San Francisco’s iconic progressive image in the American mind has made the city a prime target for critical conservative commentary. In conservative media, California and the Bay often function as a symbol of liberal or Democratic policies. For example, a Fox News investigation (2019) of the unhoused in the city illustrates the San Francisco-as-dystopia symbolism in right-leaning mediaspheres. The investigation’s partisan lens is explicit: “to chronicle the toll progressive policies have had on the homeless crisis.”

The Fox journalist details the problem of those forced into the streets by inflated housing costs and inadequate social programs. How the story is framed makes all the difference. The investigation underlines the problem with anecdotes from the perspective of frustrated business owners and visitors appalled or frightened by street encounters with the poor, drug-addled and mentally ill. To Fox’s credit, the wealth gap exacerbating the issue becomes clear in interviews with Bay Area residents. All fair points about housing policy failures aside, the Fox piece frames the issue in two significant ways:

1. The unhoused is a problem for visitors and the middle class who wish to use the city without the inconvenience of poverty-battered bodies in the street;
2. A failure of “Democrats” and the progressive ideology SF has come to symbolize in the American imagination.

The report only lightly touches on inflated housing costs resulting from capitalist housing market dynamics and the wealth gap in the state. Instead, the story focuses the reader’s attention on arguments that a soft-on-crime agenda was central in creating the crisis. The report appears to be a piece on public policy. However, it becomes clear that the emphasis is on “failures of liberal programs” rather than an earnest journalistic exploration of proposed solutions to housing crises.

In public discourse, filtered through the business model of cable news, San Francisco is a means to a partisan end. In stories like this, the city is used as a symbol of progressive policy failures. The city is a character in a narrative that confirms the correctness of conservative politics. Comments on stories like these seem to confirm how the framing pits city progressives vs. non-city conservatives:

Strange how Liberals claim to be “progressive” and Conservatives “backward thinking”, yet their cities resemble something out of the Middle Ages, when the streets of large cities like London were open running sewers of human and animal waste. Now we can sit back and wait for all the old time epidemics like cholera and dysentery to make a return. Everything we have learned about the importance of public sanitation tossed aside by these “progressives”.

@Icomeinpeacenot, https://www.foxnews.com/us/san-francisco-map-shows-human-poop-complaints

The historical context for the emergence of these partisan news frames is important. The origins of conservative media city-bashing are rooted in transformation from a more unified, low-choice world of media of the 20th century to our current high-choice and politically fragmented environment.

Until around the 1980s, American media was a low-choice world. The media system was “low-choice” when TV news, for example, was produced by three or four mainstream networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) with roughly similar ideological perspectives. By the 1990s, Americans found themselves in a “high-choice” media environment.

The low-choice media environment had its flaws but it likewise had the benefit of putting Americans on the same page about the major problems we faced as a nation. Scholars and journalists of the 1970s could identify something like a mainstream public debate. The high-choice media world (after cable then satellite then digital and social media) made more perspectives available, but it also fragmented the public. Over time, the public’s use of media took shape around preferred news sites, guided by confirmation biases, selective attention and information “bubbles.” The diversity of available perspectives was supposed to be more democratic and empower citizens with access to information, but the high-choice media environment paradoxically allowed us to insulate ourselves from opposing views and the people who expressed them.

These gradual changes to the media system enabled new business models to specialize in partisan content. The introduction of Fox News in 1994 is a popular illustration of this late 20th century business model, but digital platforms also followed suit with the right-leaning Drudge Report (1995) and the liberal Daily Kos (2002). Today, Breitbart news, One American News and a number of other media start-ups are targeting these partisan audiences and competing for audience market share, often by expressing ever more partisan frames on American politics. Facebook’s leaked internal research has confirmed this trend. The leak shows how digital media companies profit when “core parts of its platform appear hardwired for spreading misinformation and divisive content.” For these companies, the civic decay stemming from this ideological war is a gold mine.

The way technology and business models have exacerbated partisanship in American politics challenges classic tenets of journalism. It has also disrupts the traditional function of news. Where 20th century journalists could think of news as a sort of schoolhouse, offering information to foster educated voting and self-governance, the 21st century has cultivated new functions of news in public life. The schoolhouse metaphor has given way to another functional metaphor: the church. Americans increasingly use news as a way to endorse a common ideological faith. Conservatives look to Tucker Carlson to confirm the evils of Nancy Pelosi and commiserate about the dangers of “creeping socialism.” MSNBC viewers tune in to see if Trump will be indicted for his role in the Capitol riots following Biden’s election. In many ways, our choice of news is a choice of a dramatically illustrated world view. The faithful, after all, don’t go to church to learn something new about what happened to Jesus. They go to participate in a community of shared values and fellowship.

Partisan news and the reorganization of the public into news communities of faith helps explain the fragmentation of the public and the use of San Francisco as a symbol for conservative news audiences. Liberals can wonder why the farmers of Kansas vote against their own economic interests. In each case, the cultural chasm widens as news media marshal cities and places as symbols of difference and antagonism rather than one people working as a larger collective.

The year 2008 was important to understand RT’s evolving purpose in world affairs. After relative obscurity following its 2005 launch, RT began countering American and NATO news regarding Russian intervention in South Ossetia, Georgia. RT offered a counternarrative: Russian intervention was defensive and humanitarian, and Russia as a benevolent actor in world affairs. Most importantly, RT framed itself as an underdog in a battle for truth in the murky world of global politics and war.

A profile of RT in The New Statesmen in 2013 noted how “Russian journalists fought back” by aggressively portraying Russia’s humanitarian intentions and citing examples of American news stifling or suppressing Russian perspectives:  

Some western channels, particularly Fox News, were hardly less biased in covering the war. RT repeatedly aired a Fox interview in which two South Ossetians from California tried to thank the Russian government but were cut off by the anchor. Fox’s many detractors could watch the take-downs on YouTube, which started carrying RT in 2007. Simonyan’s channel began to win a whole new audience.

This period in RT’s development illustrates how a war over framing international conflict led RT its unique style of international journalism: flashy, daring, brash, anti-establishment, populist, etc. But RT also made the battle over news narratives a part of their coverage. The channel’s turn to media criticism appealed to the growing suspicions of media bias and offered RT’s coverage as a way to escape corporate media.  

Was the Georgian war a turning point for the coverage and tone of RT? Perhaps. By challenging the coverage of Western news media giants, RT tapped into the growing suspicion of American news media. There was a market for those suspicious of mainstream journalism. Much like Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes filled a market for conservative opinion with Fox News a decade earlier, RT saw an audience they could develop by portraying the channel as the uncorrupted truth-teller in a world of insider politics and patriotic stooges . . . all while thumbing their nose at authorities. Russia has continued to play media critic, self-righteously dressing down UK regulators for violating RT’s right to broadcast after complaints.

By portraying itself as the “anti-Fox,” RT made the meta-turn to commentary on news as an extension of the critique of America and American leadership. By the 2010s, RT had embraced the anti-establishment tone reminiscent of a sarcastic teenager rebelling against the overbearing father. The host of RT’s The Resident roams the streets of New York, interviewing passers by about their suspicions of media. “Special reports” have a cynical edge as the reporter reviews the considerable number of U.S. military and intelligence officials on MSNBC’s payroll for news commentary.

For a bulk of the 20^th century, professional broadcast journalism organized public opinion guided by “professional” standards of newsworthiness and neutral reporting (Hallin 1994; Schudson 2001). Professional, neutral reporting was well suited to the needs of journalism of the network and early cable era. U.S. networks wanted to speak to mass audiences and maximize advertising revenues. As a business model, it was best not to offend any region of the country. Informative, factual news about matters of broad interest was a safe bet for these networks. Walter Cronkite intended to speak to and for a nation.

Though producers have moved online, the demand for neutral reporting remains, somewhat like a vestigial tail. The cultural expectation of neutrality and objectivity that underlie common public criticism of newsrooms works well for RT. The expectation has outlasted the conditions that made it possible during the “gatekeeper” era of professional news. I’m reminded of Max Boot’s concern over conspiracy theory in the digital age:

“The online world is a post-truth space where there are no undisputed facts, only competing narratives, and even the most deranged claims (e.g., QAnon) can aggregate an audience.”

This is when RT’s motto makes the most sense as effective branding: Question More. The network doubles down on this outsider credibility in both branding and self-referential reporting. When regulators or critics accuse the channel of bias in coverage, RT’s apologists can reasonably retort that all media are biased. That all news is framed in narrative. But this sidesteps the real question . . . Is RT offering criticism of journalistic failures or a merchant of doubt availing itself of the ultimate unmooring of truth in public discourse? How might Russian interests be served by a post-truth American public?

James Carey’s most famous work is a criticism of Communication Studies’ over-reliance on a social science view of communication. Early social science on mass media tended to rely on a model of communication that was pretty mechanistic.

For the scientifically-minded, communication was information transmitted between a sender and a receiver. The classic formulation was who said what to whom with what effect. Social scientists, skeptical of those claiming media was fundamentally reshaping society, designed studies to get at that last part about the effects. Did propaganda win wars? Could violence in films make a population more aggressive or criminal? The quantitative research they conducted found surprisingly little evidence that media had direct, powerful influence over individuals.

Over time, these findings accumulated and became known as the “Limited Effects” school of thought. Social science methods found minimal influence of media so consistently, one researcher proclaimed the field of mass communication research had been exhausted. Everyone could hang up their clipboards and go home.

But many researchers were not satisfied mass media had been fully understood. The relationship between media and society seemed more complicated and the effects more profound than quantitative research could reveal.

Offering the “ritual” approach as an alternative, Carey sought to explore new angles on the role of media in human life. His perspective is rooted in history and asks us to consider the communal aspects of communication. Perhaps media are more than information transmission. Instead of viewing humans as information receptacles, perhaps we can focus on how media brings people together, how it can bind a nation and create communities of shared belief.

As a word, communication shares roots with other words like community and communion. Its Latin origins meant both to impart and to share. While most communication and media scholars were focused on how information was imparted or “transmitted,” Carey focused on the idea of sharing. Sharing, after all, is how culture is created. Carey wanted us to examine the idea of shared culture and media’s role in it, as did a generation of cultural theorists who followed him.

Carey was skeptical that social science was able to effectively study this role of media. The transmission view of social science ignored some of the most important functions of media. Carey was a religious man, and careful readers can sense this in his writing. He sometimes speaks of communication in nearly mystical terms. Communication’s role in forming communities, he suggests, is ritualistic in a fashion . . . not unlike church.

In mainstream Christian churches, the congregation reads a common book (the Bible). Reading the Bible is a way to confirm an ordered worldview and share that with a community of belief. Very few church-goers are there for the information about Jesus. They are there not to learn new facts about the life of Jesus as much as to hear familiar stories and share in a narrative about their lives. They share faith, not information.

Carey argues that the newspaper of his time (and the news sites today) perform a similar function. In America and other Western nations, reading the news is to “subscribe” to a democratic worldview. When we think about the news, we engage in a collective enterprise and endorse shared values. Congregants become worshipers when in church. People become citizens when reading and talking about the news. What insights about media can we gain by seeing communication through the ritual lens rather than mere transmission?

This “communion” function of media goes beyond news. Communities taking shape around a variety of cultural identities. K-Pop stans, gardening enthusiasts, comic-book collectors . . . the internet has allowed almost any identity to find a group. Media make these identities possible. That’s what Carey find so mystical about communication. It is the basis for shared culture. It is how “the miracle of social life is pulled off.”

The cultural approach advocated by Carey, British cultural theorists and others also called attention to the role of media in distributing social power. Representation, they argued, was instrumental in structuring multicultural society by portraying cultures, race and ethnicity. Often, these portrayals positioned some groups as outsiders, threats and deviants. They are positioned as “others” in contrast to a “mainstream” constructed for the viewing audience.

Scholars in the cultural studies tradition have looked at film and television as sources of knowledge about the world for audiences. Examples of work on media representation are now near as prominent as the social science tradition. Shani Orgad (2015), for example, says the “new visibility” in global media means various identities compete for social power by managing how the group is represented in media. Studies of media portrayals fill journals, populate conference panels and appear in popular news. The Media Education Foundation alone features dozens of documentaries addressing the representation of Arabs in early cinema, Black Americans in television, and women in advertising. The study of media and identity is tied to culture and, as culture changes and forms of representation multiply, identities will be created, maintained and adjusted in too many ways for cultural studies researchers to keep up.

If Carey is right, media play a significant role in shaping the shared reality we call culture. Shaping that reality, it also influences the unequal distribution of social power along class, gender and racial lines. Analysis of how symbolic processes construct these identities and hierarchies will be of enduring (if lamentable) value if we are to better understand the relationship between media and society.

I interviewed Ali to get a sense for the kind of life Iraqis experienced after US armed forces forcibly removed Saddam Hussein from power and installed the Coalition Provisional Government. The big moments of Ali’s early life offer a glimpse into the violence and uncertainty that defined Iraq during this period.

Ali’s story paints a picture behind the headlines on American news and the history of recent US involvement in the Middle East.

The US intervened in Iraq in 2003. The Bush administration had warned Americans that Saddam Hussein possessed and planned to use weapons of mass destruction. The invasion was called Operation Iraqi Freedom. After the invasion, US forces and independent inspectors failed to find WMD, and the rationale for invading Iraq shifted. Hussein, pro-war US officials now reasoned, was a ruthless dictator who endangered his people and deprived Iraqis of basic human rights. But in the wake of Hussein’s death and the end of his Baathist regime, Iraq seemed to spiral into even greater peril. Sectarian violence erupted as suppressed tribal and religious division in the country competed for power.

Many questions still linger in discussions of US adventurism in the Middle East. The war in Afghanistan, by and large, had broad support. Al Qaeda had operated in Afghanistan to launch the attacks of September 11^th. But the invasion of Iraq met greater public skepticism. WMDs were unconfirmed. Our goals for Iraq, vague. Controlling the country’s vast oil reserves seemed to be the only plausible rationale, though no American official would admit this.

Did the US intervention help the Iraqi people? What kind of country did the US help to create by removing Saddam Hussein?

In 2007, the year Ali and his family escaped Iraq, 26,078 civilians would die. Between 112,017 – 122,438 civilian died from violence by March 2013. Other estimates put the number at 174,000 deaths. Researchers at Johns Hopkins put the total number of war-related deaths at 650,000.[1] Regardless, it is clear that the removal of Saddam Hussein increased sectarianism and, according to Ali, produced a political extremism fanned by a media system no longer under Iraqi government control.

Ali’s memories of nightly bombs and gunfire, the threats to his father’s life for having worked with the Americans, Ali’s time under a false name as a refugee in Syria and Jordan and his eventual move to America in 2008 are stories worthy of a biopic. America ultimately became a place of refuge for Ali and his family, despite occasional slurs, like the time someone asked Ali felt about his Uncle Bin Laden dying. Still, America provided Ali with a safer environment and educational options. But, as an American, I can’t help wondering what role “America” had in forcing the Muksed family to flee in the first place.

At times Ali’s story is harrowing; at others it is a powerful illustration of what it means to be displaced by violence and political conflict. Above all, Ali’s is an immigrant story. And one that ends happily, by and large. Though American foreign policy may have made Ali a refugee, America also gave Ali a place to grow and improve himself through higher education. But the details of Ali’s story also raise questions about the changes in Iraqi life brought about by the $2 Trillion dollar Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Interview link

[1] https://www.npr.org/news/specials/tollofwar/tollofwarmain.html

Since 2016, mainstream news has fixated on technological explanations of political extremism. Article after article foregrounds technology to explain political change and, specifically, the rise of the American right. However, when we focus on technology as a cause for social change, it becomes easy to lose sight of the social world we wanted to explain in the first place. This is especially true of current debates about rightwing extremist in the US.

As violent and hateful politics in the US become more visible, the internet has also taken root as an instrument of popular communication. Given the seismic change introduced by information technologies, it makes sense to ask what role new media play in the spread of the alt-right or neo-Nazi thought. The editorial board of The New York Times recently took up this tech-as-catalyst narrative, pointing to social  media as an agent of negative social and political change. The board argued that . . .

the fundamental design of social media sometimes exacerbates the problem. It rewards loyalty to one’s own group, providing a dopamine rush of engagement that fuels platforms like Facebook and YouTube, as well as more obscure sites like Gab or Voat. The algorithms that underpin these networks also promote engaging content, in a feedback loop that, link by link, guides new audiences to toxic ideas.

There is certainly some truth that media have a role in creating group identity around ideologies, but blaming the technology for the appeal these ideas shifts attention away from more obvious spurs for social change.

Let’s break down the argument. According to the Times, impersonal agents of the network (algorithms) lead a child-like citizenry (audiences) to ideas that are not good for them or the society in which they exist (toxic). By this reasoning, removing the communication tools that link the radically-minded would undermine the spread of rightist ideologies if not rightist movements themselves. The problem is that this tech focus does not adequately account for the social anxiety that these radical beliefs seem to answer.

An analogy to online advertising helps make this point. Innumerable cookies and web trackers follow us online and collect behavioral data to create predictive consumer profiles. Thus, a woman between 16 and 34 who searches lotions for stretchmarks has a higher probability of buying, for example, prenatal vitamins. The algorithm serves the woman the “Superbaby” vitamin ad. Though she did not intend to buy the vitamins, the targeted marketing works and she puts the item in her cart. Here we see algorithms at work. But did the algorithm prompt the woman to buy the vitamins or did the technology facilitate a preexisting need? Like pregnancy, the social problems that allow extremism to make sense to online audiences similarly preexist the technology that serves it up.

This is why I argue we need to correct the technology bias in addressing the relationship between extremism and online communities. We can do so by inverting the implied causality in arguments that blame new media. Did technology lead to the rise of rightwing extremism or did rightwing extremism seek communication tools to link the like-minded into communities? The NY Times editorial board seems to believe Gab and Voat fell from technology heaven fully formed. In reality, Gab’s creator was all-too-human. Social conditions created the technology to meet a political need that preexisted the technology. If we want solutions to American radicalism, we need to pay more attention to social conditions that make extremism a legitimate option rather than the secondary question of how it gets around the internet.

The focus on tech is not without merit, but the questions social researchers take up should ask why such toxic ideologies have appeal. “The algorithm did it” is insufficient and, in fact, undermines finding clear answers. Furthermore, technological explanations for why people hold political beliefs may function as a sort of optimistic fairy-tale about the inherent goodness of the United States. Taken to a logical conclusion, technology arguments about extremism assert that if not for Facebook, Americans would be more tolerant, less anxious about change and more trusting of government. The focus on technology allows us to believe that Americans are only temporarily “off course.” American neo-Nazism is a mistake that better algorithms and artificial intelligence can correct.

This is a predictable mistake when technology dominates our search for answers to social problems. Excessive focus on a technological explanation suggests that Americans are not fundamentally xenophobic, anti-Semitic or tribal. But this may not be true. In reality, the mélange of conspiracy theories (Soros is a hidden political puppetmaster; an Islamic center is an effort to institute Sharia law in the US, etc.) stems from a sense of social powerlessness and a loss of local American communities. Technology only offers the idea. The social context makes far-fetched or conspiratorial explanations of that powerlessness attractive.

Blaming the algorithm can also function as a sort of ignorant optimism. It can become a story about an American population misled by technology run amok. But this explanation of American radicalism too quickly pushes aside obvious explanations for the growing rejection of the status quo. Middle class incomes have stagnated for decades even as US gross domestic production has grown. American wealth, in general, has become concentrated in the hands of not just the 1% but the top 0.1% of citizens. Healthcare in the US is the most costly in the developed world while for-profit insurance companies avoid taking on sick customers and pay out as little as is legally required. Racial, religious and political tensions undercut the unifying story of American society, what David Brooks called the “American Creed.” Globalization has restructured the national economy, prompting the collapse of entire communities and ways of life, leading to misdirected anger at immigrants and ethnic minorities. The focus on technology can obscure these traditional triggers for extremism and tribalism.

In short, revolutionary dissatisfaction with life in America does not need an algorithm. At best, the technological explanations illustrate how ideologies circulate according to the network logics of the commercial companies that profit from their circulation. At worst, they distract us from actual reasons such ideologies are growing. To understand why these ideas take root in the minds of people, we must focus on the lived experiences of Americans that give such “toxic” ideas traction.