I have frequently here decried the quality of our national political media outlets, writing that they focus on the horserace, not the impacts electing one or another candidate might bring to all of us.
Many people have jumped (surely unknowingly) on my bandwagon, saying they want “less about the horserace, more about the stakes.”
The American Enterprise Institute scholar Norm Ornstein has said, “Many reporters are whitewashing the reality of American politics….You’re doing the same analysis we’ve watched in the NFL playoffs. Very little different. …the more you cover it like a horse race the less focus there is on what really matters.”
Jay Rosen of New York University is quoted similarly in Dan Froomkin’s “Press Watch:” ‘”Not the odds but the stakes’ is my shorthand for the organizing principle we most need from journalists covering the 2024 election. Not who has what chances of winning, but the consequences for our democracy.”
I’ve beaten this drum before. So let me move on from this, to another way the press might do a better job: by stealing from my job, which is creatively speculating about the future.
No one knows what the future will bring. This does not mean that no thinking about what the future might look like is legitimate. It just means PREDICTION about the future is illegitimate.
Creating a variety of speculative futures, however, can be quite provocative of useful thought, which in turn can get us all ready for what plausibly MIGHT be.
When reporters covering politics are mired in the extreme short-term tactical political horse race stuff, and feel that the only legitimate way to talk about the future is in terms of odds and polling, they are blinding themselves to an infinity of plausible future outcomes beyond “who wins.” If they took a broader view of their job, they might be able to write something like the following, and inform us about both odds AND stakes:
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What Is to Come
In 1969, Beatles fans were thirsty for information about their idols. The band had not toured at all for several years, and one of the few sources of information about them was their studio albums. Obsessives examined and replayed the LPs to glean intelligence. A subset of them became convinced that Paul McCartney was dead. When he appeared on the cover of the “Abbey Road” album walking barefoot, while his bandmates were shod, some were convinced: “Paul’s Dead” became a rallying cry. A larger group was unsure, but entranced by the notion that “the truth was out there.”
Prepare for 2024 to be “The Paul’s Dead Election.”
The 2016 and 2020 elections were the targets of numerous attempts to sway U.S. voters by means of false planted stories, on Facebook and elsewhere. In 2024, these efforts will receive a gigantic boost from artificial intelligence.
In previous cycles one might have expected stories saying that Candidate A was senile or corrupt. In this cycle, expect stories more along the lines that Candidate A is comatose, dead, and/or being directed by a huge worldwide conspiracy. Artificial intelligence will sample the internet, seek out the stories that get the biggest reaction from voters, and spread these stories as far and wide as it can, regardless of truth.
In a world of AI-driven false information, there will be a first-mover advantage, and that advantage will go to the side with fewer scruples. There will also be an advantage to whichever candidate happens to appeal to the sort of voters who are swayed by false on-line propaganda. “Honest” candidates will be put in an extremely difficult position. Using AI to respond to AI attacks would deprive the relatively more “honest” candidate of any advantage they might have had due to their “honesty.”
On the other hand, it is possible that AI might itself be used to identify and counteract false AI-concocted propaganda. This would inevitably be a reactive strategy, which would make it possibly inferior; however, it could be programmed to react almost instantaneously to slanders, perhaps simply mirroring them back onto the other side. If one side said the Candidate A was senile, the other side could simply flip the names and other details, and blanket cyberspace with an identical attack on Candidate B. The result might be utterly confusing, but it could cause voters to doubt everything they read on-line, which might work to the advantage of one side or the other.
Mainstream media is utterly unprepared to deal with such a phenomenon. The New York Times stubbornly insists to this day that its coverage of the 2016 election, which culminated in a breathless italic-headlined front page screaming that the Clinton campaign had been “rocked” by the discovery of “new emails,” was perfect, even though none of the emails turned out to be “new” at all, and the direction of the election turned as if on a dime that very day in Trump’s favor.
The Times, and other “mainstream elite media,” rather than investigating whether the AI claims are true, are very likely to do what they did with the “new emails” in 2016: simply report the secondary effects of AI-driven false information in 2024. Instead of headlines like, “No Truth to Candidate A Coma, Senility Claims,” or “No Proof of Russian Money in Candidate B Campaign,” which would require something like old-fashioned laborious journalistic legwork, we can expect to see “Candidate A Campaign Rocked by Senility, Coma Claims;” “Candidate B Campaign Denies Aid from Putin.”
Is Candidate A senile or dead? Is Candidate B receiving campaign cash from Russia? That kind of old-fashioned professional reporting takes time, the rarest commodity in a 24-hour news cycle. But there sure will be a “news story” about these spurious claims’ effects on voter attitudes and the polls.
Partisan media outlets, by contrast, are well-equipped to take fake AI-driven information and run with it. One can readily anticipate cable TV teasers such as “Are reports of Candidate A’s death exaggerated?” on the more “mainstream” partisan cable outlets, while the more extreme partisan outlets will give us something more along the lines of “Why the administration can never admit that Candidate A is dead.”
But should we really be worried? The truth comes out in the end, right? Ultimately, after all, the Times reported that none of the “new Clinton emails” were, in fact, new, didn’t they? Actually, they did not. In a story one day before the election, conveying that James Comey had found nothing to warrant a change in the FBI’s decision not to recommend prosecution, they referred to the emails, none of which were new, as “new emails” once again.
And then Trump was elected – and the Times minted money off the Trump phenomenon. Their online subscriptions immediately mushroomed after Trump was elected. Since the third quarter of 2016, their on-line subscriptions have quintupled and what Trump used to call “the failing New York Times” has been returned to robust health – thanks, ironically (or not,) to Trump himself.
One can expect a similar journalistic conflict of interest when AI-driven propaganda truly takes off, driving desperate eyeballs toward any “mainstream elite media” willing to pander to it.
The result may make many of us long for the placid, factual days of 2016. Paul’s dead.
