Rural and Urban America, isolation and media bubbles
2 questions and 1 prediction with Elizabeth Spiers
Media bubbles were a decisive factor in the 2016 Presidential election and remain an element of division between rural and urban America.
Elizabeth Spiers lives in New York but hails from rural Alabama where she is spending time right now and tweeted a very interesting observation last week:
Elizabeth Spiers founded The Insurrection in 2016. She is a new media expert and entrepreneur and veteran journalist. She was previously the Editor in Chief of The New York Observer and Editorial Director of Observer Media Group. Before that, she was the founder of Breaking Media (which publishes Dealbreaker, AboveTheLaw and Fashionista) and was the founding editor of Gawker, the flagship site of Gawker Media.
I reached out to Elizabeth following this Twitter exchange to engage in a longer form conversation.
Frederic Guarino: you're from rural America and now live in urban America - are these 2 Americas so divorced from each other in cultural and political terms that the Union is forever scarred ?
Elizabeth Spiers: I don't believe the split is irreparable, but it's multifactorial: in the late 20th century our political parties became more polarized ideologically and their constituencies became more heavily split along rural and urban lines. Not everyone who lives in rural America is a Republican, and not everyone who lives in urban America is a Democrat, but symbolically, a lot of people view them that way, and negative partisanship (where people are more motivated by dislike of the other party than support for their own) has increased over time. So there are politicians and institutions that have incentives to exploit those divides to consolidate their own power. And cities tend to be vastly more diverse than rural areas, so racism is a big factor, too.
Another factor is that people live in media bubbles where they choose to consume news-oriented narratives that reflect their own biases. They don't willingly expose themselves to alternative sources, and research says this is more true on the right, where people are more likely to triangulate on whether something is true based on what their peers think and whether it comports with how they feel. On the left, people tend to value the credibility of a source and triangulate between credible sources. As a result, people have two utterly different views of reality that are difficult and sometimes impossible to reconcile.
Isolation is a factor
Lastly, I think isolation is a factor. People who live in cities are exposed constantly to people who aren't like them and it's harder for them to construct mental models of entire groups of people based on, say, memes they see on Facebook. People who live in demographically and culturally monolithic areas where there are very few people have their perception of the outside world shaped more by media and their peer group than they do real world interaction. I think too much isolation creates fear and distrust. This can be true of cities as well, but cities tend to be very transient in a way that rural areas are not, so I think it's harder to surround yourself with people who also have no exposure to the rest of the world.
I live in New York City, and nearly everyone I know comes from somewhere else, if not in this generation, in the last two. Where I grew up, people are more likely to have been in the area for several generations and never really left it. I think that's a factor.
I think there are different ways to approach each of these problems, but I think it's far more complex than coming together around shared values, because to put it bluntly, we don't necessarily have shared values.
Frederic Guarino: you're a former journalist now working in the political realm - why is the media so unable to self analyze and self correct as a core element of democracy ?
Elizabeth Spiers: There are a lot of uniquely American journalistic practices that grew out of a well-intentioned desire to be fair in coverage that have been utterly distorted over decades and now generate a kind of news coverage that dictates that every issue has two sides and they must be given equal time. And the people who run newsrooms tend to be of a pre-internet-and-social-media generation that is not accustomed to the willful exploitation of that by bad actors. As a result, you have a lot of Both Sides journalism that treats two interpretations as equally valid. Sometimes this can be innocuous, but the last four years are littered with examples of Both Sides-ism that actually push readers and viewers further from the truth in the name of being "objective" which is too often conflated with neutrality.
You end up with newsrooms that refuse to say President Trump is racist because his supporters think he's not and their opinion is important, or that Nancy Pelosi clapping back at him is an equivalent example of partisan disdain to Trump's constant belittling, personal attacks, and attempt to direct violence toward people he considers enemies. These sort of false equivalencies distort truth.
Journalism is not supposed to be about getting a consensus view of the truth from all parties
Journalism is not supposed to be about getting a consensus view of the truth from all parties, some of which have no interest in a view that's reflective of reality. It's about reflecting reality on the ground, whether readers or viewers like that reality or not. This overwrought fear of appearing biased has led to credentializing viewpoints that are not legitimate, are overtly propaganda, or that distort what's happening. Republicans have been moving toward an anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian model for achieving power for a long time, but it's really been front and center in the last few years because their constituencies are shrinking. You see commentators talking about it, but newsrooms are reluctant to characterize what's happening like that for fear of being accused of being partisan. (Even though they'll get those accusations anyway, no matter what they do.)
I think younger journalists are less likely to internalize bad faith critiques of media bias because they grew up with a fragmented media environment that includes a lot of manipulative crap on the internet. Those people aren't running newsrooms yet, though.
Frederic Guarino: A prediction for the next 5 years ?
I want to see Democrats stop burning their digital channels for short term electoral gains
Elizabeth Spiers: I know better than to make any predictions for the next five years, but here's what I'd like to see happen at the intersection of politics and media (and I think these things are necessary): I want to see Democrats stop burning their digital channels for short term electoral gains. Voters are sick of endless bait and switch fundraising emails and crappy intrusive texting. Digital communication with voters is extremely cost effective and allows you to reach people you can't via canvassing and other channels and we have to stop taking the medium for granted because it's inexpensive. If you abuse those channels on the basis that the only thing that matters is the next election, longer term, voters just ignore you. Those emails go to spam, they block you on text, you turn an enthusiastic small dollar donor into someone who stops engaging that way because they don't want to be constantly barraged. As far as I can tell, we don't have a plan for long term voter contact at all, and we need one.
I'd also like to see Democrats figure out a better economic narrative. We're better on deficits, market returns, and wages than Republicans, but even among some Democrats, the perception is that the GOP owns economic issues. I think we're good at convincing people that we'll get them out of poverty and not very good at talking about how we'll make them financially successful, and voters don't aspire to be middle class; they aspire to be comfortable. Fixing the inequality problem and allowing people to thrive and build wealth are not mutually exclusive, but we message as if they are.
We need to invest in counter-programming disinformation
And lastly, we need to invest in counter-programming disinformation. That doesn't mean debunking it, which more often than not, amplifies it. It means flooding the zone with messaging that counters it without referencing it. The anti-vaxxer movement has been extraordinarily effective online because anti-vaxxer propaganda has been optimized for online distribution and there hasn't been enough of a counterforce where the same amount of money and effort has been spent to educate people about vaccines, or particularly relevant to covid--what the vaccine development and approval process looks like. This is partly because the conventional wisdom is that everyone knows vaccines work. But when you have bad actors spending a lot of money and making a lot of effort to build a counter-narrative, you can't just sit back and let them dominate the spaces people spend time on to get their information.