How our Media are Pushing Domestic Armageddon and Destroying Our Democracy

“Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.”—ancient proverb, attributed to Euripides, but refined over the centuries.

“Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . .” — U.S. Constitution, Amendment 1 (emphasis added)

“Who will guard the guardians themselves?” — Ancient Roman query, translated from the Latin (“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”)

It’s now clear to me who’s destroying our democracy and our civic peace. It’s not Donald Trump. It’s not the Proud Boys and their fellow white supremacists. It’s not the “left-wing extremists” that Trump and his sycophants rail against, even those who say dumb things like “Defund the Police.”

All these are doing their parts, of course. But they are mere accomplices, if not dupes. They are products of a fundamentally corrupt system that promotes, values and cherishes money, fame, celebrity and notoriety. In that system, our so-called “news” media pursue these goals by a single means: reinforcing citizens’ confirmation bias. And the media—all of them—are willing, if not eager, participants in that system.

The precise mechanism of their treachery is absurdly simple, almost syllogistic. They are out for themselves. Virtually all of them have become fundamentally corrupt. The unwritten code of professionalism and service of “truth” that once ruled the old NBC (without the modern nod to so-called “tech”), CBS and ABC lies trampled in the dust. It’s been overrun in a mad rush for audience, ratings, fame, status, and anchor/pundit salaries. Trump’s lust for crowd size has suborned us all.

For me, the dime of these conclusions dropped quite recently. Three previously unknown or unrealized facts drove them home.

The first was the revelation, made incidentally in an op-ed on another subject, that political operatives earn commissions on their political ad buys. Think about that. Our media incentivize pols to “invest” in their divisive, fear-mongering, thirty-second video clips by giving the pols, or the “operatives” who spend their campaign money, a “piece of the action.”

What could possibly be more corrupt? This revelation confirmed my earlier decision to donate only to GOTV organizations, like the ones in my endnote below, and not to support political parties or candidates directly. I don’t want my donations to promote manipulative thirty-second video clips that do little more than incite division, fear, alarm and hate.

My second and third awakenings came just this week. It’s hard to tell which was more important and decisive.

When we watched the third night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, my wife and I started with PBS. But as we watched the proceedings (in arrears through streaming), we noticed something strange. My beloved PBS was, in effect, censoring what I watched.

Of course it would show the “headliners,” including Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, and Tim Walz. But the “lesser” orators, including names like Maryland Governor Wes Moore and Pennsylvania Governor (and one-time VP contender) Josh Shapiro, were often omitted. Why? To let the usual suspects—anchors Geoff Bennett and Amna Nawaz, pundits David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart, and poll-reporter Amy Walter—do their thing. Apparently justifying the salaries of these broadcast personalities was more important than informing the public fully about something that happens only once every four years, and in the case of a vice-president replacing a sitting American president as candidate, once in American history.

To be fair, I don’t remember precisely which speakers were “overwritten” by pundit-speak. But I do remember switching to MSNBC soon after “tuning in” to the Convention with PBS and having PBS omit a speaker I thought worth hearing. Apparently MSNBC had decided to make its profit the “old-fashioned” way, by reducing costs rather than bloating revenue. It provided a direct feed of the proceedings, including all the speakers, without interruption or comment. Probably that required only a single camera-person and a video switching console.

When our in-arrears watching of all the speakers concluded, I was dumbstruck. Not only had I seen several young, powerful, intelligent, incisive and eloquent speakers, all totally unlike Joe Biden. I had seen an entire evening whose major theme was in direct contrast to the calls to Armageddon from our bomb throwers, haters, dividers and all those divisive, negative thirty-second video clips. What I had seen was mostly calls to listen to the opposition, persuade them, not insult or belittle them, and—above all—to be good neighbors as you would have them be unto you. (Sound familiar?)

Look, I love Geoff Bennett, Amna Nawaz and PBS’ diverse set of reporters. I particularly love Bennett, whose resonant voice and perfect diction helps justify my putting off getting hearing aids. But when PBS buries a consistent and much-needed message of domestic tranquility and neighborliness, delivered for an entire evening by a major party, so that its pundits can bloviate, something is seriously wrong with our media universe.

The final dime dropped when, at my wife’s urging, I listened to an interview of The Pope of Probability, Nate Silver, author of The Signal and the Noise and the 528 poll-aggregation service, on KQED, the San Francisco Outlet of National Public Radio. Silver confirmed that our modern electoral polls are riddled with systematic bias. (Unfortunately, in this podcast you can’t push a slider but have to wait for the clock to time to the point listed below.)

Not only that. The systematic bias is pretty much the same kind that led the media to mis-predict Thomas Dewey’s “win” over Harry Truman in 1948. In their sampling, pollsters are over-representing voters with landline telephones and other less sophisticated means of communication. Then they “correct” for this known systematic bias by “seat of the pants” guesswork, and they all do it mostly the same way.

For example, according to Silver, if a poll is finally able to contact an elusive young Hispanic, it weights the answers by a factor of three. On the other hand, it underweights the views of old white women, eager to answer calls and state their views, by one-half. Can we all say “seat of the pants”? (Wait for 24:20 on the timer and listen.)

What could possibly go wrong? I’m 79, and my wife is 78. I gave up my land line five years ago, she about two or three. Deluged by unwanted robocalls, I set my cell phone, over a year ago, to dump into voice mail all calls from numbers not in my personal directory. So did she.

We’ve both been retired for a decade or more. We, who presumably have time on our hands, and are hardly busy growing our careers or raising kids, protect ourselves from robocalls, and coincidentally from pollsters. Then what about the millions of Millennials and Gen-Z people who have no time at all for this nonsense, and who are far more sophisticated than we seniors in ducking unwanted calls? You think the pollsters are properly representing them? If you do, I’ve got a wall on our Mexican border that will instantly solve all our migration problems to sell you.

This not just a simple sampling issue. It’s a fundamental problem with modern polling. Although they try to use Internet channels, most pollsters take the easy (and cheap) way out by contacting people by phone. But now young people communicate often, if not primarily, by text, e-mail and “memes” on social media. Or they bypass the telephone system altogether, using Internet video apps like FaceTime and Zoom. Are pollsters even investing money considering how to poll that?

A moment’s thought reveals the clear trend of this massive systematic bias. Who is more likely to vote Democratic? A senior in the country who still has a landline because no one (including robo-callers) calls her much? A middle-age voter with a cellphone that blocks no calls? Or a city-dwelling Millennial or Gen-Z voter who knows well how to duck unsolicited calls and is busy with a career, a nascent family and an otherwise all-encompassing online life?

Let’s get real. Today’s polls are meaningless. They are based on broken, outmoded methods and “follow the herd” guesses on how to correct known systematic biases. And pollsters can’t do more to correct systematic bias because: (a) doing so would be horrendously expensive; and (b) they don’t have a clue how to do it.

But even this is not all. What’s the effect of all this systematic bias, which over-polls the old and the isolated, and leaves the media-wise and plugged-in stuck without a voice? Of course it overestimates the likely vote for “conservatives” and MAGA voters, just as it underestimates the votes of minorities, the young, independents and moderates.

And what’s the practical effect of these bad polls riddled with systematic bias? It’s precisely what we are seeing in our divided country day after day. Based on the bad polls, Trump voters think they are winning. Based on the bad polls and the consequent breathless doom-saying of progressive pundits, Trump voters think they are winning. So if and when Harris and Walz win, Trump voters will have every reason to think they’ve been robbed and to perpetrate another January 6, or worse, all over again.

We might get lucky, and it might not happen. I hope it won’t. But this possible outcome is based on simple, foreseeable cause and effect.

So who’s at fault? Our media, all of them. Even PBS. For all of them push flawed polls as gospel, with the usual disclaimers than no one heeds because everyone in the audience wants to know the future, and polls are all we’ve got.

Political polls have become the modern equivalent of the Gypsy fortune teller with her ouija board, but at infinitely greater scale and with infinitely greater social impact. And our media — all of them — sell poll results relentlessly in the search for ever-greater audiences and ever more “news,” and because if some media don’t do it, others will.

Why do our media work like that? Because most are private and work for profit, and even the nonprofits like PBS work for audiences. Predictions sell, no matter how flawed. Division sells, as Fox has proved so well by pandering relentlessly to its audience’s prejudices, fears, hate and alarm.

A still, small voice of conscience tells perhaps the best of our media executives that all this is corrupt and fundamentally wrong. But it gets drowned out by careerism, the quest for ratings and the fame, celebrity and high salaries that come with them.

The media—our people’s eyes and ears—are blinded by self-interest. Our government and our leaders can do nothing about it because our First Amendment, which is the prime directive of our Constitution, unambiguously yells “hands off!”

If alive today, Euripides would scream a warning. But even he would throw up his hands at our absolute legal and constitutional impediment to collective action involving government.

Will our First Amendment be the “Catch-22” that relegates our American democracy to the dustbin of history? Will it legally bar anyone from putting in place a system that incentivizes “news” that is true and accurate and makes common sense, let alone a system that requires it?

At the moment, any such salubrious system seems unlikely, maybe impossible. If so, our species’ next go at democracy might learn the lesson that absolutism in any form, even in defense of freedom of speech, is never a good idea. To reach that point of enlightenment, our species, with its current media, might have to survive another extended Dark Age, replete with massive migration driven by planetary heating, far worse than the Dark Ages after the Fall of Rome.

Endnote on GOTV Donees. Here are the fourteen GOTV organizations to which I donate monthly through Act Blue, the secure progressive donation site: (1) Black Voters Matter Action PAC; (2) Fair Fight Action (Stacey Abrams’ old organization); (3) New Georgia Project (a spin-off of (2)); (4) Coalition for the Peoples’ Agenda; (5) Democracy for America (DFA); (6) Democratic National Committee; (7) Progressive Turnout Project; (8) VPP; (9) Mijente (Hispanic GOTV organization); (10) Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC) Action Fund (which seeks to restore ex-felons’ voting rights); (11) Swing Left; and (12) Advance the Electorate PAC; (13) Hope Springs from Field; and (14) Northeast Arizona Native Democrats (which works with the 300,000 Navajo or Diné people).

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