In the wake of the presidential election, there has been a surge of criticism among American media outlets about the problem of so-called “fake news” on social networks. Alongside calls in opinion columns for Facebook and Google to crack down on the spread of misleading information, newspapers themselves have published reflective assessments of their own coverage and of the duties of American journalists.
In these various op-eds and reflections, I’ve been surprised to see so little attention given to Tocqueville’s study of American media in shaping political opinion. His sociological insights into Americans’ reliance on news outlets anticipate some of our own anxieties about “fake news,” even if our country has otherwise metamorphosed in the century and a half since the publication of his magnum opus, Democracy in America.
Tocqueville explains how American newspapers allow citizens to achieve political consensus, even in the face of the atomizing individualism of democratic culture. In the chapter “On the Relation between Public Associations and the Newspapers,” he explains:
When men are no longer united among themselves by firm and lasting ties, it is impossible to obtain the co-operation of any great number of them unless you can persuade every man whose help you require that his private interest obliges him voluntarily to unite his exertions to the exertions of all the others. This can be habitually and conveniently effected only by means of a newspaper; nothing but a newspaper can drop the same thought into a thousand minds at the same moment. A newspaper is an adviser that does not require to be sought, but that comes of its own accord and talks to you briefly every day of the common weal, without distracting you from your private affairs.
With Google and Twitter in our pockets, we have tools that “can drop the same thought into a thousand minds at the same moment” with even less effort than Tocqueville’s unbidden “adviser.” It’s striking, nevertheless, how Tocqueville’s understanding of newspapers describes our own perception of today’s social networks and our interactions with them. Daily, frictionless, almost inescapable. He might as well be writing a review of the New York Times app on your phone.
Like recent criticism of fake news, Democracy in America also highlights the dangers of the easy spread of misinformation. Just as one can view Silicon Valley giants not as beneficent purveyors of knowledge but as efficient mechanisms for distributing propaganda, Tocqueville is quick to point out that newspapers can both “maintain civilization” but also bring about its ruin:
To suppose that [newspapers] only serve to protect freedom would be to diminish their importance: they maintain civilization. I shall not deny that in democratic countries newspapers frequently lead the citizens to launch together into very ill-digested schemes; but if there were no newspapers there would be no common activity. The evil which they produce is therefore much less than that which they cure.
For Tocqueville, the social benefits of newspapers are inextricable from their dangers, but the benefits of an American media that can unite and civilize outweigh the “evil” of “ill-digested schemes” propagated via broadsheet. In contrast to calls for Google and Facebook to wipe fake news from our screens with carefully tuned algorithms, Tocqueville’s nineteenth-century commentary sounds more forgiving of the outlets that bring information—whether nutritive or not—to our smartphones. His text is content to describe the occasional perils of a free press; it does not prescribe propaganda’s cure.
But perhaps Tocqueville never expected such propaganda to reach millions of Americans, a feat now easily achieved through effortless retweets. He imagined that America’s vibrant media landscape would include several small newspapers, corresponding to America’s numerous “associations” that provide individuals with the structure for political action: “newspapers make associations, and associations make newspapers.” Yet this vision of media subsidiarity doesn’t describe today’s Zuckerberg-dominated Internet news ecosystem. When Facebook’s billion-plus users share sensational (and false) headlines of Pope Francis’ endorsement of Trump and media-funded protesting of the presidential election results, these stories—shared hundreds of thousands of times—extend far beyond any newspaper’s readership in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Democracy in America views newspapers with ambivalence but ultimately with optimism: even with whatever potential ills they facilitate, they still prove essential to democratic politics. Surely this net-positive view of an unrestricted press remains true. But now that fake news can metastasize instantly through global social networks rather than remain confined to the newspapers of small associations, Americans need to reconsider how to defend against the long-understood dangers of misinformation. Tocqueville is a good place to start.
