The Audience Gets a Vote

In 2004, sitting in the only journalism class I would take, we watched some industry commentary on the coverage of the Michael Jackson trial and what it implied about the state of the media. One media executive—I cannot recall which network he worked for—acknowledged the valid criticism they had received for their excessive focus on the case at the expense of more important stories. But the time they spent on it drew orders of magnitude more attention than those neglected stories. As one account put it five years after the trial had ended: 

It was November 18th 2003 when 70 sheriffs swooped on Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch. As soon as news of the raid broke, news channels abandoned their schedules and switched to 24 hour coverage. When it emerged that Jackson was accused of molesting young cancer survivor Gavin Arvizo, the boy who famously held the singer's hand in Martin Bashir's 'Living With Michael Jackson', the media went into overdrive. Networks were so obsessed by the Jackson scandal that a terrorist attack in Turkey went almost entirely unreported, with only CNN bothering to broadcast George Bush and Tony Blair's joint press conference about the disaster.

All three major networks immediately set about producing hour-long specials on the Jackson case, apparently undeterred by the fact that nothing was yet known about the allegations and prosecutors weren't answering questions. CBS dedicated an episode of 48 Hours Investigates to the arrest, while NBC's Dateline and ABC's 20/20 also rushed out Jackson specials. Within two days of the Neverland raid, and before Jackson had even been arrested, VH1 announced a half-hour documentary called 'Michael Jackson Sex Scandal'.

Daily Variety described the Jackson story as "a godsend for…media outlets, particularly cable news channels and local stations looking to pump up Nielsen numbers in the final week of the all-important November sweeps."

This was not the behavior of masters of the information system, secure in their positions. This reeks of a desperation for survival at best, simple greed at worst. During the trial, in which cameras were not allowed in the court, CNN broadcast a video of the closed door for absurd lengths of time.

To me, this is a level of the audience exercising its agency over the media system that borders on coercion, with many organizations abandoning any sort of professional pride or sense of distinction between themselves and tabloids to…engage in tabloid reporting, plain and simple.  In that moment, the media was not driving the news. The news was driving them.

Of course, one should never underestimate the influence that the media has on their audience. Journalists too often assume a posture of powerlessness in order to dodge responsibility for their own choices, and that of their employers. They do have choices. Those choices do matter.

Yet one should not overestimate their agency either.* The audience gets a vote. Before the Internet, this meant what publications they chose to purchase and what channels they chose to watch. Today it means something more complex, from what platforms they adopt and which accounts they follow, to what they personally express on their social media and in chats, to what content they choose to share with their friends or followers. 

It is important to work at getting the media to say the right things. They do have an influence, both on the mass public and on elite opinion formation. We have covered a number of times how important it is to get a consolidated pro-democracy media bloc if we want to avoid an authoritarian consolidation. But it would be a mistake to conclude that victory would be within our grasp if only we could get the media to say the right things. The audience has agency too. A media strategy is just that: a strategy, with both strengths and limits.

Landing a story

Elsewhere, I have characterized actions in the public sphere as akin to punchlines delivered by a stand-up comic.** The comic delivers the punchline, and it “lands” or it does not. Journalists, media organizations, and indeed anyone performing in the public sphere before an audience take actions that may or may not land. 

Having an audience to begin with, especially if it is a big one or one comprised of powerful and influential people (or both) is precisely why some media figures have more agency over our information system than an ordinary person would. On the other hand, even the most influential media figures and organizations in the entire public sphere are not guaranteed to have their performance “land” with their audience, much less go viral (which is to say, go big beyond the boundaries of their usual audience). Determining whether or not a story lands is precisely how audiences exercise agency over our information system.

There is a crucial asymmetry here: media actors act individually or in small groups, whereas the audience exercises its agency collectively. An individual member of the audience in practice has very little influence over the outcome. Going viral, or even having a story get relatively widely discussed within a discrete audience (such as New York Times subscribers) is a matter of cascading behavior. One ordinary person reading a story and especially one ordinary person sharing it increases the odds that someone else will read or share it, and these probabilities stack in a way that leads to a narrow set of stories winning the lottery and getting spread very widely. But any one person in the cascade only adds a very small boost to the probability of spreading wider.

In short, audiences have social agency that is very broadly distributed, whereas media companies have social agency that is far more concentrated. In practice the latter’s agency takes the form of having a great many tries to find stories that land. Of course, given the disastrous state of media as a business these days, they do not have the luxury of trying forever. Nor have they ever truly had that luxury; the vulgar frenzy surrounding the Michael Jackson trial was hardly a first in media history.

It was precisely this kind of tawdry scrambling for audience that helped to catapult Donald Trump to the presidency. For all the talk of backlash theory, or economic insecurity, or educational polarization, the number one thing that gave us Trump specifically was the media. He was a media figure first and foremost before his presidency, and the TV coverage of his primary debates and outrageous campaign behavior constituted billions of dollars worth of free airtime. In February of 2016, CBS Chairman Les Moonves infamously said “It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS.”

Now CBS could have chosen to exercise agency by reducing its coverage of Trump in 2015–2016. But CBS was already on the rocks as a business at that time. Staying out of the biggest political story of the day would likely have hastened that decline. Moreover, I’m skeptical that CBS unilaterally choosing to do so would have had a significant impact on the amount of attention Trump received. Fewer people would have watched CBS, and more would have watched the networks that kept their coverage the same. The audience gets a vote.

Again, this does not mean that media actors have no influence at all. I don’t think you could look at the past 30-40 years of American politics, and the impact of Fox News and the burgeoning right-wing media ecosystem at that time, and credibly make that case. It is just that the nature of influence is not one in which media companies replace the chip in the brains of a passive audience. Influence is always influence over people with agency. “The public” and “the audience” are words that paper over the heterogeneity of the groups under discussion and the idiosyncrasies of the individuals within them.

To take a case from the other direction, the entire right-wing media ecosystem went all in on making the assassination of Charlie Kirk a story that landed in a particular way. The story did indeed land, in the sense of picking up a lot of attention in the short term. But they wanted much more than that. The intention on the part of actors in right wing media, along with the administration itself, was to turn the story into a political victory, a means to consolidate a new McCarthyism. This was ultimately a flop. People fired from their jobs in the initial frenzy sued their former employers and largely won in court. The effort sputtered out and audiences moved on.

Even the great big right wing media machine cannot simply impose its will on our political system or even our information system.

Exerting media influence

None of this is merely academic for Liberal Currents. For the entirety of our existence, we have given thought to just what it is that is contributed by publishing political writing under our banner. This question has only grown more urgent in the last two years.

There are two things we try to do as a political publication. One is to help consolidate the pro-democracy media bloc around useful ideas, strategies, and talking points. There are a few aspects to this I’ll cover very briefly:

• Promoting good values within that coalition as much as possible, and spreading tools of analysis and strategies of action that individuals and groups can take and use (see more here). You can think of this in terms of what individual readers get from us. 
• Promoting reflective beliefs—that is, beliefs about what one is supposed to believe, regardless of what you actually believe—that are based in reality, useful, and help to mobilize the collective audience of the media bloc as a whole towards political victory (see more here). You can think about this in terms of our role in helping produce the conditions for successful collective action.

The second thing, a far taller order for a niche publication like ourselves, is to actually contribute to a pro-democracy victory in mass politics. By and large, our ability to do this is contingent on our ability to successfully do the first one—bigger, more influential media figures than us who are part of the pro-democracy media bloc read our work and listen to our podcasts, and that influences what they say to their much larger audiences in turn.

One might summarize this as saying we seek to publish things that land with the pro-democracy media bloc, in the hope that members of that bloc will in turn publish things that land with the broader public. Alongside journalists or media personalities, this also includes ordinary audience members of that bloc whose statements on social media, group chats, and in person are different as a result of what we have said. 

When I wrote “He Will Try” in 2024, I did not think Liberal Currents’ readers needed to be convinced to vote against Donald Trump. I hoped that, by providing an argument for doing so which required the least amount of shared political assumptions and perceptions, our readers might be better armed to talk to the people in their lives that did need to be convinced.

Working in media, particularly mission-driven media, will quickly humble you about your ability to make things land or even to predict what has a chance. It is also a quite depressing education on human nature. Consider Kalief Browder, who was subject to all manner of brutality at Rikers, including being held in solitary confinement for nearly 800 days. He never saw his day in court; his charges were eventually simply dropped. Cases like his get widely reported on, but oftentimes the audience votes against it landing with them. Most of the high-value reporting done in our or any country simply does not land in any meaningful way, the work holding its value largely to be a source of facts for others to cite.

But the point is that it is very hard to win the audience’s vote on civil liberties. This does not deter Liberal Currents from writing full-throated arguments for those civil liberties on a regular basis. But it does inform our expectations for how much even arguments with the most compelling evidence and stories behind them will move audiences.

To draw on a historical example, Claudette Colvin did not deserve to be passed over by the Civil Rights Movement in favor of Rosa Parks. It was utterly unjust and unfair, and an indictment of the kind of society that would not sympathize with her. But it was also the correct choice for those activists to make.

Similarly, we had nearly a full year of reporting on the atrocities being committed by DHS, from the street behavior itself to the terrible conditions in the detention facilities. But Renée Good’s murder landed in a big way, and Alex Pretti’s murder hit the information sphere like a bomb going off; social media and small-to-large influencers all, to a shocking extent, jumped on the story immediately. The audience voted and said in a fairly uniform voice: this was cold-blooded murder.

The story of Minneapolis is not one of political media choosing the right messages that delivers the right outcome. Professional media, and indeed the audience writ large, to a great degree aren’t even aware of the lion’s share of what went down during the ICE invasion, especially the extent of the social mobilization. But the community worked very hard to produce conditions that were unfavorable to ICE, and more than once that enabled them to get the audience’s vote on their side. Pretti’s death was the peak of that, occurring as it did after the community’s actions had already drawn a significant amount of attention toward the events in Minneapolis. Outlets scrambled to cover the case, conservative outlets desperately sought to smear Pretti, the New York Times offered incredibly detailed forensic analysis of the videos, and the audience rewarded them with attention. Like the Jackson trial, Pretti’s murder was a situation where audience agency played a major role in driving coverage.

What lesson can publications in the pro-democracy bloc draw from this? We can fulfill our role in serving as a hub for strategic and tactical lessons for others to draw on, discuss, and critique. Not that any of us at Liberal Currents have perfect judgment on this. Indeed our fallibility, and the fallibility of everyone in the coalition from the most militant activist to the median Indivisible group membe,r is precisely part of the value of having these out-in-the-open discussions within the pro-democracy bloc. The American military conducts a great deal of strategic and tactical analysis in published works, despite the fact that this makes those analyses available to our adversaries. That is precisely what it takes to develop an adapting, learning culture.

It is important to build truly liberal media institutions. It is important to think about how to use your influence responsibly, whether you are in the media or simply a key figure in another community.

But it is also important to remember that the way you win mass politics is, ultimately, by winning the audience’s vote.

*Here at Liberal Currents our secret is that we choose not to over or under estimate, but to only correctly estimate.

**There is also a vertical video giving the basic point, because the audience gets a vote and they have voted for video.

Featured image is A Theater Audience, by Honoré Daumier