Our own contribution to debates about the 2016 election was to shine a light on the right- wing media ecosystem itself as the primary culprit in sowing confusion and distrust in the broader American media ecosystem. In the first two parts of this book we continue that work by documenting how the right- wing media ecosystem differs categorically from the rest of the media environment and how much more susceptible it has been to disinformation, lies, and half- truths. In short, we find that the influence in the right- wing media ecosystem, whether judged by hyperlinks, Twitter sharing, or Facebook sharing, is both highly skewed to the far right and highly insulated from other segments of the network, from center- right (which is nearly nonexistent) through the far left. We did not come to this work looking for a partisan- skewed explanation. As we began to analyze the millions of online stories, tweets, and Facebook sharing data points, the pattern that emerged was clear. Our own earlier work, which analyzed specific campaigns around intellectual property law and found that right and left online media collaborated, made us skeptical of our initial observations, but these proved highly resilient to a wide range of specifications and robustness checks. Something very different was happening in right- wing media than in centrist, center- left, and left- wing media.
We will make the argument throughout this book that the behavior of the right- wing media ecosystem represents a radicalization of roughly a third of the American media system. We use the term “radicalization” advisedly in two senses. First, to speak of “polarization” is to assume symmetry. No fact emerges more clearly from our analysis of how four million political stories were linked, tweeted, and shared over a three- year period than that there is no symmetry in the architecture and dynamics of communications within the right- wing media ecosystem and outside of it. Second, throughout this period we have observed repeated public humiliation and vicious disinformation campaigns mounted by the leading sites in this sphere against individuals who were the core pillars of Republican identity a mere decade earlier. At the beginning of this period, Jeb Bush, the son and brother of the two most recent Republican presidents, was besmirched as having “close Nazi ties” on Infowars. By November 2017 life- long Republicans who had been appointed to leading law enforcement positions by President George W. Bush found themselves under sustained, weeks- long disinformation campaigns aimed to impugn their integrity and undermine their professional independence. When a solidly conservative party is taken over by its most extreme wing in a campaign that includes attacks that are no less vicious when aimed at that conservative party’s mainstream pillars than they are at the opposition party, we think “radicalization” is an objectively appropriate term.
This radicalization was driven by a group of extreme sites including Breitbart, Infowars, Truthfeed, Zero Hedge, and the Gateway Pundit, none of which claim to follow the norms or processes of professional journalistic objectivity. As we will see time and again, both in our overall analysis of the architecture and in our detailed case studies, even core right- wing sites that do claim to follow journalistic norms, Fox News and the Daily Caller, do not in fact do so, and therefore fail to act as a truth- telling brake on these radical sites. Indeed, repeatedly we found Fox News accrediting and amplifying the excesses of the radical sites. As the case studies in Chapter 5 document, over the course of 2017 Fox News had become the propaganda arm of the White House in all but name. This pattern is not mirrored on the left wing. First, while we do find fringe sites on the left that mirror the radical sites, these simply do not have the kind of visibility and prominence on the left as they do on the right. Second, the most visible sites on the left, like Huffington Post, are at their worst mirrors of Fox News, not of the Gateway Pundit or Zero Hedge. And third, all these sites on the left are tightly integrated with traditional mainstream media sites like the New York Times and the Washington Post, and most, though not all, of these sites operate either directly under long- standing journalistic norms or are indirectly sensitive to criticism based on reporting that adheres to such norms. As we show in Chapter 3, there is ample supply of and demand for false hyperpartisan narratives on the left. The difference is that the audience and hyperpartisan commercial clickbait fabricators oriented toward the left form part of a single media ecosystem with center, center- left, and left- wing sites that are committed to journalistic truth- seeking norms. Those norm- constrained sites, both mainstream and net- native, serve as a consistent check on dissemination and validation of the most extreme stories when they do emerge on the left, and have no parallels in the levels of visibility or trust that can perform the same function on the right.
We do not expect our findings to persuade anyone who is already committed to the right- wing media ecosystem. The maps we draw in Chapter 2 could be interpreted differently. They could be viewed as a media system overwhelmed by liberal bias and opposed only by a tightly- clustered set of right- wing sites courageously telling the truth in the teeth of what Sean Hannity calls the “corrupt, lying media,” rather than our interpretation of a radicalized right set apart from a media system anchored in century- old norms of professional journalism. We take up this issue in Chapter 3 where we compare left and right news sites for their patterns of reporting and correction and where we describe our explicit efforts to find conspiracy theories that made it out of the margins of the left to the center of mainstream media. We dedicate Chapter 6 to exploring the modes of failure of mainstream media in their election coverage, and examine the recipients of the Trump Fake News Awards and how they responded to having made the significant errors that won them that honor. We think that fundamentally, anyone who insists on claiming that we cannot draw conclusions about which side is biased, and which side gravitates more closely to the truth, must explain how the media sources most trusted by consistently conservative survey respondents— Fox News, Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck— are the equivalent of the sites that occupy the same positions among consistently liberal respondents: NPR, PBS, the BBC, and the New York Times.
The central role of the radicalized right in creating the current crisis of disinformation and misinformation creates a significant challenge for policy recommendations and is not easy to reconcile with democratic theory. It seems too partisan a perspective to convert into a general, nonpartisan policy recommendation or neutral argument about what democracy requires. And yet, we believe that there is a core set of concerns that transcend party affiliation and should appeal across party lines. First, having a segment of the population that is systematically disengaged from objective journalism and the ability to tell truth from partisan fiction is dangerous to any country. It creates fertile ground for propaganda. Second, it makes actual governance difficult. Other than their major success with tax reform, Republicans found it difficult to govern during the first year of the Trump presidency, despite holding majorities in both houses of Congress and the presidency. In large part, this is due to the inability to bridge the gap between the state of the world as many in their base know it and the state of the world as it is. Third, the divorce of a party base from the institutions and norms that provide a reality check on our leaders is a political disaster waiting to happen— see for instance the primary victory of Roy Moore over Lucas Strange and Moore’s subsequent defeat in the general election. However strident and loyal the party base may be, not even a clear majority of Republican voters is exclusively focused on the right- wing media ecosystem. Over time, the incongruence between the reality inside and outside that ecosystem will make it harder for non- base “lean- Republican” voters to swallow candidates that are palatable inside it. Our hope, then, is that perhaps Republicans see in our findings reason enough to look for a change in the dynamic of the media ecosystem that their most loyal supporters inhabit.
Finding nonpartisan or bipartisan solutions in a society as highly polarized as the United States has become difficult, to say the least. But ignoring the stark partisan asymmetry at the root of our present epistemic crisis will make it impossible to develop solutions that address the actual causes of that crisis. Any argument that depends for its own sense of neutrality and objectivity on drawing empirically false equivalents between Fox News and CNN, much less between top left- wing sites like Mother Jones and Salon and equivalently prominent sites on the right like the Gateway Pundit or Infowars, undermines clear thinking on the problem at hand.
Network Propaganda and the Radicalization of the Right-Wing Media
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Originally Posted by Heathen Hammer
ing expert and had/knew of theories/ideas that were there all along. Internet rubbish takes a lot more effort to clean up and disprove than it does to conjure up.
