S5E11: Gashed Hull: Broadcast Democracy: Markus Prior

This is Larry Lessig. The lesson from the last episode with

Ben Page and Robert Shapiro was that there was a time when we the people, responded sensibly to the information that

we confronted, that the public was rational

and at least in the sense that its views evolved in a way that made sense given the information or facts that it confronted. In this episode, we talk to someone who has, more than anyone forced into the foreground an understanding of the technology that makes understanding possible. Because, of course, that technology has changed dramatically. Before radio, we understood the world through reading and wandering speakers. The press exploded across america in the 19th century. The printed press and America's consumed a wide range of disparate material. But radio, the beginning of broadcast, began to focus more of us on the same material. Through the Depression and World War II, our concentrated focus on an increasingly narrow range of material changed us. And with the birth of television, it changed us even more. In his book Broadcast Democracy, Princeton professor Marcus Prior looks back at the period of broadcast democracy to consider exactly what it gave us and what we won't have now that it's gone. The book was published in 2007. So of course, media in 2007 is not media today. But I think the work is essential for developing the discipline that we need to understand what's possible within a democracy and what's not possible. That discipline is particularly important for us boomers. We, who were born between 1946 and 1964, come to this world with assumptions that were cemented during a bizarrely unique period in human history, and we fail to recognize how those assumptions are just no longer true. If I had endless time, I'd love to write a book about the mistakes that we boomers hold in our heads. Assumptions that are just not true and yet that continue to guide us and influence us about what we think is possible and what we want to happen. I think about three of these assumptions. First, an assumption about our collective ability to know things. That's the focus of this episode with Marcus Pryor. But the frame for that question is to recognize the bizarrely unusual period that somehow around 1965 to 1985, was in the whole of American history. Because before that period and after that period, we were a fragmented and many sourced people.

People.

But within that narrow range of 20 or 25 years, we watched the same shows, we saw the same news, we were fed the same moderate down the middle story about the world and what it was doing. We boomers presume today that the future could be like that again. That's an absurd, literally hopeless project. This episode will begin to dislodge that assumption. But let me just name the other

two presumptions just to get it out so that I don't feel I have to write about it.

The second presumption is about the nature

of economic growth, the expectation that we

live in a world with a rising tide, and that rising tide raises all boats almost naturally, automatically, as if there's nothing that has to happen to guarantee that these things all happen together again. That was true roughly in the same period of broadcast democracy a little bit earlier, 1950 through around 1980. During that period, productivity rose at about the same rate that wages rose. But after that period and before that period, those two indices were never so perfectly correlated. It was never the case, and it has not been the case that productivity growth automatically meant increases in wages. Indeed, automatically is the critical word. We boomers think this is given to us by nature. The truth is, this was constructed through institutions that made sure it was true. The third presumption we could call the Superman presumption. For us boomers, it really is a

man that we have in our head, because that's who Superman was.

This is the constant obsession of the 20th century to find the hero, the superman who will save us. Before the 20th century, there were few, but very few nationally famous and and consequential leaders. But the 20th century fed through broadcast media. Maybe because of broadcast media created a wide range across the world of both heroes and villains. Teddy Roosevelt, Mussolini, fdr, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, jfk, Mao, lbj, mlk, Bobby Kennedy. Politics in this frame is always the search for the savior, for the one who can rise above it all and deliver us to what we all need.

It was not like this before the 20th century.

Politics was not about finding the Superman. And I fear, because I'm a boomer,

and I think this is the natural

way of leadership, that we find our Superman. So I have to say, I fear, but I hope my kids don't, that it will not be like this again. Okay, Those are the three assumptions that we boomers bring.

We're focusing today on the first.

In this episode, we're focusing on the architecture of media. And my guest is Marcus Pryor. Marcus Pryor is a professor of politics and public affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International affairs and the Department of Politics at Princeton University. He joined Princeton about 20 years ago, 2003. His research has examined how people learn about politics and the role of media in politics, including the measurement of news audiences and the impact and origins of political interest. His most recent book is how politics captures people's interest, that was published in 2019. But again, the book we'll talk about today, Post Broadcast Democracy, was published in 2007. Hooked received the 2020 Robert E. Lane Award from the Political Psychology Section of the American Political Science association and the 2020 Alexander George Book Awards given by the International Society of Political Psychology. Post Broadcast Democracy won the 2009 Goldsmith Book Prize awarded by Harvard's Joan Shorenstein center and the 2010 Doris Graeber Award for book on Political Communication. In the last 10 years, Prior's work has also appeared in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the Annual Review of Political Science, Public Opinion, and Political Communication. Marcus received his Ph.D. from Stanford's Department of Communication in 2004. He's the winner of the 2008 Emerging Scholar Award by the Elections, Public Opinion and Voting Behavior section of the apsa. He's been incredibly patient with me over the years. The questions I've peppered him with, being outside his discipline and unknown, I'm sure, to him. But I'm so grateful he has joined us for this conversation about what this architecture of media means both for the

past and for the future. Marcus Pryor, thank you so much for talking to us. You're kind of a foundational figure in the way that I'm thinking about the problem that this whole series is addressing. And the way I think that you're a foundational figure is that you have, I think, done the most to make salient the technical infrastructure within which we live our political and social and economic lives, but importantly the political lives, because your book, which obviously is old now. So it's a little bit unfair to ask you to go way back to talk about old work, given you're doing so much interesting new work that I hope we're also going to get a chance to talk about. But your book Broadcast Democracy tees up and what is an obvious point once you think about it, but striking that so few write about it, that the character of democracy that we saw in the late 20th century was affected fundamentally by the very architecture of media that we saw in the late 20th century. And that architecture historically was extremely weird. I mean, never in the history of humanity before the middle part of the 20th century, until about 1985, did we have everybody basically listening to essentially the same story broadcast at essentially the same time, whether it's three channels or however you want to carve that up before that period, many, many different sources of media.

And after that Period.

Obviously, the Internet age and the cable television age is very, very different. But that age, that age you call broadcast democracy was distinctive. Now, I want to start by just asking you to tell it in the way you feel most comfortable to tell it. Like, what did you discover when you began to think about it from this perspective? And what lesson should we draw from that now?

Yeah, so I initially got interested actually in the start of broadcast television, coming out of radio and becoming television then, which happened before the period that you're referencing. So that's sort of the childhood of broadcast television. And so what was initially interesting to me was the essentially just having the first local station in a country or in a particular local area or the first few stations. And that happened much earlier. And there was this interesting thing about the FCC freeze. The Federal Communications Commission allowed some local stations to start in the 40s and then took a break to think about whether we should actually do this and have television. And so parts of the country remained uncovered or not covered very much at all by broadcast televisions. And others had this new technology already. And I think, if I remember correctly, this lasted for several years, something like five years. And so that was actually a starting point to think about television and politics together. I was in a communication program, but always sort of considered myself more of a political scientist than a communication person, per se. So I wanted to bring those two things together. And so that led to thinking about what's the initial impact of the medium of broadcast television.

And.

Right.

And just to emphasize for people who are not scientists like you, the reason that's so significant is that when you have a technology that affects the world differently, so you have places where you have the technology and places where you don't, that creates the conditions to be able to evaluate or at least begin to understand what effect might the technology be having. Is that why that was interesting?

Right. It was also interesting, I think, on a much more intuitive level for me, because this was work sort of in the late 90s, and we were all looking at screens, we were all seeing politics on screens. And actually, I think you already have the web then, although a much earlier version than what we are used to now. And we don't have many of the other bells and whistles of current it in the late 90s, but we definitely are dominated by seeing politics play out on our screenshots. And just to think about how the world would have been without that, that was just a fascinating question.

So you saw these initial communities that were exposed to television, and what could you begin to Suss out about what the effect of that was as compared to communities where you didn't have that exposure to television.

Yeah, it's actually. So you're asking me to go back to work that I did a long time ago. I want to think that I would do it differently now. So there were actually some obstacles that I think are just insurmountable. It is really hard to know what was on television then because nobody recorded it. This was initially live television and the means for recording either didn't exist or they essentially overwrote the storage devices because it was expensive. And so we have. I tried for a while not in a kind of historical, historically systematic way like a professional historian would, but in my amateur way. I try to figure out. So are there archives, is there media reporting on what was actually on television? And it was pretty scattered. Obviously we have a sense of what was on network television because everybody was seeing the same thing anywhere in the country. But then what was on the local. Most of the television day was devoted to programming that was selected by the local stations and produced by the local stations. And to understand what that was turned out to be very, very hard. So I really regret that I don't have a better sense of how much, not just political news, but sort of political coverage that was actually potentially produced not by independent newscasts, but rather by potentially politicians. How much of that actually existed in the early days?

Did the FCC, obviously, the FCC's original decision to slow television was grotesquely self motivated by interests. I mean, the radio which dominated the control of the FCC was not eager for this new competitor. So they at least wanted to slow it down so they could begin to acquire the technology and be able to compete themselves.

But did the FCC itself study like

what was going on? Did they have like efforts to characterize what people were actually seeing?

I mean, you asked me to dig deep in my own memory. I think at some point there were evaluations that were. That were more sort of about to what extent is the public interest served by this new medium television. But at least I could never really find systematic analysis of the political content. What was most intriguing about the anecdotes was that it seemed like incumbent members of Congress. So these are federal incumbents, they seem to occasionally have their own show or in markets where there were larger markets, where there were more districts, more congressional districts covered, then a bunch of them got together and had a show together. And that was just. I wish we could tell, I wish we knew more systematically how prevalent that was.

Okay, so I mean, what we know Independently, I mean, what I know independently of your work, but is complimenting of your work is obviously the 1950s for broadcast television was a difficult decade because there was a lot of scandals that led people to question the integrity of the institution of broadcast television. And the institution kind of fought back by trying to build their, or burnish their reputation by producing at the time and even today relatively high quality documentary like news programs that would tell the story of what was going on in the world. And so by the end of the 50s, you have a pretty self conscious effort in the industry to try to tee up a serious news infrastructure that FCC chairman, including eventually Newt Minow, who famously called television the vast wasteland, could begin to be happy with, begin to think, okay, we're actually doing something now that is worthy of the medium. And that's really where I think from, I remember from your work, we begin to see some systematic effort to be able to, or systematic ability to be able to measure what is the consequence of having a world focused on broadcast television where broadcast television is relatively narrow in what it's covering and what it's sang. Is that right?

So we get, in that period in the 60s, we get the expansion of network television news. So it used to be 15 minute programs and not every station actually I think ABC is the newest of the then three networks, I think initially doesn't do any news or does a shorter news. And so the world that your older listeners will be familiar with, where there were three network news programs on at like 6, 30 or 7, depending on the market, that was sort of, we're talking mid-60s to, well in a way the present day. But then, right, this important thing that you already alluded to happens. They're losing their audience. So we're getting after the mid-60s into the 80s, we're getting this heyday of broadcast television, which is that's what most of the book's about. And there we have large audiences to something that is really quite difficult to avoid. One of the bigger points about the book was kind of a psychological story of a captive audience. Television was amazingly exciting. You could watch things on your screen in your home. And then at some point of the day they moved all the fun stuff away and you had to watch the news essentially.

Yeah. And I mean I actually come across the memos in the late 1950s where they coordinate the idea that they're going to do it in the same time slot. And really it's defensive. It's like, okay, if we're all doing the boring stuff at the same Time slot, nobody's going to lose, but they do it in the same time slot. And your book is fantastic to make you realize that the absence of choice is in a sense coercive. Forcing people into this daily education about what's going on in the world and whether they like it or not. I mean, nobody's complaining in the sense of they could easily just turn it off. But the addictiveness as you emphasize the kind of the fact that things are moving on screen and it's people and it's like famous people or famous politicians all of a sudden in your screen makes it irresistible. But the byproduct of that, nobody planned it I think obviously. But the byproduct of that is a relatively well educated and as you emphasize, democratically educated, small D, democratically educated. Like for the first time everybody is in a sense aware of what's going on in politics as opposed to the old days where it's basically the reading class that's involved in politics. A lot of people can read, but not everybody has time to sit down in the journals.

Right. I think it's easy to spin this in too positive a way. So yes, people were more aware, especially the kind of people that were either would have had a hard time with written media just because reading for them wasn't as much fun or something they couldn't do as fast. For them, having the visual medium made a change. And then also those that are not motivated but were kind of caught in this captive audience situation that we're discussing for both of those segments it did make a difference. But let's not exaggerate how much people knew about politics in the 70s and 80s. So it was still superficial. And it actually, and this is something I didn't really, I didn't systematically analyze myself, but it seems fairly self evident that having such a dominant new medium being visual would also encourage politicians to change their style and make it potentially a little more superficial.

Of course, I mean you don't have to call Kennedy superficial, but this is the story of the Kennedy Nixon debates. Like obviously there's a certain we're optimizing or selecting for a different kind of politician in the age of, of broadcast television for sure. But the feature that I want to emphasize, recognizing there's lots to complain about in this period, like the issues that are covered are not as diverse as the issues we would like to have been covered. Poverty is not sufficiently covered, race is forced into the field, not sort of pulled in. Questions of sexual orientation are completely invisible. So there's lots to complain about this is not a golden age. But what's important, I think about it is that the business model does not have, in its view, the idea of polarizing the public. It's not its objective to get people to hate each other or to get people to view the other in a way. I mean, maybe the other is the communists, but the other is not people from West Virginia. And so the business model is really about just telling a story kind of a mainstream down the middle, like Walter Cronkite like story that has an effect, which is that there's a public that is superficially exposed to this, to this kind of information. And the consequence of that is a certain kind of political reality. Whether we want to like it or not. It's different from the one we've got now. Is that fair?

That's fair. And I think there are two important dimensions to it, and they both originate with this observation that you made earlier that the broadcast networks did not put news on for business reasons. It was a sort of a political service. And they had this hunch that if we don't do this, we're going to be regulated in ways that we don't like. So let's do something supposedly good for the public or for the democratic process, and then they'll let us get away with stuff in the other 23 hours. I say 23. It was actually not on for 24 hours, but you get what I'm saying. And so out of this came this sort of like it was called a public interest obligation. But I'm not quite sure we can say it was really an obligation. And I'm not sure it was public interest in a pretty pristine way. But still we had some of that. And then the second point that. That you're talking about now is that the absence of a kind of competitive entertainment motive meant that the news in those days, they weren't after the niche audiences that might actually be pretty dedicated and come back and come back for more than just a half hour. That was not part of what the networks could provide or even thought to provide. And that makes obviously a huge difference as we're seeing now.

Right. So it makes a difference in what they want to talk about. And it also makes a difference in the extent to which what they talk about might be affecting the public. I mean, the question. Nobody has a good way to measure this, I think, but I think the intuition has got to be correct that to the extent you blather on at the extreme right or extreme left, you're producing more people on the extreme right or the extreme extreme left, or at least a more commitment or at least a more sense, deeper salience of that difference that can begin to matter. I mean, this is related to the second book. I want to talk about your book Hooked, but I just want to make sure we're focused on the fact that the consequence of the business model, maybe not intended by anybody, but the consequence of the business model is to produce a certain kind of public. And that public has a pretty important democratic character to it, small d democratic character to it. And some of the most important empirical work you do in the book, it might have been painful, so you want to forget it, but painful to do, but it's really interesting, is demonstrating the way in which it begins to change the character of the issues that are salient and successful in politics as a wider segment of the public is exposed to this information.

Yeah, I'm actually not doing a whole lot with respect to exactly what was on the news. My presumption is there is political content there and I think that's borne out. And there ended up being archives for the national broadcast part of television news. And so, yes, they talk about politics beyond that, which particular issues were emphasized. That's not something I researched. I just was trying to make the connection there is more political content. It catches people in this captive state and they at least learned something about it. That was the main argument for it. There's a pro democratic, small d effect of this arrangement.

But you also, and this is important, I think you also point to the fact that across classes you have different people participating in the context where you see this kind of. When you see this exposure, I mean, you get more middle class, lower middle class engagement in markets where you have this kind of exposure. That was the punch of that empirical work.

Yes. So I used education as the segmenting variable there. And I do find sort of an increase in political knowledge and turnout among the less educated Americans that were covered then by this new medium in the, in the part of the country where they were living. So, yes, I don't know if you want to edit the following out or not, but I'm not sure if this finding would hold up to today's social science standards. It's there. I'm not quite sure how much I believe it. I don't know quite how much I want to make of it.

I'm not going to edit that out because it's important that the strength of your own view about your own work is accurately represented. But that's very helpful. Okay, now I want to begin to shift then more to the present. Because one consequence of this way of understanding this weird period, let's say 1960 to 1985, where the clearest period of broadcast democracy exists, is that when we move out of that period, the interests of broadcasters change. So to the extent you don't have to watch the news, you can watch the Home Shopping Network, or you can watch the History Channel, or you can watch sports, certain people choose not to watch the news anymore, and other people continue to watch the news. But the people who continue to watch the news are a particular kind of person. They're news junkies, which lots of people have demonstrated tend to be more politically polarized. And eventually the news itself learns that the most profitable business model is to play to its niches. So Roger Ailes's famous contribution to the birth of Fox News is that he convinced them that they should be aiming for the conservative segment. That instead of trying to be like the old broadcast news shows, just faster, more engaged, graphic driven news program, reaching everybody, they should be focused on the conservative segment because that would build a loyal base that would be much more valuable ultimately to the advertisers. So that change in the business model is going to have an effect, or did have an effect on the character of what is going to be covered or what is going to be spoken about in the news that's there.

Yeah, I think it's important in telling the story to actually emphasize that the first two decades of cable were not the kind of cable that we have today. So the early channels, where HBO started In the early 70s, ESPN was one of the first channels. And so in that period, so you have at least a decade without actually really news on there. There was one of those kind of. We would maybe call it an aggregator network now, but we could actually see the. I think it was the Chicago local station. You could see that in. Through the cable system in other parts of the country. And there was some news there as well, but There was no 24 hour news channel until CNN started in the early 80s. I think it is 1980. And so in that first period of cable, it's only as a provider of better entertainment. It is not yet a provider of more political coverage for the news junkies who are actually dissatisfied with just a half an hour a day or an hour.

But it certainly is going to have an effect on the audience watching news. Right. To the extent you have 30 options, the number of people would choose news as the option is going to drop dramatically.

Exactly. So in this period you're starting to observe political change that comes about because you're essentially losing this not particularly politically motivated segment of the audience that was just watching because nothing better was on. And so they go elsewhere, they go to cnn, they go to hbo, they go to whatever else they can find. Fairly limited number of options still. But if you put yourself in the mind of somebody who really doesn't want to watch news, probably even the Home Shopping Network will do.

And so do we have a concise or easy way to get a sense of the order of magnitude of change here? I mean, obviously it's shallow news that they're watching in 1970 and 1970. I mean, it's not as. It's not, you know, it's for a relatively limited period of time every day. So I don't want to again, emphasize or exaggerate the significance of the substance, but there's a certain number of people who are watching the news in 1977 from these broadcast stations and in 1997, that number's got to be different in a significant way. And I'm not quizzing you because, again, this is work from many years ago, but I wondered if you, if you just have a sense of what's the scale that we're talking about?

Yeah, this is a question that continues to fascinate me because we don't have precise answers for this. And it's not because I can't remember them. It's because of the way that audiences get measured. So what I'm about to tell you is much more of a back of the envelope kind of calculation than I wish. And the problem is actually relatively intuitive, given what. So Nielsen is a company that measures television audiences, but they do it for the purpose of advertisers. And they sell their intelligence about news audiences to advertisers. And so they provide it in a format that advertisers find useful, which is to ask at any given moment how many people are watching. And what the advertisers want to use this for is to know how many people watch their 30 second commercials. And so we have good data on how many people or at least how many households were watching in the peak period. And that's close to half of all households. It's sort of in the 40%. On a given night, on a given weeknight, about 40% of American households were watching broadcast news. And so you might think, well, 40 is just a large number, but it's not really like everybody's watching. But keep in mind that that's who is watching. The average minute of that time slot actually, or a news program. And so this number actually is higher. If you think about not everybody watches every night of the week and every minute. And so once you allow for the fact that there's people who are kind of tuning in for the first 20 minutes of the news, or maybe some people who actually don't make it home from work in time to watch every night of the week, so then the reach overall, so the number of people who are touched by television news in a given week is much higher than 40%. And so then how far down does it go? I think now, actually Nielsen Cotel is precisely what the number is. They still don't have any interest in doing that because we're not paying them, but it's certainly at least a halving of the peak audience. So this is a pretty big change.

So it's halving at the peak audience. And to the extent people are watching the news, the character of the news they're beginning to watch by 2000 is different. There's a really interesting set of work by people whose name I can't pronounce, but I will link to it here, that's measuring the ideological content of cable news networks beginning in the 2000s and in 2000, they're basically the same. There's no difference between Fox and MSNBC and cnn. But then it begins to veer in a really dramatic way over that decade. And that's consistent with them understanding this is in fact the most profitable way to be doing their business if they're going to be pulling people in against the other competitive things that people might be spending their time on now.

I wish we could compare notes quickly because my understanding was that Fox News was founded for the reason of peeling off a conservative segment of the audience. So they must have distinguished themselves from the main competitor, which was actually cnn, which had been at that point on the air for about 15 years or so. And for CNN in that period before there were other cable news networks, it made perfect sense to essentially do the broadcast model, go for the center, just do it more, just do it 24 hours. Once there's more competitors in this cable news segment, and that starts with Fox News and actually MSNBC at right about the same time, then you have at least an incentive to. To have this differentiation, to either differentiate and say we do politics even more or even better. But that actually doesn't seem like you're going to get a huge audience from that. We already know kind of what the max is on that from CNN's experience, which was they had millions of viewers, but not more than that. We're talking about single digit millions here. Not that many people, not that many Americans in time wanted to watch a whole lot of news. We need to not forget that either. But then this process that you're describing, this sort of segmentation that there is a, certainly there's a more conservative option with Fox and then MSNBC moves to the left. Maybe you can put in a graph or something when that actually starts, it's not there right away. They kind of still have to, it seems to me they still have to make an experience with how is this actually going, how's my business going? And then they realize, oh, I maybe could make a little bit more money if I. If I veered a little bit farther away from the mainstream.

Yeah, I think the story in Fox is quite dramatic because Ailes comes in and his attitude is pretty alien to the rest of the quote, news people who are there because those news people are professional news people who are raised on the culture of news circa Walter Cronkite or later. I mean, they don't want to be boring, but they don't believe it's their job to kind of be the mouthpiece for one place political party over another. And so it must take time for them to kind of shake the culture into a place where they could begin to really execute. And of course, politically there's a lot going on without it being ideological with Clinton in that period of time. Monica Lewisky is not really an ideological question. You're not going to see right wing when you're talking about Monica Lewinsky. You're just going to talk about scandal and that's enough to drive the market for Fox News News. That's obviously what explodes their market share initially and that kind of fights against Clinton. But at least these data suggest that it's really not until the 2000s you begin to see them ideologically segment in a way that is significant and important. Now your work ends just as the Internet is really becoming the next space. I wonder. And nobody's obligated to do the same work for their whole life except me, but. So you haven't, from what I've seen, done a lot for the Internet. But is there a Marcus Prior in the context of the Internet? Is there somebody who sees the problem in the same, sees the issue in the same way that you do, whose work you think is trying to continue the analysis but now emphasizing the Internet as a platform relative to cable?

No, there isn't really. I'll Be honest with you. So the Internet is in the book. The book was. This is work I did in the early 2000s that came. It was published in 2007. The Internet is a dummy variable. And for those of you who don't know what that is, that's a.01. It's like, either you have the Internet or you don't have the Internet. That's not gonna fly anymore. These days that actually worked. In a way, it worked for me then because the Internet was another way, in addition to entertainment, cable channels, to get stuff that's not politics. And you, by design, kind of headed around the clock if you had access to the Internet. And so it helped the book, extending it sort of into the Internet era, if you want, but then beyond that, it doesn't cover it. And then I realized that I can't understand what's going on anymore, actually much, much earlier than now. Things are more complex now than they were when I gave up. It just becomes too complicated. Because with mobile technology and with websites developing from what they were in the Stone Age to sophisticated conveyors of content, with video, with video on demand, with things like YouTube, it's just too much. And I. I didn't know what to do with it anymore. And you get very quickly into this, into the flip side of the logic that helped me write the book in about the 1980s. There was very little choice in the 1980s when you now have so much choice. And you take my argument that people essentially, they do what they want if they can get it, if they can get that content, they consume the content they want. What? Well, that means what we really have to understand is what they want, what their preferences are, and where these preferences come from? So I did do work that extends that argument that asks, well, why are some people politically interested and others aren't? But I did not manage to sort of link it back to, well, here are the dozen different ways that you could get your politics. And which one do you actually pick that I think we still don't have a great understanding on. And I understand that that's just really difficult.

Yeah, I mean, the Internet is too vague a descriptor, because the business model of the Internet in the period you were looking at, it is very different from the business model of the Internet in the period immediately after your book is published, because the whole idea of what has been called surveillance capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff's idea of surveillance capitalism, the technology to be able to surveil what people are doing and what they're in Interested, interested in and plug it into sophisticated enough AIs that can then decide what exactly you should be seeing and which ads you should be served based on where you've gone and what you've said. All of that comes in the late 2000 and then 2010 on is the core of how the Internet's going to make tons of money. And that dynamic is social media's dynamic. But obviously that's long past the time that you were looking at it. And there are a lot of people thinking about the social media dynamic. But I. But again, I don't feel like there's enough thinking about it from exactly your perspective. Like how, how does that dynamic affect how people are going to see the. The world and especially the political world, when the platform profits from producing a certain kind of product, meaning the audience is the product here, and the more the audience, you know, I mean, look at. Even I, as cynical as I am about the way the media plays here, would not have predicted that Covid would trigger a partisan media. I mean, the idea that we politicized mask wearing or vaccines in the middle of, you know, the greatest pandemic we'd seen in a hundred years is really kind of astonishing. Like what, what would explain that? Except here's how we keep people glued in a particular way to our platforms. And both the platforms of cable, which obviously most expressly did that. But the unintended consequence of the engagement model for Facebook and Twitter also did that. And that dynamic seems to me is a dynamic that would be in the school of Marcus Prior, would be in the later chapters of what that work would suggest, but is just as important for understanding how the platform, the technology, drives and changes politics.

I'm not sure I want to go along with that. I think of it as really a very different topic. What made it feasible for me to do that early work was that the bundles that people were getting there were few of them, and they were, with respect to politics, not particularly differentiated. So the broadcast, what you get when you have an antenna that receives a broadcast signal, it was three newscasts that were designed by the same principle. We can assume if you have access to. If you have that antenna, if you have access to the signal and the television set in the house, we can have a sense of how you see politics, because there isn't very many different versions of it. And so that's why putting in the Internet there in the early days as a dummy variable was maybe still halfway informative, because it didn't have all this variation that we see now. And So I don't think this approach doesn't make sense today. I think, I think it's a difference. You're asking about a different.

Yeah, but it depends what you think the approach is. So yes, I mean if the approach is, let's understand how a common source has an effect on a relatively narrow, then yeah, of course we can't do that because we don't have that. But if you think of the approach as understand the relationship between the technical infrastructure and the culture of media and politics that it produces, seems to me perfectly continuous. I mean that's exactly what the insight of broadcast democracy is for that period of time. It's just a different insight for a later period of time. But it's the same components, it's the same analysis, it seems to me.

Yeah, I see what you're saying. Yeah, including so the regulatory regime, the technology. Yeah, yes, all of that together.

Okay, so then what's really interesting about. So the second book I wanted to have a chance to talk about and then I'm eager to see where you think the next chunk of work goes. But the second book is this really fascinating work. The book is titled How Politics Captures People's Interest and you can see how it's a continuation of the earlier work in the sense that once we come to recognize that people aren't going to be coerced into exposure into politics, then it's a question of what is it that drives people to select their interest in politics. You describe the challenges to identify political interest and what leads people into what you call the self governing class. You say the segment of the population that contributes to our collective decisions about how we run our country. There's a kind of rough thirds here. There's a third who's in the self governing class and a third who's close but not really and then a third who's not at all. The book is really incredibly careful effort to try to understand what puts people in each of these places, places and how might they be moved. And maybe the depressing conclusion by the end is there's really not a lot we can do in the short term. It seems to affect that reality so that we have a reality that there's the self governing class that governs us and it turns out not to be majoritarian.

Yes, which on its own I think would be not terribly concerning unless the governing class also differed in, in their preferences, in their political preferences and priorities a whole lot from the rest. And so there's actually somewhat limited evidence on this. They appear to be extreme More extreme. And again, we shouldn't. So if you take the 1/3, 1/3, 1 third, which is again, it's very back of the envelope, this is very, very broad strokes. But if we take, if we're Talking roughly about 25 or 30%, yes, they have a more extreme preference distribution. So there are more people who want relatively conservative things and more people want relatively liberal things, whereas the remaining 70% or so, they're sort of a little bit more centrist, possibly also because they really don't enjoy thinking about this and therefore it's a little bit more vague. Not because they want, they really want centrists, but rather because they haven't quite thought about it. So yes, you do have that. And that is probably the biggest concern with this self governing class in terms of the issues that they care about, as far as I can tell. And the book doesn't really go deeply into this. It's not as big a difference. I want to say one thing as you sort of introduce this book and this concept of the self governing class, it's maybe a slightly grand term that I picked because I wanted to emphasize it's a class that's not defined in the traditional way of defining class, which is based on socioeconomic status and means of production and all of that. This is a class that is defined by motivation. Anybody can be politically interested and nobody has to. And that's an individual choice. And the book doesn't talk about the first part. So it could sound really harsh to say that there is this in political interest terms, the lower class, the non governing class, and we sort of say, well, they could do differently. That's correct when we think about it as a motivation. It may not be correct when we think about it even in terms of participating, because there are socioeconomic, economic differences that would keep people from participating. It is a feature of the political system in the US that is kind of hard to take time off to participate and certainly to donate money and influence people that way. And I just want to be clear about that. That's not what the book's about. It's really about who's motivated enough to show up essentially to participate in one way or another and maybe even just by thinking about it carefully.

Yeah, no, that's fair. And it's significantly. That's what's really interesting about it because it's a way of understanding power that makes it seem closer to individual autonomy. Like I can choose to be a member of this class. I might not win, but I can choose to be a member of this class in a way that I can't easily choose to be a member of the rich class or the white class or whatever other class we might imagine in the traditional class based ne analysis is governing society. So that's incredibly interesting. But the flip side to this is this is a kind of laissez faire ordering of the classes in the sense that there's not a lot done to constitute the self governing class other than just allowing people to opt into it. I mean, there's lots of ways to opt into it that are again, laissez faire in the sense that okay, yeah, I can choose to give money to a political campaign if I have that money to give to a political campaign. And obviously most people, the idea of giving $1,000 to a political campaign is just insane because they don't have $1,000 even to pay for their health care. So in the sense that, okay, leave things as they are, there'll be a bunch of people who want to choose to be a member of this class and have the means to in an effective way and that produces a certain kind of government.

But then that seems to beg the

question, well then what could we do do differently? And a lot of what you're looking at is what could we do differently in a long term sense? How could we educate people? How could we, like what is the consequence of education on this? Or what's the way in which we could engage to produce them differently? But there seems to be a whole class of interventions that are much more direct or much more immediate. For example, you know, I'm sure about the explosion of citizen assemblies across Europe right now, which is a technique for including a representative sample of the public, random representative sample of the public who's brought in and given information and then given a chance to deliberate about it with each other. France just did a big one around climate change, but Belgium's doing it, Berlin is doing it, Ireland did it and continues to do it with really important difficult issues like same sex marriage or abortion. That's a way to constitute the self governing class as opposed to people opting into the self governing class. Right. I mean, how would you, you know, how would you, based on your understanding of the character of people in these, these three buckets, imagine systems like that working or not working? Like what would you be skeptical about if you, you imagined regularizing the idea of a citizen assembly here?

I would still imagine, I don't have any data on this, I haven't looked into this. I would still imagine that those bodies that you're describing in other countries that are convened, they would still mostly be constituted by people who are interested in politics. You're not getting everybody to come to those either. And so I think there is a, there is an argument that at a sort of relatively minimal level, the United States gives opportunities for people who want to participate and at relatively little cost at least. So you have to be able to figure out what your choices are and figure out which choices, which options are in your interest. And then you need to find time to cast a vote. And that's made unnecessarily difficult. And you often have to go multiple times because you first have to register and then you have to cast a vote and then you have to do that again. But in a way that is part of that at least is right how democracy is supposed to work, that it is, it draws on the continued participation of its citizens. And so I'm not sure I'm seeing a huge difference between American democracy and these sort of participatory elements that you're describing that I think exist in the US to some extent. But I take your point that there are other countries that have taken the lead in making that at least more of a focal point. The more interesting question to me would be is that a way in the long or medium run to increase political interest in the first place? If people realized, oh, there are these decision making bodies and I can show up and I can play a role in it, would that over time generate greater interest, maybe sort of even cultivate a sense that it pays off to be politically interested because there are easy ways to get involved? That's an interesting question. What I've learned from this book is that the answer most likely is, well, maybe a little bit of an effect, but it's going to be really hard to find and it's not going to be big.

Yeah, I mean, so if you're committed to the idea that democracy must mean that I'm like moved into a place where I want to regularly participate. Yeah, I would agree with you completely. And I also would agree that we don't have good data to know whether, for example, in the French context where they originally recruit tens of thousands of people who say that they're interested in being selected and then they randomly select them in a representative way. We don't know whether those tens of thousands themselves were just the same self governing class already or whether it had included people from beyond the self governing class. So that's a really important question. But if we did it in the way the juries are done in the United States where you're like notified you're going to be part of a citizen assembly or to make it American, let's call it a citizen jury. You're going to be brought in and we're going to pay you. It's not going to be difficult for you. We'll give you childcare and the like, but you're going to be informed about a particular issue, whether it's like a constitutional amendment or something like that. We're going to give you information, you're going to deliver aid, you're going to spend a couple weekends over six months doing this and at the end of it you're going to come up with something.

What we know from that experience is

that's going to increase significantly the likelihood that they're going to become self governing class people. I mean, we know that from jury studies. When you serve in a jury, you're more likely to move in into what you would call the self governing class. But even if they don't, you might say that that process produces a kind of democracy which is much more representative, much more democratic in the traditional representative democracy sense of the word than the one we have right now. And that doesn't require everybody changing their preference. It's just a regular process of assuring we have the right kind of representative group who's participating.

Yeah, although last time I checked this sense that jury duty is around the corner, that wasn't a happy thing for most people. So I don't know that we want to make politics mandatory in this way.

Well, I mean, jury duty is terrible in a lot of ways. So first of all, it's not really a representative sample of anything because lawyers get to muck it up. Secondly, it's terribly underpaid and third, it can be, you know, really disruptive in a way that it's hard to manage around. So if you're middle class or lower middle class and you're told you've got to go to jury duty, who's going to take care of your kids or who's going to, you know, make sure that you have enough money to survive. So there's a lot of things about the actual jury that's terrible. But we do know that people who do participate in the jury actually then become more civically engaged. They just, they vote more, they give money more. And it's not just juries. Even like deliberating in deliberative polls or things like that are processes that make them into people more interested in being the self governing class. But the question I'm really pushing on is why do we insist that democracy needs a huge self governing class in the sense of people who do it regularly, all the time, as opposed to just make sure we've got a random representative body who's doing it at particular times. So you do it the this week and I do it next week and maybe I'm never going to do it again. But at least that process is also, it seems to me, plausibly democratic in a way that we should celebrate, certainly better than the system we've got right now.

Yeah, you could even argue that the outcome in the end should be, or the normative judgment should be based on whether people had the opportunity to participate and that was an equal and fair opportunity. And then if they exercised their right not to show up, that's just fine. And we shouldn't worry then about 60% turnout levels if the 40% that decide not to show up, they knew they had that chance, they knew the consequences of not showing up and they're fine with it. So in a way, this work on political interest got me to a very bare bones normative view of I'm not a normative theorist. And so I really was just trying to understand if we think that making people interested is one way to increase participation in a really voluntary way, in a not like indoctrinatory way, or in a let's force people to eat their spinach kind of way, what do we learn? How does this develop on its own without actually too much pushing and prodding? And what I found was that

it

seems to be determined really early and then there's very little that happens later, sort of in adult life after early adolescence, there's very little change in political interest. And so there's some data that ask really, really good samples of individuals. And this is not only in the United States. Ask them every year how interested they are over decades. So it's fabulous data because you really feel like you're becoming their friends, you're meeting them every year again and they kind of give you the same answer year in, year out. And so obviously I didn't do any, I didn't try to make them more interested. This is all just me using observational data without any designed interventions. But there are a bunch of things a little bit kind of going to points that you raised that didn't seem to matter very much, including civics education. So this is, these are not random controls, these are not experimental designs. So I want to be a little careful about how to generalize this but for example, there was a change in England in the period of this data collection where they required more civics education. And so you could compare young people who were in school just before and just after this change, and it that it's not quite an experiment, but it's actually a pretty good approximation of one. And that didn't make much of a change at all. So it's still a little unclear to me, other than having educated, sorry, not educated, but politically interested parents and having a keen partisan interest. Those are the two things that work. But you can't randomly assign those either or in a deliberate way. We can't give everybody an interested parent. That's not, I think, public policy.

Right. But there's another dimension which again, I think this is like what we learn from citizen assemblies or even juries, which is the efficaciousness of the engagement. So in America, if you engage in politics and then you sit back and you think like, does this produce certain political outcomes? There's a very low correlation between people being elected and things happening. As opposed to many of the democracies in Europe where parties are defined by what they're going to do and they get elected and they do a bunch of things. And you measure parties based on how much you did, based on what you predicted, what you promised. In America, that seems kind of crazy given the separation of powers between the Congress and the president. It's not fair to hold the Congress responsible if it has a different president and so forth.

But the point is, the idea of

engaging feels like it's not likely to actually produce a bunch of results that, that it's gonna matter much, as opposed to a jury or a properly constituted citizen assembly where there's like a question and you will address that question. And at the end of it, something's gonna happen. I mean, you know, juries in America, somebody could be executed based on your deliberation, or $40 billion could be taken from Exxon and given to environmentalists based on your deliberation. That feels like real power that you're exercising and acting on. That typically not what politics is about. If you think about the variables that are conceptually modifiable, you looked at a whole bunch that are in some sense affecting what's inside the supply side of political motivation. But there's a whole bunch of demand side of political motivation that we should also consider. And how could we architect the political democracy so that the demand side polls are much more effective or stronger than they are right now? That seems to me like an open question. It would be wonderful to find a way to answer.

I agree with where you end that this is a very important and open question. I don't think I would be too optimistic that the effects would be large in terms of getting additional people to develop this sort of motivation to participate again and again. The other note of caution I think would be if you think about what happened in Chile with their constitutional reform. Right.

Terrible.

It was actually as far as I read this in the paper, so I'm not an expert on this, but I think it was actually a body that was constituted in a fairly inclusive democratic way that wrote this proposal and then was put to a referendum and voted down because the. So it's not necessarily a case that the more inclusive decision making bodies end up determining policy.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean we can each deploy anecdotes here because Ireland is the counterexample. Iceland is an interesting intermediate example where an incredibly inclusive process produced a constitution that 2/3 of the public voted, should be told the parliament should be the basis of a new constitution, and then parliament just ignored it. Like sorry, thanks very much for your input but we have other things we want to do. So yeah, there's a range of efficaciousness results. But I think my only point is two points really about hooked. Number one, we could think about how to be more creative about those. And number two, I'm not sure I'm convinced it wouldn't be a much better democracy if people could look at the product of those and be inspired by them. Even if it doesn't produce 50% of the public being in the self interested class. And that especially seems to be significant when you look at Pew's done this amazing study since the late 90s where they've asked Americans what is your confidence in Americans political judgment? And in the late 90s/2 of Americans said they were confident in Americans political judgment. And those numbers are now inverted. Two thirds say they're not confident in America's political political judgment. And so to the extent you begin, you see a public that's lost faith in our own ability to govern ourselves. Not necessarily because they're less confident, but they see the crazies. And so they're like, oh my gosh, they're Americans too. Why should we be confident in this process? It's really important, it seems to me to think about what could we do

to begin to build up a sense

that the people actually can do this. Well, if they're able to do it in the right kind of, of context.

I agree.

Great so in one minute, tell me a little bit about where you're going next, because that's certainly going to be the next interesting thing to think about,

even if it has nothing to do with the media.

Okay, yeah.

All right. Well, yeah, I really have shifted gears lately and I'm interested in the role of time in people's thinking about political outcomes. So I still study ordinary people. I don't, I don't study elites or politicians. And I'm interested in trying to understand whether voters, ordinary folks, are willing to pay to some extent a cost earlier in order to get a bigger benefit later. And so the canonical example in my mind right now is actually addressing climate change, which requires some short term costs, be it making energy prices more slightly higher because a carbon tax would have that effect. Or you have to internalize some of the damage that energy consumption does, certainly most forms of energy. And the benefit of that policy would be to avoid, as far as we know, pretty catastrophic damage several decades in the future. So you have a. Classical economists have studied this for a long time. Psychologists have. Your listeners may know the marshmallow test, where it's like one, you can have one marshmallow that's sitting in front of you, or you can wait 15 minutes and you get two marshmallows. And they did this with kids. And it's fascinating research. And so essentially I'm trying to understand whether the American public would be up for that kind of arrangement where you have to chip in a little bit now in order to avoid something really bad later. Or in other words, to get this benefit of avoiding the bad thing later.

Are you comparing it with the already massive amount of research that just tries to calculate the internal discount rate of people for economic reasons? So we're already not terribly rational about that just economically. So is the idea to ask whether it's worse with politics or just as good with politics or maybe better with politics?

Yeah, that's certainly one part of it. And the first data I've collected with my team actually suggests that people might be a little bit more patient, a little bit more willing to wait for the good thing for a little longer than they are in these studies that you're referencing that are done with money or with health outcomes. That's very interesting. I don't quite know what actually surprised me a little bit. That would be good news. And I need to push it a little harder to see whether it's real.

Wow.

Okay.

Well, I'm really grateful that you took the time to talk about your incredibly important work and I'm grateful for the work and and I look forward to seeing the next chapter if especially if it's a hopeful chapter in the story

of Americans that can never be our goal. But great talking to you. Thank you for those questions.

So this has been the 11th episode of season five of the podcast Another Way. These podcasts are produced by Equal Citizens in the abstract sense, but in the practical sense by Josh Elstrow of Elstro Productions. You can find out more about Equal Citizens at Equal Citizens Us. At that site you can give us your thoughts and feedback. We love the feedback, especially the ideas. And of course we're also grateful for the support. Though everything I do for Equal Citizens is pro bono, we have a team that needs to earn a living to

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Sa.