(I have another election post I am working on, but this idea came to mind last night in the meantime. Enjoy!)
This past week, Matt Yglesias, one of the co-founders of Vox.com, announced he was leaving the site (which he helped co-found) to start his own independent blog. Yglesias has been one of my favorite commentators on the center-left, partially because of his focus on economic issues (he played an important role in elevating the importance of housing and zoning regulation before it was cool) and because he is a noted contrarian who will voice disagreement with his side of the political spectrum. Over the summer, Yglesias signed the “Harpers Letter,” a banal defense of the importance of free discourse that became a lightning rod for the controversy over the relationship between social justice and free speech. Many went after the signers with a real sense of vitriol, including Yglesias, who was publically called out by one of his colleagues to the HR department for signing the letter. While Yglesias didn’t cite the incident when leaving Vox, he noted that he felt he could no longer speak freely at Vox:
Yglesias felt that he could no longer speak his mind without riling his colleagues. His managers wanted him to maintain a “restrained, institutional, statesmanlike voice,” he told me in a phone interview, in part because he was a co-founder of Vox. But as a relative moderate at the publication, he felt at times that it was important to challenge what he called the “dominant sensibility” in the “young-college-graduate bubble” that now sets the tone at many digital-media organizations.
Many noted that if Yglesias, a co-founder of Vox with quite a bit of internal political clout, does not feel free to speak openly working there, how could a rank-and-file writer whose political views are on the center-right speak their mind? This is mostly because when Vox was founded, it was intended to be a de-polarizing news outlet.
So what went wrong at Vox? Well, first, it is worth pointing out that this is not a phenomenon isolated to Vox. Many have noted that Center-Left media, ranging from NYT to the Washington Post, to CNN, have moved notably to the left in recent years in their reporting and editorial voice. Prominent centrist writers at center-left publications, including Bari Weiss at the NY Times and Andrew Sullivan at New York Magazine, have left to form their own independent sites.
Why is this shift happening? One reason often given is that Trump’s presidency has radicalized many on the left, including many center-left journalists. Another explanation is that younger staff at these publications are more stridently left, especially on identity issues, and are pushing the media organizations' internal culture to the left. Yglesias nods at this in his quote above. But while I think both of those theories have truth in them, I want to explore what I think is an under-covered phenomenon: the audience. As Andrew Potter points out in this great blog post, the media's biggest polarizing force is the audience.
Back when media was concentrated (pre-internet), most of the revenue to news sources (TV Networks and Newspapers) came from big corporations advertising. While many on the left (IE Noam Chomsky) believed this made the media biased towards corporate interests, the lived experience from that era tells a different story. As Potter points out:
…Advertisers didn’t spend a lot of time trying to dictate what went into the news pages, presumably because they didn’t really care. What they wanted was our audience, not the content. Also, an ad-driven newspaper benefits from having their advertisers in a nice little collective action problem. Coke and Pepsi might both disapprove of the content of the Podunk Examiner, but if the audience is valuable enough to pay to reach, then each has an interest in continuing to advertise in it. If Pepsi pulls their ads, Coke gets unchallenged access to that audience, and vice versa.
Most consumer product brands in the 20th century wanted to appeal to the largest possible audience and want to be generally liked by that audience. This meant they had an incentive to put the bulk of their money into advertising on mediums like the big newspapers and broadcast news. While these outlets may have had their biases, they were motivated to keep a veneer of centrism and moderation, to ensure that the widest possible audience can tolerate the news. On the other hand, magazines like “National Review” or “The Nation” were more partisan news magazines had a much narrower readership base due to their more polarized editorial stance. They had to rely primarily on subscriptions to make their business models work.
However, the media's disruption by the internet has meant that newspapers and news networks have had to embrace new business models to survive. Most mainstream newspapers now focus on subscriptions as their means of expansion. But passionate, paid-subscribers are a double-edged sword when it comes to editorial control of media:
But you know who does complain a lot? Subscribers do, endlessly. Sometimes with good reason, but many other times, with no justification at all. I lost count of the number of times I took calls from readers calling to complain about something they had read in The Globe and Mail or the Toronto Star or had heard on the CBC, but who swore it was in our pages. Sometimes you could tell these readers to take a hike (newsroom legend told of a managing editor who once screamed at a caller “you are too stupid to be reading our newspaper!” before hanging up), but as the business declined, as readers and advertisers fled, it became less advisable to treat readers as an annoyance
Potter goes on:
So what happens when you apply this to news? My suspicion is that it will lead to an increasingly polarized media environment, through more or less the same mechanism that leads to group polarization in social psychology. When a news organization relies almost entirely on its readership for its revenue, it will inevitably start to cater to what the owners perceive to be the political centre of gravity of that readership. And the readership will in turn make demands on the editors to shape the coverage in certain ways, which will tend to gradually shift that centre of gravity away from the middle, and towards the political extremes. The organization will end up in a content box the readership won’t let them out of.
I think of this phenomenon broadly as “audience capture.” Once audiences are the main fuel of a news organization’s bottom line, they become more beholden to saying what the audience wants to hear. Partisan audiences thus end up getting what they want from news organizations. When the NY Times published the controversial op-ed by Tom Cotton this summer, I knew partisans on the left who canceled their subscription as a way to voice their displeasure, hoping that the newspaper would take it to heart and move leftward in its editorial discretion.
This is not a phenomenon confined to the left. When Donald Trump first ran for president in the 2015 GOP primary, all appearances were that many of Fox News’ journalists were prepared to treat him with skepticism. The first debate famously included Megyn Kelly, working for Fox News, asking Trump very pointed questions, after which he accused Kelly of being unfair, and having “Blood coming out of her…whatever” after the debate (see clip below):
One would have assumed that Fox News would take this as an affront and continue to cover Trump with Skepticism. And they did for most of 2015! But many observers noted a shift in 2016, where Fox seemed to make a conscious choice in their coverage of Trump, becoming more positive. The biggest reason? Fox found that its viewers liked Trump by all accounts, and many viewers did not want the network pushing back on Trump. Similar phenomenons happened at other conservative publications: the Wall Street Journal saw the Trump-skeptical writers leave its editorial board, National Review saw an exodus of its Trump-skeptical writers, and the Weekly Standard fully shut down.
I think one of the most interesting transformation arcs of a political commentator has happened with Dave Rubin, who rose to prominence in 2018 as a self-identified progressive guy, who gained prominence as a critic of identity politics. I never was a fan of Rubin, but I knew folks who liked and followed him. Over the last 3 years, he has shifted from:
A progressive (pre-2017)
Then a “classical liberal” (2017)
Then a reluctant Trump-endorsing conservative (Early 2020)
Then whole-hearted endorser of the “Trump was robbed” conspiracy (now)
(Note: I use the word conspiracy because the best conservative reporting on the matter indicates that it is a conspiracy, even though many Trump fans do not want to hear this)
I’m sure this has been a complex transformation for Rubin. Still, I strongly suspect that Rubin responds to his audience's incentives, which has MASSIVELY increased as Rubin has gradually gotten more skeptical of the left and friendly toward Trump.
So how do we stop this media polarization? I am not sure the market incentives will work in a “less polarized” direction anytime soon, and regulated social media does nothing to fix the incentives on a publication level. As individuals, we can work to be conscious of this tendency and make sure we are consciously counteracting the impulse within us to punish media we disagree with and reward media we agree with. However, I am skeptical that rewiring our brains is that easy! I also suspect that we would be in a better place if we did the hard work of finding 1-2 dissenting voices that you can tolerate enough to listen to (maybe this blog is that for you).
Keep reading for part 2:
To combat the harrowing media polarization you describe, I have two proposals: 1) Thomas starts a Patreon page through which he curates a balanced hodgepodge of news sources to challenge liberals, conservatives, and moderates alike to expand the way they think about politics and society. You will have minimum 1 supporter - me! 2) Thomas and his friends form a diverse "reading group" to consume and discuss said diverse media, which eventually becomes a hit podcast. We all become wealthy from the Audible advertising revenue. How does that sound?