Facts, lies, elections and the press: In search of a shared national story

By William H. Freivogel >>

“Facts can’t fix this.”

That was the headline that emerged from a post-election discussion recently at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School about how the press fell short covering the presidential election.

The point: The press constantly repeating facts and pointing out lies won’t stop a man like Donald Trump from building a successful campaign on a foundational lie about the last election being stolen from him.

Fact checkers may annoy people and seem to be talking down to them, said journalists at the Berkman discussion.

Ben Reininga, former head of editorial at Snapchat, said media fact-checkers can contribute to the voters’ reaction that “elites” are lecturing them. 

“It’s almost like some of the institutional markers or the thing that makes a news organization look like a polished news organization have gone from being a [symbol] for trust … to actually a negative relationship,” Reininga said. “People don’t trust The New York Times because it looks like The New York Times.”

People feel closer to Joe Rogan, the podcasting influencer than A.G. Sulzberger, the Times publisher.

“Facts can’t fix this,” said Jesselyn Cook, who recently wrote a book about QAnon conspiracy theories. “What social media has done is made it really hard for us to have a shared reality.”

One thing that stands in the way of achieving a shared reality is the economics that govern which social media posts are amplified.

Content creators are paid more by advertisers when posts go viral, regardless of their truth, so creators are incentivized to produce and amplify eye-catching content. False claims often are more eye-catching than truthful ones, studies have shown.

Reininga said, “If you give people an incentive to post a certain sort of content, it is almost impossible to create a moderation infrastructure that will stop them.”

Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain, the moderator of the Berkman discussion, interjected a pithy lesson:  “It’s the power of incentives and the power of economics,” he said. “Markets eat laws or norms for breakfast.”

Better understanding voters

The soul searching at the Berkman Center is part of a post-election self-evaluation by mainstream press.

Marty Baron, the much-admired former executive editor of the Washington Post, said shortly after the election that the mainstream media did not understand the voters in the country well enough. “They didn’t understand that [Trump] would win in the voting segments that he won to the degree that he did among Black Americans, among Latinos, among even women, among, you name it.”

Baron added, “I don’t think we detected that level of desire for change. I don’t care whether we go to a diner or wherever we go. We have to get out into the country.”

Meanwhile, two publishers who faced strong media criticism before the election for not publishing presidential endorsement editorials — Jeff Bezos of the Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong of the LA Times — now are taking victory laps. Bezos said his decision not to endorse was the right one even though his editorial page and newsroom rebelled. Soon-Shiong is talking about running bias meters next to editorials and news stories to give “both sides” of a story to the reader. The bias meter would be based on AI technology he has developed in his biotech business. The newsroom is aghast.

Another news organization – ABC owned by Disney – kissed the president-elect’s ring by agreeing to pay $15 million to Trump’s presidential library to settle what many lawyers considered an extremely weak defamation case that Trump filed against the network and George Stephanopoulos. The suit related to a jury finding that Trump had sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll. The network and journalist also agreed to apologize, prompting journalists and lawyers to predict the capitulation will only encourage more frivolous libel suits.

But Richard J. Tofel, a veteran journalist who writes the Second Rough Draft newsletter, a critique of journalism, says some of the journalistic panic and self-criticism is overblown. “There have been no end of declarations that the relatively narrow second election of Donald Trump heralds some sort of end of the press as we know it,” he wrote earlier this month. “Those announcements are vastly overblown, in my view.”

Tofel points out that Trump’s victory was not the landslide originally portrayed and that studies have found that voters were mostly influenced by their friends and by old-fashioned TV news.

Medill’s State of Local News project also found that the places where Trump actually won by a landslide were news deserts without traditional media. It concluded:

“Donald Trump won the 2024 election with one of the smallest popular-vote margins in U.S. history, but in news deserts — counties lacking a professional source of local news — it was an avalanche. Trump won 91% percent of these counties over his Democratic rival. While Trump’s national popular-vote margin was just under 1.5%, his margin in news deserts was massive. He won these counties by an average of 54 percentage points.”

Trump and Musk: 21st century media celebrities

Nevertheless, historic change is happening in the media and it had an important, if not necessarily decisive, impact on the presidential race.

Trump, with his Truth Social social media company, and Elon Musk, with his ownership of X, bear no resemblance to the Pulitzers or Sulzburgers of news publishing fame. But they are two 21st century media celebrities whose billions and media platforms beam them into the heads of hundreds of millions of people.

Musk — the wealthiest man on the planet, whose SpaceX company owns two-thirds of all satellites orbiting the earth and whose social media account gives him 200 million followers — spent a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected. 

Musk spent $20 million of it on an October campaign where the RBG PAC, named after the liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg, promised pro-choice voters that Trump would not sign a national abortion ban if elected — even though it was Trump’s Supreme Court nominee replacing Ginsburg who provided the decisive vote overturning Roe v. Wade.

Musk is one of at least 14 billionaires appointed in cabinet posts and top jobs for the returning billionaire president. The situation is replete with possible conflicts of interest. One possible example of this is the favorable position that Musk is in to obtain future government space contracts from NASA. The new head of NASA paid to take a space walk from Musk’s vehicle.

Social media eclipsing journalists?

Musk’s X hosts 85% of “news influencers,” according to a Pew Research Center report — over three-quarters of whom have no affiliation or background with a news organization. Trump’s high-profile interview with Joe Rogan is viewed as an important event in Trump’s campaign. It seemed to matter more than Trump’s refusal to be interviewed by 60 Minutes or his opponent’s interview on that storied platform.

In the end, social media influencers may have a greater impact on voters, especially young ones, than traditional media. This may be a reason the much-predicted GenZ vote didn’t favor Harris as much as predicted. Four in 10 voters favored Trump, up from one in three voters in 2020.

A Pew study released after the election showed that one in five Americans regularly gets news from influencers. For those under the age of 30, the number nearly doubles.

People find the social media influencers more personable and relatable than journalists, even though 77% of them have no background in news or connection to news organizations.

Social media influencers contributed to big lies pushed by Trump during the campaign, including his sensational but false claim during the only presidential debate that in Springfield, Ohio, “they are eating the dogs.” It didn’t take long for real reporters to knock down that claim.

Musk’s X account was also a major source amplifying Trump falsehoods, such as the one about immigrants illegally voting.

Printing press in your pocket 

Former President Barack Obama, in a speech this month, exhorted the importance of pluralism and described a “media landscape that would shatter into a million disparate 

voices.” He said Americans have lost the sense of “a common national story or a common national purpose.” Without this common purpose, pluralism is difficult because “in a democracy, we all have to find a way to live alongside individuals and groups who are different than us.”

Jeff Jarvis, a seasoned journalist and media guru, told a Stanford audience this month that they should not panic about the chaos of the modern media universe.

“We are living through a time as revolutionary, and possibly more revolutionary, than half a millennium ago when the invention of the printing press led to the Reformation and Enlightenment,” he said. “The internet, cell phones and artificial intelligence are creating a world few imagined at the turn of the century.” 

Is the dream turning to a nightmare?

At first, this digital revolution was viewed idealistically as the democratization of communication where everybody could have their own means of sending news, information and opinions to the world. Stories sent via cell phones by the Black Lives Matter from the streets of Ferguson is an example.

But things didn’t turn out as idealistically as enthusiasts had hoped. Hate speech, misogyny and misinformation often dominated the cybersphere. Parents have discovered their teens communicating with imaginary AI-generated “friends” who deepen their children’s loneliness. On Telegram, one of the most popular social media platforms in Europe, three-quarters of the channels are run by anonymous providers, some with names like Cartel.  

Section 230 of the Communications Act, passed in 1996 to protect the internet in the cradle, did not anticipate the entertaining but often menacing creature as it grew up to titanic size.

Section 230 protects social media companies from being sued for the false and harmful posts of third parties. But it turns out the companies sometimes promote dangerous ones.

When neo-Nazi messages about “replacement theory” and photos of the torch-wielding marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 attracted Facebook traffic, the social media giant sent a promotion to the Kentucky Traditionalist Workers Party offering to boost viewership for a price. “Your post is performing better than 95% of other posts on the page,” Facebook Business told the group in a message that included a button to “boost it now to reach more people.”  

Cook, the journalist who wrote about QAnon, said, “It’s not so much about what we’re allowed to say or what we’re not, it’s more how this content is treated — what is eligible for monetization and algorithmic amplification. I wouldn’t mind seeing a little bit more overly aggressive rules in place for dialing down that amplification and seeing how this content performs on its own without this unnatural boost.”

Mark Sableman, a Thompson Coburn media lawyer in St. Louis, agrees Congress should consider removing Section 230 protection for amplification of messages, and for paid messages. The social media company would thus have responsibility where it itself acts to spread the message more broadly, as with the Facebook message in Charlottesville. Sableman notes that brick-and-mortar publishers are legally liable for all that they publish, including the paid advertisements.

No one knows how our electronically supercharged communications revolution will be operating in 5-, 10- or 20-years time. Nor does anyone know what kind of impact it will have on our democracy, which depends on an enlightened citizenry for its survival.

In the media world that Obama sees of a million disparate voices, people and the press should work to find the shared story for a successful democracy.

That shared story will almost certainly be centered around the values that have animated the nation since the beginning and have become more important with time — freedom, equality, pluralism and democracy. With each passing generation these values have become stronger. 

William H. Freivogel is the publisher of GJR. This column appears in the winter print issue of the magazine.

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