At the Eastern meeting of the American Philosophical Association in January, the five winners of the 2019 public philosophy writing award were recognized. One of the prizes went to Bryan Van Norden for a piece originally published in The Stone, The New York Times’ philosophy column. The spirit of Van Norden’s thesis is captured well in its title: “The Ignorant Do Not Have a Right to an Audience.” He targets the media’s allegedly supine attitude to what I have characterized on this blog as the “post-truth condition.” By this I mean the tendency to contest not only the truth or falsehood of knowledge claims but also the terms on which the matter is to be decided. This opens the door to multiple, potentially incompatible standards of evidence, which together spawn what Kellyanne Conway, counsellor to US President Donald Trump, has memorably dubbed “alternative facts.”
Van Norden’s critique takes no prisoners: He excoriates even the likes of Descartes and Mill for promoting a naively universalist approach to rationality that in practice enables charlatans and cranks to corrupt the public sphere. It is certainly easy to understand Van Norden’s frustration, since the post-truth condition seems to put his way of thinking on the defensive. Nevertheless, his argument stands in the long tradition of philosophers trying to redress an imbalance by pressing their fingers on the scales—this time, to promote what Van Norden calls “just access,” a principle that would deny the “ignorant” any entitlement to a public hearing.
Van Norden’s intervention recalls the desperation of the logical positivists in post-First World War Germany. It was a time of political instability brought on not only by the Treaty of Versailles’ draconian settlement, but also by the expressive pluralism unleashed by the Weimar Republic’s own democratic constitution. The full ideological spectrum from extreme right to extreme left were jockeying for position. Who to believe?
In an attempt to bring some order to the situation, the positivists conjured up various criteria designed to distinguish not only “true” and “false” beliefs but also “meaningful” and “meaningless” statements. On closer inspection, these criteria were purpose-made to exclude all the religious, political, and metaphysical doctrines that they regarded as contributing to the ambient instability. For good measure, Karl Popper provocatively added psychoanalysis and Marxism to the mix of what he called “pseudoscience.” Perhaps the philosophical high point in this episode was Rudolf Carnap’s 1932 take-down of Martin Heidegger’s understanding of “negation” in an early issue of Erkenntnis.
However, it didn’t take long for philosophers to start questioning both the feasibility and desirability of the criteria on offer. Nevertheless, these criteria were applauded for being public in the crucial sense that they were readily comprehensible, because they made reference only to observable events and checkable forms of reasoning. It was therefore easy to judge the fairness of how the criteria were applied. This in turn made the criteria vulnerable to charges that they unfairly targeted certain practices rather than others. It led Popper and especially his followers to relax their conception of criteria so as to disregard both the provenance and the content of a knowledge claim as relevant to its validity, just as long as the claim is regularly subjected to stringent tests.
In striking contrast, the character of Van Norden’s argument is of a piece with our post-truth times. It dispenses with criteria altogether, resorting instead to innuendo in the form of a rapidly delivered inventory of intuitions that is designed to conjure an image of how the world has deviated from the judgement of “right-minded” people. The result is a philosophical version of dog whistle politics, since it is unlikely that an explicit formulation of Van Norden’s intuitions as criteria would go beyond codifying the prejudices of the average reader of The New York Times.
The Problem of “The Public” in Today’s Media Environment
Beyond the obvious point that any professionally endorsed “public philosophy” should do more than simply confirm the prejudices of the average New York Times reader, its normative strictures should also reflect the vast changes in the media ecology that have occurred over the past half-century. Van Norden’s failure to provide an independent definition of “the public” suggests that he may be begging the question on what constitutes a “just access” policy. In particular, his central claim that freedom of expression does not entail a right to an audience presupposes that access to an audience is at least in principle controllable because it is finite. To be sure, the cognitive capacity of any given audience member remains finite, but starting with the cable television revolution in the 1970s, it has become increasingly difficult for any authority—be it the state or the mass media—to control who attempts to gain access to an audience.
Van Norden implicitly trades on an obsolete Enlightenment-based media model in terms of which it made sense to speak of “the public.” It relied on both the state exercising a monopoly over broadcasting licences and the market ensuring that the entry level costs of becoming a broadcaster are relatively high. The idea was that a well-educated, well-resourced, and well-behaved vanguard would be positioned to channel an emerging democracy towards effective collective decision-making. The model was conceived in the world of the printing press but it was extended to the mass media. The BBC has perhaps remained truest to the model’s ideal of ‘nurturing’ an informed public. However, the annual BBC licence fee of £154.50 ($200)—charged to its captive audience—has stretched credulity in an increasingly commercialized and pluralist media environment.
Indeed, the past 50 years have drastically altered the dynamics of the situation. Ever since the invention of the printing press, state authorities have found it tempting to adopt a permissive licencing policy in the hope of increasing tax revenues through media-related profits, notwithstanding its potential for generating social unrest. However, in the past, the people who wanted to communicate and the people who owned the means of communication tended to be different, which in turn invited the broadly “editorial” activities that interest Van Norden, ranging from censorship to a more bespoke practice such as gatekeeping. The difference today is that social media has shrunk the distance between platform and content providers. In principle, anyone can start their own newsfeed or video channel and simply let the market determine its fate.
Surprisingly, Facebook and other social media giants have been blindsided by this development, even though they are largely responsible for it. Moreover, their confused response in the face of public outrage and political scrutiny hasn’t helped matters. On the one hand, they claim to be mere platform providers and not content providers; on the other hand, they still want to appear to be responsible stewards of the media ecology. Not surprisingly, they have failed to persuade lawmakers in the various countries where they operate.
In contrast, whatever one makes of the politics of the late Andrew Breitbart, the creator of the right-wing website Breitbart News, he got the measure of the situation right. He responded by strategically re-appropriating a concept close to the heart of the cultural Marxism that he otherwise demonized. I refer here to Antonio Gramsci’s notion of the “organic intellectual”—that is, someone capable of generating an entire world-view from a specific position in society. This is how to make sense of Steve Bannon, former Breitbart News executive chairman and Trump strategist, and the alt-right movement that was spawned once this modus operandi was converted into a newsfeed algorithm. How exactly one identifies the “specific position in society” associated with the alt-right is an interesting question in itself, but the point here is that such things can be manufactured.
Doing Justice in a Radically Pluralist Media Environment
Do recent changes in the media ecology mean that no justice is to be found? Not necessarily. However, Van Norden’s “just access” principle would need to be re-invented in a world where the name of the game is competitive advantage. His “right-minded” judgements about the news do not sell themselves to an audience that is not already receptive. The good news here is that receptiveness can be cultivated. One way is by promoting the idea that these judgements have been “curated,” in the expansive sense that has become central to digital culture. Thus, the emphasis would be placed not on the judgements themselves but on the second-order fact that a wide range of alternative judgements have been considered and rejected along the way. Such a news source would be trusted less for its ideological consistency than for its high level of discrimination. This strategy reflects the deeper philosophical point that markets tend to turn problems of epistemology into ones of aesthetics.
The historic motto of The New York Times—“All the news that’s fit to print”—expresses just this sensibility. The slogan dates from 1896, when the paper’s new owner, Adolph Ochs, wanted to distinguish the struggling Times from titles owned by the US media moguls William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. For them journalism provided a campaigning platform along ideologically predictable lines—of the sort that is still practiced by mass circulation tabloid papers. By contrast, the Times would not be so predictable but it would be “measured” in the sense that came to be defined over time as the Times enshrined its style of journalism through a self-archiving policy that provided a periodic index of all the topics it covered, including follow-up pieces. By 1913 US librarians were dubbing The New York Times, the “newspaper of record,” which continues to make the paper of considerable value to researchers who regard journalism, in the words of former Washington Post publisher Phil Graham as the “first rough draft of history.”
However, in a market environment, the initial connection to the consumer is at a more sensory level, on the page or on the screen. Apple phones may increase their apps indefinitely but the phone itself still needs to look appealing to potential users. In this context, the most influential US journalist of the 20th century, Walter Lippmann, recommended a rhetoric of “objectivity” in which the journalist appears knowledgeable of the world’s complexity while presenting it in emotionally neutral language. This ethos persists in the self-presentation of mainstream radio and television news broadcasters, while The New York Times has traditionally stood for it in the print medium.
While Lippmann may seem to have been motivated by a desire to avoid the appearance of bias, he was in fact a student of Plato. Thus, the appearance of neutrality was more about reassuring readers that the public figures reported in the news have even the most urgent matters under their collective control. Lippmann believed that the simultaneous increase in political participation and purchasing power in the 20th century made the public susceptible to mood swings that had potential to destabilize the mechanisms of government, if not the social order more generally. In this respect, the democratic spirit was always something that “responsible” journalism should be taming.
Lippmann had witnessed how newspapers often boosted circulation by sensationalizing the events of the day. Such sensationalism traded in the currency of righteous indignation with an eye to revealing duplicity, conspiracy, scandal, and corruption. The underlying message was: “You deserve better than this!” Understood as a marketing pitch, it opens the door to new products that promise to satisfy the need that has been surfaced. But in politics, it can pave the way for demagogues claiming to cater to the now public’s inflated expectations of good governance. As far as Lippmann was concerned, the various expressions of sensationalism—not only “warmongering” but also “muckraking,” both early 20th century coinages—often resulted in poorly judged policies. .
Although muckraking has come to be seen positively as the precursor of today’s investigative journalism, Lippmann saw it as coming from the same emotional wellspring as warmongering. The zeal attached to both reflect a kind of wishful thinking that threatened to make the perfect the enemy of the good—and for that matter, the true. Lippmann came to an empirical understanding of this matter in the first systematic study of what we now call “fake news,” which involved The New York Times’ coverage of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The paper’s coverage was lauded at the time for its unprecedented immediacy and comprehensiveness, including eyewitness accounts and access to key players. Yet, once the dust settled, it became clear that the reporters’ judgements had fallen victim to preconceptions and press releases. The long term effect was to unleash the sort of bipolar politics—part-utopian romanticism and part-existential threat—that would characterise American attitudes to Russia for at least the next 70 years, if not longer.
After the unexpected and—for many—unwanted election of Donald Trump as US President, The New York Times shifted its motto to “The truth is worth it,” followed by four tag words: “persistence, fearlessness, rigor, resolve.” This combative and seemingly partisan turn would please Breitbart as the paper’s admission that it had located itself in—not above—the political fray. However, Lippmann would be disappointed, as it sounds too close for comfort to the path followed by early 20th century crusading journalism before it was hoist by its own petard. All that is needed now in the post-truth condition is for a third party—a Lippmann 2.0—to establish a new baseline of truth-telling against which The New York Times’ own biases come into open view.
Steve Fuller
Steve Fuller is Auguste Comte Professor of Social Epistemology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK. Originally trained in history and philosophy of science, he is the author of more than twenty books. His most recent work has been concerned with the future of humanity (or ‘Humanity 2.0’). His latest books areKnowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History(Routledge, 2015); The Academic Caesar: University Leadership is Hard (Sage, 2016) and Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game (Anthem, 2018). He is currently writing a book, tentatively entitled ‘Nietzschean Meditations: Late Night Thoughts of the Last Human’.
