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Network Propaganda: Manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in American politics
No one, today, can be simultaneously honest, informed, and successful in the Republican Party.
— William Rusher, 1960, on Barry Goldwater’s primary loss to Richard Nixon
No one, today, can be simultaneously honest, informed, and successful in the Republican Party.
— William Rusher, 1960, on Barry Goldwater’s primary loss to Richard Nixon
How do we know the news we are consuming is telling us the truth and not what they want us to hear? In their 2018 book, Network Propaganda, Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts (all staff of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University) challenge the notion that bias in mass media coverage of national politics in the United States is spread evenly across the political spectrum.
The authors’ findings clearly indicate that there are two media ecosystems – the right and “the rest” – and that those ecosystems operate based on two very different standards of journalistic integrity – the propaganda feedback loop and the reality check dynamic. Benkler, Faris, and Roberts support these conclusions with an extensive series of analyses using Media Cloud, the open-source, media analysis platform they developed with partners at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology.
Throughout the book, the authors present network maps and case studies of the propaganda feedback loop at work on the right. They name the major influencers, the mechanics and reasoning, and some examples of alternative facts that the propaganda feedback loop created during the 2016 presidential election and the first year of the Trump presidency. The authors also present the origins of our collective epistemic crisis, tracing the current iteration that has captured the right back to the repeal of the Federal Communication Commission’s Fairness Doctrine in 1987. [1]
The chapter that most efficiently demonstrates the mechanisms of the propaganda feedback loop, titled “The Fox Diet,” walks through how Fox News used its platform to undercut the facts of the Mueller investigation. The investigation found that Russia intervened in the U.S. election on behalf of former President Donald Trump, and that the Trump campaign was presented with multiple opportunities to coordinate with the Russians (Ward 2019). The most damning example of how media across the political spectrum, but especially right-wing media, shapes an alternative reality for conservatives that is the Uranium One conspiracy theory. The hollow core of the Uranium One conspiracy theory is that, while she served as Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton oversaw the sale of 20% of the United States’ uranium supply to the Russians. The authors describe how, in 2015, Breitbart used a New York Times story (Becker & McIntire, 2015) to legitimize and validate the Uranium One conspiracy theory. Fox then built on the Breitbart narrative base, resurrecting the more than two-year-old story to bring the “real Russian scandal” as Sean Hannity called it back to life to discredit President Trump’s investigators.
Much of the discussion of the current state of information disorder has blamed distortions of reality on Russian interference, alt-right hackers, and the structural features of social media advertising that make Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter excellent tools for manipulation. After the 2016 election, countless amounts of ink and airtime were spent discussing the evidence of Russian misinformation campaigns and attempts at election manipulation presented in the Mueller report. The Cambridge Analytica scandal similarly drew a great deal of media attention and demonstrated the potential for individual-level political manipulation presented by psychographically microtargeted social media ads (Harbath & Fernekes 2023). The end result of these discussions was significant scapegoating of technology and foreign interlopers in the American epistemic crisis.
Network Propaganda disagrees with the importance of these sources of information distortion. The book draws countless network maps showing how the right-wing media ecosystem operates in relative isolation. It illuminates how that isolation allows lies and half-truths to bubble up until they are widely held beliefs among voters on the right. Fundamentally, most Americans across the political spectrum still get their news from television, talk radio, and reading major news outlets. They do not primarily get their news from social media. The difference between the media ecosystems of the right and “the rest” is that conservative news consumers listen to and trust only a small list of sources, headlined by Fox News, Fox Business, and Fox radio. In contrast, “the rest” spread their trust more broadly, benefiting from a marketplace awash with competition and fact-checking that provides a widely validated sense of current events. In the propaganda feedback loop, conservatives place their trust in the media ecosystem that has told them not to trust anyone else.
The epistemic crisis described by Network Propaganda leaves center-right news consumers feeling that they do not have a trustworthy option. Just like Americans have only two political parties to choose from, center-right Americans have only two media ecosystems to choose from: one detached from the truth and the other seemingly politically detached from them. According to Benkler, Faris, and Roberts, the solution to our collective epistemic crisis cannot be contained to a search for a singular news source that is truly neutral or moderately center-right. Instead, the solution is to focus on strengthening the ways we collectively identify truth, and to uplift the market designed to confirm those facts for the people who want to know what is really happening in the world around them.
Network Propaganda is an unfortunately effortful read with a difficult message to swallow for many. The authors, while clearly competent technologists and researchers, are somewhat inconsistent in the readability of their prose. Interspersed between moments of drama and clarity are long expanses of fairly repetitive claims and detailed play-by-play recitations of media events. The authors also overuse the media network mapping tool they have developed, including too many webs of relationships in their pursuit of demonstrating their academic integrity. A clearer and more detailed description of their methods would have been preferable. This text is meant to arm anyone reiterating its claims with the facts required to prove their point, and the authors effectively use it to promote the open-source media analysis tool they have developed to answer related questions.
Benkler, Faris, and Roberts conclude that the greatest threats to an adequately informed electorate – and therefore policymaking and democracy – in the United States are not the Russians or social media companies. The greatest threats are rooted in our domestic politics and culture and are manifest in the major media outlets of the political right that report identity-confirming falsehoods over disconfirming truths.
End Note
End Note
[1] The Federal Communication Commission’s Fairness Doctrine, first implemented in 1949, required broadcasters to present issues of public importance in a balanced manner and was intended to protect the electorate from consuming narrow perspectives. As part of the fairness doctrine, controversial matters of public interest had to be covered by major networks like NBC, CBS, and ABC, and contrasting views had to be included in that coverage. Equal airtime was not a requirement of the Doctrine.
Note: The views expressed in this publication are those of the student authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of the Humphrey Public Affairs Review (HPAR) or the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.
References
References
Becker, J. & McIntire, M. (2015). Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html
Benkler, Y., Faris, R., & Roberts, H. (2018). Network propaganda: Manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in American politics. Oxford University Press.
Harbath, K., & Fernekes, C. (2023, March 16). History of the Cambridge Analytica controversy. Bipartisan Policy Center. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/cambridge analytica-controversy/
Ward, A. (2019, April 19). The Mueller report, explained in only 500 words. Vox. https://www.vox. com/world/2019/4/19/18507580/mueller-report-trump-russia-obstruction-summary
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