Press access, political communication and a fragmented media landscape

Contact: Jayeeta Chowdhury-Woodstrup, [email protected]

ANN ARBOR—As the dispute over White House press access moves through the courts, Joyojeet Pal, professor at the University of Michigan School of Information, examines what restrictions on journalists, direct-to-audience political messaging, and the rise of independent media could mean for accountability.

Are the United States and countries such as India beginning to converge in the way political leaders manage the press and communicate with the public?

Whether this was pioneered in the Global South is a much more complicated question. Authoritarian regimes were doing versions of this long before the Cold War. But there are elements that you could argue are being picked up from Global South leaders. One is moving away from established institutions like a standard press conference, for instance, where there is an exchange between political leadership and the press, and replacing them with a more selective format.

When you align that with social media, you can create the appearance that an administration is constantly communicating with people. But the communication is actually one way. It looks like two-way communication because it is happening on an interactive platform, but the leadership still controls what is being communicated and when. That is something you could argue has been picked up from Global South leaders, and I would say Narendra Modi (prime minister of India) has been one of the most important political figures in that space.

What happens when citizens become accustomed to leaders communicating directly rather than regularly answering questions from journalists?

Social media completely changes that ecology. You get what I would call a normative naturalization of this behavior. People gradually begin to accept that this is simply how government communicates: The government sends something out, and citizens receive it. Historically, governments have communicated through proclamations or missives without any expectation that leaders would answer questions in return. Social media can recreate some aspects of that relationship while making it appear much more participatory.

The other important issue is institutional. The legal and political infrastructure that gets created to restrict access or exclude journalists can outlive the particular political moment that was used to justify it. That creates a downstream problem. Imagine a situation in which the country genuinely needs a trusted, unified source of information. COVID is a good example. During a national emergency, people need institutions they consider reliable. If you have spent years damaging the credibility of those institutions, you cannot suddenly restore that credibility because you need it during a crisis. Trust is not something that can simply be switched back on.

Governments can also seek the rapid removal of online content. How does that kind of takedown environment change journalism?

I have mixed feelings about this because, on the face of it, it looks highly controlled: You have a system that is corporatized, technologically mediated and capable of taking material down quickly. But these moves have not necessarily been very effective at eliminating opposition. What opposition media often do instead is move away from established institutional mechanisms and toward more loosely structured channels, including platforms such as YouTube.

It can also change journalistic behavior. If you believe something will be taken down within three hours, for example, you may begin operating "publish first, verify later." Instead of waiting until everything is completely verified before publishing, someone might put the material online quickly and rely on screenshots and redistribution to keep it circulating. You can then get something like a Streisand effect: The attempt to suppress the material actually makes more people interested in seeing it.

Another consequence is that the center of media production can shift from institutions to individual journalists. We have already seen significant evidence of this in India. Journalists have left established organizations and essentially become small media houses themselves, sometimes one journalist working with a few staff members and operating through their own channels. That gives them considerable independence. But it also means that many of the institutional checks that once existed around an individual journalist may no longer exist. Take someone like Ravish Kumar. A viewer may trust his reporting and his voice. But when the journalist becomes the institution, that individual also becomes the final authority on what gets published.

There is a tradeoff. A journalist may now be able to say things independently that an established organization would not have permitted. At the same time, there are fewer internal checks and balances. And then the question becomes: What happens after repeated takedowns? When does a platform ban someone entirely? Even then, people frequently move to another platform or channel. It can become something of a Hydra situation: you shut down one outlet, and another appears.

Can factual, independent journalism still build a significant audience without government or large corporate backing?

There is already evidence that it can. One important development in India—and something American audiences should watch—is the growth of citizen-funded journalism. Print journalism became increasingly difficult economically because printing is expensive, and newspapers historically depended heavily on advertising. Online publishing changes those economics. If your production costs are relatively low, you do not necessarily need the same advertising structure. There are individual journalists doing this, but there are also independent news organizations that are entirely subscriber-supported. Some do not accept advertising at all. Others use hybrid models. For example, publishing on YouTube and allowing the platform to insert advertising without the news organization having a direct relationship with the advertiser.

So, there is good evidence that these models can work, certainly on a smaller scale. The concern is what happens to the political and information system around it.

What is the longer-term risk when political leaders become increasingly insulated from unscripted questions and traditional media institutions lose their central role?

One risk is that practices introduced by one government become attractive to its political opponents as well. Opposition politicians may criticize a communication system while they are out of power, but they may eventually decide that the same system works quite well for them once they are in power.

There is another problem for politicians themselves. Once everything is tightly choreographed, anything unscripted becomes risky. Politicians become better at politics by answering questions, dealing with disagreement and facing antagonism. If you protect political leaders from that process, they lose that ability. You can see this in political systems where leaders become accustomed to scripted questions and controlled environments. When they suddenly face genuine antagonism, they may have much more difficulty responding.

In the United States, politicians traditionally expect some of that confrontation. If you go into a town hall, you know that people may be angry and that many of the questions may be hostile. Dealing with that is part of the political process. If leaders stop doing it, they are no longer sharpening those skills.

The broader end point is that journalism itself can begin to feel downstream of government communication. Once that happens, people start looking elsewhere for what they regard as news. You then get increasing fragmentation. If you ask 20 people for their three main sources of news and everyone gives you completely different answers, you no longer have even one or two widely shared institutions serving as common reference points.

Eventually, delegitimizing media can produce something close to epistemic nihilism: Nobody entirely knows what to believe, so people increasingly accept as true whatever information most closely matches what they already believe.