On Crowds and Tribalism
2019-01-27 · Guest: Robbie Soave (Associate editor at Reason.com) · 52:11
Media tribalism and the rush to judgment
Bob Zadek and Robbie Soave discuss the 2019 Covington Catholic incident and the 2014 UVA rape hoax to illustrate the dangers of media tribalism and the rush to judgment. Robbie explains how his investigation into the full video footage of the Lincoln Memorial encounter debunked the initial viral narrative, highlighting the role of social media and the “Trump lens” in modern journalism.
Topics: Media Bias, Tribalism, Covington Catholic, UVA Rape Hoax, Social Media, Journalism Ethics, Black Hebrew Israelites, Nathan Phillips
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Robbie Soave
The UVA Rape Hoax [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. What a record that is. Thank you so much for listening this Sunday morning. We are always the show of ideas, never, ever, ever the show of attitude.
In the recent past, a few days ago it seems like, we had the perfect storm—the perfect storm of irresponsible media reporting, the perfect storm of mob media, if you will, media violence. We had the perfect storm of a cultural clash. We had, all in one moment, Native Americans, “Make America Great” big ugly red “Make America Great” hats, Christian conservative teenagers from an upper-class Catholic school. We had the Lincoln Memorial, and we had, not to be denied, a black activist group called the Hebrew Israelites, all captured on video, all not very happy to be around each other. The media had a field day, the public had a field day, and everybody—everybody—got the story wrong except for this morning’s guest.
With that introduction, Robbie, that’s a tough row you have to hoe now. With that introduction, I’m happy to introduce my friends out there to Robbie Soave. Robbie is an associate editor at Reason.com. He writes at Reason, he’s a columnist at the Daily Beast, he’s written for the New York Times, New York Post, CNN, USA Today, U.S. News & World Report, and Forbes named him in 2016 as the “30 Under 30” category in law and policy. And Robbie broke one of the most interesting stories in recent times: the UVA fake rape case. Robbie, with that introduction, I’m happy to welcome you to the show this morning.
Robbie Soave: Thank you for having me. I hope I live up to the hype.
Bob Zadek: Now Robbie, you were in the Forbes “30 Under 30” list. I guess that’s a list you cannot stay on forever. Pretty soon you get term-limited out of that one, I guess.
Robbie Soave: Yeah, I just passed that point there, but it’s now just to remind me of my lost youth.
Bob Zadek: So you got term-limited out on the “30 Under 30” category. Now Robbie, I introduced you, and part of my introduction was I associated you with a wonderful piece of journalism that you did almost single-handedly: the UVA rape story, the hoax in December of 2014. I want you to, if you don’t mind, tell us briefly what the UVA rape story hoax was in 2014, because it will have some relevance to this morning’s show.
Robbie Soave: Yes, absolutely. It’s a sort of related—there are some similar themes. This was a story, this was a piece of journalism produced by the magazine Rolling Stone. The author was a freelancer for them, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, and she was writing about sexual assault at the University of Virginia. She had interviewed a young woman who went by—whose name was Jackie, and that was the woman’s name, but her last name was not given in the story.
Jackie claimed that when Jackie was a freshman at UVA, she’d gone on a date, and her date took her to a fraternity party and lured her upstairs, and then she was ritualistically gang-raped by like ten men, the fraternity brothers. She was dragged through glass. It was—they treated her like an animal, and this was part of some initiation ceremony for their fraternity or something like that. And then her friends later discouraged her from going to the police out of—and even the Dean of Students didn’t want to do anything about it. It’s this horrible, horrible tale.
It turned out none of it was true. The author had not forced Jackie to divulge the name of the person, because she was on a date with this guy, so she knew who he was. But the author didn’t verify that this person existed, nor did she try to interview Jackie’s friends. She took Jackie’s word for it that her friends wouldn’t want to talk to her. So I was one of the first people to say this sounds fishy, since it seemed that some of these basic journalism steps of trying to verify the story were not taken. This is an example of why you always have to take those steps.
The friends eventually revealed that Jackie had been “catfishing” them, which is when you make up a fake identity and then you send messages pretending you’re some other person. So she had made up this guy who had taken her on a date. He does not exist. Also, the party did not happen—there was no party at that fraternity on that day. Jackie, by all appearances, was struggling with some mental issues, probably, and had really gone to elaborate steps to build this complete lie. And for this, Rolling Stone’s reputation was kind of largely ruined after this. I mean, they still produce journalism, but they were sued. The fraternity members sued, the Dean of Students sued for being misrepresented in the story, and it’s just this kind of iconic failure of good journalism.
Bob Zadek: And what happened was, of course, UVA was in the spotlight for a while. They got an enormous amount of negative publicity, obviously. And of course, nobody except for you, Robbie—no other journalist questioned the story. Nobody tried to do a deep dive, at all, even a shallow dive, to see: was this really true? The instant the story hit the pages—if there are still pages—of Rolling Stone magazine, it became absolute inviolate truth, and nobody questioned it except for you. And that lesson will be kind of the subtext of this morning’s story. So nobody else questioned it; it became instant dogma, instant absolute truth, did it not?
Robbie Soave: It did. Yes, it fit into a sort of a narrative about what’s happening on campuses, that there’s this out-of-control sexual assault problem—a narrative I’ve been skeptical of because I’ve done some reporting on the statistics and the idea, for instance—you hear this among activist kind of victims’ advocate circles—that the problem is these serial predators, that there are young men on college campuses who commit so many sexual assaults, they do it over and over again, and that that’s the problem, that there’s these predator men.
But I’ve actually looked into the science of this, and it’s simply not true. There’s not good evidence for it at all. So this incident would have been an example of that, but I was just so skeptical of it because how would they—I mean, how would they expect to get away with this? What if she went to the police? You know, most—when a sexual assault actually happens on campus, it’s usually everyone is very drunk, and then some boundaries are crossed, or some other drug or intoxicant is used. And this was a case where she was fully conscious, and she had not been drinking, she had not been drugged. So it just seemed wildly unlikely to me. I’d never seen another case of a serial sexual assault where intoxicants were not involved. I’d never seen another case like that. So it just seemed very unlikely. Now, I think other people maybe were doubting it, but were afraid to say anything about it because you get attacked as a “rape denier” or a hater of women if you point out that actually this problem on college campuses is different than the activists kind of make it out to be. Actually, young women are more likely to be sexually assaulted if they’re not in college than if they are in college.
The Covington Catholic Incident [09:12]
Bob Zadek: So now we fast-forward—a wonderful piece of investigative journalism and skepticism—we fast-forward now all the way forward to the middle of January of 2019, and we have the Covington boys. Covington is a small town in Kentucky. Interestingly, it’s near Virginia, Kentucky is, but no coincidence, I’m sure—nothing other than a coincidence. The Covington boys, the Lincoln Memorial, a Native American with a drum, and we again have journalism run amok but for Robbie. Robbie, tell us, if you will, the story of the Covington boys, how they instantly got the attention of media throughout the country. Tell us the story of what happened at the Lincoln Memorial and the aftermath.
Robbie Soave: It was the Lincoln Memorial. So a short clip, just a few minutes long, a video went viral on social media, on Twitter, and the video showed these young men, the high-school-aged boys from Covington, the Catholic school, mostly white, many of them wearing the red “Make America Great Again” hats. And they appear to be racially harassing this Native American man named Nathan Phillips, an older Native American man who is drumming and singing, engaged in some kind of song or prayer of his heritage. And these boys are harassing him, and one in particular appears to get in his face and give him this very creepy, threatening smile right at him. It’s disturbing if you watch it in the video; it’s hostile and aggressive.
And everyone who saw this went, “Oh my god, what is wrong with these boys? Look at how badly they’re treating this poor man.” It instantly became kind of a tale of the Trump years, of these young, Trump-loving kids who were there for a conservative reason—they were there for the March for Life, the anti-abortion march—and these are Trump-loving, hateful young white people bullying this marginalized Native American man. And this was just awful, and this is what we’ve allowed our society to become.
And everyone was so worked up about it. Journalists on the right were eager to disassociate themselves from these boys because they didn’t want the pro-life cause to look bad because of the actions of these kids. So they were condemned by National Review and by lots of other conservatives. There were other people calling for these kids to be “doxxed,” which is for their personal information to be revealed and their addresses and phone numbers and those kinds of things. I mean, death threats poured in. Just unbelievable hate, that everyone wants to punch these kids, they would deserve it. And that was all because of this couple-minute clip that initially went viral last weekend on Saturday.
Bob Zadek: Now Robbie, I want to make one point. I just want to ask you to continue the narrative, but you said in describing the expression on the young boy’s face who went viral, you said “appears to be smirking.” And that “appears to be” is really relevant to me, and it should be to everybody. We are talking about an appearance on a video that went viral. We don’t really know whether it was a smirk, a smile, a grimace, or whatever, but Robbie said “appears to be smirking,” and the apparent smirk was very important to enable or to give that video the viral legs that it had.
Robbie Soave: Absolutely. And like I said, this was just such a symbolic short clip. So I was going to write something about this. I was actually at a conference, a student libertarian conference, while this was kicking into high gear on social media. So the next morning I thought, “You know, I’m going to write something about this. I’ll see what it’s about, and maybe I’ll write something about how we need to teach young kids better behavior,” or something like that.
And then I started seeing a couple people, actually mostly sort of far-right random Twitter accounts that are often conspiratorial, but now and then latch onto something that’s the truth. And they were saying that there’s this longer video available. So I sat down and watched it. There was actually two hours of footage, most of it taking place before the encounter between the boys and Nathan Phillips. So I just watched it. And the more I watched it, the more I realized that this had been taken completely out of context. There was so much else going on. And indeed, the boys had not actually behaved all that badly when you saw the broader context.
The Three Groups at the Lincoln Memorial [15:02]
Robbie Soave: It turned out there was a third group there. There’s the Covington boys, there was the Native American man, Phillips, who actually had kind of an entourage, and there was another group called the Black Hebrew Israelites, who you alluded to, who are this just absolutely crazy kook group. I’ve encountered them in D.C. before. They stand next to one of the metro stations in Washington, D.C., and they shout vile, obscene insults at people that are racial, that are anti-gay, that are anti-women, they’re anti-Christian, they’re anti-Jew. I can’t repeat on the air the language they use; it’s equivalent to like the Westboro Baptist Church or something. It’s a black nationalist fringe kook group.
And they, like they do in the streets of Washington, D.C., near the Lincoln Memorial, they had been berating the people around them, including Native American people initially, and then eventually the Covington boys. They had been insulting them in really, really offensive language for an hour. And they had actually challenged the boys to fight them. They had egged them on. It’s like, “What, are you afraid of us? There’s more than us, come fight us.” And the boys had not done anything—or they’d not physically confronted them. They had sort of heckled them back. They booed them when they had made offensive remarks. The boys had laughed at them.
And then finally, the boys had started doing kind of like a pep rally type cheer thing, they said, to drown out the Black Hebrew Israelites. So they were doing kind of like, you know, they were jumping up and down. It was like a pep rally kind of thing. There’s nothing wrong with that. So they haven’t done anything wrong up until now. I think it’s fine to heckle back insane, crazy people who are ranting about how the “white devils” deserve to die.
So this is the moment at which—this is an hour and 12 minutes now into the video footage. And this video footage, by the way, is from the Black Hebrew Israelites’ perspective; they took this video. Now Nathan Phillips, the Native American man, arrives on scene. And he chooses to go up and confront the boys. And later tells the media that the boys were these “beasts” and the Black Hebrew Israelites were their “prey,” and he was afraid for the Black Hebrew Israelites and he was going to—so he was there to protect them. So he was siding with the Black Hebrew Israelites, even though he was fully aware that these were vile, horrible people and that the boys were not—he was choosing the wrong side in this conflict, and he was fully aware of that.
So he goes up to the boys and he’s drumming, and they’re already cheering, so they’re continuing to cheer. And they are very confused. And there’s a lot of them, so there’s different reactions, but it seems like many of them think he’s on their side or he’s there to show support or join in with their cheering. So they kind of cheer along with him. Now in this broader context, it’s very clear they’re not making fun of him or threatening—most of them aren’t kind of joining in with him; they’re not trying to be racist toward him. A few kids do make like a tomahawk chop gesture, and by a few I mean two—two or three in this large, large crowd. Those I would have said engaged in insensitive behavior that they probably shouldn’t have.
But by and large, this is not a crowd of people who came up to racially harass and intimidate him. They were doing their own thing and he joined in with them. And he moved into their crowd—like he went right for them. And that’s how he ended up face-to-face with the appearing-to-smirk teenager, who—this kid’s name is Nick Sandmann. So he did not single Phillips out; it’s the other way around. And his explanation fits with what I see in the extended video, which is that he didn’t really understand what was happening or why this man had come up to him, so he smiled because he wanted to communicate a non-threatening facial expression. And he keeps smiling until—and he gets increasingly confused why this man is drumming in his face. And then his smile slips a little bit eventually, but he doesn’t do anything—he doesn’t do anything provocative at all. And then it eventually ends, and that’s it. And that’s it. So this moment of obvious predatory racial harassment and hostility, it couldn’t be further from that. It’s not that at all once you watch the broader context.
Investigating the Full Footage [19:11]
Bob Zadek: So what we have is, we have three very different groups, although the Native American was in the video just one person, so not really a group. We have three very different elements of our society caught on a video in a confused, perhaps obnoxious, but certainly non-violent event on video. It goes viral. And the reason we are talking about it this morning is mainstream media was instantly, unquestioningly on top of this story. And when I say mainstream media, we are talking about including David Brooks, a columnist, a somewhat conservative, perhaps not so much, columnist for the New York Times. He is as close as the New York Times comes to a Republican columnist. He does his usual self-righteous scolding in a column, as well as CNN was all over this story. This was big time, as if it was a major, major event. And none of the media questioned this. And it fed right into—and this is really why we are talking about it this morning—the incredible polarization as everybody in America instantly picked sides. So this fed right into the polarization which is happening in this country and the role of the media—mainstream, if there is such a thing anymore. As far as I’m concerned, the only mainstream media is Reason.com, Robbie. But mainstream media is all over this. And now tell us, with the somewhat critical eye of a journalist, what was the role of mainstream media, and how was their behavior different than what one would expect of mainstream and not-so-mainstream media, and how did the public react to the reaction of mainstream media?
Robbie Soave: Well, I mean, for almost a full 24 hours, they were just—nobody could get enough of this story because it was an example of—so the media increasingly in the Trump years, the issue is everything is through a lens of Trump. And there can only be two positions, there are only two sides, there are only two tribes, whatever you want to call it. There is the pro-Trump tribe and the anti-Trump tribe. And the mainstream media, you have to squeeze everyone into one or the other. It’s very difficult and frustrating for those of us like myself who have a more complicated view of Trump and Trump policies—not an altogether positive one, but I have a more complicated view than just entirely against or entirely for. But you have to be entirely against or entirely for. The mainstream media so must be entirely against. So these were people in red hats, so these are entirely for, so we are entirely against. So we must destroy—oh my god, this is so terrible, they are the worst, they are our enemies, we will explain how evil and terrible they are. And you were just getting this over and over again.
Now, my story came out Sunday afternoon, in which I said the media has wildly mischaracterized this. If you watch the fuller video, Nick Sandmann is not doing anything wrong. Second of all, they are already cheering, they’re engaged in pep-rally-type behavior as a form of opposition against this crazy hate group, and that’s fine. And Nathan Phillips completely misrepresented what happened when he spoke to the media. And actually, Nathan Phillips did have a few Native American men with him who appeared to be—who tried to be argumentative with the boys; they were starting it. And actually, Nick Sandmann tried to stop—he made a gesture with his hand to one of his friends saying like, “Cut it out, don’t even talk to these people.”
So anyway, my piece comes out and it really does blow up. I mean, it’s the most-read article I think I’ve ever written at Reason. And thankfully, many in the media did reverse course. Certainly many on the right, now knowing that actually what the boys did wasn’t all that bad, took back their immediate disassociation. Jake Tapper of CNN tweeted my article, Meghan McCain talked about it on The View. So there were a lot of people in the media who did reverse course at this point, and that’s great. But not everyone. Not everyone. Because what happened then is, again, it has to fit into a pro-Trump or anti-Trump narrative. So then these kids are now sort of being—they’re rightfully victims of the media’s misportrayal, so now conservatives are kind of touting them as—correctly so—as examples of what can happen when you have partisan bias in the media. And then others in the media on the left are doubling down, asserting that no, no, no, now this is spin and it was just as bad as your initial reaction that this was bad was correct and now people are trying to trick you. I was astonished to see the number of people who doubled down: in the Washington Post, in the Atlantic—again, these are diffuse media organizations, so some agreed with me and others didn’t—but there were people who wrote in—Jonathan Capehart in the Washington Post, who’s a left-of-center columnist, Adam Serwer in the Atlantic, the same. There was a very widely read piece in Deadspin, which is a very left-of-center publication, that called me a “professional contrarian” and explained that I was trying to deceive people or something like that.
Media Malpractice and the Trump Lens [23:32]
Bob Zadek: A professional contrarian. Robbie, as I asked you when we spoke a few days ago, and as we go to break, I wonder if being a professional contrarian means you are or should be licensed. We did a show last Sunday on the licensing of occupations, and I don’t remember my guest, Morris Kleiner, mentioning that contrarian required 300 hours of training and passing a licensing exam. Maybe you are just a self-taught contrarian. This is Bob Zadek, I’m speaking with Robbie Soave this morning. We are talking about the Covington boys, how the media got it wrong. We’ll be back in 30 short seconds when I’m going to ask Robbie: how did we get into this mess, and Robbie, how do we get out of it? Please stay tuned, lots more to come.
(Sponsor break removed)
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. We are speaking this morning with Robbie Soave. Robbie is an associate editor at Reason.com—maybe I should say the associate editor, because he is doing such a wonderful job with his simple questioning of the stories that so many other members and participants in the media just take for granted because they are lazy or because perhaps they have a message they want to convey and they will ignore all facts and events that are contrary to the message.
Robbie, in the first half of the show, I introduced you with your UVA rape story case, a textbook example of horrible journalism. And I said there are parallels between the story you wrote in 2014 and in the Covington boys story of last week. However, Rolling Stone magazine in the UVA rape case was kind of victimized. They were victimized by their own sloppiness, perhaps by their own political agenda—don’t really know, I’m not a psychologist—but they were kind of a victim, a victim of a woman who wanted whatever she wanted—attention or a political agenda—and they were victims of their own sloppiness. In the Covington boys story, media was not so much a victim; they just did a horrible, horrible job.
Now Robbie, I’m going to ask you—the wonderful part of having an opinion radio show is opinions matter, and you’re allowed to have an opinion, and opinions are what make it interesting. So Robbie, my first question is: I would guess there is a gap—I would hope there is a gap—between the craft of journalism as it is taught in journalism school and as it is practiced today and as witnessed by our story. So what do you think happens? Do journalism students—are they not taught the right thing, or do they discard it, or do they forget? Doctors who go to medical school don’t graduate and then turn their back on all the medicine they are taught and they just do what they want. So where can you help us understand what’s going wrong with the profession of journalism?
Robbie Soave: Sure. Well, some thoughts on that. First of all, I actually do think journalism is different than something like medical school. So there are journalism schools, but I don’t think they’re very good, and I think if you want to become a journalist, you should just skip them entirely. And that’s actually advice that many professional journalists, left, right, and center, would give, because journalism is actually a craft in my mind rather than a scholarly discipline. It’s something you just get better at by doing. So you should have an internship at a publication, or I mean, the best way to become a journalist to “study” it is to just work for your college paper at the university, and then you learn what you need to learn. I mean, that’s how I did it; I majored in English literature and I worked for the college paper and you pick up the skills.
The issue—an issue in both of these stories—was that in both cases you do have sources that misled the writers. So Nathan Phillips, the Native American man, when interviewed, he gave information that was not true. And Jackie gave information that was not true. So on one hand, I mean, that’s a difficult problem if you’re going to have a source who misleads you. You have to think about how likely is it that this person is misleading me. And obviously, the more anonymity you give them, the more likely they are to mislead you. So Jackie was—her real identity was not printed and never has been. Nathan Phillips is a little bit different.
But this is kind of a problem—there’s an increasing reliance that I see with the D.C. media reporting on Trump in the White House. There’s been a lot of reliance on anonymous sourcing, which is increasingly so, which is a problem because if people are speaking to you and you’re not printing their full name, then it’s harder for the public or for other media organizations to verify that what they’re saying is true. They can just rant about whatever bothers them and know they’re not going to get in any trouble from the administration because they’re anonymous. Trump has been serious about this kind of reporting, but even people on the left have—some of them have complained.
And I think my classical training tells me that you really should only redact a source’s name in really compelling situations where like their life could be in danger. I mean, there would be other reasons—I’ve done it before, you know, if their job is threatened, something like that. But if you’re constantly relying on that, it’s almost like you’re creating this narrative that no one else can question because they have no ability to question it because they’re solely reliable on you. And I see a lot more of that in the media that’s kind of harmful.
The other thing is, in comparing these two stories, so the point where everyone in the media with the Rolling Stone story—everyone in the media, pretty much everyone—there were still some deniers—but pretty much everyone had to admit eventually the Jackie story was made up, probably after the friends explained that actually Jackie sent us text messages pretending to be this guy who allegedly took her on the date and raped her, and he doesn’t exist, and these text messages are clearly sent from Jackie, and she had a crush on one of the friends and she wanted to make it seem like he needed to protect her, something like that. At that point, pretty much everyone had to go, “Okay, this story is made up.”
I feel like we’ve had that moment already with the Covington story. I feel like my article and the broader context make it just equally as abundantly clear that these kids were not engaged in targeted racial harassment and that Nick Sandmann in particular was not engaged in targeted racial harassment. And yet there are still countless deniers of this reality in the media, to the degree I think—and again, I think this is a Trump thing—that the media versus Trump is such a partisan tribe-versus-tribe struggle that I wonder if the UVA story had happened today in sort of the wake of kind of the MeToo activist movement, I bet there would be a lot of deniers that the story had been debunked, equivalent to how many there are about Covington, if it had happened in today’s totally politically charged tribal media culture.
Lessons in Media Skepticism [37:37]
Bob Zadek: Now Robbie, that leads me to my next question, kind of a consumer reports sort of question. The American public are customers of the media. They are purchasing or absorbing a product. The American public, from best one can tell, had an immediate reaction, they took sides, as you pointed out. They accepted everything; they accepted a grainy video as absolute gospel. Help us—what’s your lesson, what’s your observation as to how the public can absorb this barrage of alleged facts and real facts, and how one can do the complex task of sorting it all out? Are there any bullet-point guides you can—other than select those people who you rely upon for information, other than being careful who you select—what are the hallmarks? How can one tell that this story requires more information and perhaps one ought to look further?
Robbie Soave: Well, A, put your faith in journalists who occasionally write something, report something, that goes against what their biases would want the story to say. That’s because that shows independent thinking, that shows that they’re not just playing for a side, that they’re willing to call out people they would be inclined to be favorable toward or vice versa. That’s a sign of someone you’d be more likely to trust. That’s A.
B, you know, some of these weren’t even stories; this was just people tweeting condemnation of the boys, they were quote-tweeting this video. This is a lesson for everyone, journalists and consumers alike: social media is not a substitute for good, hard-reported news. Not everything you see there is true, and it can be very misleading. And you don’t have to be on top of everything; you can tune it out and wait for the more clarifying reporting to be done. Everyone is just sitting around getting so fired up about every offensive thing they see on Twitter or on Facebook, and these mediums lend themselves very well to piling on and to kind of having mobs against people, and that’s not healthy.
Another thing is, actually, this whole incident has gone to a kind of libertarian critique of police and sort of evidence standards and kind of the criminal system. Eyewitness testimony is unreliable. That’s something that libertarians, civil libertarians know, that when a person says, “No, that was the guy,” actually, you don’t always know. People have confessed to committing crimes because they’ve been interrogated by the police for hours and they get tired and they get confused and they slip up in what they say and they’re wrongfully convicted—they wrongfully confess to things they never did.
And video can be misleadingly edited. If you’re moving while you’re recording the video, it can look like the person you’re recording is moving when actually it’s just you’re moving. I’ve watched—there are like a dozen videos of this whole encounter from different angles. In some of it, it looks like one comes up to the other, but in the other videos, it’s reversed, it’s opposite. In some of the videos, it looks like it’s a whole bunch of people; from other angles, it’s not that many people. The distance between the groups goes up and down depending on what video you’re looking at. But reality hasn’t been altered; the truth is out there, but it’s not as easy as you might think. So that’s just a warning from libertarians for everyone to be a little bit more skeptical just in general of ironclad claims made by authority figures or media or police or whoever, because it can indeed always be more complicated than it seems, and in fact usually is.
The Impact of Social Media [42:41]
Bob Zadek: You and other observers of the public interaction between media and the public, you have been somewhat critical of, skeptical of, cautious about social media. Indeed, many people blame social media as part of, maybe a large part of the problem. Isn’t social media nothing other than like a wire that just conveys information? Social media itself is not—it doesn’t take a position, it just transmits the information of others. But we didn’t used to have social media. How does social media, if at all, make matters worse? Is it going to continue to make matters worse? Are we in such a pickle these days because of social media, or is social media the symptom of something else?
Robbie Soave: Right. So as a libertarian—and libertarians have been warning against panic about new technology for decades, which I agree with. There’s always some kind of nanny-state, often a liberal but sometimes a conservative thing, whatever the new thing—comic books or video games or whatever—they’re too violent or they confuse people or they’re dangerous or we get too much of our news from the TV, oh this is bad. They always want to harken back to some golden age where kids were pure and their brains weren’t being rotted by the technology or what not. We libertarians are always disdaining that overly simplistic narrative.
So similarly, I don’t like to come down too harshly on social media because there are huge advantages to social media. It allows us to communicate with a wide range of people across huge geographical distances. I can have conversations with other people in the media, actually people who are better-known writers than I am who have much larger followings; I would have to like write them a letter or something and hope they would respond. Now I’m writing them and people are seeing that I’m writing them, so they want to see a response. So it facilitates these amazing conversations that would be very practically difficult to have otherwise. There’s tremendous upside to this. Information can be spread and is decentralizing who gets to control who gets what information—it can often be a good thing.
Now, I do think there are downsides, and while it’s true that the tool is not—it can be tempting to blame the tool when the fault is ourselves, not the way we use it and what we choose to do with it is us, not the system. However, I think particularly Twitter encourages snark and quick thinking with the—there’s short responses, it has a character limit, so you can only express a quick thought. So this can, I think, encourage not having particularly deep or well-thought-out conversations. Your quick, snarky response, your moral condemnation, your “Oh my god, this is terrible, this person should get punched” kind of response is, I think, to some degree encouraged by the medium, by the form, by the platform, in a way that can be unhealthy for our society. So that’s the tradeoff; that’s the negative aspect of this. Now, I would never call for the government to do something about this; that would be a violation of my sacred libertarian principles that the government should not tell companies what to do, specifically and most importantly in a speech context. And indeed, the Supreme Court would invariably say that they could not. Our understanding of what the First Amendment protects is very robust and very far-reaching and is not really contentious even on a contentious Supreme Court; there’s widespread agreement that the government cannot and should not do something like that. So then it’s up to us to kind of just use social media more responsibly, I think, and that would be a good idea. And maybe stories like Covington serve as gentle or not-so-gentle reminders to look within ourselves and be a little more introspective and not be so inclined to jump on everything and yell at everyone. And maybe if you are a person who’s inclined toward that, maybe you should get a hobby, maybe you shouldn’t spend all your time online, maybe you should unplug and go for a jog or do some yoga or clear your head, and then we would be able to have a more productive conversation.
Bob Zadek: Robbie, as I introduced you, you were listed by Forbes in 2016 as “30 Under 30,” which was an honor. I don’t think anybody who is in a “30 Under 30” category would ever refer to writing a letter. I didn’t even know you knew what they were. How did you learn about letters?
Robbie Soave: Right, did you have to maybe smoke signals or something? I hear there’s something called the post office. Yeah, whenever I get a bill in letter form, it just ends up going unpaid because I don’t know how to return, I don’t know what stamps are. Actually, as a left-handed person, writing by hand is immensely difficult and indeed painful for me. So all hail our new technology.
Bob Zadek: And I think you give Twitter sort of a bad rap for the mandatory brevity of the tweets. I think back that I think the first one to use a form of tweets was Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanack; he had hundreds of what would be perfect tweets if they were around today. Short little homilies that were often wise, often humorous, and certainly worth saving. He might have been America’s first tweeter, if that’s the proper noun. So don’t knock brevity; it’s not all that bad. Just a passing comment, no need to respond.
Historical Divisiveness and Government Growth [48:08]
Bob Zadek: Now, we have a few minutes left. Is it possible to put the painful tribalism and picking sides and polarization that we seem to be experiencing today—can you put it in a broader historical perspective? Is this the same as it’s always been? Is this more than ever? Is it merely a phase like adolescence that we will go through, or is the likelihood—maybe fueled by technology—is this symptom going to get worse before it gets better, and indeed will it ever get better?
Robbie Soave: So politics has always been incredibly divisive and negative. Our dialogue has not gotten worse. You can—I’m sure you know this, but there was a senator, I can’t remember the two names, but the beating with the cane on the steps of Congress in right before or right after the Civil War. The campaign ads against people like even Thomas Jefferson were unbelievably vile and cruel. So our politics has always been demeaning and degrading and gross and disgusting and horrible.
What is worse now is that politics actually occupies more of the space in our lives because the government does far more than it used to. It is now—now we spend way more time—the common person, all people spend so much more time on political dialogue, which again is nasty and horrible and ill-informed. People are not particularly well-informed in politics; neither politicians are very not well-informed in policy, they’re not there to enact policy, they’re there to get re-elected. And because Trump comes from the media world, he is first and foremost a reality TV star—that is what he is known for to the people, for being on The Apprentice. So his success has caused these worlds of media and reality TV and politics and government to blur and to actually have the boundaries between them become indistinguishable, such that—and the government is more involved in our lives than ever. There are more laws. The federal government, the executive branch in particular, has far more authority relative to the other two than our founders intended, and of course the government does more than our founders intended.
So this means we just spend way more time on politics than people used to, way more. And that means that the nastiness that characterizes politics eats up more of our souls than it would of a person before. So because of government’s growth, things have gotten worse, but not because politics itself has gotten measurably worse; politics was always horrible. Is there a solution to that? I mean, again, I’m coming at you from an ideological libertarian perspective, so I do in fact want the government to be less and think our society would be healthier for a number of reasons if it did. I’m skeptical a little bit that there’s a “well, this is why and how government will end up constrained.” It could be we all get so sick of constant war between CNN and Trump that people want for and vote for a kind of more normal or less in-your-face at least constant conflict between the press and the presidency. But barring that, I can easily imagine this cycle of outrage just continuing to spin faster and faster for the foreseeable future.
Closing and Robbie’s New Book [53:33]
Bob Zadek: Oh groan. Robbie, we have about 20 seconds left. How can our friends follow your writing and your work at Reason?
Robbie Soave: You can follow me on Twitter @RobbieSoave and at Reason.com, and you can pre-order my book, “Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump,” which comes out in June. It’s available on Amazon right now.
Bob Zadek: It’s bound to be a bestseller. Robbie, good luck with your book. Thanks so much for spending the hour with us this morning, and say hi to all my good friends at Reason. I’ll see you guys in a couple of weeks. Bob Zadek says so long for now, I’ll be back again next Sunday for another hour of ideas and never attitude. Thanks so much for listening, have a good balance of the weekend.