Close to done/done: the anti-democratic freakout turn in my scholarship
Intro-ing some new content that I've written or edited which reflects my general preoccupation about the uncertain survival of pluralism and tolerance
I don’t need to be the 1000^X person to point to the more than 80 countries having elections in 2024. But I do want to share what I’ve been up to: a steady drumbeat warning how “the mainstream news media contributes to the rise of illiberal politics just by doing its thing.” First though, you need to know the barebones of my current theoretical commitments:
My general approach to the current state of being and time is that we can only control what we can control. Agency comes from the decision to make choices even when it seems like there might not be a choice to make. This is a very liberatory articulation of existentialism, but this is where I find glimmers of hope and, yes, freedom.
What does this approach mean for journalism and journalists? What does “choice” and “agency” even mean for public stakeholders who hope for continued democracy? To me, I see one essential takeaway that can be within our control:
Do not be the pawn or the amplifier of those who seek to undermine democracy.
Do not let Goebbels’ premonition win: “the big joke on democracy is that it gives its mortal enemies the tools to its own destruction.”
If you need some help seeing how and why a choice can be empowering - and may be all we have to work with - I definitely encourage a reading or rereading of some Heidegger, and Sartre, which has taken on so much resonance for me given contemporary politics and the dawning (and now sunsetting )of midlife crisis.
Below, you can see three pieces I’ve authored and then six review essays that I’ve commissioned and taken to the finish line. Mine are all about this drumbeat of democratic decline.
Recent contributions moving into the universe:
Why news organizations “platform” illiberal politics: Understanding news production, economic insolvency, and anti-democratic pressure through CNN’s 2023 Trump Town Hall (forthcoming in Discourse and Communication, draft)
Abstract: This article discusses how the economic insolvency of the contemporary mainstream media makes it particularly vulnerable to manipulation by illiberal political actors. Through a case study of CNN’s 2023 Trump Town Hall event, this article argues that democratic backsliding itself has become a potent constraint structuring news production routines and news decision-making. The metajournalistic discourse about the event maligned the role of CNN in “platforming” the former president, underscoring how platform logics have hijacked newsroom decision-making and news judgment. Journalists and other commentators pointed to the continuing power of Trump to dominate coverage and the continued inability of mainstream media to cover his threat to democracy via traditional norms of press/politics. Because news values continue to prioritize coverage of knowns over unknowns, news production routines highlight politicians with illiberal politics, who are in turn able to use the media’s discursive power to undermine democratic norms.
Accidentally amplifying anti-democratic actors: Small town extremists, media storms, and American journalism (with Jessica Hagman, under review in Cambridge Elements: Politics and Communication, but preliminary acceptance, but still a draft, and to some, this counts as a book?, thankful to Stuart Soroka, series editor, for helping me refine this one!)
Abstract: Within a week, a no-name Republican state representative from a town of 384 people in Illinois catapulted from obscurity to a prime-time appearance on Fox News’ Ingraham Angle. This newly-empowered politician, Darren Bailey, would go on to hijack the pro-business Republican party in Illinois toward extremism. Democratic backsliding emerges across all levels of politics, but the threats posed by small town politicians to the rule of law have been overlooked. This research asks, first what features of local political ecologies might facilitate the rise of small town anti-democratic extremists? Second, how does the political economy of the contemporary news ecosystem–local, regional, national, and partisan media–serve to amplify these bad actors? Ultimately, this case study considers how small-town extremists are enabled by the structural, cultural, and normative dimensions of democratic life that they seek to undermine, especially the difficulty the institutional news media faces in covering anti-democratic actors.
Post-Newspaper Democracy and the Rise of Communicative Citizenship:
The Good Citizen as Good Communicator (forthcoming: in RonNell Anderson Jones and Sonja West’s Press Freedom Scholars Series via the Knight First Amendment Institute and Cambridge University Press, draft)
This one I’m pretty stoked about — I’m trying to introduce a new concept: the citizen as communicator, or reconceptualizing the “good citizen” as a citizen that puts communication at the center. I do reckon with the word citizen a bit - I dislike it (and remember, a “citizen” had privileges to do democracy in the 80 or so years of Athens’ golden age in part because there were slaves doing everything else).
This piece argues for the need to reconceptualize citizenship in an era when professional journalism plays a significantly diminished role in directly shaping our news and information environment, especially at the local level . First, I make the case that we must consider what it means to live in a post-newspaper democracy. In a time of market failure for local news, both journalists and the public need to identify which functions are unique to professional journalism as a civic institution.[1] Second, I join others who have argued that we need to move away from the concept of the “good citizen”[2] as only a consumer of information as their form of civic participation. Instead, I call for reimagining citizenship with communication at its center. Within this theory of “communicative citizenship,” a “good citizen” plays the civic role of communicator, not as a replacement for journalists, but instead as a facilitator of the flow of reliable civic information from institutions to their fellow community members. If we accept that newspapers and for-profit digital-first news outlets face an uphill battle to survive, yet we believe that their function is essential to democratic life, then perhaps it is possible to shift some of the responsibility for fulfilling these functions from newspapers to the people themselves.
Some content I’ve helped to birth:
The review essays bring a fresh, original, hopeful perspective - a small revolution in our most prestigious communication journal, the eponymous Journal of Communication, where we are interrogating power and privilege and surfacing race, disability, the “global south,” and where you can find words like ontic and agonistic and hegemonic; regardless of what you think about this sort of writing, you rarely find it in a social science journal.
So, yes, very very delighted at the small revolution happening in the pages of the Journal of Communication’s Forum section, which I co-edit with Charlton McIlwain. We have rehabbed a section that has existed off and on in the journal, one meant to push boundaries beyond peer review (for our manifesto, see here).
For the first time since 1996, I can attest that we have had the following:
Four books about digital critical race studies written by BIPOC female-identified scholars reviewed by BIPOC scholars, done as a conversation (featuring Meredith Clark, Deen Freelon, and Hector Amaya) - landing page here
What has got to be the first review essay on disability studies and communication in JOC, maybe the first use of disability studies in the journal ever? (Sorry not open access!) We write the following.
Forum editors’ note: In keeping with our efforts to create a forum that both lives beyond the pages of the journal and that challenges tradition, we have invited the authors of the books to engage with the main text of the review essay below. You will find a review essay by Gerard Goggin that provokes our field to engage more with disability studies in communication and features two new books in our field that are exemplary for doing so. Together, Gerard Goggin, and book authors Meryl Alper, and Joshua St. Pierre remind us that the default ableism and normativity in communication scholarship limits our scholarship. You will find the authors’ comments in footnotes below the main text. The scholars remind us that communication scholarship must consider who gets to speak and why certain forms of speech and speakers are privileged above others, and remind us how access to communication technologies and the malleability of their affordances can both reify and resist power. Here, we mark the importance of creating space for difference as central to our field of inquiry.
The FIRST book ever reviewed written and read in Spanish by the reviewer, Dan Hallin, and likely, the first review essay ever featuring sonic studies by Chris Chavez, together for a theme forum on Latin American media studies.
Dan’s piece is exciting because he takes his own framework into account:
Extract: I first started following Latin American scholarship on journalism, media, and politics in the 1990s, at the time a wave of democratization was in progress across the region, and major changes were taking place in the media. I was often disappointed at what literature was available in that era. It seemed to me that, with a few exceptions, there was a tendency for scholarship in the region to be characterized by a kind of split between grand theory on one side, and descriptive empirical work on the other, with little effort to develop middle range theory that would link the two. It also often summarized theory developed in Western Europe or North America without trying to interrogate its applicability to Latin America or to develop a distinctive Latin American conceptual perspective. Gradually over the years, this has changed, and distinctive Latin American perspectives on journalism and media systems are emerging much more strongly. Three articles recently published in top-ranked international journals, Echeverría et al. (2022), Kitzberger (2023), and Guerrero et al. (2024) are particularly strong examples of this trend. So too, in longer form, are the three books, two in Spanish and one in English reviewed here.
Chris’ piece is amazing because it talks about subaltern, sound, and resistance in the Journal of Communication and that’s mind blowing to me.
Extract: In 2022, journalist Xochitl Gonzalez wrote an essay for The Atlantic titled, “Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?” In it, she describes her uneasy transition into an Ivy League university. The working class, Puerto Rican community, in which Gonzalez had grown up had been marked by constant sound: the sound of loud music, the sound of constant traffic, and the sound of children bickering. In contrast, Gonzalez found that elite white spaces seemed defined by the absence of such sounds. This stubborn insistence on silence, Gonzalez realized, was more than an aesthetic preference. It is a way of policing who belongs in a space, and who does not….For Latinxs, whose belonging is continuously being questioned, the suppression of Latinx sounds, and particularly Latinx voices, has ensured their exclusion from the majoritarian public sphere.
[1] Nikki Usher, News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism 237 (2021).
[2] See Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life 309–12 (2011).