Rather Than Whining About the Media, We Should Fight to Win

In her interview with the political scientist Omar Wasow, Liberal Currents Executive Editor Samantha Hancox-Li asks whether we’re even capable of making productive use of the media today the way that the Civil Rights Movement did. “If the media is hostile to the kind of message that we want to be telling, if they’re kind of more sympathetic than we want them to be to Trump and his policies, how do we deal with that problem?”

There is a persistent myth that the Movement succeeded chiefly because of the sympathetic and monolithic media of the era, which helped structure a national consensus in favor of ending Jim Crow. By contrast, Wasow noted that “In the 1960s there was a pro-segregation faction of the press,” and even outside of the South, aside from the black press specifically, the press was “often indifferent to the interests of black Americans.” In most other countries throughout the 20th century, mass media was aligned with the interests of the state, rather than being independent watchdogs.

“We’ve always been in epistemic bubbles,” Wasow points out, and the “dual reading of the Renee Good video” is not at all a new phenomena. The protests of the Civil Rights Movement were often portrayed as “outside agitators [engaged] in a criminal act” by pro-segregation media. And the same message was often repeated beyond that narrow confines.

Far be it from me to sing the praises of our major media organizations and how they have responded to the current crisis. The problems are well documented at this point, and to my mind beyond dispute. 

But—while pressure campaigns and criticism are valuable—we need to stop whining and reject defeatism. Right wingers spent decades whining about liberal bias in the media, just one of many victim postures they opportunistically adopt. How unfair! If only the liberal media would treat us more fairly, we’d win more elections!

Life isn’t fair and politics ain’t beanbag. You don’t win power and use it to any effect by hoping that your adversaries and observers will play nicely and go along with your plans. The enemy gets a vote, as do the people and groups you wish would be your allies. The New York Times is not your friend; their publisher made that quite clear when he stated that they were not part of the opposition, despite the fact that the Trump administration is seeking to crush independent media and The New York Times specifically.

The media are not your friend. The media are not your enemy. They're just the terrain.

We need to stop whining about “the media.” If “the media” in the 1960s was good enough for the Civil Rights Movement to have viable options, our current media is more than good enough. We need instead to think about our overall strategic environment, and how to make the best play with the hand we’ve been dealt.

When they go low, we go video it

When DHS agents murdered the nurse Alex Pretti in broad daylight, the outcry reverberated across every corner of the social Internet. The extent to which even banal, apolitical accounts were spitting mad about the incident is difficult to overstate. After years of hearing that these platforms tanked everything but rightwing content, you had everyone down to the golf influencers referencing Pretti being “murdered by masked agents of the state.”

Renee Good’s murder 17 days earlier did not have quite as dramatic an effect on social platforms but it did dominate traditional media coverage for some time afterwards.

The basic lessons of the Civil Rights Movement remain true today, even though our media system has drastically changed. Movement leaders certainly did not intend for any of their members to die, but they pursued action in dangerous places like Selma knowing that it was a very real possibility. They did not want James Reeb to be murdered by white supremacists, but once he was they damn well made good use of it.

In Minneapolis, ICE Watchers turned out in large numbers to point their cameras at DHS agents, to discourage them from harming members of the community and to record such harm as occurred. After murdering Good, those agents frequently and explicitly threatened to do the same to others who watched them, but people kept showing up. Pretti paid the price, alongside many others wounded by “less lethal” weapons. But even as they were threatened and abused, they continued to show up and record what was happening.

This was not a silver bullet. The administration did not dismantle itself as a result. Donald Trump did not resign. The personality cult party still rules Washington.

But given the poor hand that was dealt to them, the people of the Twin Cities played a very good game. An invading force of thousands found themselves remarkably suppressed, and national public opinion was pushed further against the administration. Ultimately, the force was drawn down and the leading figures most directly involved are out of the job. The fight goes on, but the obvious lesson is that the media veil can be pierced, whether the media is professional or social.

Punchlines and pathos

Going and getting yourself murdered isn’t in fact a reliable way to do this, nor, obviously, a desirable one. Indeed, few things are reliable in persuasion. That’s what makes it so difficult, so seemingly intractable at times and effortless at others.

In December of 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in protest of police corruption. That single act kicked off a series of events that culminated in the Arab Spring. Nine months earlier, Abdesslem Trimech set himself on fire and kicked off nothing at all. The details matter. Bouazizi was observed. Awareness of his act spread widely. Wasow notes that the Civil Rights activists were careful about such details, giving the example of protests that were organized in the morning “so that NBC News could cover the event and fly footage back to New York to broadcast nationally.”

The manner in which an event becomes a media event, and the manner in which a media event actually changes people’s beliefs (or their beliefs about what they are supposed to believe), is akin to the manner in which a punchline actually succeeds in making an audience laugh.

In stand-up comedy, successful punchlines cascade—the laughs come less from any one member of the audience finding the jokes funny as from successfully working “the room.” The more people laugh, the more the general mood becomes favorable for the comedian, to the point where jokes that might have received only polite chuckles at the beginning of the set begin to reliably draw full belly laughs.

People do not laugh at punchlines because they choose to—not, again, if it is the kind of laugh that leaves you in tears, or gasping for air. That kind of laugh is something that happens to you, or at best something you surrender to rather than consciously produce. Persuasion is the same way. You do not choose your beliefs, or the range of beliefs you are open to considering. That is something that happens to you, based on what you have experienced, the contingencies of your cultural background, personal history, and personality.

While the decision to publish an article or post on social media is a degree more intentional than whether you laugh at a joke or are persuaded by an argument, in practice it works very similarly. Publications become persuaded that this is “a story,” social media accounts become persuaded that this is engaging content, their actions help to perpetuate that belief among their peers, and belief becomes reality. It is a cascade of actions grounded in beliefs which become self-fulfilling.

In order to win, you do not need to persuade The New York Times that Trump is a danger to democracy, that he is a greater danger than a Democratic president, or even that trans rights are human rights. You do need to persuade The New York Times and its peers that this story—about a sympathetic, innocent victim of ICE, or a sympathetic trans woman facing discrimination, or any other subject matter that will spread support for liberal causes and opposition to fascism—is “a story,” one they actually need to cover.

We don’t always have the option of simply producing that story the way a comedian produces punchlines or the way that Rosa Parks created a conflict advantageous for her movement. But like the brave residents of Minneapolis, we can aim at creating the conditions for such stories to emerge.

The strategic structure of persuasion

There is a moral structure to persuasion. What horrified people about the murders of Good and Pretti was how manifestly unjust the crimes were and how innocent the victims were—but moralism per se does not persuade. Before Rosa Parks confronted discrimination in the Montgomery bus system, Claudette Colvin did the same. She was not backed by the Civil Rights Movement because she was pregnant and not married. She was not any less worthy a human being than Parks. The moral justification for integration and equality does not rest on whether or not you are living a lifestyle that the public approves of. But it is an unfortunate fact that Parks was simply a more sympathetic figure for the campaign than Colvin.

This unsavory aspect of mass persuasion is still very much with us. I am not particularly inclined to applaud the public for its outrage at what happened to Good and Pretti. After all, they were not the first to be murdered by ICE since Trump returned to office. Since their murders, ICE has been cramming innocent people into concentration camps without sufficient food, water, or medical attention, and yet this has not sparked outrage as widely or to a similar degree. Reacting when the “right kind” of victim is harmed or killed is not a particularly laudatory quality.

But we are not here to applaud or denounce the public on moral grounds. We are here to bring them over to our side so that we can seize and exercise power. If the public’s narrow sympathies were good enough for black activists living under Jim Crow to make use of, they should be good enough for us.

The task before us is not a moral evaluation, but a strategic one. 

Classical rhetoric provides a useful starting point for any strategic account of persuasion. Aristotle argued that the components of rhetoric are ethos, pathos, and logos—roughly, the character of the speaker, emotional appeals, and the logic of the argument. All of these, of course, are a matter of perception—how the speaker’s character is perceived, whether an appeal is made to something the audience actually has an emotional connection with, and whether they perceive the logic of the speaker’s argument to be sound.

Today, in as much as we think about rhetoric at all, we place far too much weight on pathos and logos and far too little on ethos. In most cases, the credibility of your character, or the lack thereof, will determine whether you will be given the time of day or whether you will be dismissed outright. In our highly polarized environment, this means that partisans of the other side will dismiss you or be negatively polarized into the opposite of what they perceive you to stand for.

A successful strategy for building credibility with an audience today is to show that you are hated by who they hate. Jordan Peterson’s public career was launched, in many ways, by the energetic protests against him when he was a nobody. I watched, with great frustration, as more and more mainstream outlets wrote about how awful Richard Hanania is, when what they should have been doing was ignoring him entirely while awareness of him remained negligibly small. When this publication is denounced in the Wall Street Journal for endorsing dictatorial leftist rule, that only strengthens us.

This negative persuasion is still a useful tool. You just have to be aware that it exists and not fall victim to the assumption that simply making a direct case to some groups will help your chances of having that case accepted. If you can use negative polarization to make your side the party of patriotism, democracy, rights, affordability—or any other number of things that play well with unsorted voters, you should do so. Nancy Pelosi adeptly used negative polarization to get Trump to take ownership of the 2018-2019 shutdown, even if she didn’t make particularly good use of that leverage.

Moreover, even if you cannot persuade the other side, you can persuade your side to trust you more. Building your credibility as an individual or an organization is a critical part of participating in intraparty politics, or in our current circumstances, of building an effective opposition bloc.

For both reasons—because you might persuade your opponents to do the opposite of what you want them to do, or because your credibility with your own side is so precious—you need to think very carefully about what fights you choose to pick, and how you choose to pick them.

Do less but better

Sometimes silence is more persuasive than anything you could say.

During the second World War, Japan developed balloons capable of carrying bombs with the intention of attacking the continental US. They launched more than 9,000 of these, with 285 bombing incidents observed by the government here. What did we do in response?

As more sightings occurred, the government, with the cooperation of the news media, adopted a policy of silence to reduce the chance of panic among U.S. residents and to deny the Japanese any information on the success of the launches. Discouraged by the apparent failure of their effort, the Japanese halted their balloon attacks in April 1945.

The bombs successfully reached us, but the choice to remain silent and Japan’s lack of on-the-ground intelligence meant that it appeared to have failed. Silence persuaded them that the bombs never reached us.

Similarly, it is at this point well established that media coverage of mass shootings can lead to more mass shootings. Is it intrinsically wrong to cover mass shootings, or to cover them in the way that has been shown to have this contagion effect? Not on paper; these are real stories with a serious impact on the communities of the victims. They are a legitimate national issue that shouldn’t be swept under the rug. But strategically, it is imperative that media organizations do what they can to reduce the chances that one mass shooting event will lead to another, and in practice that often means saying much less than they typically do.

In an interview, the streamer “QTCinderella” discussed her experience of being “swatted” multiple times. “Swatting” is when malicious actors call the police to fraudulently claim something illegal is going on—usually something quite urgent like an intention to commit a mass shooting. SWAT teams are then sent in to victimize the target. That is precisely what happened to QTCinderella. Of interest to us here is the strategy she and her fellow streamers in her household adopted for responding to these incidents.

In one particular case that she recounts, they had shut off the stream when the SWAT team arrived. After it was over they pretended that nothing had happened other than a technical mistake that caused the stream to be shut off accidentally. As she put it:

You can either talk about it and say, 'hey we got swatted and this isn't okay,' and that person wins, they're validated, they've collected it. [. . .]That's what they want. Or, you don't talk about it and they don't know if they did it so they keep doing it. BUT, you do talk about it—copycats.

In order to minimize the chances of copycat swatters, they chose not to talk about the incident (until later, during the linked interview). This choice came with a heavy emotional cost, but was nevertheless a well reasoned response to a terrible strategic environment. Is it fair? Not even a little. But it was the best choice they could make.

Now that we’ve covered wartime bombing, mass shooting, and swatting, let’s talk about something really unpleasant: social media.

In particular, feed-based social media: Facebook, X, Tumblr, Bluesky. There are important differences among them, such as the extent to which an algorithm overdetermines what you see rather than your own choices. But they are similar enough for our purposes here.

Let us say that someone is lying about you on one of these. You could reply, or quote-post, or share with a comment—depending on how you want to go about it, depending on the platform in question. When it is just one person, this may make the most sense. After all, why let a lie stand unopposed? It may also turn out to be the result of a misunderstanding that can be resolved relatively easily.

Now let’s say there are a hundred people spreading a lie about you. Can you take this approach with all one hundred? Should you?

I have seen people attempt this relatively straightforward approach. And my observation is that it is not a strategy that scales, especially not on social media.

Even without algorithms muddling things, in a reverse-chronological feed, the way that larger audiences are going to encounter the disagreement is going to be partial, in the middle of something still ongoing, and not necessarily in a way that will help your case. Even if you are entirely in the right, even if you’re being smeared with the most outrageous of lies, a good faith observer may enter the discussion at a point that (without the larger context) makes you look bad. The more you directly engage the horde, the larger it grows—this is a well established principle.

Perception is mediated, and the media through which that happened may be the traditional sort or the social sort. The existence of falsehood, misinformation, and lies of all kinds on those media are undeniably an important matter that needs to be addressed. But in seeking to address it you must be strategic. You cannot anticipate everything that might happen, but you can anticipate common patterns.

There are times when it simply makes sense to block clear bad actors, to turn off notifications or replies or the ability to quote the targeted posts, and to otherwise walk away until things die down. Sometimes you simply cannot defeat liars in open combat; you must pick and choose your battles. Do not fight the battle your enemy wants you to fight. You must do less, but better, more skillfully.

The Civil Rights Movement did not organize campaigns in every single Jim Crow locality. They did not even do so in very many of them, all things considered. They picked towns that had certain characteristics: like having an abusive sheriff who was likely to behave thuggishly on camera. They chose their timing and their approach for particular campaigns carefully.

You don’t win by fighting on every front perpetually. You win by identifying structural weaknesses in the enemy and striking at it with the right timing and intensity to do the greatest damage. On social media this means playing the game of spreading your side of things as far as you can, rather than attempting to persuade people one by one. Sometimes individual conversations are useful or necessary. But like the comedian, you must always aim to play the room skillfully. That is the key condition for victory, not whether you have managed to flip one specific individual one time.

That is the true answer to the perpetual question of how we got Trump in the first place. In the 2016 campaign, the man was a skilled performer, and had been for decades. Like the comedian who performs the same set over and over again, Trump was as inauthentic as one can be in an objective sense, but that did not matter. To the audience, a skillfully delivered set feels spontaneous. To voters, what matters is not whether a politician is fake or not, but whether or not they seem so. Trump pulled it off, and his Republican and Democratic opponents largely could not and have not been able to.

A great deal of work needs to be done if we are going to win. We cannot get tripped up on shallow moralisms. No one, including the Civil Rights activists themselves, believed that you need to behave impeccably before you are worthy of having human rights. But they recognized that they were in a life or death struggle with an adversary that was willing to put them in their graves to stay in power, no matter what they did.

So they used every tool of persuasion they could. They approached the matter strategically, not moralistically. What should have mattered to the public, what the media should do or say, could not bring them victory. What brought them victory was what did matter to the public, what the media would do and say, given the choices the activists made.

Our media is terrible. Let’s stop whining about it and do what it takes to win anyway.

Featured image is No Kings Downtown Miami, by Phillip Pessar