity politics and partisan conflict while portraying traditional civic engagement as futile and, for lack (or need) of a better word, uncool. This constitutes a second, dangerous abstraction of political discourse: one that frames politics as meaningless. If this distorted conception of political discourse achieves widespread adoption, rising generations will be steeped in a defeatist brand of cynicism and will regard civic engagement with disillusioned apathy. Without fresh minds and ideas to tackle our most pressing problems and the critical ethical debates at their foundation, we risk societal stagnation, regression, and will likely find ourselves unprepared for the existential threats humanity may face in our lifetimes.