'Democratic Delusions:' A Conversation with Natalie Fenton on Reclaiming Media for the Public Good

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Welcome back to FMC Fast Chat. This is Jaci Clement. Today we're examining how our rapidly changing media landscape shapes democracy, public trust, and civic life. Our guest isn't just analyzing these issues, she's working to change them. Joining us is Natalie Fenton, a leading voice in media reform and a professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. She's also founder of the Media Reform Coalition in the UK, an organization dedicated to tackling media concentration, ensuring journalism in the public interest, and building a more democratic media environment. Natalie's new book, Democratic Delusions: How the Media Hollows Out Democracy and What We Can Do About It, pulls back the curtain on how our media systems struggle and often fail to serve the public good.

Natalie, thank you so much for joining us today.

My pleasure.

So I'm excited to speak with you because of your experience and your expertise with media and democracy, because these are 2 huge issues So to talk to someone who brings them both together is very interesting. How did this become your life's work to begin with?

Well, there's a long history that goes behind, of course, the demise of what we might think of as democracy and the role of the media in, in that particular downfall. And, you know, so this research has been ongoing for around 30 years now, and that has been kind of a hamster wheel I've not been able to get off because The issues have always come back and hit me in the face. And so it is an endless, even though I feel, you know, like many people kind of quite dismayed with where we are with, in terms of understand, well, in terms of the practice of democracy across the world, in fact, is actually, you know, the role of the media in that has shifted and changed during those 30 years in big ways, but it's been in the same general direction. And so an analysis that attempts to understand what is going on in those worlds. And I talk about not just what we might think of as mainstream media and newspapers and broadcast media, but also systems of technology that are also now intermediaries in very many ways. So it's really an attempt to garner how those Mechanisms of communication are changing, or at least contributing to the changes that we're seeing in democratic practices.

From your perspective, do you see a direct correlation between the state of democracy and the state of media, or how does that work?

It's a complex interrelation, and I think that it's not just all the media's fault. It is very interwoven entanglement, I would say, of political forces, of commercial forces and of media change and innovation. And part of the problem has been, as we've seen technology innovate our media spaces, that has also happened in a period of profound deregulation of our media where they have been enabled to pursue unhindered wealth. So we've seen a massive concentration of media ownership. And of course the tech giants are the largest oligopolies we've ever seen. But we can also throw in our legacy media, you know, the likes of Rupert Murdoch and, you know, are still huge media moguls exerting enormous amounts of power. And no amount, no, no amount of attempts of which there have been some have been able to actually rein in that power. And so that has exerted impacts on Democratic processes and systems in, in all manner of ways. But it has also been because the politicians themselves have been on a mission to deregulate everything in, in, because of that notion that somehow democracy is about a free market. So it is, you know, and that free market, which is no longer free, it's now owned by very few people. So it's not a free market. It's not actually a functioning market at all. In many instances, it's about the accumulation of huge amounts of capital and wealth in very few hands. And so we find that supporting and entangling with our systems of political representation. You know, you just throw in money into politics and it immediately distorts and corrupts everything. So you can see how, just how much this has happened in recent times in the US. You know, need I mention Elon Musk and the vast amounts of money he poured into the Republican campaign? You know, millions and millions and millions of dollars in order to support a particular political direction that will support his own business interests. in particular ways. So it is, you know, this, these are the ways in which, you know, we suddenly have the richest man in the world using his systems of communication as a mouthpiece for a particular political party. And suddenly, why are we surprised that liberal democracy falls apart?

Right.

What do you think is the biggest factor here? Is it because of the rise of technology? And how that's impacted media, whether it's news media or the newer digital landscape?

I think we can go before the impact of new technology. There was, you know, commercialism has engulfed our news media way before new technology came along. So, and we have known for a long time that the problems with the endless pursuit of ever greater profits has had on the representation of news as being a plural and open landscape. You know, if you, if profit is your motive, then you're not driven by the public interest. You're driven about, you know, ever greater sales and whether that's clickbait online or whether that's pushing sensationalist news stories in broadcast or print media, that the outcome is the same. I think what we've had with the, with new technology coming on board is a complete shift in the, the ways in which newspapers are able to make their money. So with the movement from classified advertising, once a, you know, a really major part of the business models of our newspapers into online spaces, their business models fell apart and they've been kind of chasing their tails ever since, trying to find ways of monetizing their business. And so the kind of lure of clickbait has been, you know, has been a real driving force. So whereas one, we used to say, oh, they run after soundbites and celebrity politicians, now we have clickbait also providing the engine for that drive. So it, you know, it's, and that's very hard to row back from. When you are— so commercialism really is the biggest problem. If you have a news media that is largely for profit, then, you know, when that profit is challenged, that profit margin is challenged, then you will go to the lowest common denominator in order to keep that profit, in order to keep that money flow coming through. And we know that online now is You know, those clicks are driven by, you know, kind of often deeply polarized and reactionary debates. And that's where we're seeing our news media run to because that's what is, you know, it is driving the clicks that will give them the meager return on their advertising compared to what they once had. So it's lose-lose situation actually. In those circumstances, but it's driven by, you know, what, in many ways, why would we expect a news that is driven as a business to ever support democracy? You know, we can see that it just doesn't function in that way. If we think it's crucial to democracy, we should think of it, in my mind, in the same way as any other public utility. If it's crucial, it should be the same as, you know, we support education.

Right.

Education is about, you know, knowledge and understanding. So is our news media. So if we allow that to be dominated by a profit motive, we'll end up in a mess, which is where we are now.

Listening to you talk, I'm old enough. I grew up in the newspaper business when our problem was we had too much money, but the bread and butter behind it all was the classified section.

Yeah.

And that also was a great indicator of the basic economy. As if you had a healthy classified section, you had a healthy economy because people were buying and selling. So it's, it's kind of amazing when you think about how that was such a simplistic kind of metric on how we were all doing in a state of democracy. And, and as you talk, I can't help but also wonder though, you know, so much of media now is owned by venture capitalists. Yeah. So I don't see that changing anytime soon in terms of the profit motive.

No, I mean, the change— changing it is really deeply problematic, particularly in the US context, right? Where that this is, you know, in the UK we have a much stronger and more vibrant public service broadcasting sector which enables a slightly different type of news culture and environment. Grow, but in the US you don't have that. And so this is, you know, you're, you're in a situation where actually the media is being utterly engulfed by commercialism. We know from plentiful research in the field of media and communications that that is problematic, deeply problematic for people's grasp of what's going on. Their understanding of the world around them and their tolerance and knowledge of others. It's a really huge problem. And one of the things we need to think much more carefully about, and the US needs to think much more carefully about, is if we carry on down this road where we have a kind of tragic loss of all forms of accountable knowledge. Really, the only mechanism of accountability is profit. So it will, and when that is the overriding factor, you know, we really are on a, you know, a rapid downhill trajectory in terms of democracy.

Yeah. You know, some people call it the post-truth era. How did we become so afraid of information?

Well, it's really problematic. When you have a, you know, particularly an online environment where apparently we've never had so much information ever before at our fingertips, but actually nobody knows where to go to get so-called trusted information. And there's a chapter in my latest book on trust which says this isn't just a problem of news media. It's in fact a demise of trust in our politicians and very many figures of authority. Because they've not seemed to be serving democracy well. And when those two become ever more entangled, so when we see, you know, the likes of our news media cozying up to certain politicians, we see our politicians afraid of regulating media in certain ways, or the likes of Donald Trump refusing to acknowledge the relevance of any news media that doesn't support him.

Right.

You know, then, then we have, you know, why would anybody trust anything? So it is a collapse of, of trust more generally, which has something to do with the relationship between, you know, general people on the ground and their, and their understanding that elites are getting away with it. And elites are just doing whatever they want in whatever shape. And the media are part of that elite mechanism, which allows Trump to pretend he's on the side of the people to call the elite media out. But that, that's only possible because of the history that comes before it.

And we did just see coming off this presidential election, historic spending in political advertising and how that impacted the journalism that covered it, but also how it continues to encourage political journalism that continues to divide and polarize us. Yeah. Is there anything in history that, that you can compare that to? Wow.

That's a good question. Is there anything in history that can be compared to? Well, you know, we, we can, propaganda has a very long history. So, you know, we can, and propaganda is essentially about peddling a message. That is severely one-sided and has vested interests at its heart. And so we are seeing really contemporary propaganda in many of these forms at play. And I think, you know, many scholars are returning to the study of propaganda to try and understand the current moment. And propaganda, of course, is about, you know, that kind of Peddling a delusion, even when, you know, actually, you know, it's not real, which is why I call the book Democratic Delusions. You know, this is about saying, you know, we know this is not real, but it suits our benefits to peddle it as being legitimate and forceful. And the more we do that, the more we'll be able to convince people that there's some legitimacy to it. In certain forms. So, you know, you can go back to fascism and talk about propaganda of that era and see some very traits that are very reminiscent of what we're experiencing right now. Because where do people go to really establish what they can, you know, where do you go for your most trusted information? People used to say, I don't trust anyone but my closest group of friends. If your closest group of friends Are now, you know, a group of unknowns on the dark web. That's clearly deeply problematic. And that is often where we're finding ourselves right now. And we can even go back, you know, I mean, I often think that the issue with the Fox Dominion trial really is kind of illustrative of where we are at now in terms of that.

Yeah.

Profit motive, you know, that Dominion Voting Company tried to take Fox to court on defamation counts for saying that they had peddled a, you know, that they had rigged the election in particular ways. Now, and in that process, during those court proceedings, it came out that actually Fox were very aware that this was probably untrue. But they were willing to literally broadcast that story because they were worried that their ratings were going down because they weren't taking that very populist view that certain other news channels had been willing to go with. So, you know, this is— if that's where we're at, it's— there has to be some ways and means of countering that.

Yeah.

In particular forms. And that's not to say, you know, there's, there's, whenever you have these arguments, you're always met with the, but it's a free press. You know, there's, they have to be allowed to say what they want. Well, you know, if a free press means the powerful being able to say exactly what they want and everybody else having to fall in line, that's not really about free speech. That's about the powerful over the powerless. And I think we've got to come to terms with that. In our politics.

One of, one of the things I've noticed talking with people is depending on what generation you are changes your outlook on what news is. So baby boomers often ask, what the hell happened to news? This is not what I grew up with. And they're rather perplexed on how we got here. You know, millennials and Gen Z, they don't really know what news is because they've grown up in the digital landscape and it's all clustered with Yeah. Everything else out there on the internet, right next to entertainment and misinformation and everything else that's out there. And then I'm Gen X and we're just kind of impervious to anything going on around us. But when you talk to your students, what are their impressions of news today?

I think they are far more intelligent and engaged than often we give them credit for. So those students come in with a very skeptical understanding of what news is. But that's right. You know, I want them to be skeptical. I want them to be critical thinkers when they engage with our news media. They, it's true, they don't have that sense of history of what news once was and how we once engaged with it. But I'm grateful for that, to be honest. And what I'm, what I'm encouraged by is their desire to go out there and try and think about how news could be different and what is required for a news ecology that could actually begin to have more legitimacy in terms of being, you know, kind of ethically produced news at, you know, at high standards in a manner which would enable that news organization to be held to account readily. And then we're seeing far more students now who are have a much more in-depth understanding of the rhetoric of a free media, as opposed to actually, this isn't a free media. This is just, you know, kind of market populism. Actually, what we want is a media that is regulated for the public good. We want somebody who is, you know, a government who is willing to say, our news media are vital to democracy. And because of that, They need protecting beyond a First Amendment of free speech that does something, but actually it doesn't regulate news media for the public good. We need something that actually prevents concentration of media ownership as well. We need something that enables not-for-profit alternative forms of news ownership to thrive. And so it's a kind of complex environment. That won't, you know, that it's unsurprising that it's falling apart because of the politics that have enabled that disintegration.

That's happened over generations. We've watched the ownership cap limits being raised. We've watched the ban on cross-ownership being eliminated. So the concentration did become huge, but also driving the concentration was the profit motive.

Yeah.

But now that we don't really have a business model, How do we even fathom having an accountable media when they can't even figure out how they're surviving and how they can survive without being accountable to the almighty dollar?

Yeah, again, it's a really good question, but it's a moment of possibility, right? So if we say actually one of the things that has led us to this place has been unfettered capitalism. So, you know, literally the accumulation of huge wealth in very few hands. If we say, well, that's not worked, it's not worked for our news media, so what do we need to do? Well, we need to rein it in and we need to think about news media as being, you know, paying journalists and being profitable to an extent, but not being driven by, you know, hedge funds and venture capitalists. We need it to actually profit, to be returned to the journalistic endeavor, to, to grow and develop a much stronger and vibrant journalistic culture. It's part of that problem is that that money doesn't go back into journalism. It's, you know, it's hived off and goes into the hands of very few. So what we need is to go back to basics actually, and to really see journalism as rooted in communities and as being vital to democratic wellbeing. And I'm not, you know, I actually think it would be really beneficial to have also a funding stream that was, you know, was, were public funding streams that news organizations could apply for to be subsidized by if they met certain criteria.

Okay.

So if they could guarantee they're operating in the public interest, they can guarantee they're functioning with a high quality ethical standards of journalism, then they should be able to apply for some forms of government subsidy that will enable the government, no interference whatsoever, enabling those organizations to function well without the endless fear of the financial bottom falling out of that.

Do you see any kind of movement anywhere in the world towards improving where we are with the state of media? Are there any bright spots?

There are, there are some bright spots around. I mean, any regulation trying to prevent concentration of ownership has failed. So there is, we can look to Greece and Germany where there's been a little bit of success. Around that, but, but not a lot, you know, it's very minimal. What we are seeing, however, in many places is the kind of a huge growth of a more communal grassroots forms of journalism that are starting out as saying, we want to be democratic media for democracy. So these are often locally based. They are working in very close proximity to the communities they're serving. They are being run democratically and governed democratically. So their audience, the people they're speaking to, has a direct say in their advertising policy, their editorial policies, you know, the sorts of things they need to see this news organization doing to improve their communities. So what they're doing is they're not just seeking to hold power to account. But in many instances, these organizations are addressing powerlessness. And I think that's a key change that we need to see. In addressing powerlessness, they are building trust in those communities as these are organizations that are actually working for us, not against us. So they are growing this interdependency. I don't think there's ever been a thing, such a thing as independent news, but we always say that's the nirvana. We all need independent news of integrity. That's never existed. News has always been relational. It always exists in relations of power, and we need to recognize that, but understand it and manage it better. And I think this notion of, you know, actually communities coming together and saying, you know, a great example in the UK is an organization called the Bristol Cable, which runs on that basis. We also have another brilliant example. Called the Govanhill Magazine in Scotland, which works with— it's set up in a news hub in the center of the city where it invites people of the local city to come in and tell them the issues. It works with them to do journalism. It is premised on the basis of kind of communicative justice. So it's not, you know, it's kind of abandoned that idea of, oh, all news has to be objective. It's saying, no, we need to work with communities to deliver social change. And there's examples of that in the US as well, where these are happening at a grassroots level. And I think they, they're the organizations that I think are the most interesting and exciting because they are genuinely trying to do the job of a fourth estate. They're genuinely trying to understand what's going on out there and to hold organizations to account whilst addressing power imbalances that exist in society. And that's a shift that would really enliven news and journalism.

And I think it would bring back the spirit of what news used to be before it was beaten down into survival mode. Because I, I'm a big advocate of journalists getting out there into the community, you know, not making phone calls from the desk or pretending they're covering a story from 3,000 miles away. But all of it sort of leads me back to, I kind of visualize the newsroom of today as being set inside a public library.

Where you're—

Hey, where you're interacting with, I'll call them real people, not to confuse them with journalists, because I think a lot of the issues That we're seeing what journalism is, journalists sitting around in a room manufacturing ideas, reiterating the ideas to each other, and in their mind they just second-sourced something. So now they have enough to go on to create a story. So, so really the, the grassroots element of it, how do we encourage that?

Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting that you talk about that because I've had exactly the same image in my mind of a public library. operating as a space, as a news hub where people can come in, they'll say, I have, you know, I'm concerned about this particular issue. They are engaged and trained to kind of investigate that with somebody within that news hub, a trained journalist there then, you know, but that has to function on the ground, which is kind of noncompetitive. So it's not like, you know, oh, we've got a scoop here and this is, you know, we need our scoops to, you maintain our competitive edge. It's about saying, how do you know this is, you know, a great wrong is being done here. How can we right it? And that's the first issue. That's the first dynamic that comes to mind rather than this is going to push a few papers or, you know, get a few clicks. So it is a, you know, we've got to change the notion of how people engage with that news media. So that it's not about endlessly going online. And I do think that change will come because people are hugely dissatisfied with the news that they are finding in those online spaces. And people want what I call a kind of substantive relationality. People want relationships that mean something to them. And they want this by, you know, kind of human interaction. They don't just want it in a, you know, an online space, which is endlessly failing them. So I, if there were organizations, which is very much like the Govanhill Magazine set up on that basis, is we're here, we're here to serve you and to work with you to really understand what's going on and then seek to change it. And it's what I call a kind of democratic media for communicative justice. And it's that word justice. That is key to all of that. This is a journalism that works for delivering justice. And I think rather than thinking of it as reporting in an entirely objective way and not kind of taking sides, which was always a nonsense, right? There's never been any, nobody ever has an objective bone in their body. It's all come with any decision that's made. It comes with a weight of history behind it. So this idea, and we know that from, you know, endless feminist theorizing, there's huge amounts of philosophy that understands that the notion of objectivity is not real. And we know that in online media now, that's been allowed to kind of run rabid. And so what do we do? How do we address that? How do we then say, well, if there is no such thing as objectivity, Where do I go to better understand what's going on? And that's what we're talking about is better understanding. And it's, and that's where you need to get in those spaces. You need to go to the equivalent of a public library and really, and that's where our news media should be taking its cultural impetus from really.

Yeah.

And that's, it's a big shift. That's a hardship to me.

But even if you just look at your standard research librarian, they're doing more journalism work than journalists do today because they're trained in how to research and how to ferret out facts.

Exactly.

Where we don't have a standard for that, you know, and so much with the cutbacks with the economy of journalism has been, let's hire someone young. We throw them out there. It's baptism by fire. You're just supposed to know how to cover a story. And we know that's not true. Yeah.

And then there's the huge danger of AI, of course, thrown into that. So, you know, it must be the same in the US. Here in the UK, we're seeing more and more adverts for AI-powered journalism. And it is— my anxiety with that is what we used to call churnalism, that's people being in an environment where they're willing just to churn out press releases instead of actually doing journalism on the ground. It's gonna be kind of journalism on steroids with AI, where simply the material that's out there is endlessly regurgitated at the click of a button, and nobody has any idea whether that was AI-powered or not. And that is already there. Then, then what does that mean for this thing called accuracy, even let alone truth? You know, how do we know Then, and that's going to be, you know, that, that's going to cause huge, have huge social consequences. And that will drive people back to other ways of knowing. And we'll go back, I think, to old-fashioned forms of understanding and knowledge brokering.

So I'm wondering if you can leave us with a tip or two for the average person who's out there just trying to figure this out at home. What do you tell parents? What do you tell parents to tell their kids about interacting with media today?

I think be as skeptical and, and be as critical as you possibly can. And that means not just being critical about your news media, but being kind of engaged critique of all things political and media related. So you can't do one without the other. And I don't just mean having a knee-jerk anti- response. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about being critical as a means of seeking to understand what's going on. So you need to take in as many different sources from, you know, places that have a— you can see, you can trace back where that knowledge has come from. So anything which has— don't take anything as a given. And if you can't see where that's come from and you can't understand what's driving that opinion or that view, then don't accept it. And always look for where the money's come from first and foremost. Who's funding it? Always. Who's funding it and who, who serves to gain by this particular view being published?

Yeah.

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