Brawny Solutions for our Dysfunctional Public Discourse

This piece is part of a biweekly series written by David A. Foster (Center bias), based on his new book, Moderates of the World, Unite! 

It has become difficult to imagine an America that is not dominated by today’s roaring spectacle. Where, instead, public discourse is sober, problem-focused, and restrained. Where the tide is turned against increasing national polarization.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this world is more within reach than anyone realizes. Yes, even with our social media, partisan news, free speech absolutism and the rest of it. All of us want that world. (Perhaps excepting propagandists and media/tech shareholders.) It’s mainly a question of political will.

The starting point is to get clear about how the past three decades have gotten us here. It wasn’t caused by Trump. Nor was it caused by mutations in human cognition or morality.

The two proximate causes were the fragmentation of media audiences and the internet. Tech platforms have nearly destroyed news media corporations’ economic model, forcing them into a desperate daily competition for eyeballs to stay afloat. Citizens gravitate toward shows and publications that flatter and confirm their own beliefs. The profitability of social media, meanwhile, rests upon maximizing user engagement, dispensing dopamine hits, and algorithmically rewarding tribal histrionics. Speech is now “cheap,” with millions of voices generating a cacophony in the public sphere. And propagandists of all sorts find it very easy to exploit the new environment.

Seriously, though: was political news ever much more than entertainment? This new discourse environment lends an urgency to the question. Certainly, journalism has a vital role in exposing corruption and wrongdoing, but that is a small portion of what we’ve been relying upon the Fourth Estate to accomplish.

Media scholar Lance Bennett identifies four ineluctable biases in news content: focus on the visible people instead of the issues; dramatic angles; self-contained (no time for context); and politics as a game. Large audiences otherwise could not and would not follow along. There is an intrinsic bias against underlying context.

Now, in the new media environment—with shrinking profits and the brutal battles for attention—it’s only getting worse. News is entertaining, even exciting. It makes individuals feel “informed,” and they inevitably assume this is how democracy is supposed to work. But they do not and will not learn about substantive matters from the news. Paradoxically, our democracy would be better off if people were less interested in the weekly political news, with its drama, its outrage, and its fixation on the electoral horse race.

Given this new environment, I suggest that we as a nation will have to shift from a news-centered paradigm to a learning-centered paradigm. (I don’t mean learning about candidates or political figures—the media will provide us non-stop coverage for that.) It cannot be done in a way that requires effort, willpower, or study by busy citizens. Rather, it has to be via in-passing learning, in the flow of daily life.

Media Intercessions

Here are just two proposed national initiatives that exemplify this learning-centered approach.

1. Given the partisan bias that’s increasingly necessary for media outlets to stay in business, there is a well-known (if sometimes overstated) echo chamber effect. However, what if there was a new law and infrastructure to break open those echo chambers and insert on-the-spot counterspeech by authorized persons? It would be 100% feasible to implement with current technology. It could be accomplished without cost for each outlet, with no change to their operations, and it would never need to be seen by viewers who did not wish to see it.

2. A second national initiative could focus on the problem of polarizing rhetoric (as opposed to factual falsehoods) on social media. No social media company has the resources or business interest in evaluating and flagging posts of this sort. However, what if a large, independent, nonpartisan organization were established to systematically find and selectively flag offending posts (equal numbers on each side) and, for each, to provide a diagnosis with educational material about the specific rhetorical problem, right next to the post?

See that, for both of these initiatives, viewers learn how to analyze political arguments without the requirement of study or effort. Both, meanwhile, would have the indirect effect of tempering the rhetoric on all of the platforms, with much less strawmanning.

About the Series

In this series, six bold, national, reforms and initiatives—including the two above—will be described in detail. Together, they have the potential to lower the temperature of public discourse and create an environment for saner democratic discourse. By raising the public’s level of discernment, and also by implementing structural reforms in the media environment itself.

Of course, motivating Congress to act is one problem. So are uncertainties about the First Amendment and the risks associated with government meddling. Since these questions are sure to provoke hesitancy and inertia, both of these important issues will also be addressed in the series.

In this new era of cheap speech, we must recognize that individual citizens’ limited amount of available attention is a precious societal resource. Allowing it to be wasted on deceptions, sensationalism, and divisive rhetoric is benefiting no one. (Except propagandists and media/tech shareholders.)

With the solutions described in this series, public discourse and polarization could be tamed. It is within our grasp if we only decide to apply solutions matching the scale of the problem. Stay tuned.

This piece was reviewed and edited by Clare Ashcraft, Bridging & Bias Specialist (Center bias).