Media must fight fake narratives even when winning seems impossible
date
Jul 14, 2024
slug
2024-media-must-fight-fake-narratives-even-when-winning-seems-impossible
status
Published
tags
media
disinformation
journalism
Trump
type
Post
summary
An assassination attempt against a former or future US president will open the floodgates of disinformation hell. Even if victory seems unlikely, journalism must make its stand.
And someone tried to kill Donald Trump. Although all the reactions refer to the event as “shocking,” it is as shocking as a river running to the sea. In historical perspective, it is just one more sign of the approach of the end of a historical cycle and the confirmation that shocking events lie ahead. In the battle for the narrative, disinformation has been winning since the moment the first shot was fired from the teenage sniper's gun, who is another victim of history itself, in a plot far beyond the control of its protagonists. Does such a fragmented and polarised news scenario have the strength to reverse this course? The answer is: no - but journalism must keep fighting nevertheless.
Minutes after the shot in Pennsylvania, the wisdom of the crowds could be read in Google Trends. “Trump” and “Civil war” spiked in search and were reflected in social media. Potential plots from left and right suggested conspiracy theories incriminating each other ran amok, while the partisan news channels were mirrors of the voters they represent. Fox was on the attack portraying Trump as a martyr, while Jake Tapper on CNN led a panel of pundits on Sunday morning that clearly knew two things: Trump won the election by surviving the shots and that they would be blamed for inciting violence against the former-and-next-to-be president.
What goes wrong here? From the historical perspective, nothing. The radicalisation of the rhetoric of the politicians sets the tone of the press, and in a world full of fear, populism has no competitors. Why? Because disinformation, in the last decades, has been crafting the audience for such a story to pop up. In a sense, there is no guilt in the process, because even the main names are merely filling the roles created by social facts. In a nutshell, Trump is not leading the narrative - if he didn’t exist, someone would fill the gap. The shooter, in the same way, is a weird victim of a much larger and wider narrative, just like Gavrilo Princip was when he killed the archduke Franz Ferdinand and triggered World War I.
From a societal perspective, however, there is a major problem. The radicalisation that led to the assassination attempt is not caused by professional media, but by the multiple reverberation boxes that have stolen the narrative from media. For almost three decades, media have been increasingly trailing an unbeatable competitor, which is the fragmented digital media that is close to putting the once omnipotent legacy media structure down forever. CNN, BBC, The Guardian, and any other professional media groups have to compete with every single video that reaches YouTube and, thanks to an insanely complex overlapping algorithm structure, reaches exactly who it was supposed to reach.
For convenience, after the technological shift that has been the digitisation, society felt it was more comfortable to hand its information system to a new industry - the data giants - that thrives on a business model which rewards buzz, clicks, and trends, instead of boring, safe, and predictable checking and rechecking of all information. Trump’s assassination attempt has not been caused by media, but by the new mindset that forced most media to become partisan, click-driven, and where opinion beats information at any given day.
Why will it be impossible to beat disinformation in this (and many other cases)? Because information cannot be “saved” with fact-checking. Such attempts are not effective to people who want to believe in something. There is no time to set up a true safety system that can contain the garbage close to its producers only. The endless narratives being created now are much more resilient and enduring than the repetitive narrative of rolling-news channels. People do not get vaccinated against lies or twisted versions after watching half an hour of TV. The reach of disinformation is thousand times greater than professional media. Only a detailed and organised leitmotiv of gears and pipes can make information to be accountable, which is what really needed. US voters are already “confessionalised” - once they are already in the same spectrum of family and friends, it’s very hard to take them out of there.
What lies ahead? Mayhem. There is no way that the US and most other Western democracies will revert this trend without first making the crisis more severe many times over. Trying to bring the country back to a democratic debate is a lost battle - but as I wrote before, this is also a lost battle that journalism has to fight. In Nazi Germany, when the war was already lost, a group of Germans set a plot to kill Hitler, aware that it was bound to fail, but they did it anyway to show the world that the German people were not the monstrosity epitomized by the Third Reich. All the plotters were killed by the dystopian national socialist reality. Future generations need to have well-documented material to understand how once-in-a-generation tragedies happen, and right now, the developments in the US seem to show that it will be the ground zero of these seismic changes. Journalism is something societies badly need and even if writing a réquiem, journalists have to do the boring checking and re-checking that make society feasible.