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© Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts 2018
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Benkler, Yochai, author. | Faris, Robert, author. | Roberts, Hal (Harold) author.
Title: Network propaganda : manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in American politics / Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, Hal Roberts.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018020121 | ISBN 9780190923624 ((hardback) : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190923631 ((pbk.) : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Presidents—United States—Election—2016. | Communication in politics—United States. | Political campaigns—United States. | Mass media—Political aspects—United States. | Social media—Political aspects—United States. | Internet in political campaigns—United States. | Disinformation—United States—History— 21st century. | Radicalism—United States. | Political culture—United States. | United States— Politics and government—2009–2017. | United States—Politics and government—2017–
Classification: LCC JK526 2016 .B46 2018 | DDC 324.973/0932—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020121
Paperback printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
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7.
Epistemic Crisis
As a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power
Walter Lippmann
, Public Opinion, 1922
On Sunday, December 4, 2016, a young man carrying an assault rifle walked into Comet Pizza in Northwest Washington, D.C., to investigate reports that Hillary Clinton and her campaign chief were running a pedophilia ring from the basement of the pizza parlor.1 A week later, a YouGov poll found that, however whacky the story, the young man was not alone in believing it; nearly half of Trump voters polled “gave some credence” to the rumors.2
Two weeks earlier, BuzzFeed’s Craig Silverman had published an article that launched the term “fake news.”3 Silverman’s article examined engagements with news stories on Facebook through shares, reactions, and comments and argued that the best-performing stories produced by political clickbait sites masquerading as actual news sites, often located offshore, generated more Facebook engagements than the top stories of legitimate news sites. On January 6, 2017, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report that blamed Russia of running a disinformation campaign aimed to influence the U.S. election with the aim of helping Donald Trump get elected.4
The steady flow of stories reinforced a perception that the 2016 election had involved an unusual degree of misleading information flowing in the American media ecosystem. From claims during the primary that Jeb Bush had “close Nazi ties,”5 through claims during the general election that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was 20 percent funded by the Saudi royal family,6 the campaign was littered with misleading stories, often from sources that masked their identity or affiliation. Moreover, just as with the alleged pedophilia case,
Network Propaganda. Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts.
© Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts 2018. Published 2018 by Oxford University Press.
many of the stories seemed designed to elicit fear and disgust, as the titles of Breitbart’s most widely shared stories on immigration exhibit: “Six Diseases Return to US as Migration Advocates Celebrate World Refugee Day,” and “More than 347,000 Convicted Criminal Immigrants At Large in U.S.”7
The 2016 U.S. presidential election won by Donald Trump followed closely on the heels of the equally shocking success of the Leave campaign in Britain’s vote to exit the European Union. Both seemed to mark an epistemic crisis in contemporary democratic societies. As 2016 was drawing to a close, many in the United States and the European Union saw these events as signals that democracy itself was in crisis, buckling under the pressure of technological processes that had overwhelmed our collective capacity to tell truth from falsehood and reason from its absence. Brexit and the rise of far-right parties in countries such as France, Hungary, Austria, and even Sweden signaled a deep crisis in the pluralist, cosmopolitan, democratic project that was at the heart of the project of Europe. The victory of Donald Trump marked a triumph of a radical populist right-wing politics that had long simmered on the margins of the American right and the Republican Party: from the segregationist third-party candidacy of George Wallace in 1968, through Pat Buchanan’s primary runs in 1992 and 1996, to the rise of the Tea Party after 2008. These remarkable political victories for what were once marginal ideologies appeared at the same time that democracies around the world, from the Philippines, through India, to Turkey saw shifts from more liberal democratic forms to a new model of illiberal, and in some cases authoritarian, majoritarianism.
Something fundamental was happening to threaten democracy, and our collective eye fell on the novel and rapidly changing—technology. Technological processes beyond the control of any person or country— the convergence of social media, algorithmic news curation, bots, artificial intelligence, and big data analysis—were creating echo chambers that reinforced our biases, were removing indicia of trustworthiness, and were generally overwhelming our capacity to make sense of the world, and with it our capacity to govern ourselves as reasonable democracies.
The first year of the Trump presidency brought no relief. The president himself adopted the term “fake news” to describe all news that was critical or embarrassing. By the end of his first year in office, the president was handing out “Fake News Awards” to his critics, and four in ten Republicans responded that they “considered accurate news stories that cast a politician or political group in a negative light to be fake news.”8 While trust in news media declined in a broad range of countries, the patterns of trust and mistrust
differed widely across different countries. Together with Hungary and Israel, two other democracies with powerful right-wing parties, the United States was an outlier: distrust was high on average but markedly higher for one party affiliation.9
Echo chambers ringing with false news make democracies ungovernable. We can imagine a pluralist democracy in which populations contested elections and won or lost based on their votes, without ever sharing a viewpoint on what is going on in the world. Partisan press hurling accusations at the other party was, after all, the norm in nineteenth- century America. One party might believe that we are under attack from zombies and vote to counter this existential menace, while another party might believe that we are threatened by a long-term decline in productivity growth and vote to focus on that problem. Whoever won would design policies to counter what they saw as the major policy question of our times. The role of pluralist democracy would be to govern the rules of orderly transition from the zombie slayers to the productivity wonks and back with the ebb and flow of electoral success.
In practice, given the intensity of the “zombie-threat” party’s sense of impending doom, such a pluralist democracy would be deeply unstable. Some shared means of defining what facts or beliefs are off the wall and what are plausibly open to reasoned debate is necessary to maintain a democracy. The twentieth century in particular saw the development of a range of institutional and cultural practices designed to create a shared order out of the increasingly complex and interconnected world in which citizens were forced to address a world beyond their local communities, values, and beliefs. The medical profession, for example, rapidly and fundamentally transformed itself after the discovery of germ theory in 1876. Between 1900 and 1910, the American Medical Association grew from 8,400 to 70,000 members. This growth represented the transition from dubiously effective local medical practices to a nationally organized profession acting as an institutional gatekeeper for scientifically-based practices. The same pattern can be found in the establishment of other truth-seeking professions during the early twentieth century, including education, law, and academia. All of these professions organized themselves into their modern national, institutional forms in roughly the first 20 years of the twentieth century. Those years saw the emergence of, among others, the American Bar Association; the National Education Association; and the American Historical, American Economic, American Statistical, and American Political Science Associations.10
During this same critical period, journalism experienced its own transformation, into an institutionalized profession that adopted practices we
would recognize as modern objective journalism. By 1912 Columbia University’s journalism school had been founded, which helped to institutionalize through professional training a set of practices that had developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that we now associate with objective journalism—detachment, nonpartisanship, the inverted pyramid writing style, facticity, and balance. Before this development, none of these attributes were broadly present in journalism.11 These shifts in the professions in general, and in journalism in particular, were in turn part of the broad shift associated with modernism, employing rational planning, expertise, and objective evidence in both private sector management and public administration.
Since the end of World War II this trend toward institutionalized professions for truth seeking has accelerated. Government statistics agencies; science and academic investigations; law and the legal profession; and journalism developed increasingly rationalized and formalized solutions to the problem of how societies made up of diverse populations with diverse and conflicting political views can nonetheless form a shared sense of what is going on in the world.12 As the quip usually attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” Politics was always centrally about identity and belonging and meaning, but in the decades following World War II, democracy operated within constraints with regard to a shared set of institutional statements about reality. Zombie invasions were out.
Zombie invasions are definitely back in. The year following the 2016 U.S. presidential election saw publication of reports13 and academic papers14 seeking to categorize the confusion, defining misinformation (the unintentional spread of false beliefs) and disinformation and propaganda (the intentional manipulation of beliefs), identifying their sources,15 and studying the dynamics by which they spread.16 This flurry of work exhibited a broad sense that as a public we have lost our capacity to agree on shared modes of validation as to what is going on and what is just plain whacky. The perceived threats to our very capacity to tell truth from convenient political fiction, if true, strike at the very foundations of democratic society. But it is important to recognize that for all the anxiety, not to say panic, about disinformation through social media, we do not yet have anything approaching a scientific consensus on what exactly happened, who were the primary sources of disinformation, what were its primary vectors or channels, and how it affected the outcome of the election. In this book we try to advance that diagnosis
by applying a wide range of tools to very large data sets and reviewing the literature that developed over the first year after the election.
The critical thing to understand as you read this book is that the epochal change reflected by the 2016 election and the first year of the Trump presidency was not that Republicans beat Democrats despite having a demonstrably less qualified candidate. The critical change was that in 2016 the party of Ronald Reagan and the two presidents Bush was defeated by the party of Donald Trump, Breitbart, and billionaire Robert Mercer. As our data show, in 2017 Fox News joined the victors in launching sustained attacks on core pillars of the Party of Reagan—free trade and a relatively open immigration policy, and, most directly, the national security establishment and law enforcement when these threatened President Trump himself. Our work helps to explain how a media ecosystem that initially helped the GOP gain and retain power ultimately spun out of control. From the nomination of Roy Moore as Republican candidate for the Alabama special Senate election over the objections of Republican Party leadership to Republican congressman Francis Rooney’s call to “purge the FBI,” and from the retirement of Paul Ryan from his position as Speaker of the House to evangelical leader Franklin Graham’s shrug at Donald Trump’s marital infidelities, a range of apparently incongruous political stories can be understood as elements of this basic conflict between Trumpism and Reaganism over control of the Republican Party. In the 2016 election, once the Trump Party took over the Republican Party, many Republicans chose to support the party that had long anchored their political identity, even if they did not love the candidate at the top of the ticket. Indeed, it is likely that the vehemence of the attacks on Hillary Clinton that we document in Chapters 3, 4, 6, and 7 were intended precisely to reduce that dissonance, and to make that bitter medicine go down more easily. Our observations, and the propaganda feedback loop we identify in Chapters 2 and 3 help explain both how such a radicalization could have succeeded within the Republican Party, and how that transformation could achieve an electoral victory in a two-party system that should, according to the standard median voter models favored in political science, have led the party rebels to electoral defeat and swept them into the dustbin of history. We leave until Part Three our historical explanation for how and when that propaganda feedback loop established itself in the right wing of American politics.
The bulk of this book comprises detailed analyses of large data sets, case studies of the emergence of broad frames and particular narratives, and synthesis with the work of others who have tried to make sense of what
happened at both abstract and concrete levels. Our goal is to understand which actors were responsible for this transformation of the American public sphere, and how this new public sphere operated through those actors so as to make it so vulnerable to disinformation, propaganda, and just sheer bullshit. Our heavy focus on data is complemented by an effort to make sense of what we see today in historical context, both political and cultural.
We take a political economy view of technology, suggesting that the fundamental mistake of “the internet polarizes” narrative is that it adopts too naïve a view of how technology works and understates the degree to which institutions, culture, and politics shape technological adoption and diffusion patterns. These, we think, were the prime movers of the architecture of American political media, and it is this finding that makes this book, for all its detailed focus on American politics and media, a useful guide for other countries as well. We argue that it would simply be a mistake for countries such as, say, Germany, to look at elections in the United States or the United Kingdom, see the concerns over online information pollution or propaganda, and conclude that the technology, which they too use, is the source of disruption. Different political systems, coming from different historical trajectories and institutional traditions, will likely exhibit different effects of the same basic technological affordances. So it was with mass circulation presses, movies, radio, and television, and so it is with the internet and social media. Each country’s institutions, media ecosystems, and political culture will interact to influence the relative significance of the internet’s democratizing affordances relative to its authoritarian and nihilistic affordances. What our analysis of the American system offers others is a method, an approach to observing empirically what in fact is happening in a country’s political media ecosystem, and a framework for understanding why the particular new technological affordances may develop differently in one country than another.
Dramatis Personae
Media and academic discussions of the post-truth moment have identified a set of actors and technological drivers as the prime suspects in causing the present state of information disorder, such as fake news purveyors, Russians, and so forth. These discussions have also employed a broad range of definitions of the problem. Before turning to our analysis, we offer, first, the list of actors who have been described as potentially responsible for disrupting American political communications, and second, precise definitions of the terms we will
use in describing the sources and forms of misperceptions that spread through the American media ecosystem.
“Fake News” Entrepreneurs/Political Clickbait Fabricators.—Before Donald Trump appropriated the term, the “fake news” phrase took off in the wake of Craig Silverman’s reporting on BuzzFeed about the success of fake election news stories.17 This reporting built on Silverman’s earlier story describing over 100 pro-Trump websites run from a single town in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The Macedonian teenagers responsible had little interest in American politics but had found that by imitating actual news sites, and pushing outlandish hyperpartisan stories, they got lots of Facebook engagements from Trump supporters, which translated into very real advertising dollars.18 For a while, these websites received a lot of media attention.19 Their operators had figured out how to leverage a core affordance of Facebook—its ability not only to connect publishers with audiences, but also to generate revenues and distribute them to publishers able to elicit “engagements” on the platform. The social media entrepreneurs who created these sites were the perfect target of anxiety for traditional media: they diverted attention and advertising dollars from “legitimate” media, they manipulated Facebook’s algorithm, they were mostly foreign in these stories, and they were purely in it for the money. Here, we call them “clickbait fabricators,” and primarily address their role in Chapter 9. By “clickbait” we mean media items designed to trigger an affective response from a user that leads them to click on the item—be it an image, a video, or a headline—because the click itself generates revenue for the clickbait purveyor. While this can easily apply to many news headlines and much of online advertising, “clickbait fabricators” are individuals or firms whose product is in effect purely the clickbait item, rather than any meaningful underlying news or product. We use the “fake news” moniker to introduce them here because it was used early on to identify this particular threat of pollution from political clickbait fabricators. Elsewhere, we avoid the term itself because it is too vague as a category of analysis and its meaning quickly eroded soon after it was first introduced.
Russian Hackers, Bots, and Sockpuppets—Claims of Russian intervention in the U.S. election surfaced immediately after the hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) email server, in June 2016.20 By the end of the year, it had become an official assessment of the U.S. intelligence community.21 Over the course of 2017 and 2018 this set of concerns has been the most politically important, not least because of the criminal investigation
into alleged connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. Reports and documentation released by congressional committees shone particular attention on Russian propaganda use of Facebook advertising. Facebook itself, and later Twitter, issued reports confirming that they had identified instances of Russian interference. A range of independent academic and nonprofit reports confirmed the effort. The types of interventions described included the email hacks themselves—primarily the DNC and John Podesta emails—which provided grist for the partisan mill in the months before the election; and the use on Facebook and Twitter of automated accounts (“bots”), and “fake” accounts masquerading as something other than Russian agents (“sockpuppets”), which incited people on both the right and the left to protest, and pushed and gave particular prominence to anti- Clinton and pro-Trump messages. We dedicate Chapter 8 to assessing the Russian threat in detail.
The Facebook News Feed algorithm and Online Echo Chambers—A third major suspect was centered on the Facebook News Feed algorithm, although it extended to other social media and the internet more generally as well. To some extent, this was simply a reprise of the nearly 20-year-old concern that personalization of news, “the Daily Me,” would drive us into “echo chambers” or “filter bubbles.” To some extent it reflected a wave of newer literature concerned in general with algorithmic governance, or the replacement of human, legible, and accountable judgments with “black box” algorithms.22 In particular it reflected the application of this literature to politics in the wake of a series of experiments published by Facebook research teams on the News Feed algorithm’s ability to affect attitudes and bring out the vote.23 It was this algorithm that rewarded the clickbait sites circulating the hyperpartisan bullshit. It was this algorithm that reinforced patterns of sharing in tightly clustered communities that supported the relative insularity of user communities. As a result, many of the most visible reform efforts in 2017 and 2018 were focused on revisions of the Facebook News Feed algorithm to constrain the dissemination of political clickbait and Russian propaganda. As with the case of the Russians, concern over the Facebook News Feed algorithm in particular, and over algorithmic shaping of reading and viewing habits in general, is legitimate and serious. In our observations, Facebook appears to be a more polluted information environment than Twitter or the open web. In Chapters 2, 3, and 9, we show that sites that are particularly prominent on Facebook but not on Twitter or the open web tend to be more prone to false content and hyperpartisan bullshit, on both sides of the political divide,
although there is more than enough pollution on these other media as well. But, we will explain why manipulations of Facebook’s platform, like Russian intervention, were nonetheless not the primary driver of disinformation and confusion.
Fake news entrepreneurs, Russians, the Facebook algorithm, and online echo chambers provide normatively unproblematic, nonpartisan explanations to the current epistemic crisis. For all of these actors, the strong emphasis on technology suggests a novel challenge that our normal systems do not know how to handle but that can be addressed in a nonpartisan manner. Moreover, focusing on “fake news” from foreign sources and on Russian efforts to intervene places the blame onto foreigners with no legitimate stake in our democracy. Both liberal political theory and professional journalism consistently seek neutral justifications for democratic institutions, so visibly nonpartisan explanations such as these have enormous attraction. The rest of the actors, described below, lack this nonpartisan characteristic.
Cambridge Analytica—Another commonly blamed actor is the Trump campaign’s use of Cambridge Analytica to manipulate behavior using artificial intelligence (AI)-driven social media advertising. The extent to which Cambridge Analytica, a U.K.-based data analytics political consultancy that had used tens of millions of Facebook profiles to develop techniques for manipulating voters, in fact used psychographic data and manipulated targets is debatable. What is clear is that the social media companies, Facebook in particular, helped the Trump campaign, as they would any paying customer, to use their deep data and behavioral insights to target advertising.24 It is less clear, however, that there is anything wrong, from the perspective of American norms of electoral politics, with this campaign usage of cuttingedge, data-driven behavioral marketing. In 2012, when the Obama campaign used then-state-of-the-art data-driven targeting, post-campaign analyses feted the campaign geeks.25 If there is a problem here, it is part of a much broader and deeper critique of behavioral marketing more generally, and how it undermines consumer and citizen sovereignty. We outline some of the events and the broader concerns in Chapter 9, explain why the threat is likely more remote than news coverage of Cambridge Analytica implied, and suggest how some of the proposed solutions may, or may not, help with this long-term threat in Chapter 13.
White Supremacist and Alt-Right Trolls—One of the most troubling aspects of the 2016 election and the politics of 2017 was the rise of white supremacists
in American politics. As Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis carefully documented, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other long-standing denizens of the American far-right found fellow travelers in young, netnative subcultures on Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan, graduates of the Gamergate controversy, and other online trolls, to undertake a meme war.26 The core argument is that these decentralized, politically mobilized, and meme-savvy activists deployed a set of disinformation memes and framings that altered the election. Serious anthropological and computational work, in addition to the work of Marwick and Lewis, supports the argument that these meme campaigns had significant impact on the campaign.27 Our own work detailed in the following chapters, however, aligns with that of researchers, including Whitney Phillips, Jessica Breyer, and Gabriella Coleman,28 who were more skeptical of the central role assigned to “alt-right” online activists by some. In Chapter 4 we document how isolated the white supremacist sites were from the overall Islamophobic framing of immigration that typified rightwing media. In Chapter 7 we document how these activists intersected with Russian propagandists to propel stories up the propaganda pipeline, but also suggest that these events were, in the scheme of things, of secondary importance.
The impact of the white supremacists matters a great deal, because fear over their impact has created nettlesome problems for Americans concerned with democracy and the First Amendment; and for Europeans concerned with farright propaganda on one hand, and the fear of American companies imposing their speech standards on Europeans on the other hand. Far-right activist meme wars undoubtedly represent core political speech, by a politically mobilized minority. It is hard to think of a clearer case for First Amendment protection. But many of the techniques involved in these campaigns involve releasing embarrassing documents, hateful drowning-out of opponents, and other substantial personal offenses. The substantive abhorrence of explicitly racist and misogynistic views and the genuine concern with the effects of the intimidation and silencing campaigns have increased calls for online censorship by privately owned platforms. The most visible results of these calls were the decisions by GoDaddy, Google, and Cloudflare to deny services to the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi site, in the wake of the white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the middle of 2017. In Europe explicitly Nazi content is an easier constitutional case, but questions of what counts as illegal and worthy of removal will remain central. A German law called the ‘NetzDG’ law, effectively enforced since January 2018, became the most aggressive effort by a liberal democracy to require online platforms to
police their systems. Aimed at hate speech in particular, the law imposed very large fines on major online platforms if they failed to remove speech that violates a broad set of German criminal prohibitions, some of which applied to much broader and vaguer categories than obvious hate speech. We offer a more detailed description of this law and its limitations in Chapter 13. That law will undoubtedly inform other countries in Europe and elsewhere as they decide to create their own versions of laws that push private platforms to impose what some would call “editorial control” and others “private censorship.” Our data support the more reticent approach, based on the scarcity of evidence of transformational impact of these extremists on the U.S. media ecosystem. Throughout our case studies we observe instances of alt-right memes trickling through the media ecosystem, but to do so they rely overwhelmingly on transmission by the more prominent nodes in the rightwing media network. These major right-wing outlets, in turn, are adept at producing their own conspiracy theories and defamation campaigns, and do not depend on decentralized networks of Redditors to write their materials. Given the secondary and dependent role that these sites have on the shape of the American media ecosystem, the gains from silencing the more insulated far-right forums may be less significant than would justify expansion of the powers of private censorship by already powerful online platforms in relatively concentrated markets.
Right-Wing Media Ecosystem—Our own contribution to debates about the 2016 election was to shine a light on the right-wing media ecosystem itself as the primary culprit in sowing confusion and distrust in the broader American media ecosystem. In the first two parts of this book we continue that work by documenting how the right-wing media ecosystem differs categorically from the rest of the media environment and how much more susceptible it has been to disinformation, lies, and half-truths. In short, we find that the influence in the right-wing media ecosystem, whether judged by hyperlinks, Twitter sharing, or Facebook sharing, is both highly skewed to the far right and highly insulated from other segments of the network, from center-right (which is nearly nonexistent) through the far left. We did not come to this work looking for a partisan-skewed explanation. As we began to analyze the millions of online stories, tweets, and Facebook sharing data points, the pattern that emerged was clear. Our own earlier work, which analyzed specific campaigns around intellectual property law and found that right and left online media collaborated, made us skeptical of our initial observations, but these proved highly resilient to a wide range of specifications and robustness
checks. Something very different was happening in right-wing media than in centrist, center-left, and left-wing media.
We will make the argument throughout this book that the behavior of the right-wing media ecosystem represents a radicalization of roughly a third of the American media system. We use the term “radicalization” advisedly in two senses. First, to speak of “polarization” is to assume symmetry. No fact emerges more clearly from our analysis of how four million political stories were linked, tweeted, and shared over a three-year period than that there is no symmetry in the architecture and dynamics of communications within the right-wing media ecosystem and outside of it. Second, throughout this period we have observed repeated public humiliation and vicious disinformation campaigns mounted by the leading sites in this sphere against individuals who were the core pillars of Republican identity a mere decade earlier. At the beginning of this period, Jeb Bush, the son and brother of the two most recent Republican presidents, was besmirched as having “close Nazi ties” on Infowars. By November 2017 life-long Republicans who had been appointed to leading law enforcement positions by President George W. Bush found themselves under sustained, weeks-long disinformation campaigns aimed to impugn their integrity and undermine their professional independence. When a solidly conservative party is taken over by its most extreme wing in a campaign that includes attacks that are no less vicious when aimed at that conservative party’s mainstream pillars than they are at the opposition party, we think “radicalization” is an objectively appropriate term. This radicalization was driven by a group of extreme sites including Breitbart, Infowars, Truthfeed, Zero Hedge, and the Gateway Pundit, none of which claim to follow the norms or processes of professional journalistic objectivity. As we will see time and again, both in our overall analysis of the architecture and in our detailed case studies, even core right-wing sites that do claim to follow journalistic norms, Fox News and the Daily Caller, do not in fact do so, and therefore fail to act as a truth-telling brake on these radical sites. Indeed, repeatedly we found Fox News accrediting and amplifying the excesses of the radical sites. As the case studies in Chapter 5 document, over the course of 2017 Fox News had become the propaganda arm of the White House in all but name. This pattern is not mirrored on the left wing. First, while we do find fringe sites on the left that mirror the radical sites, these simply do not have the kind of visibility and prominence on the left as they do on the right. Second, the most visible sites on the left, like Huffington Post, are at their worst mirrors of Fox News, not of the Gateway Pundit or Zero Hedge. And third, all these sites on the left are tightly integrated
with traditional mainstream media sites like the New York Times and the Washington Post, and most, though not all, of these sites operate either directly under long-standing journalistic norms or are indirectly sensitive to criticism based on reporting that adheres to such norms. As we show in Chapter 3, there is ample supply of and demand for false hyperpartisan narratives on the left. The difference is that the audience and hyperpartisan commercial clickbait fabricators oriented toward the left form part of a single media ecosystem with center, center-left, and left-wing sites that are committed to journalistic truth-seeking norms. Those norm- constrained sites, both mainstream and net-native, serve as a consistent check on dissemination and validation of the most extreme stories when they do emerge on the left, and have no parallels in the levels of visibility or trust that can perform the same function on the right.
We do not expect our findings to persuade anyone who is already committed to the right-wing media ecosystem. The maps we draw in Chapter 2 could be interpreted differently. They could be viewed as a media system overwhelmed by liberal bias and opposed only by a tightly-clustered set of right-wing sites courageously telling the truth in the teeth of what Sean Hannity calls the “corrupt, lying media,” rather than our interpretation of a radicalized right set apart from a media system anchored in century-old norms of professional journalism. We take up this issue in Chapter 3 where we compare left and right news sites for their patterns of reporting and correction and where we describe our explicit efforts to find conspiracy theories that made it out of the margins of the left to the center of mainstream media. We dedicate Chapter 6 to exploring the modes of failure of mainstream media in their election coverage, and examine the recipients of the Trump Fake News Awards and how they responded to having made the significant errors that won them that honor. We think that fundamentally, anyone who insists on claiming that we cannot draw conclusions about which side is biased, and which side gravitates more closely to the truth, must explain how the media sources most trusted by consistently conservative survey respondents—Fox News, Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck—are the equivalent of the sites that occupy the same positions among consistently liberal respondents: NPR, PBS, the BBC, and the New York Times. 29
The central role of the radicalized right in creating the current crisis of disinformation and misinformation creates a significant challenge for policy recommendations and is not easy to reconcile with democratic theory. It seems too partisan a perspective to convert into a general, nonpartisan policy recommendation or neutral argument about what democracy requires.
