CSU's The Audit

(The following transcript has been lightly edited)

(Intro) On Jan. 6, 2021, as Congress met to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election, a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol.

Inside, they roamed the historic halls, ransacking offices and searching for lawmakers. Outside, they were smashing news cameras. It was the height of a cycle of polarization and distrust in some of the strongest examples of democracy that we have, free and fair elections and free speech.

Dominik Stecula is an assistant professor of political science at Colorado State University. His research focuses on the intersection of political communication, political behavior and science communication in the American media. Today, I’m talking with Stecula about the changing way people look at the media and democracy.

Host Stacy Nick: Hi Dominik, thanks for being here.

Dominik Stecula: Thanks for having me.

So, as I said, your research focuses on the intersection of the supply of news content and its impact on political polarization and attitudes about controversial topics such as climate change, balanced with the demand for news, including how and how much media people consume and what sources they deem credible and why. It seems like both of those areas have changed wildly in the last few decades.

The media landscape, when you reverse a few decades, was very limited. If you wanted to be informed, you maybe would buy a newspaper. It would frequently be a regional newspaper, maybe you are fancy and were getting a New York Times or Wall Street Journal, one of the national newspapers, maybe a weekly magazine. And there were TV stations that did the news in the evening and more or less, whichever one you picked, whether it was NBC, ABC, CBS, they were mostly talking about the same stuff. That was essentially the entire media landscape.

There was some heterogeneity in terms of the types of content maybe you would encounter, but it was a low-choice type of environment. Everybody was mostly exposed to the same types of news, and that was before the internet and obviously before even cable. So, there were no choice options for you to pursue even outside of that.

Obviously, right now it’s very different. The media is very fragmented, and everybody can find whatever they’re looking for. Whatever niche interests you might have, you can pursue that interest, especially online. Everything is happening immediately. So, we have very little patience. Everything we need to know right now. And that, too, leaves us in weird places.

Right now, with the situation in the Middle East, the other day there was a hospital in Gaza that was bombarded and a lot of discourse. Who did it? Was it Hamas or was it Israel? And sometimes we simply must wait. Sometimes we must wait for people to do their job and investigate. But in this social media world, it doesn’t work like that. We’re very impatient. We want stuff now. So, it’s this fragmented media landscape where everybody can get exactly the viewpoint they want. I think that’s the major difference between what the media landscape looks like right now versus what it was like 30, even 25 years ago.

With accessibility to this 24-hour news stream and to very partisan media, are we even able to hear the other side now? How has that impacted how we consume our news and how we react to it?

So, I would say first, because we started with January 6, and January 6th to some degree was possible because people were coordinating on social media and it was primarily platforms like Parler, Signal and Telegram, which are encrypted messaging platforms.

There’s the ability of the internet to bring like-minded people together. And we hear “bringing like-minded people together,” that frequently means something very good, right? Like, I moved around a lot and social media helped me find other people to play soccer with. That is an example of social media being really useful in connecting me with people with similar interests.

But sometimes that can be bad when the people with similar interests that you’re connecting with are neo-Nazis. So, there’s pros to a lot of these things, but there’s also cons. January 6 was an example of bringing like-minded people together, except their like-mindedness was the conspiratorial kind of desire to overthrow the government. So, the idea of social media can be very positive, but it also can be negative. There are two sides to that coin.

But I also think it’s inaccurate to say that everybody’s in a bubble. We have a lot of research that shows that people are not all in a bubble. Only the most politically engaged people are, but most Americans are not super politically engaged. So, I think whether you’re exposed to other viewpoints partly depends on you and your behavior.

And if you have a desire to seek out all kinds of perspectives, you can do so very easily now. In many ways, right now you have access to way more perspectives than you did 20 years ago, because 20 years ago there were gatekeepers who decided who gets to have a megaphone. Right now, a lot of marginalized and minority voices are very loud in the media space. So, I think that’s a good thing. But that also means that some very questionable voices have a megaphone, and that’s arguably a bad thing.

It’s a very complex story because an average person is not super into the news. So, an average person can just tune out altogether and just pursue all kinds of entertainment that’s out there on social media, on the internet, etc. So, the ability to check out and not be informed at all is very easy now. And for the same reason, the most partisan people, the people who really seek out the news, know what view they hold. They know which tribe they belong to, and they pursue voices only on their side and more or less totally ignore the other side.

We have this almost tribal drive to collect information that essentially verifies everything that we already believe and discredits entirely what the other side believes. I think the internet makes that very easy, too. But it’s also very easy for people to just tune out of politics altogether. Which is why Jeff Zucker, who used to run CNN, got in trouble for saying something out loud that I think is ultimately true. That Donald Trump is bad for American democracy, but very good for the media business. Because Donald Trump brings a lot of entertainment, a lot of conflict, the kinds of things that make people tune in to watch CNN who would otherwise maybe tune out and just not really care about politics altogether.

There’s this weird set of incentives now where people are trying to get your eyeballs, they’re trying to get your attention because CNN isn’t just competing with MSNBC and The New York Times. They’re also competing with PlayStation and “The Real Housewives” and all this other stuff. And I think that showcases the types of incentives that they face and maybe why the media coverage looks the way it does.

It’s not even just political. There’s a real increase in skepticism over things that even up until now weren’t maybe seen as controversial. I’m thinking specifically of a recent study you did on vaccinations and canine vaccine hesitancy. Saturday Night Live even picked it up recently with a bit on Weekend Update about it. It just seems interesting that things that we never thought of as controversial before, suddenly we’re very skeptical about or at least some people are very skeptical.

So, I think there’s like a multi-prong answer there. The study we did, we had been researching attitudes toward scientific topics. When I was doing my post-doc, we were studying vaccinations, and the biggest concern then was measles outbreaks, which there were communities across the country that would experience measles outbreaks, even though technically we eradicated this disease. But because so many parents wouldn’t vaccinate their kids in different communities, there would be outbreaks.

That’s when the pandemic started, and suddenly it became much more relevant than we ever hoped it would be. We witnessed this politicization of a lot of things, not just vaccines. A lot of things are politicized now, like what car you drive, what music you listen to, what sports you follow. Everything is polarized and everything is political.

Unfortunately, vaccines have become part of this during COVID because due to some unfortunate choices made by people in power, they thought it would be advantageous to their position to play up partisan divisions over this. So, we now have this world where, like you say, for a very long time there was more or less a societal consensus. People believed vaccines are necessary and good and it allowed us as a society to flourish and people didn’t need to needlessly die. But there were always people skeptical of that. That always existed.

The difference is that when that existed like 20, 30 years ago, you maybe subscribed to some newsletter, you maybe had some friends, but you were pretty marginalized. Most people are not super into being an anti-vaxxer or believing the Earth is flat, or you pick your conspiracy theory. But now, social media makes it really easy for you to find fellow travelers. It’s very easy to connect with like-minded people.

So, now there’s entire communities, and when politicians begin to speak about stuff, that gives things legitimacy. So anti-vaccine sentiment was pretty marginal. But then President Trump was talking about this. Some prominent Republicans were talking about it, and all Democrats were talking about how vaccines are good. Because our politics are so polarized, even if Donald Trump wasn’t saying bad things about vaccines, if the most rabid Republicans would see all the Democrats talking about how vaccines are good, they would be like, “Okay, well, we cannot believe what Democrats believe. We have to take an opposing stand.” And that’s unfortunately something that happens in a lot of issues.

There’s an entire cottage industry of all types of content like that that maybe a few years ago would never see the light of day. But now people are exposed to it. Health influencers and social media push all kinds of weird stuff on people that years ago would only see the light of day for maybe very limited periods of time. But now we just boot up Instagram or TikTok and we see people talk about all kinds of cleanses and alternatives to vaccination. And people believe it.

There’s always a group of people who are going to push back against expertise. There’s this underlying kind of populism and anti-intellectualism that always existed in American society, but before there was no outlet for it, before it wasn’t legitimized. But now there’s an entire cottage industry of those voices, and that legitimizes it. When it’s everywhere you see, you’re like, “how bad could it be if they see it on Instagram? My favorite influencer is talking about it; it can’t be wrong.” So, a lot of people had this distrust of maybe elites, distrust of scientists, but it was never really an easy way for that to translate into some concrete action and beliefs. But now there is. I think that’s the biggest difference between how our world operates now versus what it was like a few decades ago.

Going back to the January 6 insurrection, there are still people out there who believe the insurrection was justified, that do not trust our democratic process, that do not trust our elections, and especially do not trust the media, or at least certain media. So, we’ve gotten to this place of so much distrust. How do we find a way out?

Yeah, no, that’s a great question — partly above my pay grade in a way. If I had the answer, maybe I could. I could monetize it. One thing we should talk about is the fact that, first of all, this isn’t new. These trends have been going on for several decades. This started in the late ’70s and distrust in mainstream news just kept going down since then, especially among Republicans.

I think part of the reason why that’s the case is that a lot of Republicans for a long time felt that the news media is essentially full of people who are politically liberal. So, the news media is essentially like a political constituency of the Democratic Party. They have their own political motivations, and that’s why they do things. That’s why the coverage looks the way it does.

They looked at how the coverage of Donald Trump was. It was very negative, obviously, and I think frequently for very good reasons. But when Trump is your guy and then you see all the negativity about him, that only reinforces that feeling that, “yeah, I was correct that these people are just partisan hacks. They don’t like my guy. They cannot be trusted.”

The forces that are driving it have been with us for much longer than the internet and social media, like the idea of what role media plays in a democracy. There’s just different views on the left and on the right about what that means. But I think increasingly we are now looking at a landscape where the majority of Democrats are fine with the media, and essentially no Republicans trust the mainstream media. When you ask Republicans if they trust the media, that number sometimes is in single digits. It’s very low.

That doesn’t mean Republicans don’t consume news media, but it means they consume very limited spectrum of information. And it primarily comes from like-minded outlets like Fox News, sometimes things like Newsmax, One America Network, some of the more fringe sources. But that essentially means that on the right, when you’re consuming news, you only have very limited choices because you view everything on the left as being super biased against you.

How do you reverse that I think is a question that a lot of academics are trying to find out. But I think when we look at some underlying things that exist, it’s hard to argue against for example, that the media isn’t full of liberals because we actually have data on that. When we look at surveys of journalists, there’s a lot more liberal journalists than there are conservative journalists. When we look at the political donations of journalists, they donate more to the politicians on the left than politicians on the right.

I think the argument against that would be that serious journalists have norms. There’s a way to do their job right. They don’t let that seep into their coverage. And maybe some people on the right would find that persuasive, but others probably wouldn’t. So, how do we make media content maybe more diverse, maybe diversity of opinion, maybe diversity of voices that are heard that would reassure people and their rights to kind of bring them into their realm.

That might help, because right now, journalism in America is kind of a bubble in a sense that when you look at all journalism jobs, I think something close to 35 to 40% of all journalists who work in America live in three metro areas New York, D.C. and L.A. It is a bubble. Maybe it’s this bubble that doesn’t really consider other voices. When I moved to Colorado in 2020, we had the biggest fire in Colorado history. The bubble of journalism was really visible then because very little national attention was paid to these fires here. The reason why is because most journalists, by a pretty huge margin, don’t live in Colorado. All the national journalists live in those three metro areas, and they primarily care about things that are happening there. So, I think there’s definitely some justifiable concerns about journalism as a whole, and maybe journalism as a profession could do a better job integrating a broader array of voices geographically, politically, etc.

How can the media work to turn this tide, and what is their role in democracy? How are they doing right now?

I think sometimes they’re doing well and other times they’re not. I think it’s a very complex question with a very complex answer. Looking at coverage of Donald Trump, it seems biased, because it’s very negative. But also, in the case of Trump, the reality is kind of biased. He’s being indicted. He’s done all kinds of things of questionable legal status. He says things that are very provocative, and it’s hard to come away from that thinking this person deserves very positive coverage. The coverage seems to actually reflect the serious concerns that exist with this politician.

So, yeah, it comes off as biased, but should the media reflect reality, or do they have an obligation to be neutral? I think the media should have an obligation to be truthful. And whether that truth is closer to the right or closer to the left, they should report accordingly. But I think a lot of people think of the media and their role as being unbiased, that that more or less means you must not take a side and give the megaphone to the right, give the megaphone to the left, and you’ve done your job. I think that’s a simplistic view. I think most journalists have a commitment to the truth and try to pursue this.

There’s been excellent work that’s been done in the past several years with investigative reporting on all kinds of really important issues. But there’s also this idea that the media are in a hard place right now. The New York Times is doing well, but a lot of newspapers aren’t. In a lot of communities across this country there are news deserts where the media just disappeared. The Internet came, the business model collapsed. Nobody really wants classifieds anymore; they can just post stuff on Craigslist and on Facebook marketplace. So, a lot of people are deprived of local coverage and all the national media are fighting for your attention because of this fragmented media landscape that we talked about earlier.

Because of that, they don’t have an incentive to do a good job. They have an incentive to get your attention. And what gets your attention is not necessarily really thoughtful, long reads or very elaborate interviews with academics and experts. What gets your attention is getting people in the studio to yell at each other. Our attention goes towards the dumpster fire, and the media gives us the dumpster fire.

So, unfortunately, the answer to your question is both. They do a good job sometimes, but frequently that is totally drowned out by all the noise and all the nonsense that they also cover. But the reason why they do it is because they ultimately need to survive as an institution. We don’t have state media in this country. We have some public support for NPR and PBS. Everything else is a for profit model. It’s a business. They do have commitments to American democracy. I think they all would say journalists do it for loftier goals.

But at the end of the day, these are employees of an organization that needs to make money. The way you make money is by getting people’s attention, and the way you get people’s attention is through negativity and conflict. So, they have every incentive in the world not to do a good job and not to kind of play a positive role in our democracy. They have every incentive in the world to do, in fact, the total opposite of that and amplify division instead of highlighting common ground and bringing people together. Common ground exists on a lot of issues, but they don’t talk about it because people don’t like it. We say we want to hear it, but we also like a good dumpster fire, right?

We say we want happy stories, but do we really want them?

Exactly right. And that’s a major discrepancy. There are actual studies on this. We all say, “yes, I do my research. I want serious talk about the issues.” That’s what we tell people. Then they look at our actual behavior. All these media outlets have a robust set of analytics. They know what we click on, how much time we spend on things, and the numbers are very clear. We love conflict, we love anger, we love emotional content that highlights our differences instead of our commonalities.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today.

My pleasure.

Dominik Stecula is an assistant professor of political science at Colorado State University. His research focuses on the intersection of political communication, political behavior and science communication in the American media. I’m your host, Stacy Nick, and you’re listening to CSU’s The Audit.