How the Media Shape Our Thinking

The purpose of the media is to teach the public how to think. This claim might offend the sensibilities of those who believe that America is a nation of independent minds. But no mind is independent, and in a mass technological society, the public relies on the media to learn how to see the world, interpret events, and make decisions.

Ideally, members of the media—newspaper, radio, television, and now social media—offer clashing arguments and try to persuade their audiences to take a particular course of action. The winner of these contests shapes public opinion and can build a democratic majority.

Substance matters, but even more important are the forms. The key question is which forms—which technologies and which publications—shape the public mind, Left and Right. What are their strengths and weaknesses, and what kinds of opinions do they produce?

On the left, the public mind is shaped by the New York Times. At its best, the Times is sophisticated, deeply sourced, and well-crafted, with human editors who can be held accountable and resist the worst impulses of the liberal base. At its best, the coverage in America’s most important daily newspaper is usually thoughtful, its opinion section has recently re-expanded its range, and the aesthetics of every layout are pristine.

These standards, of course, can no longer be taken for granted. Following the Covid-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter revolution, the Times revealed a tendency toward groupthink, publishing the worst arguments from left-wing racialists and running cover for censors who wanted to silence the truth about controversial topics, such as the origin of the Covid virus and the demographic realities of crime.

During this period, it also became apparent that the Times represented a profoundly isolated demographic of affluent, college-educated East Coast liberals, who saw themselves as “the best and the brightest” but had enormous blind spots about science, race, policing, and other concerns. For years, the paper had been a hysterical mess; it has only recently started to correct course.

On the right, the public mind is now shaped by the X algorithm. Ten years ago, this role was filled by Fox News. But after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the narrative for the Right is increasingly set on the social media platform, which then influences the agenda on talk radio, cable television, and magazines. On the positive side of the ledger, X has a low barrier to entry and a high tolerance for experimentation, and it allows information to circulate at the speed of light.

In the first months after Musk’s takeover, many hoped that he would not only stop the vicious censorship policies of his predecessors but also establish a forum for open debate and—as Musk himself was fond of saying—create a place to channel the full range of human consciousness.

Musk delivered on his anti-censorship promises, but his utopian vision of a world consciousness divining the truth through the X algorithm has yet to materialize. In fact, the platform’s algorithm seems increasingly hijacked by bad actors who peddle baseless conspiracies and indulge their personal psychopathologies. Musk’s decision to pay content creators has further detached reach from quality, incentivizing narratives that earn clicks but fail to resemble a persuasive—or even meaningful—public argument.

The recent treatment of Charlie Kirk’s assassination illustrates the point. The government’s case against the alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, seems airtight. The authorities have video, the murder weapon, DNA evidence, a written confession to his trans-identifying lover, and the actions of Robinson’s parents, who apparently recognized him in the images and persuaded their son to turn himself in.

For figures such as Candace Owens, however, the assassination was something much more elaborate: a conspiracy involving traitors within Kirk’s organization, the Israeli intelligence services, French special forces soldiers, Egyptian airplanes, and elements within federal law enforcement.

While the Right has long had a conspiratorial streak, such narratives have usually been restricted to marginal newsletters or ham radio broadcasts. By contrast, on X, they generate enough controversy and spectacle to become the day’s top headline.

My concern is that we are approaching an epistemic fork. Americans can stick to the road of empirical reality or take the other road and follow conspiracy theories to the bitter end.

For the Right, the danger is that an increasingly large fraction of our political coalition is choosing the second path, binding itself to figures, such as Owens, who harvest them for clicks, dollars, and shares. This audience is becoming effectively indistinguishable from a foreign bot farm—real people who mindlessly submit to the algorithm and enter a drug-like stupor that makes them incapable of analytical rigor or basic fact-checking.

Down this road lies a politics in which argument becomes meaningless and action becomes impossible. The web of conspiracies eventually gets so tight that the audience enters a kind of paralysis, capable only of clicking the next video.

What can be done? It’s tempting to lay the blame on the algorithm, but every algorithm has a master—in this case, Musk and his team. Given that their vision for X has not been realized, they would be wise to revise the algorithm before it begets further disorder.

Maybe they can reform or even eliminate monetization, which seems to have done more harm than good. Likewise, they should prioritize high-quality accounts and adjust the algorithm to better detect and demote those that engage in bot-farming and consistently require corrections by the “community notes” system.

Musk’s contention has been that X is a neutral platform for human conversation. The reality, however, is that the platform has not been, and will never be, neutral. It rewards and punishes, and it is up to the algorithm’s master to make sure that the system as a whole is pointing toward the higher good. To improve, the platform should strive to be a forum that encourages deeper reading—by, for example, removing any penalties against outside links—and rewards originality, rather than partisan spam.

If the media’s purpose is to teach the public how to think, then at the moment the public is not being taught very well. 

Photo by Gary Hershorn/Getty Images