We live
in a time of political fury and hardening cultural divides. But if there is one
thing on which virtually everyone is agreed, it is that the news and
information we receive is biased. Every second of every day, someone is
complaining about bias, in everything from the latest movie reviews to sports
commentary to the BBC’s coverage of Brexit. These complaints and controversies
take up a growing share of public discussion.
Much of
the outrage that floods social media, occasionally leaking into opinion columns
and broadcast interviews, is not simply a reaction to events themselves, but to
the way in which they are reported and framed. The “mainstream media” is the
principal focal point for this anger. Journalists and broadcasters who purport
to be neutral are a constant object of scrutiny and derision, whenever they
appear to let their personal views slip. The work of journalists involves an
increasing amount of unscripted, real-time discussion, which provides an
occasionally troubling window into their thinking.
But this
is not simply an anti-journalist sentiment. A similar fury can just as easily
descend on a civil servant or independent expert whenever their veneer of
neutrality seems to crack, apparently revealing prejudices underneath.
Sometimes a report or claim is dismissed as biased or inaccurate for the simple
reason that it is unwelcome: to a Brexiter, every bad economic forecast is just
another case of the so-called project fear. A sense that the game is rigged now
fuels public debate.
This mentality
now spans the entire political spectrum and pervades societies around the
world. A recent survey found that the majority of people globally believe their
society is broken and their economy is rigged. Both the left and the right feel
misrepresented and misunderstood by political institutions and the media, but
the anger is shared by many in the liberal centre, who believe that populists
have gamed the system to harvest more attention than they deserve. Outrage with
“mainstream” institutions has become a mass sentiment.
This
spirit of indignation was once the natural property of the left, which has long
resented the establishment bias of the press. But in the present culture war,
the right points to universities, the BBC and civil service as institutions
that twist our basic understanding of reality to their own ends. Everyone can
point to evidence that justifies their outrage. This arms race in cultural
analysis is unwinnable.
This is
not as simple as distrust. The appearance of digital platforms, smartphones and
the ubiquitous surveillance they enable has ushered in a new public mood that
is instinctively suspicious of anyone claiming to describe reality in a fair
and objective fashion. It is a mindset that begins with legitimate curiosity
about what motivates a given media story, but which ends in a Trumpian refusal
to accept any mainstream or official account of the world. We can all probably
locate ourselves somewhere on this spectrum, between the curiosity of the
engaged citizen and the corrosive cynicism of the climate denier. The question
is whether this mentality is doing us any good, either individually or
collectively.
Public
life has become like a play whose audience is unwilling to suspend disbelief.
Any utterance by a public figure can be unpicked in search of its ulterior
motive. As cynicism grows, even judges, the supposedly neutral upholders of the
law, are publicly accused of personal bias. Once doubt descends on public life,
people become increasingly dependent on their own experiences and their own
beliefs about how the world really works. One effect of this is that facts no
longer seem to matter (the phenomenon misleadingly dubbed “post-truth”). But
the crisis of democracy and of truth are one and the same: individuals are
increasingly suspicious of the “official” stories they are being told, and
expect to witness things for themselves.
On one
level, heightened scepticism towards the establishment is a welcome
development. A more media-literate and critical citizenry ought to be less easy
for the powerful to manipulate. It may even represent a victory for the type of
cultural critique pioneered by intellectuals such as Pierre Bourdieu and Stuart
Hall in the 1970s and 80s, revealing the injustices embedded in everyday
cultural expressions and interactions.
But it
is possible to have too much scepticism. How exactly do we distinguish this
critical mentality from that of the conspiracy theorist, who is convinced that
they alone have seen through the official version of events? Or to turn the
question around, how might it be possible to recognise the most flagrant cases
of bias in the behaviour of reporters and experts, but nevertheless to accept
that what they say is often a reasonable depiction of the world?
It is
tempting to blame the internet, populists or foreign trolls for flooding our
otherwise rational society with lies. But this underestimates the scale of the
technological and philosophical transformations that are under way. The single
biggest change in our public sphere is that we now have an unimaginable excess
of news and content, where once we had scarcity. Suddenly, the analogue
channels and professions we depended on for our knowledge of the world have
come to seem partial, slow and dispensable.
And yet,
contrary to initial hype surrounding big data, the explosion of information
available to us is making it harder, not easier, to achieve consensus on truth.
As the quantity of information increases, the need to pick out bite-size pieces
of content rises accordingly. In this radically sceptical age, questions of
where to look, what to focus on and who to trust are ones that we increasingly
seek to answer for ourselves, without the help of intermediaries. This is a
liberation of sorts, but it is also at the heart of our deteriorating
confidence in public institutions.
The
current threat to democracy is often seen to emanate from new forms of
propaganda, with the implication that lies are being deliberately fed to a
naive and over-emotional public. The simultaneous rise of populist parties and
digital platforms has triggered well-known anxieties regarding the fate of
truth in democratic societies. Fake news and internet echo chambers are
believed to manipulate and ghettoise certain communities, for shadowy ends. Key
groups – millennials or the white working-class, say – are accused of being
easily persuadable, thanks to their excessive sentimentality.
This
diagnosis exaggerates old-fashioned threats while overlooking new phenomena.
Over-reliant on analogies to 20th century totalitarianism, it paints the
present moment as a moral conflict between truth and lies, with an unthinking
public passively consuming the results. But our relationship to information and
news is now entirely different: it has become an active and critical one, that
is deeply suspicious of the official line. Nowadays, everyone is engaged in
spotting and rebutting propaganda of one kind or another, curating our news
feeds, attacking the framing of the other side and consciously resisting
manipulation. In some ways, we have become too concerned with truth, to the
point where we can no longer agree on it. The very institutions that might once
have brought controversies to an end are under constant fire for their
compromises and biases.
The
threat of misinformation and propaganda should not be denied. As the scholars
Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts have shown in their book Network
Propaganda, there is now a self-sustaining information ecosystem on the
American right through which conspiracy theories and untruths get recycled,
between Breitbart, Fox News, talk radio and social media. Meanwhile, the
anti-vaxx movement is becoming a serious public health problem across the
world, aided by the online circulation of conspiracy theories and
pseudo-science. This is a situation where simple misinformation poses a serious
threat to society.
But away
from these eye-catching cases, things look less clear-cut. The majority of
people in northern Europe still regularly encounter mainstream news and
information. Britain is a long way from the US experience, thanks principally
to the presence of the BBC, which, for all its faults, still performs a basic
function in providing a common informational experience. It is treated as a
primary source of news by 60% of people in the UK. Even 42% of Brexit party and
Ukip voters get their news from the BBC.
The
panic surrounding echo chambers and so-called filter bubbles is largely
groundless. If we think of an echo chamber as a sealed environment, which only
circulates opinions and facts that are agreeable to its participants, it is a
rather implausible phenomenon. Research by the Oxford Internet Institute
suggests that just 8% of the UK public are at risk of becoming trapped in such
a clique.
Trust in
the media is low, but this entrenched scepticism long predates the internet or
contemporary populism. From the Sun’s lies about Hillsborough to the BBC’s
failure to expose Jimmy Savile as early as they might, to the fevered
enthusiasm for the Iraq war that gripped much of Fleet Street, the British
public has had plenty of good reasons to distrust journalists. Even so, the
number of people in the UK who trust journalists to tell the truth has actually
risen slightly since the 1980s.
What,
then, has changed? The key thing is that the elites of government and the media
have lost their monopoly over the provision of information, but retain their
prominence in the public eye. They have become more like celebrities,
anti-heroes or figures in a reality TV show. And digital platforms now provide
a public space to identify and rake over the flaws, biases and falsehoods of
mainstream institutions. The result is an increasingly sceptical citizenry,
each seeking to manage their media diet, checking up on individual journalists
in order to resist the pernicious influence of the establishment.
There
are clear and obvious benefits to this, where it allows hateful and
manipulative journalism to be called out. It is reassuring to discover the
large swell of public sympathy for the likes of Ben Stokes and Gareth Thomas,
and their families, who have been harassed by the tabloids in recent days. But
this also generates a mood of outrage, which is far more focused on denouncing
bad and biased reporting than with defending the alternative. Across the political
spectrum, we are increasingly distracted and enraged by what our adversaries
deem important and how they frame it. It is not typically the media’s lies that
provoke the greatest fury online, but the discovery that an important event has
been ignored or downplayed. While it is true that arguments rage over dodgy
facts and figures (concerning climate change or the details of Britain’s
trading relations), many of the most bitter controversies of our news cycle
concern the framing and weighting of different issues and how they are
reported, rather than the facts of what actually happened.
The
problem we face is not, then, that certain people are oblivious to the
“mainstream media”, or are victims of fake news, but that we are all seeking to
see through the veneer of facts and information provided to us by public
institutions. Facts and official reports are no longer the end of the story.
Such scepticism is healthy and, in many ways, the just deserts of an
establishment that has been caught twisting the truth too many times. But
political problems arise once we turn against all representations and framings
of reality, on the basis that these are compromised and biased – as if some
purer, unmediated access to the truth might be possible instead. This is a seductive,
but misleading ideal.
Every
human culture throughout history has developed ways to record experiences and
events, allowing them to endure. From early modern times, liberal societies
have developed a wide range of institutions and professions whose work ensures
that events do not simply pass without trace or public awareness. Newspapers
and broadcasters share reports, photographs and footage of things that have
happened in politics, business, society and culture. Court documents and the
Hansard parliamentary reports provide records of what has been said in court
and in parliament. Systems of accounting, audit and economics help to establish
basic facts of what takes place in businesses and markets.
Traditionally,
it is through these systems, which are grounded in written testimonies and
public statements, that we have learned what is going on in the world. But in
the past 20 years, this patchwork of record-keeping has been supplemented and
threatened by a radically different system, which is transforming the nature of
empirical evidence and memory. One term for this is “big data”, which
highlights the exponential growth in the quantity of data that societies
create, thanks to digital technologies.
The
reason there is so much data today is that more and more of our social lives
are mediated digitally. Internet browsers, smartphones, social media platforms,
smart cards and every other smart interface record every move we make. Whether
or not we are conscious of it, we are constantly leaving traces of our activities,
no matter how trivial.
But it
is not the escalating quantity of data that constitutes the radical change.
Something altogether new has occurred that distinguishes today’s society from
previous epochs. In the past, recording devices were principally trained upon
events that were already acknowledged as important. Journalists did not just
report news, but determined what counted as newsworthy. TV crews turned up at
events that were deemed of national significance. The rest of us kept our
cameras for noteworthy occasions, such as holidays and parties.
The
ubiquity of digital technology has thrown all of this up in the air. Things no
longer need to be judged “important” to be captured. Consciously, we photograph
events and record experiences regardless of their importance. Unconsciously, we
leave a trace of our behaviour every time we swipe a smart card, address
Amazon’s Alexa or touch our phone. For the first time in human history,
recording now happens by default, and the question of significance is addressed
separately.
This
shift has prompted an unrealistic set of expectations regarding possibilities
for human knowledge. As many of the original evangelists of big data liked to
claim, when everything is being recorded, our knowledge of the world no longer
needs to be mediated by professionals, experts, institutions and theories.
Instead, they argued that the data can simply “speak for itself”. Patterns will
emerge, traces will come to light. This holds out the prospect of some purer
truth than the one presented to us by professional editors or trained experts.
As the Australian surveillance scholar Mark Andrejevic has brilliantly
articulated, this is a fantasy of a truth unpolluted by any deliberate human
intervention – the ultimate in scientific objectivity.
Andrejevic
argues that the rise of this fantasy coincides with growing impatience with the
efforts of reporters and experts to frame reality in meaningful ways. He writes
that “we might describe the contemporary media moment – and its characteristic
attitude of sceptical savviness regarding the contrivance of representation –
as one that implicitly embraces the ideal of framelessness”. From this
perspective, every controversy can in principle be settled thanks to the vast
trove of data – CCTV, records of digital activity and so on – now available to
us. Reality in its totality is being recorded, and reporters and officials look
dismally compromised by comparison.
One way
in which seemingly frameless media has transformed public life over recent
years is in the elevation of photography and video as arbiters of truth, as
opposed to written testimony or numbers. “Pics or it didn’t happen” is a jokey
barb sometimes thrown at social media users when they share some unlikely
experience. It is often a single image that seems to capture the truth of an
event, only now there are cameras everywhere. No matter how many times it is
disproven, the notion that “the camera doesn’t lie” has a peculiar hold over
our imaginations. In a society of blanket CCTV and smartphones, there are more
cameras than people, and the torrent of data adds to the sense that the truth
is somewhere amid the deluge, ignored by mainstream accounts. The central
demand of this newly sceptical public is “so show me”.
This
transformation in our recording equipment is responsible for much of the
outrage directed at those formerly tasked with describing the world. The rise
of blanket surveillance technologies has paradoxical effects, raising
expectations for objective knowledge to unrealistic levels, and then provoking
fury when those in the public eye do not meet them.
On the
one hand, data science appears to make the question of objective truth easier
to settle. Slow and imperfect institutions of social science and journalism can
be circumvented, and we can get directly to reality itself, unpolluted by human
bias. Surely, in this age of mass data capture, the truth will become
undeniable.
On the
other hand, as the quantity of data becomes overwhelming – greater than human
intelligence can comprehend – our ability to agree on the nature of reality
seems to be declining. Once everything is, in principle, recordable, disputes
heat up regarding what counts as significant in the first place. It turns out
that the “frames” that journalists and experts use to reduce and organise
information are indispensable to its coherence and meaning.
What we
are discovering is that, once the limitations on data capture are removed,
there are escalating opportunities for conflict over the nature of reality. Every
time a mainstream media agency reports the news, they can instantly be met with
the retort: but what about this other event, in another time and another place,
that you failed to report? What about the bits you left out? What about the
other voters in the town you didn’t talk to? When editors judge the relative
importance of stories, they now confront a panoply of alternative judgements.
Where records are abundant, fights break out over relevance and meaning.
Professional
editors have always faced the challenge of reducing long interviews to short
consumable chunks and discarding the majority of photos or text. Editing is
largely a question of what to throw away. This necessitates value judgements,
that readers and audiences once had little option but to trust. Now, however,
the question of which image or sentence is truly significant opens irresolvable
arguments. One person’s offcut is another person’s revealing nugget.
Political
agendas can be pursued this way, including cynical ones aimed at painting one’s
opponents in the worst possible light. An absurd or extreme voice can be
represented as typical of a political movement (known as “nutpicking”). Taking
quotes out of context is one of the most disruptive of online ploys, which
provokes far more fury than simple insults. Rather than deploying lies or “fake
news”, it messes with the significance of data, taking the fact that someone
did say or write something, but violating their intended meaning. No doubt
professional journalists have always descended to such tactics from time to
time, but now we are all at it, provoking a vicious circle of
misrepresentation.
Then
consider the status of photography and video. It is not just that photographic
evidence can be manipulated to mislead, but that questions will always survive
regarding camera angle and context. What happened before or after a camera
started rolling? What was outside the shot? These questions provoke suspicion,
often with good reason.
The most
historic example of such a controversy predates digital media. The Zapruder
film, which captured the assassination of John F Kennedy, became the most
scrutinised piece of footage in history. The film helped spawn countless
conspiracy theories, with individual frames becoming the focus of
controversies, with competing theories as to what they reveal. The difficulty
of completely squaring any narrative with a photographic image is a
philosophical one as much as anything, and the Zapruder film gave a glimpse of
the sorts of media disputes that have become endemic now cameras are ubiquitous
parts of our social lives and built environments.
Today,
minor gestures that would usually have passed without comment only a decade ago
become pored over in search of their hidden message. What did Emily Maitlis
mean when she rolled her eyes at Barry Gardiner on Newsnight? What was Jeremy
Corbyn mouthing during Prime Minister’s Questions? Who took the photo of Boris
Johnson and Carrie Symonds sitting at a garden table in July, and why? This way
madness lies.
While we
are now able to see evidence for ourselves, we all have conflicting ideas of
what bit to attend to, and what it means. The camera may not lie, but that is
because it does not speak at all. As we become more fixated on some ultimate
gold-standard of objective truth, which exceeds the words of mere journalists
or experts, so the number of interpretations applied to the evidence
multiplies. As our faith in the idea of undeniable proof deepens, so our
frustration with competing framings and official accounts rises. All too often,
the charge of “bias” means “that’s not my perspective”. Our screen-based
interactions with many institutions have become fuelled by anger that our
experiences are not being better recognised, along with a new pleasure at being
able to complain about it. As the writer and programmer Paul Ford wrote, back
in 2011, “the fundamental question of the web” is: “Why wasn’t I consulted?”
What we
are witnessing is a collision between two conflicting ideals of truth: one that
depends on trusted intermediaries (journalists and experts), and another that
promises the illusion of direct access to reality itself. This has echoes of
the populist challenge to liberal democracy, which pits direct expressions of
the popular will against parliaments and judges, undermining the very
possibility of compromise. The Brexit crisis exemplifies this as well as
anything. Liberals and remainers adhere to the long-standing constitutional
convention that the public speaks via the institutions of general elections and
parliament. Adamant Brexiters believe that the people spoke for themselves in
June 2016, and have been thwarted ever since by MPs and civil servants. It is
this latter logic that paints suspending parliament as an act of democracy.
This is
the tension that many populist leaders exploit. Officials and elected
politicians are painted as cynically self-interested, while the “will of the
people” is both pure and obvious. Attacks on the mainstream media follow an
identical script: the individuals professionally tasked with informing the
public, in this case journalists, are biased and fake. It is widely noted that
leaders such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Matteo Salvini are
enthusiastic users of Twitter, and Boris Johnson has recently begun to use
Facebook Live to speak directly to “the people” from Downing Street. Whether it
be parliaments or broadcasters, the analogue intermediaries of the public
sphere are discredited and circumvented.
What can
professional editors and journalists do in response? One response is to shout
even louder about their commitment to “truth”, as some American newspapers have
profitably done in the face of Trump. But this escalates cultural conflict, and
fails to account for how the media and informational landscape has changed in
the past 20 years.
What if,
instead, we accepted the claim that all reports about the world are simply
framings of one kind or another, which cannot but involve political and moral
ideas about what counts as important? After all, reality becomes incoherent and
overwhelming unless it is simplified and narrated in some way or other. And
what if we accepted that journalists, editors and public figures will
inevitably let cultural and personal biases slip from time to time? A shrug is
often the more appropriate response than a howl. If we abandoned the search for
some pure and unbiased truth, where might our critical energies be directed
instead?
If we
recognise that reporting and editing is always a political act (at least in the
sense that it asserts the importance of one story rather than another), then
the key question is not whether it is biased, but whether it is independent of
financial or political influence. The problem becomes a quasi-constitutional
one, of what processes, networks and money determine how data gets turned into
news, and how power gets distributed. On this front, the British media is
looking worse and worse, with every year that passes.
The
relationship between the government and the press has been getting tighter
since the 1980s. This is partly thanks to the overweening power of Rupert
Murdoch, and the image management that developed in response. Spin doctors such
as Alastair Campbell, Andy Coulson, Tom Baldwin, Robbie Gibb and Seumas Milne
typically move from the media into party politics, weakening the division
between the two.
Then
there are those individuals who shift backwards and forwards between senior
political positions and the BBC, such as Gibb, Rona Fairhead and James Purnell.
The press has taken a very bad turn over recent years, with ex-Chancellor
George Osborne becoming editor of the Evening Standard, then the extraordinary
recent behaviour of the Daily Telegraph, which seeks to present whatever story
or gloss is most supportive of their former star columnist in 10 Downing Street,
and rubbishes his opponents. (The Opinion page of the Telegraph website proudly
includes a “Best of Boris” section.)
Since
the financial crisis of 2008, there have been regular complaints about the
revolving door between the financial sector and governmental institutions
around the world, most importantly the White House. There has been far less
criticism of the similar door that links the media and politics. The exception
to this comes from populist leaders, who routinely denounce all “mainstream” democratic
and media institutions as a single liberal elite, that acts against the will of
the people. One of the reasons they are able to do this is because there is a
grain of truth in what they say.
The
financial obstacles confronting critical, independent, investigative media are
significant. If the Johnson administration takes a more sharply populist turn,
the political obstacles could increase, too – Channel 4 is frequently held up
as an enemy of Brexit, for example. But let us be clear that an independent,
professional media is what we need to defend at the present moment, and abandon
the misleading and destructive idea that – thanks to a combination of
ubiquitous data capture and personal passions – the truth can be grasped
directly, without anyone needing to report it.
Why
can’t we agree on what’s true any more? By William Davies. The Guardian , September 19, 2019.
For
hundreds of years, modern societies have depended on something that is so
ubiquitous, so ordinary, that we scarcely ever stop to notice it: trust. The
fact that millions of people are able to believe the same things about reality
is a remarkable achievement, but one that is more fragile than is often
recognised.
At times
when public institutions – including the media, government departments and
professions – command widespread trust, we rarely question how they achieve
this. And yet at the heart of successful liberal democracies lies a remarkable
collective leap of faith: that when public officials, reporters, experts and
politicians share a piece of information, they are presumed to be doing so in an
honest fashion.
The
notion that public figures and professionals are basically trustworthy has been
integral to the health of representative democracies. After all, the very core
of liberal democracy is the idea that a small group of people – politicians –
can represent millions of others. If this system is to work, there must be a
basic modicum of trust that the small group will act on behalf of the much
larger one, at least some of the time. As the past decade has made clear,
nothing turns voters against liberalism more rapidly than the appearance of
corruption: the suspicion, valid or otherwise, that politicians are exploiting
their power for their own private interest.
This
isn’t just about politics. In fact, much of what we believe to be true about
the world is actually taken on trust, via newspapers, experts, officials and
broadcasters. While each of us sometimes witnesses events with our own eyes,
there are plenty of apparently reasonable truths that we all accept without
seeing. In order to believe that the economy has grown by 1%, or to find out
about latest medical advances, we take various things on trust; we don’t
automatically doubt the moral character of the researchers or reporters involved.
Much of
the time, the edifice that we refer to as “truth” is really an investment of
trust. Consider how we come to know the facts about climate change: scientists
carefully collect and analyse data, before drafting a paper for anonymous
review by other scientists, who assume that the data is authentic. If
published, the findings are shared with journalists in press releases, drafted
by university press offices. We expect that these findings are then reported
honestly and without distortion by broadcasters and newspapers. Civil servants
draft ministerial speeches that respond to these facts, including details on
what the government has achieved to date.
A modern
liberal society is a complex web of trust relations, held together by reports,
accounts, records and testimonies. Such systems have always faced political
risks and threats. The template of modern expertise can be traced back to the
second half of the 17th century, when scientists and merchants first
established techniques for recording and sharing facts and figures. These were
soon adopted by governments, for purposes of tax collection and rudimentary
public finance. But from the start, strict codes of conduct had to be
established to ensure that officials and experts were not seeking personal gain
or glory (for instance through exaggerating their scientific discoveries), and
were bound by strict norms of honesty.
But
regardless of how honest parties may be in their dealings with one another, the
cultural homogeneity and social intimacy of these gentlemanly networks and
clubs has always been grounds for suspicion. Right back to the mid-17th
century, the bodies tasked with handling public knowledge have always
privileged white male graduates, living in global cities and university towns.
This does not discredit the knowledge they produce – but where things get
trickier is when that homogeneity starts to appear to be a political identity,
with a shared set of political goals. This is what is implied by the concept of
“elites”: that purportedly separate domains of power – media, business,
politics, law, academia – are acting in unison.
A
further threat comes from individuals taking advantage of their authority for
personal gain. Systems that rely on trust are always open to abuse by those
seeking to exploit them. It is a key feature of modern administrations that
they use written documents to verify things – but there will always be scope
for records to be manipulated, suppressed or fabricated. There is no escaping
that possibility altogether. This applies to many fields: at a certain point,
the willingness to trust that a newspaper is honestly reporting what a police
officer claims to have been told by a credible witness, for example, relies on
a leap of faith.
A trend
of declining trust has been underway across the western world for many years,
even decades, as copious survey evidence attests. Trust, and its absence,
became a preoccupation for policymakers and business leaders during the 1990s
and early 2000s. They feared that shrinking trust led to higher rates of crime
and less cohesive communities, producing costs that would be picked up by the
state.
What
nobody foresaw was that, when trust sinks beneath a certain point, many people
may come to view the entire spectacle of politics and public life as a sham.
This happens not because trust in general declines, but because key public
figures – notably politicians and journalists – are perceived as untrustworthy.
It is those figures specifically tasked with representing society, either as
elected representatives or as professional reporters, who have lost
credibility.
To
understand the crisis liberal democracy faces today – whether we identify this
primarily in terms of “populism” or “post-truth” – it’s not enough to simply
bemoan the rising cynicism of the public. We need also to consider some of the
reasons why trust has been withdrawn. The infrastructure of fact has been
undermined in part by a combination of technology and market forces – but we
must seriously reckon with the underlying truth of the populists’ charge
against the establishment today. Too often, the rise of insurgent political
parties and demagogues is viewed as the source of liberalism’s problems, rather
than as a symptom. But by focusing on trust, and the failure of liberal institutions
to sustain it, we get a clearer sense of why this is happening now.
The
problem today is that, across a number of crucial areas of public life, the
basic intuitions of populists have been repeatedly verified. One of the main
contributors to this has been the spread of digital technology, creating vast
data trails with the latent potential to contradict public statements, and even
undermine entire public institutions. Whereas it is impossible to conclusively
prove that a politician is morally innocent or that a news report is
undistorted, it is far easier to demonstrate the opposite. Scandals, leaks,
whistleblowing and revelations of fraud all serve to confirm our worst
suspicions. While trust relies on a leap of faith, distrust is supported by
ever-mounting piles of evidence. And in Britain, this pile has been expanding
much faster than many of us have been prepared to admit.
Confronted
by the rise of populist parties and leaders, some commentators have described
the crisis facing liberalism in largely economic terms – as a revolt among
those “left behind” by inequality and globalisation. Another camp sees it
primarily as the expression of cultural anxieties surrounding identity and
immigration. There is some truth in both, of course – but neither gets to the
heart of the trust crisis that populists exploit so ruthlessly. A crucial
reason liberalism is in danger right now is that the basic honesty of
mainstream politicians, journalists and senior officials is no longer taken for
granted.
There
are copious explanations for Trump, Brexit and so on, but insufficient attention
to what populists are actually saying, which focuses relentlessly on the idea
of self-serving “elites” maintaining a status quo that primarily benefits them.
On the right, Nigel Farage has accused individual civil servants of seeking to
sabotage Brexit for their own private ends. On the left, Jeremy Corbyn
repeatedly refers to Britain’s “rigged” economic system. The promise to crack
down on corruption and private lobbying is integral to the pitch made by
figures such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro or Viktor Orbán.
One of
the great political riddles of recent years is that declining trust in “elites”
is often encouraged and exploited by figures of far more dubious moral
character – not to mention far greater wealth – than the technocrats and politicians
being ousted. On the face of it, it would seem odd that a sense of “elite”
corruption would play into the hands of hucksters and blaggards such as Donald
Trump or Arron Banks. But the authority of these figures owes nothing to their
moral character, and everything to their perceived willingness to blow the
whistle on corrupt “insiders” dominating the state and media.
Liberals
– including those who occupy “elite” positions – may comfort themselves with
the belief that these charges are ill-founded or exaggerated, or else that the
populists offer no solutions to the failures they identify. After all, Trump
has not “drained the swamp” of Washington lobbying. But this is to miss the
point of how such rhetoric works, which is to chip away at the core faith on
which liberalism depends, namely that power is being used in ways that
represent the public interest, and that the facts published by the mainstream
media are valid representations of reality.
Populists
target various centres of power, including dominant political parties,
mainstream media, big business and the institutions of the state, including the
judiciary. The chilling phrase “enemies of the people” has recently been
employed by Donald Trump to describe those broadcasters and newspapers he
dislikes (such as CNN and the New York Times), and by the Daily Mail to
describe high court judges, following their 2016 ruling that Brexit would
require parliamentary consent. But on a deeper level, whether it is the
judiciary, the media or the independent civil service that is being attacked is
secondary to a more important allegation: that public life in general has
become fraudulent.
How does
this allegation work? One aspect of it is to dispute the very possibility that
a judge, reporter or expert might act in a disinterested, objective fashion.
For those whose authority depends on separating their public duties from their
personal feelings, having their private views or identities publicised serves
as an attack on their credibility. But another aspect is to gradually blur the
distinctions between different varieties of expertise and authority, with the
implication that politicians, journalists, judges, regulators and officials are
effectively all working together.
It is
easy for rival professions to argue that they have little in common with each
other, and are often antagonistic to each other. Ostensibly, these disparate
centres of expertise and power hold each other in check in various ways,
producing a pluralist system of checks and balances. Twentieth-century
defenders of liberalism, such as the American political scientist Robert Dahl,
often argued that it didn’t matter how much power was concentrated in the hands
of individual authorities, as long as no single political entity was able to
monopolise power. The famous liberal ideal of a “separation of powers”
(distinguishing executive, legislative and judicial branches of government), so
influential in the framing of the US constitution, could persist so long as
different domains of society hold one another up to critical scrutiny.
But one
thing that these diverse professions and authorities do have in common is that
they trade primarily in words and symbols. By lumping together journalists,
judges, experts and politicians as a single homogeneous “liberal elite”, it is
possible to treat them all as indulging in a babble of jargon, political correctness
and, ultimately, lies. Their status as public servants is demolished once their
claim to speak honestly is thrown into doubt. One way in which this is done is
by bringing their private opinions and tastes before the public, something that
social media and email render far easier. Tensions and contradictions between
the public face of, say, a BBC reporter, and their private opinions and
feelings, are much easier to discover in the age of Twitter.
Whether
in the media, politics or academia, liberal professions suffer a vulnerability
that a figure such as Trump doesn’t, in that their authority hangs on their
claim to speak the truth. A recent sociological paper called The Authentic
Appeal of the Lying Demagogue, by US academics Oliver Hahl, Minjae Kim and Ezra
Zuckerman Sivan, draws a distinction between two types of lies. The first,
“special access lies”, may be better termed “insider lies”. This is dishonesty
from those trusted to truthfully report facts, who abuse that trust by failing
to state what they privately know to be true. (The authors give the example of
Bill Clinton’s infamous claim that he “did not have sexual relations with that
woman”.)
The
second, which they refer to as “common knowledge lies”, are the kinds of lies
told by Donald Trump about the size of his election victory or the crowds at
his inauguration, or the Vote Leave campaign’s false claims about sending
“£350m a week to the EU”. These lies do not pretend to be bound by the norm of
honesty in the first place, and the listener can make up their own mind what to
make of them.
What the
paper shows is that, where politics comes to be viewed as the domain of
“insider” liars, there is a seductive authenticity, even a strange kind of
honesty, about the “common knowledge” liar. The rise of highly polished,
professional politicians such as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton exacerbated the
sense that politics is all about strategic concealment of the truth, something
that the Iraq war seemed to confirm as much as anything. Trump or Farage may
have a reputation for fabricating things, but they don’t (rightly or wrongly)
have a reputation for concealing things, which grants them a form of
credibility not available to technocrats or professional politicians.
At the
same time, and even more corrosively, when elected representatives come to be
viewed as “insider liars”, it turns out that other professions whose job it is
to report the truth – journalists, experts, officials – also suffer a slump in
trust. Indeed, the distinctions between all these fact-peddlers start to look
irrelevant in the eyes of those who’ve given up on the establishment
altogether. It is this type of all-encompassing disbelief that creates the
opportunity for rightwing populism in particular. Trump voters are more than
twice as likely to distrust the media as those who voted for Clinton in 2016,
according to the annual Edelman Trust Barometer, which adds that the four
countries currently suffering the most “extreme trust losses” are Italy,
Brazil, South Africa and the US.
It’s one
thing to measure public attitudes, but quite another to understand what shapes
them. Alienation and disillusionment develop slowly, and without any single
provocation. No doubt economic stagnation and soaring inequality have played a
role – but we should not discount the growing significance of scandals that
appear to discredit the honesty and objectivity of “liberal elites”. The
misbehaviour of elites did not “cause” Brexit, but it is striking, in
hindsight, how little attention was paid to the accumulation of scandal and its
consequences for trust in the establishment.
The 2010
edition of the annual British Social Attitudes survey included an ominous
finding. Trust in politicians, already low, had suffered a fresh slump, with a
majority of people saying politicians never tell the truth. But at the same
time, interest in politics had mysteriously risen.
To whom
would this newly engaged section of the electorate turn if they had lost trust
in “politicians”? One answer was clearly Ukip, who experienced their greatest
electoral gains in the years that followed, to the point of winning the most
seats in the 2014 elections for the European parliament. Ukip’s surge, which
initially appeared to threaten the Conservative party, was integral to David
Cameron’s decision to hold a referendum on EU membership. One of the decisive
(and unexpected) factors in the referendum result was the number of voters who
went to the polls for the first time, specifically to vote leave.
What
might have prompted the combination of angry disillusionment and intensifying
interest that was visible in the 2010 survey? It clearly predated the toughest
years of austerity. But there was clearly one event that did more than any other
to weaken trust in politicians: the MPs’ expenses scandal, which blew up in May
2009 thanks to a drip-feed of revelations published by the Daily Telegraph.
Following
as it did so soon after a disaster of world-historic proportions – the
financial crisis – the full significance of the expenses scandal may have been
forgotten. But its ramifications were vast. For one thing, it engulfed many of
the highest reaches of power in Westminster: the Speaker of the House of
Commons, the home secretary, the secretary of state for communities and local
government and the chief secretary to the treasury all resigned. Not only that,
but the rot appeared to have infected all parties equally, validating the
feeling that politicians had more in common with each other (regardless of
party loyalties) than they did with decent, ordinary people.
Many of
the issues that “elites” deal with are complex, concerning law, regulation and
economic analysis. We can all see the fallout of the financial crisis, for
instance, but the precise causes are disputed and hard to fathom. By contrast,
everybody understands expense claims, and everybody knows lying and
exaggerating are among the most basic moral failings; even a child understands
they are wrong. This may be unfair to the hundreds of honest MPs and to the
dozens whose misdemeanours fell into a murky area around the “spirit” of the
rules. But the sense of a mass stitch-up was deeply – and understandably –
entrenched.
The
other significant thing about the expenses scandal was the way it set a
template for a decade of elite scandals – most of which also involved lies,
leaks and dishonest denials. One year later, there was another leak from a vast
archive of government data: in 2010, WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands
of US military field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan. With the assistance of
newspapers including the New York Times, Der Spiegel, the Guardian and Le
Monde, these “war logs” disclosed horrifying details about the conduct of US
forces and revealed the Pentagon had falsely denied knowledge of various
abuses. While some politicians expressed moral revulsion with what had been
exposed, the US and British governments blamed WikiLeaks for endangering their
troops, and the leaker, Chelsea Manning, was jailed for espionage.
In 2011,
the phone-hacking scandal put the press itself under the spotlight. It was
revealed that senior figures in News International and the Metropolitan police
had long been aware of the extent of phone-hacking practices – and they had
lied about how much they knew. Among those implicated was the prime minister’s
communications director, former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, who was
forced to resign his post and later jailed. By the end of 2011, the News of the
World had been closed down, the Leveson inquiry was underway, and the entire
Murdoch empire was shaking.
The
biggest scandal of 2012 was a different beast altogether, involving unknown men
manipulating a number that very few people had even heard of. The number in
question, the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, is meant to represent
the rate at which banks are willing to loan to each other. What was surreal, in
an age of complex derivatives and high-frequency trading algorithms, was that
this number was calculated on the basis of estimates declared by each bank on a
daily basis, and accepted purely on trust. The revelation that a handful of
brokers had conspired to alter Libor for private gain (with possible costs to
around 250,000 UK mortgage-holders, among others) may have been difficult to
fully comprehend, but it gave the not unreasonable impression of an industry
enriching itself in a criminal fashion at the public’s expense. Bob Diamond,
the CEO of Barclays, the bank at the centre of the conspiracy, resigned in July
2012.
Towards
the end of that year, the media was caught in another prolonged crisis, this
time at the BBC. Horror greeted the broadcast of the ITV documentary The Other
Side of Jimmy Savile in October 2012. How many people had known about his
predatory sexual behaviour, and for how long? Why had the police abandoned
earlier investigations? And why had BBC Newsnight dropped its own film about
Savile, due to be broadcast shortly after his death in 2011? The police swiftly
established Operation Yewtree to investigate historic sexual abuse allegations,
while the BBC established independent commissions into what had gone wrong. But
a sense lingered that neither the BBC nor the police had really wanted to know
the truth of these matters for the previous 40 years.
It
wasn’t long before it was the turn of the corporate world. In September 2014, a
whistleblower revealed that Tesco had exaggerated its half-yearly profits by
£250m, increasing the figure by around a third. An accounting fiddle on this
scale clearly had roots at a senior managerial level. Sure enough, four senior
executives were suspended the same month and three were charged with fraud two
years later. A year later, it emerged that Volkswagen had systematically and
deliberately tinkered with emissions controls in their vehicles, so as to dupe
regulators in tests, but then pollute liberally the rest of the time. The CEO,
Martin Winterkorn, resigned.
“We
didn’t really learn anything from WikiLeaks we didn’t already presume to be
true,” the philosopher Slavoj Žižek observed in 2014. “But it is one thing to
know it in general and another to get concrete data.” The nature of all these
scandals suggests the emergence of a new form of “facts”, in the shape of a
leaked archive – one that, crucially, does not depend on trusting the
secondhand report of a journalist or official. These revelations are powerful
and consequential precisely because they appear to directly confirm our fears
and suspicions. Resentment towards “liberal elites” would no doubt brew even in
the absence of supporting evidence. But when that evidence arises, things become
far angrier, even when the data – such as Hillary Clinton’s emails – isn’t
actually very shocking.
This is
by no means an exhaustive list of the scandals of the past decade, nor are they
all of equal significance. But viewing them together provides a better sense of
how the suspicions of populists cut through. Whether or not we continue to
trust in politicians, journalists or officials, we have grown increasingly used
to this pattern in which a curtain is dramatically pulled back, to reveal those
who have been lying to or defrauding the public.
Another
pattern also begins to emerge. It’s not just that isolated individuals are
unmasked as corrupt or self-interested (something that is as old as politics),
but that the establishment itself starts to appear deceitful and dubious. The
distinctive scandals of the 21st century are a combination of some very basic
and timeless moral failings (greed and dishonesty) with technologies of
exposure that expose malpractice on an unprecedented scale, and with far more
dramatic results.
Perhaps
the most important feature of all these revelations was that they were
definitely scandals, and not merely failures: they involved deliberate efforts
to defraud or mislead. Several involved sustained cover-ups, delaying the
moment of truth for as long as possible.
Several
of the scandals ended with high profile figures behind bars. Jail terms satisfy
some of the public demand that the “elites” pay for their dishonesty, but they
don’t repair the trust that has been damaged. On the contrary, there’s a risk
that they affirm the cry for retribution, after which the quest for punishment
is only ramped up further. Chants of “lock her up” continue to reverberate
around Trump rallies.
In
addition to their conscious and deliberate nature, a second striking feature of
these scandals was the ambiguous role played by the media. On the one hand, the
reputation of the media has taken a pummelling over the past decade, egged on
by populists and conspiracy theorists who accuse the “mainstream media” of being
allied to professional political leaders, and who now have the benefit of
social media through which to spread this message.
The
moral authority of newspapers may never have been high, but the grisly
revelations that journalists hacked the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly
Dowler represented a new low in the public standing of the press. The Leveson
inquiry, followed soon after by the Savile revelations and Operation Yewtree,
generated a sense of a media class who were adept at exposing others, but equally
expert at concealing the truth of their own behaviours.
On the
other hand, it was newspapers and broadcasters that enabled all of this to come
to light at all. The extent of phone hacking was eventually exposed by the
Guardian, the MPs’ expenses by the Telegraph, Jimmy Savile by ITV, and the “war
logs” reported with the aid of several newspapers around the world
simultaneously.
But the
media was playing a different kind of role from the one traditionally played by
journalists and newspapers, with very different implications for the status of
truth in society. A backlog of data and allegations had built up in secret,
until eventually a whistle was blown. An archive existed that the authorities
refused to acknowledge, until they couldn’t resist the pressure to do so any
longer. Journalists and whistleblowers were instrumental in removing the
pressure valve, but from that point on, truth poured out unpredictably. While
such torrents are underway, there is no way of knowing how far they may spread
or how long they may last.
The era
of “big data” is also the era of “leaks”. Where traditional “sleaze” could
topple a minister, several of the defining scandals of the past decade have
been on a scale so vast that they exceed any individual’s responsibility. The
Edward Snowden revelations of 2013, the Panama Papers leak of 2015 and the HSBC
files (revealing organised tax evasion) all involved the release of tens of
thousands or even millions of documents. Paper-based bureaucracies never faced
threats to their legitimacy on this scale.
The
power of commissions and inquiries to make sense of so much data is not to be
understated, nor is the integrity of those newspapers and whistleblowers that
helped bring misdemeanours to light. In cases such as MPs’ expenses, some newspapers
even invited their readers to help search these vast archives for treasure
troves, like human algorithms sorting through data. But it is hard to imagine
that the net effect of so many revelations was to build trust in any publicly
visible institutions. On the contrary, the discovery that “elites” have been
blocking access to a mine of incriminating data is perfect fodder for
conspiracy theories. In his 2010 memoir, A Journey, Tony Blair confessed that
legislating for freedom of information was one of his biggest regrets, which
gave a glimpse of how transparency is viewed from the centre of power.
Following
the release of the war logs by WikiLeaks, nobody in any position of power
claimed that the data wasn’t accurate (it was, after all, the data, and not a
journalistic report). Nor did they offer any moral justification for what was
revealed. Defence departments were left making the flimsiest of arguments –
that it was better for everyone if they didn’t know how war was conducted. It may
well be that the House of Commons was not fairly represented by the MPs’
expenses scandal, that most City brokers are honest, or that the VW emissions
scam was a one-off within the car industry. But scandals don’t work through
producing fair or representative pictures of the world; they do so by blowing
the lid on hidden truths and lies. Where whistleblowing and leaking become the
dominant form of truth-telling, the authority of professional truth-tellers –
reporters, experts, professionals, broadcasters – is thrown into question.
The term
“illiberal democracy” is now frequently invoked to describe states such as
Hungary under Viktor Orbán or Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In contrast to
liberal democracy, this model of authoritarian populism targets the
independence of the judiciary and the media, ostensibly on behalf of “the
people”.
Brexit
has been caused partly by distrust in “liberal elites”, but the anxiety is that
it is also accelerating a drift towards “illiberalism”. There is a feeling at
large, albeit among outspoken remainers, that the BBC has treated the leave
campaign and Brexit itself with kid gloves, for fear of provoking animosity.
More worrying was the discovery by openDemocracy in October that the
Metropolitan police were delaying their investigation into alleged breaches of
electoral law by the leave campaign due to what a Met spokesperson called
“political sensitivities”. The risk at the present juncture is that key civic
institutions will seek to avoid exercising scrutiny and due process, for fear
of upsetting their opponents.
Britain
is not an “illiberal democracy”, but the credibility of our elites is still in
trouble, and efforts to placate their populist opponents may only make matters
worse. At the more extreme end of the spectrum, the far-right activist Stephen
Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson, has used his celebrity and social
media reach to cast doubt on the judiciary and the BBC at once.
Yaxley-Lennon
has positioned himself as a freedom fighter, revealing “the truth” about Muslim
men accused of grooming underage girls by violating legal rules that restrict
reporting details of ongoing trials. Yaxley-Lennon was found guilty of contempt
of court and jailed (he was later released after the court of appeal ordered a
retrial, and the case has been referred to the attorney general), but this only
deepened his appeal for those who believed the establishment was complicit in a
cover-up, and ordinary people were being deliberately duped.
The
political concern right now is that suspicions of this nature – that the truth
is being deliberately hidden by an alliance of “elites” – are no longer the
preserve of conspiracy theorists, but becoming increasingly common. Our current
crisis has too many causes to enumerate here, and it is impossible to apportion
blame for a collective collapse of trust – which is as much a symptom of
changes in media technologies as it is of any moral failings on the part of
elites.
But what
is emerging now is what the social theorist Michel Foucault would have called a
new “regime of truth” – a different way of organising knowledge and trust in
society. The advent of experts and government administrators in the 17th
century created the platform for a distinctive liberal solution to this
problem, which rested on the assumption that knowledge would reside in public
records, newspapers, government files and journals. But once the integrity of
these people and these instruments is cast into doubt, an opportunity arises
for a new class of political figures and technologies to demand trust instead.
The
project that was launched over three centuries ago, of trusting elite
individuals to know, report and judge things on our behalf, may not be viable
in the long term, at least not in its existing form. It is tempting to indulge
the fantasy that we can reverse the forces that have undermined it, or else
batter them into retreat with an even bigger arsenal of facts. But this is to
ignore the more fundamental ways in which the nature of trust is changing.
The main
feature of the emerging regime is that truth is now assumed to reside in hidden
archives of data, rather than in publicly available facts. This is what is
affirmed by scandals such as MPs’ expenses and the leak of the Iraq war logs –
and more recently in the #MeToo movement, which also occurred through a sudden
and voluminous series of revelations, generating a crisis of trust. The truth
was out there, just not in the public domain. In the age of email, social media
and cameraphones, it is now common sense to assume that virtually all social
activity is generating raw data, which exists out there somewhere. Truth
becomes like the lava below the earth’s crust, which periodically bursts through
as a volcano.
What
role does this leave for the traditional, analogue purveyors of facts and
figures? What does it mean to “report” the news in an age of reflexive
disbelief? Newspapers have been grappling with this question for some time now;
some have decided to refashion themselves as portals to the raw data, or
curators of other people’s content. But it is no longer intuitively obvious to
the public why they should be prepared to take a journalist’s word for
something, when they can witness the thing itself in digital form. There may be
good answers to these questions, but they are not obvious ones.
Instead,
a new type of heroic truth-teller has emerged in tandem with these trends. This
is the individual who appears brave enough to call bullshit on the rest of the
establishment – whether that be government agencies, newspapers, business, political
parties or anything else. Some are whistleblowers, others are political
leaders, and others are more like conspiracy theorists or trolls. The problem
is that everyone has a different heroic truth-teller, because we’re all
preoccupied by different bullshit. There is no political alignment between
figures such as Chelsea Manning and Nigel Farage; what they share is only a
willingness to defy the establishment and break consensus.
If a
world where everyone has their own truth-tellers sounds dangerously like
relativism, that’s because it is. But the roots of this new and often
unsettling “regime of truth” don’t only lie with the rise of populism or the
age of big data. Elites have largely failed to understand that this crisis is
about trust rather than facts – which may be why they did not detect the rapid
erosion of their own credibility.
Unless
liberal institutions and their defenders are willing to reckon with their own
inability to sustain trust, the events of the past decade will remain opaque to
them. And unless those institutions can rediscover aspects of the original
liberal impulse – to keep different domains of power separate, and put the
disinterested pursuit of knowledge before the pursuit of profit – then the
present trends will only intensify, and no quantity of facts will be sufficient
to resist. Power and authority will accrue to a combination of decreasingly
liberal states and digital platforms – interrupted only by the occasional
outcry as whistles are blown and outrages exposed.
