Republican Victory and the Ambience of Information
Did Kamala Harris’ defeat come down to a failure to communicate, campaign mismanagement or simply being the wrong candidate to begin with?
None, writes Nathan Heller for the New Yorker in one of the best pieces on 2024 election coverage and hand-wringing. Referencing star sociologist Robert Putnam’s prescient warning that the Internet had an “individuating, isolating tendency that eroded the network of civic bonds,” Heller examines the persistent, diffuse sound of digital age “ambient” media that we receive rather than seek out, and then “struggle to recall where we picked up this or that data point, or how we assembled the broad conceptions that we hold.”
Trump, Heller writes, took advantage of this new, passive national news habit and its ability to osmote. Rather than rely on older methods of micro-targeted messaging like Kamala HQ, the Trump campaign successfully managed to “[tune] voters’ ears like satellites to the national signal,” be it through seemingly inchoate rally speeches or an 11th hour ground campaign.
“Seeding the ambience of information,” paid off, Heller writes, by, “throwing facts and fake facts alike into an environment of low attention, with the confidence that, like minnows released individually into a pond, they will eventually school and spawn. Notions must add up to a unified vision but also be able to travel on their own, because that’s how information moves in a viral age.”
Does public service media crowd out private news publishers? New research says it doesn’t
With all but a handful of news outlets in worrisome financial shape, a degree of territoriality among them is understandable. Researchers from the Universität Zürich have analyzed the rivalry between commercial and public service media to determine how wary those players should be of each other. They find that private platform fears of losing paying subscribers to outlets that provide similar content for free are overblown. That’s especially encouraging news given deflated ad revenues.
Their conclusions find “no evidence that [Swiss public service company] SRG SSR is crowding out private media in the information sector”. In fact, public service media use tends to align with healthy use of private publishers, with SRG users consuming more news from commercial media than non-SRG users.
Professor Rasmus Kleis Nielsen notes in Axios that this is just the latest in a series of analyses finding that private and public sector media not only can coexist, but often boost each other’s fortunes. A 2017 report surveying six countries including Germany found no negative correlation between public and private media intake. Likewise a broader 2020 study observing national broadcast and online markets in the 28 countries that then constituted the European Union. (This is notable given the inclusion of the UK, where the BBC has an outsized presence in media and public life.)
“Public service news provides a simple appetizer that increases interest in other publishers, which often offer more in-depth reporting, more distinct editorial lines, and more clearly-voiced opinions,” writes Nielsen.
This is great news for both stripes of media outlets in countries with robust public media funding, and would ideally inspire the US to pour more money into service news.
