Communication Breakdown

America's conversation is broken, and it's not clear how we get it back.

As long as people are communicating with one another, anything is possible. When communication breaks down, nothing is possible. When Americans discuss their current political predicament, the words are typically dripping with the futility of nothing seeming possible. This tells us communication has broken down fundamentally.

Conflict is an essential part of the human condition. Individual views, opinions, and preferences spark disagreement. In resolving that disagreement, we experience pain enroute to greater compromise and truth. This is natural and important.

But when conflict cannot be resolved, disagreement can become disunity, with collective identity called into doubt. Left to wither still, complete division is the result. At each stage, shared interest is reduced. At each stage, communication breaks down further until parties decide there’s nothing more to discuss. Once communication ceases, there is no chance of common ground or compromise. And the longer parties go without restoring communication, the less empathy they will feel for one another. In human history, loss of empathy in the context of entrenched division is a dependable predictor of conflict escalating into mass violence.

Resolution hinges on the reason underlying the initial conflict. If conflict is borne from misunderstanding, candid and fact-driven communication is the key to dissolving it. This will expose whether compromise is available or an authentic disagreement on the substance of an issue exists. For example, you and I might be in conflict about whether stout or lager is best. In discussing it over a stout and lager, we might conclude that we both like both to different degrees, and that lager is far more popular but stout is the better choice on certain occasions. Or we might clarify that our disagreement can’t be resolved at all and there is no common ground, but at least we are communicating and empathizing. We move forward together with differences acknowledged against a backdrop of mutual respect.

I reflected on this recently when someone asked me what I thought was creating the current divisions in American politics. My response was that communication was broken. Not because rank-and-file Americans are incapable of discussing their disagreements. But because those controlling the national conversation — media outlets and elected officials — have consciously chosen dishonesty and feelings in lieu of candor and facts.

There is a connection here to Old America … a vestigial notion of attempting a healthy national conversation. It was called Fairness Doctrine. In 1927, Congress passed a law dictating that federal regulatory bodies could only issue broadcasting licenses to providers serving the public interest. This made explicit that the federal government, on behalf of the people, owned public airwaves and had a right and responsibility to regulate what was delivered on them. The idea that media outlets had to be motivated by both revenue and responsibility seems utterly quaint these days, but was accepted at that time.

In 1949, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) interpreted the law to say that licensees must use the communications spectrum to cover matters of public interest, and that they should do so in a fair manner. Basically, holding a broadcasting license meant helping educate the public on important issues, to include giving a fair hearing to both sides of any controversy. FCC’s announcement of this interpretation might have been a nervous response to the rise of Communist propaganda. Or it might have been a grab for power by a strengthening federal government, or actually a genuine attempt to safeguard public discourse as a tether on that growing government. In any case, enforcement actions were taken on its basis, triggering legal challenges.

The Doctrine managed to withstand such challenges for the next two decades before being tested on free speech grounds at the US Supreme Court in Red Lion Broadcasting v. FCC. In this case, the Court held that while broadcasters have First Amendment rights in their broadcasts, the government owns the airwaves (merely leasing them to licensees) and therefore has regulatory authority.

However, tracking in parallel with First Amendment jurisprudence more generally, the Fairness Doctrine became increasingly vulnerable to free speech challenge after Red Lion. By the middle of the 1980s, it was widely considered out of phase with American culture and attitudes. The Reagan Administration took up the issue formally after Congress passed a law directing a reassessment of the Doctrine, and it was ultimately repealed in 1987.

A straight line can be drawn from this deregulatory decision and the explosion of partisan talk radio in the early 1990s. Broadcasters were no longer required to present both sides of an issue, and therefore had no implied duty to disclaim their own biases. No one need be invited on air to challenge evidence or push context into a discussion.

What had been “news” or something like it, with both sides of an issue given coverage, slid into pure opinion. Over time, this opinion became more partisan, more disingenuous, more manipulative. The repeal of the Fairness Doctrine ushered in an era of disinformation passing itself off as refined knowledge and seeming to emanate from authoritative sources … people who seemed educated and had big microphones reaching millions of listeners.

Fast-forward to the present day and cast a glance backward at what has become of our national conversation. The deterioration of our capacity for common ground tracks in perfect parallel with the rise in popularity of professional malcontents across all forms of media. They present partisan argument masquerading as news. The absence of a countervailing argument means there is no meaningful check against the confirmation of bias among their millions of consumers.

Say seductively spiteful things to pissed off people and they become righteously indignant … often completely oblivious to the fact that thing they’re pissed off about is factually unsupported, unfairly exaggerated or distorted, or a purely manufactured “nontroversy” purpose-built to rile them up … so they vote accordingly, but more importantly so they continue tuning in and feeding ad revenues.

The popularity of non-news means real news struggles to survive. Candid and factual reporting has a harder time breaking into the popular mind because it is less interesting, less emotive, and less stirring to the human soul. Facts are a bland bowl of oatmeal collecting dust on the back shelf of the communications canteen while denizens dine on a zesty buffet of comfort food.

This means the de facto absence of a sane public discussion. The provision of information labelled as news which is really just bias-confirming partisan claptrap leads to entrenched views on both sides of the ideological aisle. Since extremists’ ideas are more jarring and attractive than those of the boring but responsible middle, we see extreme views dominating communications.

Under these conditions, a meeting of the minds is all but impossible. People believe they are disagreeing on the merits, but they’re not. They don’t even understand one another enough to know if they genuinely disagree, because what they’ve been presented as fact is just someone’s opinion, distortion, or ruse. This body of falsities becomes the subject of debate, rather than the merits or principles underneath. Communication is broken down, and disunity gives way to division, mutual enmity, and the loss of empathy. This in turn breeds subconscious hysteria, setting the conditions for a political and cultural cataclysm which is fuelled even more by people like me calling it out explicitly.

But here’s the scary part. People believe what they hear in mass media because to do so is reasonable. The information comes from the public airwaves, from people who seem to know what they’re talking about, from supposedly regulated communication that is supposedly subject to some level of government safeguard. If you can’t believe the news, what is your source of authoritative information with which to make decisions in pluralistic self-governance?

We have created an environment where people believe lies because it’s more reasonable than disbelieving them under the circumstances, meaning we have manufactured a culture of disinformation and allowed airwaves owned by the public to be used to actively mislead them. Where there is no truth … only veiled opinion presented in one-sided fashion in an information marketplace designed not to inform or educate, but to generate profit by instigating unrest. Not without irony, many Americans are profiting financially by investing in media corporations that are making them too miserable to enjoy their money.

You really notice this when you live and travel abroad. Our sister societies have retained Fairness Doctrine equivalents in their media governance, often with much tighter constraints than have ever existed in our system. Turn on a talk radio or television program in the UK, and you’ll sometimes get strong opinion … clearly disclaimed as such … from both/all sides of an issue. You’ll also get a load of fact, because British broadcasters aren’t permitted to pass along information packaged as fact unless it is, well, factual. In France and Germany, where mass media outlets have been historically co-opted by virulent extremists with catastrophic results, the bridles are laced even tighter.

This is not to devolve into an Alex Jones style infowar about whether one system is “better” than the other. And certainly not to go back and re-litigate how we got here … for as much as it was a Republican objective to deregulate telecommunications content, the Obama Administration put the final nail in the coffin of the Fairness Doctrine in 2011 by removing the FCC’s original rule interpretation. It’s only to say that objectively speaking, our public discussion is getting worse not better, and there is currently no mechanism to get it back on track.

After the Arizona shootings in 2011, a few prominent politicians called for a renewal of the Fairness Doctrine in response to peculiarly caustic and grotesque remarks by prominent radio personalities. Remarks which were insensitive to victims and coarse enough to sicken anyone with a basic sense of decency and respect for those lost. The backlash from mere mention of giving equal time to political opinion on public airwaves led to widespread adoptive victimization among media snowflakes. But then the donors called in their chips and anyone facing re-election or in thrall to persons of power swiftly backpedaled and disowned any notion of regulating media content. Once again, money shut down not just genuine information, but the search for it through debate.

And this is arrival at the true root cause. The financial interest in an unregulated media marketplace are so immense as to render moot even a modest stirring of reform. Here’s an example of the money interest at stake:

This interest extends to the pockets of elected politicians, who raise funds for their electoral campaigns from media corporations, and do so with complete legality. This bakes a tightly knotted conflict of interest into any thought of media regulation.

Restoring a candid and factual national conversation will likely be the result of limiting campaign contributions, outlawing professional lobbying, and removing tax sheltering advantages from partisan think tanks. Partisans of all stripe should always be entitled to free speech as individuals and even as groups. But they should not be permitted to use money to buy political outcomes or to crowd out the voices of ordinary voters so that extremist ideas gain unfair dominance.

But good luck getting an objective discussion on this subject in any public forum. The fact you can’t even discuss it without the prompt appearance of disinformation and faux hand-wringing about tyrannical limits on speech shows just how much the weeds have crowded out the grass in our public conversation.

We need it back so we can find ways to agree, and to disagree more constructively. Based on honestly rendered views grounded in mutually acknowledged facts. Right now we’re just trading noise. And because communication has broken down, we are divided … and nothing is possible.

TC is an American veteran and lawyer passionate about communication. Opinions are solely his own.

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