The Mid-Century Media Theorists Who Saw What Was Coming

“At the very heart of democracy is a contradiction that cannot be resolved, one that has affected free societies from ancient Greece to contemporary America,” write Zac Gershberg and Sean Illing in their new book, “The Paradox of Democracy.” In order to live up to its name, democracy must be open to free communication and expression; yet that very feature opens democracies up to the forces of chaos, fragmentation and demagoguery that undermine them. Historically, this paradox becomes particularly profound during transitions between different communication technologies. “We see this time and again,” Gershberg and Illing write, “media continually evolve faster than politics, resulting in recurring patterns of democratic instability.” For that reason, Gershberg and Illing refer to media ecology — a field dedicated to studying the complex interplay between media, humans and their broader social environments — as “the master political science.” You can’t understand a society’s politics without understanding the mediums through which its people communicate. Radio and TV and Twitter and TikTok each profoundly shape the way we think, the qualities we look for in our politicians, the way we absorb news, the kind of political discourse we engage in and so much more. Illing’s career, in many ways, represents the intersection of these two worlds: He’s trained as a political theorist but eventually switched careers to become a journalist; he’s currently the interviews writer at Vox, where he hosts the podcast “Vox Conversations” and often writes about the nexus of media and politics. So I invited Illing on the show to talk about his new book alongside some of his other work. We discuss: - Why mid-century media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman are essential for understanding our current political moment - How the mediums through which we communicate — TV, social media, print news — shape us even more deeply than the content we absorb from them - The surprising dangers of “Sesame Street” - Why Abraham Lincoln probably never would have won the presidency in the TV era - How revolutions in media technology from the printing press to Facebook have destabilized political systems - How Twitter reshapes the thinking of those who use it - Why Illing believes that democracy is fundamentally a “communicative culture” and not a set of rules and institutions - What Donald Trump understood about our media age that the media itself didn’t - Why Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone” media strategy has been so successful - Whether it’s possible to achieve a healthier version of political discourse given our current technologies And much more This episode contains strong language. Mentioned: “‘Flood the zone with shit’: How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy” by Sean Illing “Quantifying partisan news diets in Web and TV audiences” by Daniel Muise, Homa Hosseinmardi, Baird Howland, Markus Mobius, David Rothschild and Duncan J. Watts Book Recommendations: Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann Mediated by Thomas de Zengotita Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Sonia Herrero, Carole Sabouraud and Isaac Jones; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein. This is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:22Ezra Klein?

  In their new book, The Paradox of Democracy, Zach Gershberg and Sean Elling make a simple but radical argument. They write, quote, "It's better to think of democracy less as a government type and more as an open communicative culture." Their point there is that democracies can end up in many types of governments. We tend to think of liberal democracies, but that's only one possibility. You can have illiberal democracies. Democracies can vote themselves into fascism. Democracy doesn't guarantee you any particular outcome. And so what drives a democracy, what decides what it becomes or what it stays, is that open communicative culture, the way its members learn about

• 1:06Ezra Klein?

  the world, debate it, and ultimately persuade each other to change it or not change it. And communicative cultures are shaped by the technologies upon which they happen. Oral cultures are different than textual ones. Radio is different than TV. Twitter is different than TikTok or Facebook. Political scientists spend a lot of time theorizing about democratic institutions and how elections work, but communicative institutions and the cultures and technologies by which we communicate, they get a lot less attention. And I guess I'm a member of the media, so I would think this, but I think it's a huge mistake. I've become almost obsessed in recent years with Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, the great mid-20th century

• 1:49Ezra Klein?

  media ecologists. I honestly think you have to pick any two theorists to act as guides to our current moment. You could do a lot worse than them. And so I'm always looking for an excuse to talk about them and to talk with other people trying to apply them to our current political age. So I was thrilled to see this book hit my desk. Sean Illing is one of the authors. He is a PhD political theorist who switched careers and became a journalist, which has always given him, in my view, an interesting dual perspective. He is the interviews writer at Vox and he sits in my old chair hosting the podcast Vox Conversations. As always, my email, if you want to have an open communicative culture with me and the team here, is [email protected].

• 2:36Ezra Klein?

  Sean Illing, welcome to the show.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 2:39Ezra Klein?

  So you and I, I think, have come to share a fascination with Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, who are these mid-century media critics. And, man, I really think that if you want to understand the modern era, you need to read them. So people may have heard McLuhan's famous line, "The medium is the message." What does it mean?

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Well, it basically just means that the forms of medium we use determine the content, right? So you can think about it like this. And this is the way Neil Postman, who wrote "Amusing Ourselves to Death," put it. I mean, his book is a kind of indictment of TV, but he actually loved junk TV. He thought it was very entertaining. The problem is that the news and politics, because it relied on TV, had to ape the mechanics and the logic of TV. It had to be entertaining. And I was listening to some interviews that he did the other day, and he used Sesame Street as an example here. What he was saying

• 3:42Speaker 01

  is that, look, it's not that kids don't learn how to spell when they watch Sesame Street. Surely, they do, and that's great.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  It's that the medium of TV also communicated an important message. And the message was that education and entertainment are bound up with each other. And so that conditioned a generation to expect education to be entertaining. Right? And so TV will do the same thing with politics shows. So like John Oliver Show, which is great, but it only works if it's entertaining and funny. And it's the same thing with cable news where you you turn on Morning Joe and they're bebopping along and playing Rolling Stones songs while cutting to commercials. It is always a TV show for us. It has to be, right?

• 4:36Speaker 01

  The form itself, the medium itself imposes that. That's kind of what he's getting at.

• 4:41Ezra Klein?

  So I love that you brought in the Sesame Street thing there, as I said, because I think it's a really clear example. Postman got in a lot of trouble for this. He talks about it a lot. But his basic argument, as I've heard him make it, to build on what you said, is that people think Sesame Street teaches children to love learning and what it teaches them is to love television.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:00Ezra Klein?

  And he's obviously right about that. I mean, it maybe does both, but he's obviously right that Sesame Street is training wheels television and also how I've used it for my own child. And to bring this back to McLuhan, what I understand McLuhan is saying is that we really miss the way mediums change us. And I've come to think of this as focusing on their their sameness rather than their differences. He's got this other quote that I think about a lot where he says, "Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the content of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar

• 5:45Ezra Klein?

  to distract the watchdog of the mind." So do you want to talk a bit about that distinction between the content that we see on mediums and how they do change? Reddit is different to, say, watch Fox News versus watching MSNBC, but that there's at the same time a commonality to what cable news is that McLuhan would say is the more important message of both of them?

• 6:08Speaker 01

  I mean, I think that's the, that's the point that Sesame Street is trying to make, right? And so it's maybe easier to understand it by contrasting it with like the printed word, which I think Postman was probably a little bit romantic about, but, you know, he argues that print has these pretty clear biases, right? Because of the nature of the medium. It's slower, it's more deliberative, more demanding, it's linear, it's the domain of ideas, of abstract thought, or at least it tends toward that. I think some of these distinctions that these ecologists make between different mediums, maybe a little too neat,

• 6:45Speaker 01

  but the core point is right. But TV, unlike print, is not a medium that encourages rational thinking. It is all about action and imagery. It's about evoking emotional responses in a more passive way. And again, this goes back to the Sesame Street point, like more importantly, TV has to be entertaining in order to capture an audience and sell ads. I mean, that's what it exists to do. So Postman just says that the purpose of a medium can't be separated from the content it produces. So TV has to be entertaining. It's image-based,

• 7:27Speaker 01

  so the people on it have to look a certain way. They have to be attractive. And politics, because so much of it happens on and through TV, has to reflect these biases, right? I mean, that's the ideological bias of TV. I mean, you think he's basically right there?

• 7:47Ezra Klein?

  I do think he's right. And an easy way to put it is that he makes this argument that various politicians who succeeded gloriously in the pre-television era can never have succeeded in the post-television era.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:03Ezra Klein?

  Abraham Lincoln is an example. He uses this melancholic, tall, not that attractive, slightly weird guy, prone to a lot of depression. His wife is quite ill in a bunch of different ways. He is not the kind of politician who succeeds in the post-TV universe. But a point you all make in the book is that it really isn't just about one medium versus another. You can get overly nostalgic about that. It's that mediums change us, and so in particular, the period of time when they are changing us is a dangerous time for democracies because they create a lot of disruption.

• 8:45Ezra Klein?

  Do you want to talk a bit about that, that recurrent history of the introduction of a new medium destabilizing political systems?

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, we go through this, sort of, the book is kind of moving through history, lurching from one revolution in media to another. And we start in Athens and Rome, both societies that were formed in large part by speech and rhetoric, but also upended by them. And there's a printing press where that gives us the birth of newspapers and books and helps give us the Enlightenment, but it also unleashes a devastating religious war that devours the continent. In the 19th century, we get the Telegraph and the penny press, and that's really good

• 9:33Speaker 01

  for spreading liberal democratic norms, but it was also a really important platform for nativist and nationalism. We get fascism in the 20th century, and fascism was not possible without mass media like film and radio. Those were indispensable vessels for...

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Fascist propaganda. And then, of course, we get television and now the internet later. And the thing, again, about all those revolutions is not that the technologies are good or bad. It's just that they're disruptive in very unpredictable ways. You know, sometimes you get the Arab Spring and sometimes you get Pizza Gate. But they change the way a society thinks and orients itself. It changes the way a society relates to each other and to the world. And that has far reaching complications. It changes us and by extension, it has to change our politics. And how could it not?

• 10:37Ezra Klein?

  You're a journalist. You podcast, you write text articles, you do interviews, you write on Twitter. Let's be a little personal here. When you say mediums change us, how do you feel you're different in these different mediums?

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Well, Twitter has been, I think, bad for me personally. I mean, I've joked that I'm the worst version of myself on Twitter. But you know, the thing about Twitter, and I'm very curious what you think about this, is that to be on there is to give yourself over to the incentives driving it. Attention, virality, the impulse to perform. And I think that's bad. It blinkers our intuitions. It creates anxieties and pressures that bleed into our work, certainly mine. And for individual writers, it's kind of become a platform for just personal brand promotion. And that carries its own kinds of perverse incentives.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't know, maybe that's too dark. You know, McLuhan had this phrase, a global village he coined, which is, sounds kind of techno utopian. Like he was, you know, very excited about this future of the internet where we would all be together. But like, his point was actually the opposite of that. That like, no, it would be the size of the world, but the psychological dynamics would be like a little tiny town. Where like, everybody's all up in everyone else's business. Everyone's always looking over everyone's shoulders. There's all these social pressures. And I feel those pretty intensely. And the more I step away from that and just do stuff like podcasting,

• 12:20Speaker 01

  which is kind of removed from Twitter and some of that immediate feedback, it just feels liberating. It just feels more satisfying. I don't know. Is that your experience?

• 12:37Ezra Klein?

  When I write, I tend to convince myself of what I think. There's an old Joe Didion line that writers love. I write to find out what I think. And I don't believe it's true, at least not for me. I've noticed over time that writing tends for me to be about finding an answer, and I tend to become convinced by the answer I find. I've noticed that because as I've done more podcasting, I notice how much more when I'm podcasting, I don't seem to enter that mode. I sit much more in a space where many possible answers seem plausible to me, and I don't feel need to choose between them. Uncertainty and contradiction and paradox are, for whatever reason, easier for me to hold in the podcast space. And Twitter,

• 13:18Ezra Klein?

  again, for better or worse, what I notice about it, what I notice happens to me the more I am on it and the better I get at it, is that it teaches me to think about the reaction, to think as if I am thinking for the collective, in a way that I have some more distance from who I'm writing for or speaking for. You know, when I'm writing a piece to go up at the New York Times or, you know, back in the day at Vox where you are, if I'm doing a podcast, you know, as we're doing this now, I am more distant from a concern about reaction, more sort of attentive to my own experience of creating the work than on Twitter or to some degree on Facebook or Instagram, where I'm much

• 14:03Ezra Klein?

  more jacked in to an expectation of what the reaction will be and both anticipating and fearing it, despite also knowing its deep ephemerality.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's, we probably overstate the broader impact of Twitter. I think like 80% of the country is even on there. But I think it has been very toxic for our business, for journalism. And to the extent that Twitter impacts how journalists think and what they cover,

• 14:42Speaker 01

  And what they fear and what they're chasing after, it has to have some impact on the public discourse, which is still influenced by political media, even if it's not as significant as it once was. Like TV, though in different ways, it's just not a space for deliberation. And for that reason, it's not good for what we do. It probably doesn't promote a healthy democratic culture. But at the same time, I guess that's sort of the paradox that we're getting at in the book. Twitter is democratic in the sense that it's pretty wide open. And if the result of that openness is a lot of bile and garbage,

• 15:27Speaker 01

  I guess that's just what democracy looks like sometimes. But the feedback is so immediate and so intense. It's just very hard to think honestly and carefully because you're just scared shitless about what's going to come back your way. At least I am.

• 16:16Ezra Klein?

  I want to use this as a way to weave into the other side of the book a little bit, which is, this is a book about the interaction between media and democracy. And you have a line in the book that has started really lodging in my head and changing how I think, where you write that, and your co-author, right? That it's, quote, "It's better to think of democracy less as a government type and more as an open communicative culture." Tell me about that distinction you're making.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  We're trying to think of democracy as a...

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Communitative culture, right? We think of democracy as a decision to open up the public sphere and let people speak, think, and decide what ought to be done. So in that sense, it is a culture of open communication. And thinking of it as a culture rather than a constellation of practices or institutions is not a pedantic or academic thing. We're trying to emphasize the open-endedness of it. The fact that it's always in a state of becoming. And the fact that you can say that a state is democratic and the fact that that doesn't necessarily tell you how it's governed is pretty instructive, right?

• 17:33Speaker 01

  I mean, it's not for nothing that fascism has only ever emerged out of democratic societies. There's something about the collision of mass media and mass politics that made fascism possible. If fascism can emerge out of a democratic society, anything can. And I just think when you talk about this tendency to conflate liberalism and democracy obscures the fact that democracy really is an unwieldy thing. And without something like liberalism to check some of its excesses, it can spin in very unpredictable directions. And there are all kinds of examples of that throughout history and even today.

• 18:17Ezra Klein?

  Spend another moment on that distinction between liberalism and democracy because I think for a lot of people, they really are quite conflated. What would an illerable democracy look like?

• 18:28Speaker 01

  It may look like Hungary. It may look like Weimar Germany, right? It may look like Russia. I've said this elsewhere, Russia is kind of a police state now, but...

• 18:44Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, Russia was a kind of a liberal democracy in a sense that Putin was pretty popular, overwhelmingly popular. I think he still is, though this is not something I track very closely. And so even if he's a tyrant, and surely he is, he's also a populist. And we wouldn't think of a state like that, a country like that, as a democracy. And it's not in a sense that these are places that are kind of shape shifting into autocracies. But to the extent those regimes or those leaders are popular, to the extent that the publics in those places have been convinced that they should follow their leaders wherever they take them, they are democratic in some fundamental sense.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  So tell me then about what you call the paradox of democracy. Well, it's the fact that the very thing that makes democracy possible, which is wide open, free expression, that while that's a condition of democracy, it can also be hijacked and turned against it. And that's what fascism is, right? So the thing that makes it possible is also the thing that threatens it from within. And that tension or that paradox is baked into the structure of democracy, if you see it in that way, right? There's just no transcending that, right? If you're going to open up society,

• 20:06Speaker 01

  then you're opening the culture up to all manner of persuasion, all manner of rhetoric, the inspirational leaders and the bullshit artists and the demagogues and the any other manner of bad faith actor you can imagine, right? Like, it is a free for all in that way, right? And so that's just what it is. And that's what makes it, I think, a paradox, right? You just simply cannot get out of it, right? The very thing that makes it possible is also the thing that perpetually threatens it. And in that sense, democracy is just sort of situated on a precipice, always.

• 20:44Ezra Klein?

  So tell me then if I have the structure of your argument right here. So democracy does not naturally lead to liberal democracy, does not naturally lead to openness. It can become anything. And the way it becomes anything is through its communicative culture. The way people in a democracy end up making the decisions that lead them to make and unmake institutions, to elect and throw out different politicians, to choose the person who wants to take them towards fascism, or the one who wants to take them towards liberalism. That's coming out of, at least at the beginning, the communicative culture. It's coming out of the way people talk about ideas, the way they learn about ideas, the way they learn about politicians.

• 21:28Ezra Klein?

  And because communicative cultures change radically over time with different technologies and different mediums and different medias, in order to understand a democracy at any given moment, you actually have to pay a lot of attention to its technologies of communication. Do I sort of have you right so far?

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. I mean, we have a line in the book where we say, "Our ideology is our technology, our technology is our culture, and culture always precedes politics." It's really just a way of saying that politics flows out of culture, and culture often flows out of technology.

• 22:04Ezra Klein?

  Ooh, tell me more about that idea that our ideology is our technology.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  Well, it's about the biases of our technology, like imposing themselves on our politics and becoming a thing that actually governs it, right? So like, one of the knocks on people like McLuhan was that he's too deterministic, and he's like a straight-up, hard technological determinist. I'm not quite that, but I guess I am a soft determinist in the sense that, in the sense that I think human beings, if not quite tabula rasa, are heavily conditioned creatures. Like, I don't want to say that context is everything, but it's kinda everything. And if you tinker with something as fundamental as our media environment, then you also tinker

• 22:54Speaker 01

  with how we structure our world. You tinker with our whole sense-making apparatus. You tinker with our categories of thought. And on some level, you tinker...

• 23:05Speaker 01

  With the core experience of being human in the world.

• 23:12Ezra Klein?

  It reminds me of one of my favorite Postman quotes. So he writes, "Introduce the alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type and you do the same. Introduce speed of light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution without a vote, without polemics, without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene. Here is ideology without words and all the more powerful for their absence. All that is required to make it stick is a population that devoutly believes in the inevitability of progress." And I've always thought that last line there is really important.

• 23:55Ezra Klein?

  That one thing that makes it hard to question technology, hard to question the way our communication changes, is that we do, particularly in America, have this baseline view that technological change is always good, that to question it makes you a Luddite. You just don't know how to use it well enough. You're just not policing your feed well enough. If you don't want to watch so much TV, you just shouldn't. That it's all a consumer choice. If you're making bad choices, it's on you and individual failing. But the argument here, if technology is ideology, and if changes in technology change our ideology, as Postman puts it, without even words and votes and polemics, then maybe it's not really individual failing.

• 24:35Ezra Klein?

  And there should be some space, maybe, that we don't seem to have for collective reflection as to whether technologies are changing us in the way we want them to.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, so McLuhan, he comes along and says, "Don't just look at what's being expressed, look at the ways it's being expressed." And then Postman...

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Says, "Don't just look at the way things are being expressed. Look at how the way things are expressed determines what's actually expressible." And you're getting at this, and this is partly why Postman is more interesting to me as a political person, because he's really just asking, "Does our media environment even allow a serious public discourse?" And I think it's maybe in the first or second chapter of Amusing Ourselves to Death, and this gets at the ideology point of thing,

• 25:35Speaker 01

  because he's talking about Reagan and William Taft, and how William Taft could not have been president in 1980. Why is that? And he says, you know, JFK is the first TV president, but TV was still fairly new, and every new medium bears the stamp of the one it's sort of overthrowing. But by the time you get to 1980, TV has really transformed the culture.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  And by the time we get to Reagan, he says, "It's no longer," or the question is no longer, "Do I agree with that guy?" It's, "Do I like him?" And that's the thing that still dominates our politics. It's vibes and feelings and impressions. And Postman noticed that with Reagan, that he was wildly popular despite people actually, when you drill down, not liking his policies, really at all. And why was that? Well, it's because they liked him on TV. And in that sense, it's not an overstatement to say that TV changed what it even meant to be a good candidate. And therefore, it changed the kinds of people who could be good candidates,

• 26:55Speaker 01

  the kinds of people who would even run for office in the first place. Like, that's a change so fundamental that it's almost more fundamental than ideology. I mean, it's just a complete transformation of how we do and practice politics. That's...

• 27:13Speaker 01

  I think hard to overstate, but it seems true to me. Do you think he's overstating that?

• 27:18Ezra Klein?

  I think it's true that TV made a televisual likability very important for politicians. What I think is interesting about social media is I'm not sure it's done the same thing. I mean, very famously, Donald Trump was the most unpopular major party candidate in the history of polling. And it strikes me that a lot of the candidates who are very good on social media, they are very liked by some, but very hated by others. So if TV made it so you had to be, the question was, do I like them? What do you think the question of social media is for politicians or for voters?

• 27:59Speaker 01

  It may be more about attention than optics, but again, it still, it still feels like internet is, at least at this point, still just amplifying the culture that TV built. The internet is more individualistic, it's more immersive, but it is still very much anchored to that world that photography and TV built. But, you know, you watch politicians on Twitter, right? I mean, they're pushing themselves in the same way that like social media influencers do. You have a lot of politicians now who are basically just professional shit posters.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  And they're just, they're on there to say things that will get engagement and that will trend. And that's good for them to the extent that it gets people talking about them, right? I mean, I guess that's somewhat different from TV.

• 28:57Ezra Klein?

  Let me try a theory out on you because I think one way in which this has all changed, and changed in a way that the media still has not caught up to, is that the question of sentiment has become secondary to the question of energy. And what I mean by that is that it's pretty good on television to be likable.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:24Ezra Klein?

  And it's pretty bad to be unlikable.

• 29:28Ezra Klein?

  And I think on social media, it's pretty good to be likable. And it's almost even better to be unlikable. Because what you need is both sides contributing energy to your candidacy or to your debate. You need controversy. Not to say controversy didn't matter at other points in American history, I don't believe that. But particularly with algorithms, that prize engagement, you really need people to join the other side of the argument. Donald Trump, people hate Donald Trump and that gives him a lot of attention. AOC, AOC drives the right crazy and that gives her a lot of attention. And the politicians, in my view, who follow a strategy of just kind of being broadly acceptable.

• 30:12Ezra Klein?

  If Joe Biden had not been Barack Obama's vice president, he doesn't have a chance in the 2020 primary. But I think that's really messed up the media, because I think we believe that as mediators, our real power is in if we cover someone or something positively or negatively. And we really don't know what to do with politicians and issues that are able to utilize our negative coverage just as much, maybe even more than our positive coverage.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  I think that's right. You know, I didn't come from the journalism world, as you know, you hired me. I was coming from the academic world, and so my first few years in this business was just me figuring out how to not suck at this. And many fine people on both sides would say I'm still figuring that out. But I started in September 2016. Rightist Trump was really monopolizing our world. And it was incredibly frustrating. He...

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Was exploiting us. He was exploiting our business model. And by us, I mean all of press, really. And we all kind of knew it, right? But we, it felt like we had no choice. I guess there's always a choice, but you know what I mean? And then, you know, I ended up writing a piece about this concept of flooding the zone and something kind of clicked for me. Do you want to say what flooding the zone is? Yeah. You know, it's a phrase that was popularized by Steve Bannon. And, you know, it's basically a very 21st century way of doing propaganda where the

• 32:07Speaker 01

  purpose isn't to convince a society to believe the same thing. The point is to just flood it, overwhelm it with lots and lots of noise so that it's very disorienting and very confusing and people do not know what to believe. And, you know, I wrote that it's basically a way of manufacturing nihilism, or at least cynicism. And it works because of the way we do business. We race for content, for clicks, for attention, and we act like greyhounds chasing a slab of meat. Every time Trump would unleash one of his unhinged tweets or whatever, it was maddening. And it's still maddening.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  But this gets to something we try to say in the book, which is that like what the media thinks it's doing is not really what it's doing. Certainly not anymore. A lot of the press is still wedded to this 20th century model of journalism where we conquer lies by exposing them, we deliver truth to a country desperate to hear it and people make informed decisions and yada, yada, yada. This just doesn't seem to be what's going on. There's too much bullshit to debunk, too many conflicting narratives to untangle. The information space has been shattered into zillion pieces, thanks to the internet.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  And the audience is so fragmented and self-sorted, a huge chunk of the country doesn't really trust public institutions or the mainstream media and they're not listening. And a lot of it feels like it's just the political class talking to itself. And it's just, I know that's kind of depressing, but that has been my experience.

• 33:55Ezra Klein?

  One thing that has always worried me and continues to worry me as a member of the media is that our biggest blind spot in how American politics works, how the political system actually functions, is ourselves. And the reason for it is that the question we are comfortable asking about our work is, are we doing a good enough job covering American politics, reflecting American politics, being a mirror to American politics? And we are unbelievably uncomfortable with the obvious question, the inescapable question, how are we changing American politics?

• 34:36Ezra Klein?

  Even if you write the most neutral article in the world, the decision to write that article and not another is an inescapably charged decision. It is a choice that could have been made any other number of ways, and by making it, you have exerted force on the political system. You've made it a little bit different. That choice lotted up over every content decision choice, whether it's a decision to do what everybody else is doing because that's safer, to do something radically different. Like, that is the sum total of our impact. And we don't really like trying to look at that sum total and then decide if that sum total is one we're comfortable with, if we should do it differently next

• 35:16Ezra Klein?

  year, if we followed good rules or bad rules. We sort of want to stay away from that question, but in a way that leaves a gaping hole in our model of how the political system actually works.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Right. And that's what was so maddening about flooding the zone. The story I globbed onto in the piece I wrote was, I guess, the 2017 story about Hillary Clinton selling Uranium One to the Russians, or something like that. It was, I mean, it was a complete horseshit, but it was a story that Bannon had fed to the press, and it kind of took off. But that's basically all it is, right? I mean, we are... Part of our business model is selling conflict. This is especially true on TV. And this is something that really comes into fruition in the 90s with the birth of cable news and kind of horse race politics. Conflict just works, right? It's politics, it's theater, politics is sport.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  And to the extent that media has profited from that model, we've also helped instantiate it, right? We've also helped make politics in the minds of people who are consuming our content think that's what politics is. And the thing that's so crazy about flooding the zone is that it works because people are doing their jobs the way they're supposed to, the way they've always been done, right? Something is out there and if it's bullshit, you debunk it, right? And you tell people why it's not true. But the problem is that, like you were just saying, in the process of debunking something, you are also amplifying it. You're pumping it out there. It's getting tattooed in people's consciousness.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  And if you do that enough, right, it just becomes very dizzying and confusing to people. And it's a way of hacking, the way media works. And it's, I think it was extraordinarily effective and no one really seems to have an answer to it. I certainly don't.

• 37:13Ezra Klein?

  I proposed in a piece I wrote years ago now, particularly with somebody like Trump, who is understood so well, that outrage is a shortcut to coverage, that if you just do something really outrageous, you can trust that you will then be able to dominate the news cycle and push everybody else out of it. I've wondered about the idea of what if the bar for Donald Trump to get covered was it he had to do something more outrageous for him, which is act like a normal politician and, you know, produce policy plans and say something worth covering as opposed to acting like an insult comic dog?

• 37:48Ezra Klein?

  But it'd be very, very hard to try to put that into play across the media. I mean, one, the media isn't a singular. We don't all coordinate. There isn't like some grand meeting of the editors where we decide how to cover things. And two, you know, we are dependent to some degree on audience. And if everybody else, you know, if the other publications are covering what Donald Trump does and you're not, that, I mean, it might be plausible to, to figure out your way to a different audience, but it's playing the game on hard mode for sure. And so I've never come up with what I think the answer to it should be. I'm curious if you, if you have a better one.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  I have no idea. None. I really don't. It's part of my frustration with this. It's just, it is very hard to see a way out, absent some kind of radical paradigm shift. And I have no idea what that would even look like.

• 38:39Ezra Klein?

  But we really need one because I feel like every Republican figured this out from Trump. It's like the one thing they all learned from him is how to do this trick.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:47Ezra Klein?

  Like Ron DeSantis is going to run an entire campaign based on tricks like this. And there's no answer to it, really. And it isn't to say that you couldn't see this on the left, too, although it would probably look different. But, you know, I think the Republican Party, they, they learned a lot less from Trump's policy, right? That he moderated on things like Medicare and Medicaid and social security. You know, he was critical of foreign adventurism. Whatever you think of how he governed, you know, he ran rhetorically more moderately on some traditional Republican issues like taxes and entitlements and, and foreign policy. And some have picked that up, but many more of them have simply picked up that you can

• 39:30Ezra Klein?

  get a lot of coverage by being a jerk and you need a lot of coverage to win.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. And this is, this is actually, it's helping me clarify what I find annoying about the populism debate, which is something I know you've written about and you've talked about on the show. You know, that this idea that a political party should just figure out what's popular and then appeal to it. Okay, that's fine. But if you take media ecology seriously, then you start with the media environment and then notice how it favors certain kinds of rhetorical appeals or incentivizes certain styles of communication and then notice how that turns or that in turn influences public opinion. Right? So it's like Trump's is a good example. He's a dude who just gets social media and he knows what drives news coverage more

• 40:21Speaker 01

  generally. So he just said and did outlandish shit in spectacular ways and he rode that attention straight to the White House. And this is partly why we emphasize persuasion a lot in the book. And it's not persuasion in the sense of Democrats convincing people that universal healthcare is a good idea. It was his ability to get attention, to use the media environment, to reinforce the image of Trump, the brand of Trump, and to turn the campaign itself into a kind of circus. That is itself an act of persuasion. And it's the kind of thing you could never do if you were just following survey data

• 41:04Speaker 01

  and then trying to craft your opinions around that. Right? I mean, Republicans, they just use the asymmetries in the media to create salience around issues that favor them and they just drive public opinion with persuasive rhetoric or propaganda or whatever it is. And Democrats just don't operate like that.

• 41:26Ezra Klein?

  See, I think that underplays actually Trump's persuasive effect. I mean, maybe in both directions, but I think it's really easy to underplay the substance of what he represented at the very least. And he didn't code it in the way that appeals to policy wonks. I remember he only had like seven or eight issues on his webpage. They're pretty thin, the way he described his policies back then. But nevertheless, I think he persuaded a lot of people, in part through the fights he picked, in part through who he went after, that

• 42:04Ezra Klein?

  He was going to, you know, represent them, right? That they didn't like immigration and nor did he. That they didn't like how this country was changing and nor did he. That they didn't like Democrats and nor did he, but also they didn't like George W. Bush and nor did he. That persuasion, I don't think, has to be high minded. And one thing I think Trump understood is that part of the way you persuade people that you're on their side is you come to share their enemies. And you expend capital, your own reputational capital, you're willing to get flayed in public

• 42:44Ezra Klein?

  as almost a show of commitment that if you'll absorb this kind of incoming fire to hold your position, well, then surely you'll do that when you're actually president. Surely you won't betray them then. And I would argue that in many ways, Trump betrayed the people that he, you know, promised to represent. But I do think there's something here that actually, you know, Democrats and populists and everybody else tend to miss, people who are too into policy communication, as I am, tend to miss, which is you have to convince people first and foremost that you're on their side before they're going to listen to almost anything else you tell them.

• 43:23Ezra Klein?

  And people judge whether you're on their side, not by the white papers you put out, but by more fundamental positioning and temperament and, you know, choosing of enemies and picking of fights. That's why I've always said that the relevant question isn't what's popular that you're willing to say, but what is unpopular that you're willing to say. When Bernie Sanders would say that he would abolish private health insurance and he would take the hit for that, the people who believed in single payer believed that he really believed in it too. Like, he wasn't going to just abandon this. Like, being willing to say the unpopular thing is often how you convince people that you mean the popular thing. I think that's right.

• 44:04Ezra Klein?

  But I think also Trump was willing to test a hypothesis that I don't think Republicans...

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Were willing to test before he showed it was

• 44:16Speaker 01

  that it could work, you know, maybe that's one of his real contributions is to show that everything he just said is right. But he also showed that if you just don't give a shit at all about the liberal democratic game and you just go after power and you just signal that you you're going to win, you're going to win, that your enemies are my enemy.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  That works. That works because there's a decent subset of the country that actually isn't invested in liberal democracy in that way. They do just want to win and they are convinced that the other side is a kind of existential threat. And Trump was willing to go farther than anyone else in testing that. But now that he has and it worked, I think that foretends bad things.

• 45:33Ezra Klein?

  I don't ask this next question in the spirit of plausibility. I ask it descriptively.

• 45:40Ezra Klein?

  What does for democracy, a healthy communicative culture look like?

• 45:45Speaker 01

  I think a lot turns on what you mean by healthy, right? I mean, for me, healthy just means stable, right? Like, like, like not imploding, you know? But the price of that stability might be a lot of injustice or it might mean a lot of people are excluded from political life. I mean, you could make the case that, you know, mid to late 20th century American liberal democracy. Was very healthy in the sense that it was, you know, there were exceptions, but there were certainly long periods of relative stability, but there were very high prices to pay for that. Like lots of people were excluded from political life.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  And a lot of speech wasn't allowed to express itself in the public square. Right. And so there are always trade offs. And you could look at the culture today, like there's like a lot of, a lot of people making noises about how, you know, free speech is under attack and there's a sweeping culture of censoriousness and all that. But you can also look at the world today and say, well, speech is actually more free than it's ever been by a country mile. In the sense that there are fewer barriers to entering the public arena and speaking. Everyone can be their own communication platform at this point.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  More people are allowed to speak now than ever. And that has obviously created a lot of tension in the system. But it is free and certainly freer than it was in the past. And I think that's a good thing, even though there's a lot of growing pains involved with that. I mean, if the price of a stable democratic culture is a significant chunk of that society being excluded, then I think that's too high a price to pay.

• 47:37Ezra Klein?

  How do you understand that tension where clearly today there is a wider range of expressible viewpoints in almost all areas of American life? I really don't believe that to be arguable against any other time in which I've been alive or can look in American history. Clearly, many more people and many more kinds of people can be heard thanks to social media, thanks to the low cost of setting up a webpage or, you know, a podcast. And at the same time, people feel in polling that, you know, they have to be more careful with what they say.

• 48:17Ezra Klein?

  They, you know, there's constant fears about cancel culture and, you know, a hostile speech environment. And this is obviously playing out in a lot of opinion pages and, you know, a lot of, a lot of our politics about our communication. These two things feel to me like they are not separate, that they're somehow deeply intertwined. But, but I'm curious what you make of them, that simultaneity of actual freedom and perceived and felt, I don't take away from it, felt unfreedom or fear.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  I think they can both be true at the same time. I mean, I think if your position is to say that they're, that cancel culture is itself a phantasm, that there's, they're not actually people and forces out there punishing speech in one way or the other. I mean, I think that's just not the case. But it's also true that if you allow everyone to speak, the boundaries of permissible discourse are going to be challenged and they're going to move. And that process is always bumpy. It's always contested.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  It can feel like unfreedom, perhaps, if you're on the wrong end of it. And maybe there are cases where, you know, that's really true. But I think both those things can be happening at the same time. I think a lot of the people who are deeply worried about cancel culture don't reflect enough on what's actually happening, on these bigger questions we're talking about here. Again, it feels very suffocating, but it really is just, I think, the, a culture of free speech doing what a culture of free speech does, unleashing lots of different voices, lots of different opinions, lots of different styles of communication, lots of disputes about where the lines are, and it's playing itself out.

• 50:22Ezra Klein?

  One suspicion I have is that the frustrations about how our political communication culture feels right now do reflect one of those lags that you all write about in the book, which is that we are working with very new communication technologies. You know, the migration of so much of our political communication onto social media is something that didn't just happen in my lifetime, it happened in my adult lifetime. It's very, very, very fresh. And maybe we're just in the lag between when lots of us go there and when we learn how to tune out the worst voices, when people

• 51:05Ezra Klein?

  who are running institutions learn what to ignore, that the fact that people are yelling at you on Twitter doesn't mean you have to respond. Maybe this is all going to settle down and this will just be looked back on, you know, the sort of explosion of Trump and Bolsonaro's and Johnson's and, you know, politicians who were able to kind of unleash some of these darker energies. Maybe it'll just be looked on as another one of these periods where new technologies destabilized us and then we refound our footing. How likely do you find that versus a more structural deranging of our politics?

• 51:47Speaker 01

  I think it's very likely. I think there's almost a kind of comfort in looking at the history of democracy in media and noticing this pattern of revolution in how we communicate, lots of disruption and disorder, then there's a lag period and we adjust, you know. I mean, I was just looking at a quote this morning, actually, from a Klein. So he says, 20th century man's relationship to the computer is not by nature very different from prehistoric man's relationship to his boat or to his wheel, with the important difference that all previous technologies or extensions of man were partial and fragmentary, whereas the electric is total and inclusive.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  I'm still working out what that means, but I think it's relevant to what you're saying. Tools like the wheel or the hammer are used instrumentally. Those are extensions of our feet and hands, extensions of our physical capabilities. But McLuhan insisted that electronic media is an extension of our nervous system. So our ability to experience what is happening isn't limited by our bodies. You know, we can know what's happening anywhere, everywhere, all the time. And I think his point was that our brains weren't equipped to deal with this much stimuli,

• 53:15Speaker 01

  this much information, and whatever cognitive tools we developed over time to deal with information, to organize our experience in the world, we're going to be totally overwhelmed by the electric revolution. And this is where you see a kind of Christian humanism bubbling beneath the surface with McLuhan that I find so fascinating, and he never quite says it. But I think he's kind of worried about our souls on some level. He's a very Catholic thinker, right? Yes, I think he was a convert to Catholicism. And if you think about the global nervous system for a second, which is, I think, a really vivid way of thinking about the internet,

• 53:59Speaker 01

  it is so obvious that that's not good. If we are being confronted by the anxieties and the outrages everywhere, all the time, and we can't do anything about it, and the algorithms are pushing all the terrible shit in front of our faces all the time, that breeds fatigue and cynicism and probably despair. And it's all so new, really. This is barely, this is barely begun. There's not, I said this before, we don't even have a name for whatever this next era is going to be, because we're still in this weird convergent space. But it's, it is pummeling us from every direction.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  And things are changing so fast, I just don't think we can, there's enough time to gain our footing. And I think we will adjust, I hope, before we blow ourselves up. But this is still so new. It just feels like it's been around forever because it's so damn exhausting.

• 55:01Ezra Klein?

  To your point about McLuhan's point that it makes a whole world into a village, I don't know that our nervous systems are built to hold the whole world as a village. I find it to be a very uncomfortable position to be in as a media professional, right? Somebody who has devoted my life to the news in different ways, or at least media commentary nowadays, that I'm not sure I think people should be consuming as much news as we are offering them. And not that most people are reading all of it because they're not, or listening, or seeing all of it. But I think it should be way less, actually, for the normal, healthy person. That there's a part of me that thinks the

• 55:46Ezra Klein?

  weekly news magazine had it right, the daily paper. It's one reason I actually love the daily as a show. It's like, pop in, you know, once a day, and you get something, and then you get some headlines, and you go about your day. And I just don't know that we're built for this. And I don't know that we are going to become built for it, because we don't change that much. And this is a pretty new experiment. Now, maybe the only outcome of that is that we become twitchier, and more anxious, and a little bit more depressed. And so this is simply one force among many, you know, pushing around the human psyche.

• 56:30Ezra Klein?

  I think sometimes when people hear you say, "We may not be built for this," they think, you know, what you mean is we're all gonna dissolve into dust if it doesn't stop. And I don't mean that. It also doesn't mean that it's good.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  Well, that's one thing about media technology today. That is actually very different from the past. It evolves so much faster now. For most of human history, the world you died in looked a lot like the world you were born into. And that kind of stability puts culture on a solid footing. Now, I don't even understand what my 13-year-old niece is doing on TikTok. Now, the pace of change is too fast for our institutions, too fast for our culture, and probably too fast for our minds to adjust. If the internet is as transformative a technology as a printing press, and I think it's certainly comparable...

• 57:25Speaker 01

  Then it's going to take several decades to fully adjust to the changes it has wrought. We had roughly 200 years after the printing press without any major revolutions in media technology, and we needed all of that time to develop the institutions of modernity. But I'm not sure we have another 200 years to adjust to this revolution, and things are going to keep changing at breakneck speed. So I don't know where that leads us, Ezra, but I do think it means we should expect a bumpy ride.

• 58:04Ezra Klein?

  I guess something that brings me to is towards the end of the book, you and your co-author write, "There's really no answer here that doesn't have to do with media literacy, that doesn't have to do with how we educate the populace." I always think it's notable that Postman's great obsession was our education system, that that even more so than media is what he really took as his core project. And you're a little vague on what you think media literacy should look like, but you have a young kid, I have two. What do you think we should be teaching them about the communications world and culture they're growing up in and that they're going to be forming?

• 58:42Speaker 01

  It's hard to say, but on some basic level, teaching kids, or really at the very least, you know, as a secondary education level, teaching people about different communication technologies and the styles of speaking and the rhetorical strategies and the ways they push and pull and impose themselves on us and manipulate us, teaching them about, really teaching them about media ecology itself and teaching them about these...

• 59:17Speaker 01

  Technology is not as reflections of our world, but shapers of it, but at least give people some kind of, you know, intellectual self-defense system, or at least some way of recognizing maybe when they're being manipulated and when they're being pulled and pushed and twisted up by these different forces. But I'm not especially sanguine about how effective that might be, but that kind of media literacy of that kind seems to me more helpful than what a lot of people often talk about, which is civics education, because I don't think that's really the problem here.

• 59:55Ezra Klein?

  I think that's basically right. It's also a good bridge to what's always our final question, which is to throw people back to an earlier medium and ask, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  Well, I have to, I have to recommend Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death. I know that's a book that's been mentioned here before, because I just feel like I have to recommend a media ecology book. And McLuhan, God bless him, is so difficult to read. Postman is at least incredibly clear and accessible, and it's a very good way into media ecology, as a way of seeing and thinking about the world. The second book would be Walter Littman's Public Opinion, and I think that was published in 1922. I really think Littman, despite his eventual turn against democracy, sort of throwing the towel, I

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  do think he understood the problems of democracy, especially in the post-industrial world. And whenever you think of his prescriptions, his diagnosis really holds up. So anyone thinking through these problems would do well to read Littman. The third book would be Thomas Day Zingotida. So, an anthropologist of all things, but he wrote a book called Mediated, and it's just a really lucid and well-written and kind of funny look at the consequences of living in a media-saturated society at the personal and the political level. And

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  I've always felt like it's a very underappreciated book. So I would recommend that.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Sean Eling, thank you very much. Thanks for having me, Ezra.

• 1:01:54Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Annie Galvin and Roji Karma. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker, Kate Sinclair and Roland Hugh. Mixing by Sonia Herrera and Carol Saburo and Isaac Jones. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristen Lynn and Christina Samulski.