Amplifying Extremism
Small Town Politicians, Media Storms, and American Journalism
When I was living in Illinois, a politician came out of nowhere and took over the ideological core of the Republican party. When I say nowhere, I mean what many detractors from rural America would deem deep flyover state - Xenia, a town of about 384 people depending on the day —is so far from anything noteworthy of tourist interest that even the giant cross that you can see from the freeway leading to St. Louis is 45 minutes due north.
The kingmaker for his reign - his run for governor, his run for Congress, his now bombast always-quote status now in the Illinois press- it wasn’t rat-f*ing by the Democrats, it wasn’t a Republican party hell-bent on culture wars, at least not yet, it was - exactly what you think it wouldn’t be. Yes, the kingmaker was the mainstream media, the good-old fact-based mainstream news media. The coronation, though, did come by way of Fox News’ Ingraham Angle, a mere five days after the politician first made an appearance in the news via an AP story and some local television coverage.
How? How is it that the mainstream, fact-based news media platforms illiberalism?
In Amplifying Extremism: Small Town Politicians, Media Storms, and American Journalism (free link here!), the book I’ve just published with Cambridge University Press and with my co-author, Jessica Hagman, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign librarian, has been five years in the making. This is a COVID story, but it isn’t a COVID story - as we keep seeing the same patterns play out, over and over again, without needing the help of pink slime, targeted conspiracy stories on social media, and any other blame-worthy “bad actor” sort of content distribution.
We tell this story through Darren Bailey, a first-term representative to the Illinois State House, and his anti-COVID hissy-fit during the very first weeks of the pandemic, when he challenged Governor JB Pritzker’s safer-at-home emergency order. He was the first Republican to challenge a blue state governor, but this novelty didn’t have to be the beginning of his political ascent. The engine of more coverage, a broken, overly concentrated and networked news ecosystem, a consolidated right wing news media, and news norms pushed Bailey’s name into the public, nationally, locally, regionally, from the get-go.
We used the word “extremist” to describe Bailey because his views were very far from the pro-business, libertarian, and largely a-religious Republicanism that has characterized Illinois Republican politics since the 1970s. Thanks to Bailey and other like him—and thanks to the legitimization of his antics and positions by the mainstream news media, well, that version of Republicanism is now the mainline Republican party.
Here’s what we think the main takeaways are, followed by where we think we’re interevening in existing debates, and then lastly a “how we did it” (short answer: we literally looked at EVERYTHING ON THE SEARCHABLE AND PROPRIETARY WEB for a ten day period. EVERYTHING). The big blow-ups of coverage by quantitiy are in the main text, but suffice it to say, this met the criteria of a media storm, or a massive, unusual boost of widespread, sustained (beyond a single news cycle), single-focus coverage.
Big takeaways and lessons learned:
Problems with the structure of the American news market/ecosystem Big takeaways and lessons learned—how the actual structure of journalism in America - its market links, deficits, owners, etc. impact the spread of Bailey’s cause and influence. Some surprises here!
-Amplification by volume: We found massive repetition and duplication of stories and headlines. Some of this was ownership, some of this was a network effect of similar-type outlets (eg. public radio), and some of this was a negative externality of trying to rebuild local news…
-Nonprofit, non-market replacements for decaying local news infrastructure can backfire, spectacularly (source diversity is not content diversity).
An effort to shore up coverage of the Illinois State House also means that over 400 newspapers and 100 plus broadcast and radio stations all get the same stories reported on by the same journalists. This has the effect of geographically disbursing the reputation, presence, and importance of a renegade one-off politican far beyond their actual impact on the political scene.
-Public media can give a huge boost with lower stakes to a local politician, especially on TV, public media’s network effect runs a similar risk of boosting bad arguments and bad actors beyond their proportional power in the public sphere.
PBS gave Bailey 19 minutes of air-time, prepping him for a big time show on Ingraham. Local NPR stations jockeyed off each other’s coverage, and fed up to a national NPR story.
-Local TV matters and local TV covers politics, especially when the politics are canned content, all ready to go. Both a deep red-backed station and one backed back a democratic donor pumped Bailey’s Facebook video where he annouced his decision to sue Pritzker over the state of emergency.
-AP stories are stenographic enough for right-wing news media to retitle and push out to partisan readers - giving a huge boost to a politician’s national relevance.
-National journalism is sometimes the new local journalism. Sometimes, the AP and other large outlets are on hand to scoop up what would otherwise be a first-pass story through smaller outlets.
-Right-wing outlets can and do offer local and regional shoeleather reporting, sometimes beyond. #notallGOPlies.
-Opinion journalism doesn’t do what we think it does. Almost everything in our corpus was straight news journalism. No opinions flashing around - a handful toward the tail end of the mass upswelling of coverage. Pure play news coverage kept this story in the air. This wasn’t a partisan media war being waged, although it was a deeply partisan campaign to get press and attention.
Political Implications
-Extremists can piggy-back off attention to “knowns” - covering a known politican’s responses to an extremist outlier can accidentally amplify the extremist’s profile, and legitimize extremist behavior. Knowns get covered, unknowns do not. Covering the known unknown creates a new known, if we are to get a little Rumsfeld about this all.
-Extremists look for copycat moments and visibility across party not just public: Eight other lawsuits followed after Bailey’s. In the most egregious example of unintended consequences, an emboldened constituent in Bailey’s district went to CVS, Walmart, and other locales while actively under quarantine for COVID. This is roughly six weeks into COVID, pre vaxine, during full hospitals. The head of Trump 2020 in Illinois got some additional attention for being the head of Trump 2020 in Illinois as his bio line once he filed a class action suit against Pritzker.
-Bandwagon effects are real. All it takes is just one church to meet in violation of an executive order to make it permissible, at least as resistance, for other church congregations to do the same. Constitutional Sheriffs taking the law into their own hands got real once Bailey stood up to Pritzker.
News norms that guide news selection can undermine democracy
-The language of constitutionalism and liberty are also used for undermining democratic processes, and in daily coverage, it’s hard for journalists to move beyond this rhetoric to critique the actual, unstated but implicit extremism and illiberal challenges to the rule of law
-Conflict language obscures and excuses extremists. You know this already: Pritzker vs Bailey play political football - but it’s not so political when hospital beds are filling up - or when this logic becomes the bedrock for resisting assault rifle bans, as Bailey would later attempt. Football is all fun and games until people get shot - as they did in a mass shooting in the Chicago suburbs in 2022.
-Novelty delights but it also amplifies. Yes, this was the first Republican politician from a red state to challenge blue state COVID restrictions. Yes, this was a super weird court decision in which a restraining order applied ONLY to Bailey. This ended up prompting a whole bunch of follow up coverage in national news media with the “Aw shucks this is weird” that actually ended up platforming Bailey further.