Transcript for “A Media Literacy Diet for Elections” with Dr. Geoffrey Baym
The blurred lines between journalism, advertising, and entertainment have contributed to a lack of media literacy in today’s audiences. So, how do we discern when we have all the facts, particularly as we gear up toward an election? In this interview, Dr. Geoffrey Baym explains the history of political content in media and how we can practice better media literacy in the lead-up to the 2024 election.
Dr. Geoffrey Baym is a professor of media studies and directs the PhD program in Media and Communication at Temple University. A former TV news producer, Dr. Baym explores the shifting styles and standards of broadcast journalism, public affairs media, and political discourse. His work particularly examines the melding of news, entertainment, politics, and popular culture. His publications include the award-winning From Cronkite to Colbert: The Evolution of Broadcast News and the edited collection News Parody and Political Satire Across the Globe.
Thank you to Starts with Us for their collaboration on this series. Starts with Us is an organization committed to overcoming extreme political and cultural division. Check them out at startswith.us.
Dr. Geoffrey Baym: The key is to not be cynical, but skeptical. Cynical is very debilitating in a democratic system. Cynicism is when we believe that everyone is lying. Everyone has an agenda and you can trust no one. Skepticism is when we have healthy doubt and our system requires a bit of skepticism to say, “I would like to hear that from more than one person.”
Don MacPherson: That is Dr. Geoffrey Baym. He’s a professor of media studies in the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. He joined 12 Geniuses to discuss how dramatically political news coverage has changed over the last two decades, and how we can better use our critical thinking to separate fact from fiction when it comes to political journalism.
My name is Don MacPherson, your host of 12 Geniuses. Heading into any election season can be divisive, that’s why 12 Geniuses has partnered with Starts With Us on this series to help you navigate the overall 2024 election. Drawing from their life experiences and current work, each expert guest provides critical insight to help listeners practice better habits when confronted with election season rhetoric and discourse.
In this episode, Dr. Geoffrey Baym describes the blurred lines between journalism, advertising, and entertainment. He goes on to talk about the dangers of these blurred lines, and he provides advice for how voters can more effectively consume political media while avoiding the news designed to divide us. A former TV news producer, Dr. Baym explores the shifting styles and standards of broadcast journalism, public affairs media, and political discourse.
Thank you to Starts With Us for their collaboration on this series. Starts With Us is an organization committed to overcoming extreme political and cultural division. Check them out at startswith.us.
Dr. Baym, welcome to 12 Geniuses.
Dr. Baym: Thank you, Don. It’s a pleasure to be here. Appreciate you having me.
Don: Happy to have this conversation with you. Let’s start out with your background. Tell us who you are and how you got interested in the topic of media.
Dr. Baym: Yeah. Well, I think I always was interested in media. I loved TV. I actually think I wanted to be the play-by-play announcer for the Chicago Cubs. That was my childhood dream was to be the next Harry Caray. I can date myself a little bit that way. I went to journalism school, Northwestern University, moved away from sports media, got very interested in politics and political media in government. Went out to Salt Lake City, Utah, where I worked in television news as a producer for several years at KSL TV. It was an interesting moment in broadcasting history, though there were some real dramatic transformations happening in the news business. This would’ve been sort of the mid-1990s, and I thought it might be time to move over to academia. I got a PhD in mass communication from the University of Utah, and I have been teaching, researching, and writing about political media ever since.
Don: I’m curious about these changes that you were noticing when you were in Salt Lake, and maybe you can touch on those, but through the lens of giving us a history of political content in U.S. media, and you can go back as far as you want and kind of bring us to present day.
Dr. Baym: Yes. So, it’s a big question, and I think you sort of have to divide big questions up into smaller questions. One way to think about it is, who are the organizations and the institutions that over history have been responsible for covering politics, producing journalism, informing citizens? Those are not necessarily stable. We’ve seen some institutions come and go over the years. And then the related question is technology, which is journalism and the political system itself are always intertwined with the dominant mode of mass communication of an era. So, for many, many years, more than a century in American history, that was the newspaper, the actual printed paper. Be that the local Metropolitan Daily, and then eventually the big national papers like The Times. I think that sort of reaches its heyday maybe in the early 1970s. You're old enough to remember Watergate, All the President’s Men, the great movie with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, that dramatized the post-investigation of Richard Nixon.
That might have actually been a watershed moment, or rather a high water moment for what a lot of people have called the high modern — that’s some philosophical thinking there — the high modern moment of journalism where it was this idea this was a professional undertaking where their responsibility was to provide us objective information that we, the rational citizens, could then use to make good choices when we went to vote. At the same time, by the time you get to the early 1970s, television is on the rise, maybe even established as a dominant mode of media.
That’s both local television news, which through the 1970s became a really important form of media. And also, of course, the big national news networks, right? Which is CBS, ABC, NBC, which were really centralized organizations, spent a lot of money on national and international news gathering, and saw their responsibility as informing citizens, even as the entertainment side of network television was the primary business. Of course, more recently, social media, digital media streaming have emerged just in the last sort of 10 years, really interesting data coming out, even right now on a daily basis about the rise of social media as a primary mode of people receiving information. And that’s complicating and challenging all of our traditions of information and political coverage.
Don: In 2010, you wrote the book, Cronkite to Colbert: The Evolution of Broadcast News. What’s the premise behind that book?
Dr. Baym: I was really fascinated at that moment with the rise of satire, political satire and news parody television programs; particularly The Daily Show with John Stewart, which was then followed by Stephen Colbert’s, the Colbert Report. And those seem to be such an innovative, at the time, really innovative and new mode of public information. There was a lot of thought about whether this was infotainment, which is such an interesting phrase — infotainment, sort of the merging or the collapse of information and entertainment. Always understood as sort of a negative thing, right? That when good information is corrupted by entertainment, it becomes something different than the kind of journalism we used to rely on.
A lot of people were looking at The Daily Show in the Colbert Report and saying that they were infotainment. And I had a different suspicion. My sense was that by the late ’90s into the early years of the 21st century, it was really television news that had become infotainment. That under corporate leadership that was prioritizing profit over public service, most newscasts, particularly on television, and especially on cable TV, were providing a kind of entertainment product that was designed not really to inform citizens and a democracy, but to attract viewers and sell advertising. I had the suspicion, and a lot of people did at the time, that the satire news programs were actually trying to do an older form of journalism, hence Cronkite to Colbert.
I had news back in the Walter Cronkite era only in a very different format using entertainment, using humor, using sarcasm, using irony to make important arguments about politics and to reinterpret the day’s events in ways that mainstream television news wasn’t doing.
Don: What is it about outrage that is so attractive? Because I had this realization, maybe within the last year, that both the left and the right, CNN and Fox News, they use this as a tool to fire their base up. But I realized I don’t want to be outraged. I actually want to be informed, but obviously there’s money to be made by outraging the base. So, what do you know about the attractiveness of outrage?
Dr. Baym: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s some deep psychological...I’m not a psychologist, but I think there’s deep psychological tendencies toward… We’re really heightened by outrage — anger, fear. Those are quite primal emotions. And certainly in the information business where the business is packaging information to sell, to charge advertising dollars and increase subscription rates, increase social metric engagement, social media engagements, outrage and fear have always been potent ways of attracting an audience as opposed to objective information, which is much more neutral, takes a lot more thinking and processing, and doesn’t really fire it up. Stephen Colbert, the satirist, once said he was talking to oh my gosh, I’m totally blocking the name — Jim Lehrer, excuse me.
He was talking to Jim Lehrer from the PBS NewsHour, who was sort of the epitome of that old model of objective down-the-middle broadcast journalism. And Colbert said to him, “How can I know you mean what you say if you’re not yelling it?” So, this whole paradigm shift from the very soft-spoken, deliberate, careful news anchors to firebrands who are filled with loud opinions. Another piece that’s I think important to understand there is that opinions are cheaper than information. It costs a lot more to pay professionals to go out and do the hard work of reporting, and it costs a lot less to get pundits to sit in front of a camera and express vehement opinions.
Don: Yeah, that’s a really good point. You had alluded to some of the changes that we’ve experienced recently, social media being one of them, and I’m assuming mobile technology, the intersection of mobile technology and social media would be one. But I’m curious, what are some of the other major changes that you’ve seen since you wrote that book in 2010?
Dr. Baym: Well, obviously since 2010, the rise of social media, I mean, I found a very funny sentence in my book that actually was written, I think in about 2009 that noted the rising percentage of people who had so-called smartphones, and that was actually… I put it in quotes because in 2009, the idea of a smartphone was still something we put in quotations. And now obviously a really astute point you’re making about the intersection of social media and mobile media. People tend to collapse those in their mind and think that it’s all the same thing. But you’re absolutely right, they’re really different. Social media being a platform, of course, where just about anyone can pitch in and the conversation can go in any direction. But mobile media, the technology where we have it in our pockets, we never need to disengage. We can stay plugged in constantly. And those are different phenomenon, but put the two of them together, it’s a potent mix.
Don: Yeah. And telling people that the difference between when we were kids and kids now is that we would hear about the world’s problems twice a day.
Dr. Baym: Right.
Don: When the morning newspaper came and then when we watched the evening news, if you were a plugged in teenager, right?
Dr. Baym: Mm-Hmm (affirmative).
Don: That’s pretty good. But now you can’t escape it. And I am convinced that that really challenges, particularly young people’s, mental health.
Dr. Baym: I would tend to agree. I think there’s an interesting phenomenon, and we can actually go back to cable television to think about this, which is, you’re right, back in the day, we had newspapers in the morning. We had half hour television news programs in the evening, and that was it, until the next day. And then we did it again the 24-hour news cycle. And if you think about taking all of the complexity of a day and putting it in a 30-minute newscast, that’s something really different than 24/7. And so let’s say when Ted Turner came along and had the idea for a cable news network, we’ll call it CNN, and they would be on 24/7, the general sense was there’s not enough information, right? News is not that interesting to be on for 24 hours a day. With that a half hour at six o’clock each evening, maybe.
And if you think back, the Gulf War, the first Gulf War after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the United States went in, that was like the first 24/7 news event. The next one that came after that, the one that really changed the business of news was O. J. Simpson, the slow-speed chase and the murder trial that got saturation coverage. That was the kind of story that they realized they could put on TV at that point all day long, every day, and people could dip in and out of it throughout the day and always enjoy it. And that really set a template for how 24-hour news is going to work. It can’t really be, aren’t there many facts? It can’t really be factual and deliberate and careful discussion of public affairs as much as breathless, sensational, entertaining, emotional — that you can mind 24/7.
And perhaps what’s changed so radically between let’s say the mid-1990s and now is that politics has been turned into that kind of spectator sport where every day we’re treated to narratives of fear and outrage and angst and emotion about what’s happening in the political world every day. So, we’re looking at Twitter or X, excuse me, to see what’s the latest update, what’s the latest update, and sometimes there aren’t really updates, but we can tell that story over and over again and give it a different kind of moral or emotional inflection. And that’s the model that cable TV, and especially Fox News perfected. And social media, I think, increases those tendencies.
Don: When we were young, our source of freedom was the car. And now, young people, their source of freedom is the phone, when they get their phone. So I couldn’t wait to get my driver’s license because that meant that I could go to neighboring towns and see my friends and do all of these different things. And now it’s getting the phone. But I also think that religion was a lot more prominent.
Dr. Baym: Oh, interesting.
Don: Worshiping was a lot more prominent in the ’70s and in the ’80s. And now it’s politics that determine our team. And this identity of our team is so ingrained in many of us. And I believe that is one of the reasons why we are so divided right now is because we can’t admit that our belief or our faith in our team might be wrong or might be flawed.
Dr. Baym: Yeah. I think that’s also an astute point. Politics and religion have fused together, in some cases quite literally, in ways that would’ve been unthinkable when you and I were young before all this gray hair showed up in my head. And more than anything, I think we’re seeing restructuring of all of daily life around identity. We come very early to decide what kinds of people are we, and that then dictates, it dictates the kind of media we follow, it dictates the sorts of jobs we do. It dictates even where we live, the kinds of neighborhoods, the friends we keep the people we vote for. All of that is really quite intertwined.
Don: It seems like the pandemic has really accelerated this. I’m going to move to a place where the people have the same political beliefs that I do. And that I think has furthered our division.
Dr. Baym: Scholars are developing the notion of what they call affective polarization. Polarization, meaning we’re pulling apart from one another. Affective, meaning it’s really about emotion and a sense of identity. And it has more to do with a sense of dislike of the other side than it does a strong commitment to the ideals that one side might have. So, a lot of research is showing that it’s more about antipathy towards the other than belief in one’s own cause. And that dovetails with this question of emotion, anger, and outrage in political media that nothing is going to get people to watch, to click to, like, to share more than a feeling of being upset, of threatened and outraged by something someone else said, or a politician proposed, or an action someone maybe has taken.
Don: How have the lines between journalism advertising and entertainment become blurred?
Dr. Baym: In the news business, though, there was always that line, that line between church and state, right? Between news and advertising. That we were in the business of informing citizens, not in the business of making profit for ownership. And that line has more or less crumbled, right? There’s very little sense now that a newsroom can lose money. Back in the 1970s, the networks regularly lost money on news. News has never been a profit center. It is very difficult to make an informative, serious newscast and make money doing so. So, if your goal is to make economic profit, then you have to rework the kind of stories you tell, the kind of information you offer, the sorts of people you put on camera. And again, if we can refer back to 24-hour cable news, there is where you see that model, where that’s an entertainment product that’s being designed to sell advertising. It’s not a valuable source of information.
Don: These lines between journalism, advertising, and entertainment have blurred. What are the most negative or dangerous outcomes of these blurred lines from a political perspective?
Dr. Baym: The tribalization of the American population, where we’re so plugged into media that confirms our own biases, that serves our own emotional and informational needs, and we’re at a loss. We simply cannot reach out and learn from and talk to people who see the world differently.
Don: What do you see as the shortcomings in mainstream media that have helped these popularized entertainment, political coverage shows thrive and flourish?
Dr. Baym: Yeah. There’s an important concept in democratic theory called the Fourth Estate that I’m sure you’ve heard of, right? Which is that journalism as the fourth estate is responsible for holding power accountable, for providing citizens with information, that we need to be engaged participants in a democratic system. And as they have moved away from that model, sort of failed to serve as the fourth estate, particularly as they’re pursuing profit, but also as they’re dealing with political pressure. So, after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, and the invasion of, first, Afghanistan and then Iraq, we saw a real breakdown in the press as sort of an agency of democratic accountability.
That’s when we saw the rise of satire shows trying to pick up this slack. But it’s also when we saw the rise of 24-hour cable channels that were serving up political narrative for the fan base, if you will. I think it’s that converting citizens into fans becomes a real problem. When we start to think of the whole thing as an entertainment, a game we’re playing, or a question of tribal warfare, which is where it seems we end up so often now. We lose that ability to talk to one another. We lose that sort of deliberative sense that our role is to have honest, open conversations with people we agree with and people we don’t agree with, to learn from those who we agree with and learn from those we disagree with, to try to come up with mutual solutions to the problems we face. Instead, we’ve really subdivided into micro-communities that agree on very little. We don’t agree on the problems, we don’t agree on the solutions, and I feel like we’re being driven further and further apart each day.
Don: We have to have an enemy.
Dr. Baym: Yeah.
Don: And that enemy was the Soviet Union in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s during the Cold War. When that disappeared, then many people saw the U.S. government or another political party as the enemy. So, we internalized the enemy. And I wonder if that resonates with you, if you agree with that, if that’s one of the reasons why we have settled into this political polarization.
Dr. Baym: I think there’s a lot of wisdom to that. There’s a very deep theory that suggests that yeah, one cannot define yourself and your in-group without another or the other, the outgroup, the people you are different from. And historically, in this country, well, maybe not historically, it used to be north and south, back in the Civil War. But certainly in the 20th century, right? We looked outward at the forces of fascism and communism and totalitarianism as being problems that other countries and other systems and worldviews were facing. And you’re right, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Soviet Union, we lost that clear obvious enemy.
I always think, and this might sound a little like a non sequitur, but if you look at the villains in James Bond movies over the years, you can really track this question of who does our society think the enemy is? And we don’t have a shared enemy at all anymore. There was some thought at the start of the COVID of the vax, the pandemic, that that could be our shared enemy, but it proved to be a little too abstract and a little too ambiguous. We really don’t have that shared enemy. And we do seem to be looking inward and looking across the street at our neighbors with our eyes askew.
Don: I felt that way too with the pandemic that it could potentially unite us, not only within the country, but around the world, and it further divided us, which is really interesting. I was pretty hopeful that it would help to settle some of our differences. I also thought climate change could be one of those things. That’s an enemy that we’re going to have to fight, but it’s not working out so well.
Dr. Baym: Yeah. And that relates to the things we’re talking about, again, to a sort of hyper-commercialized news and information environment where the number one reason we tune in is because we want to see what the other side is up to that make us angry today. What’s wrong with those people? That’s a real driving impetus or motivation for attending to news and engaging in public discussion. And that’s being divided up, right? So that we have a source. I know I can turn on Fox News every single night, and I can find out what Joe Biden has done today to destroy America, or I can turn on MSNBC and find out the ever-impending threat that Donald Trump poses. So that positioning, and really taking every event every day and compressing it into that lens of here’s what the enemy is up to — that I think characterizes so much of our media landscape. And it’s a tremendous disservice to national unity but also to the democratic system itself.
Don: And I think that television has nowhere near the power of algorithms on social media, to feed continually stories that draw people in. It just gets continually refined and refined. I’m shocked at one or two clicks on Instagram and I’m fed constantly content relating to a particular topic. And that’s got to be the same for other people — confirming their biases, confirming the things that they’re certain about, etc.
Dr. Baym: Yeah, that’s a great point because we often think of the algorithms, if we don’t think about them at all, right? And we think of social media as this really neutral objective platform where anybody can say anything and ideas circulate. But the algorithms are extraordinarily important, right? They suppress some posts, they celebrate others, and they’re built to serve a particular kind of logic. And it’s not all that different from the logic of commercial television. And that advertising is the economic engine that drives social media. So, the goal of the algorithm is to encourage people to stay plugged in. What they don’t want us to do is to log off and to put it away. So, the algorithms are privileging the kinds of content that they know are going to stir that sort of emotional reaction and really make people, or encourage people to want to be plugged in and want to care, want to chime in, want to share. And so that only exacerbates these divides that we’re experiencing.
Don: And we do have some agency on this. We could regulate those social media companies, but we need leaders, political leaders who have the courage to take those organizations on.
Dr. Baym: Yeah. There’s some really interesting dynamic here. When radio was invented, became a mainstream thing in the 1920s, it took very little time for the federal government to work out a set of regulations that remained in place for decades — that established the whole regulatory regime by which the broadcast industry structured itself. Social media, digital media, there’s nothing. There’s nothing. There’s almost no regulation whatsoever, and it’s been years. The horse is certainly out of the barn on this one. But there could be will. I think of information as infrastructure. We rely on the roads and the water pipes and the electrical grid to make our civilization work, but we also rely on information. And just as we expect that the roads are regulated, that the air will be clean, that our drinking water will be provided to us and won’t be sold simply at market value, right?
We never think of water as a commodity where if you can afford it, you get it. And if you can’t, well then you don’t, then you can die of thirst, right? That’s an abhorrent idea. But information, we tend to not think of it as infrastructure. We tend to think of it as economic commodity. And I think we see the consequences of that. There is a small but growing movement to say we have to think about information, particularly social media as critical infrastructure for the flow of society, for commerce, and for the democratic project itself. And that we need to have the political will to tackle this problem. If we don’t, especially as we start moving into the age of AI, right? I think all bets will be off if we can’t come up with meaningful regulation.
Don: Yeah. I’ve had a number of guests on the show suggest that social media ought to be a utility and having us pay for it as opposed to having them use our data, sell our data, have it as a manipulative tool. And I think there’s a lot of validity to that.
Dr. Baym: Yeah. The very idea that social media is for profit, that didn’t have to be the case. And it wasn’t the case in its origins. Zuckerberg and his buddies at Harvard didn’t invent Facebook because they were in pursuit of profit. They did it because they thought it was an interesting technological problem, that it could serve the kind of social needs that they felt as 19-year-old boys in college. It was only later when they started thinking, how can we monetize this? That they realized that they could sell access to data and that would become the profit center. We seem to be okay with the very richest people in the world singularly or single-handedly owning our communication infrastructure. And to me, to my way of thinking, that’s a tremendous amount of power and trust to put in the hands of people who may or may not deserve it. And I feel like our democracy demands better.
Don: Is it possible to be politically informed by consuming mostly entertainment, political journalism?
Dr. Baym: I don’t think anybody can rely on any one thing. The question that gets asked all the time is, how can people be informed? Where should one look for news and information? And I think my answer is we need to be omnivores. We need to look everywhere. I think we need to be reading the big newspapers — The Post, The Times, The Wall Street Journal. I think we need to be listening to NPR and paying attention to public media. They get overlooked in this equation so often. I think we need to be supporting our local newspapers. There used to be two newspapers per town. Now there are entire swaths of the country that lack good local newspapers. Democracy begins in one’s backyard, right? It’s a local project at its root. And there’s a real crisis happening with the loss of local newspapers.
I think we can get information from comedy shows as well. I think we can get information from social media, but I think we have to put it all together and be critically aware of what our sources is, what our sources are, excuse me, and how they’re directing us or leading us to certain kinds of conclusions and away from others.
Don: What’s your response to public media being left-leaning?
Dr. Baym: Yeah, I think that’s an interesting question. I think it is. But I also think that we live in a very weird era where people who believe in rational discussion and deliberation and believe in sort of institutional journalism and believe in governmental regulation that all seems to skew liberal right now.
Don: That’s true. Yeah, that’s a good point.
Dr. Baym: We’re having some pretty deep potential…I mean, that’s back to the sort of irony versus outrage question, right? That I think you’ll find, and I’m actually working on a project about this right now, that folks who are reading traditional newspapers, watching traditional newscast, they tend to lean liberal. That we’re seeing very clear divides. Conservatives have deep distrust for almost all forms of media except Fox News. And then as you go out into the internet spaces like InfoWars or Breitbart or those other places, One America Network perhaps. So, we do have a real cleavage that’s not just in terms of where I prefer to get my information, but really more deeply, what kind of society do I want to live in? I think public media comes out of a progressive mode of believing in the power of government and expertise to try to address social problems.
I want to think beyond binaries of liberal and conservative because there’s room for both within a democratic system. What there doesn’t seem to be room for both is pro-democracy and anti-democracy. And I actually do think that the stakes have risen to that level that we can’t take it for granted that all of, all of our neighbors want to live in a democracy and believe that democracy is the better option. Back to your example of the Soviet Union, we were pro-democracy, that was the thing we could all degree on at the end of the day. We would differ in terms of how active we thought government needed to be in solving everyday problems and how much freedom the economic markets should have, right? Those are the legitimate places of public debate. But at the end of the day, there was some sense of consensus that we valued a democratic system. And that I’m far less confident in now.
Don: Do you believe there are truly people who are anti-democracy?
Dr. Baym: Absolutely.
Don: And what does that mean?
Dr. Baym: I think that a serious percentage of people are authoritarian in their desires. I think deep down, they would rather have a king or a dictator. In some ways, I think it’s harder to be a citizen in a democracy. It’s the only system that demands that ordinary people be informed and take action and have to make decisions, right? It’s easier to live in a totalitarian state where you’re told what to do and you just do it. I don’t think it’s a given that people all want to be in a democracy, I think.
Don: Do you think those people who are anti-democracy have a true understanding of what society might be like? Because I’ve traveled the world. I was in the Soviet Union a month before it collapsed. I was there in 1991. It was not a delightful place to be. I’ve traveled throughout Eastern Europe shortly after the wall had come down. I’ve been in Venezuela when, I’m blanking on his name…
Dr. Baym: Hugo Chávez. Not Chávez?
Don: Is it Chávez? Hugo Chávez?
Dr. Baym: Yeah.
Don: Yeah, when he was in power. Not delightful places to be.
Dr. Baym: Sure.
Don: Do these anti-democracy folks really know what the alternative is?
Dr. Baym: Perhaps not. But if you think about democracy, as everyone gets to vote, right? That means we have to accept that people we don’t like and we don’t agree with are going to vote. And sometimes the vote will go against our way. I mean, the measure of a democracy is how the losing side handles it, right? Democracy is the way of peacefully managing these sorts of ever-present social divides. But in a democratic system, we’re supposed to accept that, well, the other side won and we need to rethink how we campaign or what ideas we really endorse to try to do better next time. And I’m not sure everybody in this country wants to accept the world that the other side would vote for. And so that’s a real complicating factor.
Don: I’m curious if you can identify some trusted sources for non-biased or fair political coverage on television.
Dr. Baym: On a philosophical level, everybody’s a little bit biased, which is why I believe in triangulation. I believe we have to follow multiple sources. I think it’s okay to get headlines on television. I think traditional network news, NBC, CBS, ABC, I think they’re still putting a lot of resources into paying journalists to try to get the story, to get it right. I’m a fan of public media — NPR think is a very valuable information source. I believe in the big newspapers. They don’t always get it right, but when they don’t, they correct the record, and they really value accuracy, or the attempt at it, right? They’re trying not just to be fair or objective, but to be accurate. I think that’s the most important thing — accuracy above objectivity. Because there are right and wrong answers, right? We have to think about morality in all of this as well. I think endorsing a democracy is ultimately a cultural or moral position, a moral standpoint, not just a neutral technocratic one.
Don: Do you have some valued sources that are self-published, internet, social media based that you can share?
Dr. Baym: I don’t really. I think the key thing, in terms of social media is a portal into the world of news, and certainly for many, many people, especially the young ones, it has become the primary access point, is to look really carefully at who the sources are, right? When a post shows up in our feed, the question to ask is, where did this come from? Because there are only so many organizations that are actually doing the legwork of journalism, going to the kinds of places you just referenced, traveling to out around the world, asking the questions, doing the work of examining the documents, really trying to talk to people. What really are the journalistic sources here? And then within that, who are they talking to? What kind of agenda might be at play here? The key is to not be cynical, but skeptical. Cynical is very debilitating in a democratic system. Cynicism is when we believe that everyone is lying, everyone has an agenda, and you can trust no one.
Skepticism is when we have healthy doubt. And our system requires a bit of skepticism to say, “I would like to hear that from more than one person.”
Don: Something that I’ve been thinking about recently, maybe within the last year or so, when the news particularly, well, in print journalism, you’ll see this, but also on television news, when they show a politician, they’ll put a D by their name and maybe the state or an R by the name and the state. And I wanted to ask you about the practice of that because it actually really bothers me. And it bothers me because it’s priming me for my response. So, if that person’s on my team, I’m going to agree with them. If that person is not on my team, I’m going to find flaws in what they have to say. And my question is, do you think we should get rid of that practice?
Dr. Baym: I think that’s a really interesting idea. I’ve never thought of that before. It’s certainly a holdover from an earlier era, right? Back in the day, right? There were liberal Republicans, moderate Republicans, conservative Republicans. There were conservative Democrats, moderate Democrats, liberal Democrats. Both parties overlapped and had a lot of commonality at a certain point, and then separated as they followed out the wings. It’s a relatively modern invention where the two parties are so completely different and isolated from one another. And you’re right that in this day and age, party affiliation is like knowing… it’s like a uniform in sports, if you’re watching the Vikings play the Lions, right? And you know which helmet is which, and you know which side you’re rooting for.
And that’s all part of this conversion of politics into a team sport — one side versus the other. And I know which side I’m on. So, if I’m a Vikings fan, there’s nothing the Lions can do that I’m going to approve of. Here in Philly, right? We’re Eagles fans. And there’s nothing the Cowboys can do that we’re going to say, “Hey, that was a good play. They did good,” right? Because we know who we’re rooting for. That’s a fine attitude for sports. It’s a pretty unhealthy attitude for democracy.
Don: Is there a country that you know of that really gets political media right?
Dr. Baym: I don’t want to say right or wrong, but I would certainly say like Scandinavia. The Scandinavian countries are much more old-fashioned as we would think of it. They still value the newspaper and objective journalism. Certainly, Northwest Europe has got a lot more social cohesion. That’s changing over time. I mean, the whole world is in flux, right? These are global issues. What’s happening in the United States is happening all over the world. But there’s interesting research about different media habits in different parts of the world. Certainly, the Scandinavians are the most sort of democratically oriented, most deliberative in their attitude towards politics and media.
Don: We have an election coming up. Can you leave us with some final advice for how voters can practice better media literacy as we move toward that election?
Dr. Baym: I think it’s really about awareness is the most important thing. Awareness of one’s media diet. So, we can think in terms of media like food, like what media are we consuming? How often are we consuming it? If we can be aware of our own habits, where are we getting information? What are the media sources that are influencing how we understand our position in the world? Really, literally, how do we spend our time? Are we checking our phones and looking at social media every chance we get? And how does that make us feel? I think we want to be skeptical of news and information that tweaks our emotions. And that’s not a conservative or a liberal thing, right? Besides, we’ve been talking about throughout this conversation, so much news now as a commercial product is designed to fire emotional responses. And I think we can try to be more aware of that.
I’m not always able to do that myself, but I would like to pay more attention. Does my heart start racing when I’m reading a post on social media or watching a news clip on television? Or am I thinking more carefully? Am I learning from people who see the world differently from me? Where are those sources of news and information and political discussion where I can hear other people, and not just ranting and raving about who they hate and what they believe in, but making more reasonable arguments? I think we forget that so much of the work of government is not about the stuff of the culture wars. We get caught up in thinking about abortion or immigration and those big-ticket very emotional issues, and we forget about the everyday work of government — making sure that the meat we buy in the grocery store is safe, right?
There was just a huge recall of eyedrops because eyedrops were tainted and could cause blindness. We rely on government to make those sorts of decisions all day, every day in so many different ways. And that has nothing to do with identity, that just has to do with competent, qualified people being in position who are going to take their jobs seriously.
Don: This has been a phenomenal conversation. Dr. Baym, thank you for your time, and thank you for being a genius.
Thank you for listening to 12 Geniuses. In our next episode, I interview Dr. Pano Kanelos, who is Founding President of the University of Austin in Austin, Texas. We discuss the hotbed of division on college campuses and what can be done to restore open, safe dialogue in educational settings. If you are learning from and enjoying the podcast, please share it with others, and please consider rating the show on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening, and thank you for being a genius.