Is Journalism Anti-Democratic?
It's not obvious how modern democratic ideology is compatible with political "expertise" and "elite" institutions.
“[From the Gorgias] I conceived the highest admiration of Plato, as he seemed to me to prove himself an eminent orator, even in ridiculing orators.”
—Cicero, De Oratore
Persuasion and Force
Are persuasion and force two sides of the same coin? Or are they actually entirely separate things?
Persuasion is generally thought of as a lawful and legitimate way to get people to vote for you in a country like the United States. Politicians have to convince other members of the public to vote for them, and cannot simply strong-arm or threaten their way into office.
It is obviously more complicated than that. Politicians can offer material rewards to certain interests while threatening material harm to others in exchange for votes. Not all speech is free speech. True threats, for example, are generally unlawful. Others argue that speech itself can be violence. Words can cause psychological harm, and a burgeoning “trauma culture” concentrated among the highly educated argues that words-as-violence is pervasive.
In general, however, most people view persuasion as distinct from force.
This was also true in Ancient Greece, more or less. Following the upheaval and rule of the Pisistratids (who arguably had significant support from the demos anyway) and the subsequent political reforms of Cleisthenes, the figure of the “tyrant” became synonymous with rule through illegitimate force. Democracy, in contrast, valorized consent achieved through persuasive rhetoric.
This brings me to Gorgias, again. I wrote previously about how Plato’s Gorgias can provide some perspective on the misguided attempt at a “science of misinformation.” Among the fragmentary texts we have from the real Gorgias is his Encomium on Helen, the same Helen whose abduction or elopement with Paris sparked the Trojan War.
The speech is famous for its use of paradoxologia, twisting around the typical logical forms used by someone like Parmenides to make counterintuitive arguments. More relevant for our purposes, it is also famous for its unitary theory of force and persuasion.
At the beginning, Gorigas tells us that he is going to “free the accused [Helen] of blame” from those who would “rebuke her” for her part in the war. He offers four alternatives. Either:
it was an act of the gods, or
she was forcibly kidnapped, or
she was persuaded to go, or
love (eros) overcame her.
Gorgias then argues that if it was an act of the gods, it was decided by Fate and the decrees of Necessity, and Helen cannot be held responsible, for it could not have turned out otherwise. If she was kidnapped by force, then it cannot be her fault. Similarly, if she was overcome by eros then she would have been overwhelmed by an external force and it cannot be her fault.
But Gorgias goes even further, saying that:
Speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works […] The effect of speech upon the condition of the soul is comparable to the power of drugs over the nature of bodies. For just as different drugs dispel different secretions from the body, and some bring an end to disease and others to life, so also in the case of speeches, some distress, others delight, some cause fear, others make the hearers bold, and some drug and bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion.
Rhetoric, in other words, is an external force that acts upon the body in the same way as other forces, and it is the speaker rather than the listener who is responsible for the consequences of speech. Skilled rhetors therefore have a tremendous power, nearly indistinguishable from violence.
Democracy and the Contestability of Truth
This presents a problem for theories of democracy. How can it be said that a democracy is rule by the people if the people are spellbound by a rhetor-cum-tyrant? If persuasion is just force, or just one species within the genus of force, then rule through persuasion is just rule by the strongest, same as any tyranny.
Democracy distinguishes itself from tyranny because it claims to be egalitarian. (fn: Obviously Athenian democratic egalitarianism was not universal. It was limited to a small ownership class of men and denied to slaves, women, and everyone not part of that class.) The unitary model of persuasion and force, on the other hand, implies a hierarchical political structure. The “best” speakers are best able to harness the magical, druglike powers of speech. They get to decide on political matters, and they convince everyone else what to do. There is no room for “action” or “decision” by the audience, who are at the mercy of the rhetorical magicians. Separating persuasion from force is therefore critical to democratic ideology. It underpins the notion of “free” consent. Attempts at persuasion have no necessary outcome because the listeners are free to judge the worth of the speech themselves.
What might oppose the words, the logoi, of the rhetor? More words by an opposing rhetor? Is there anything but words and their action on the psyche?
In the Encomium on Helen, Gorgias appears to be saying that words dictate reality. If Paris were a fine speaker he could make things appear as he wanted them to, purely through his own skill in the craft (techne) of rhetoric, and Helen would have no choice but to follow him to Troy. The power (dynamis) of speech can only be resisted by the application of a greater power.
Plato’s Socrates in the Gorgias contests this notion of a unitary logos. Knowledge (episteme) stands separate from the mere “display” of epideictic rhetoric. Although a rhetor may persuade those who are ignorant, words alone cannot persuade a doctor to abandon his knowledge of medicine in favor of whatever the rhetor proposes. There is a reality principle, based in knowledge, which cannot be overcome merely by the deceptive flattery of speech. And critically, for Socrates, this knowledge is a product of collaborative dialectic. This is an impersonal form of speech with equal participants who are free to ask questions and judge responses. Unlike the hierarchical form of rhetorical speech practiced by sophists and would-be tyrants, the dialectical elenchus does not rely on appeals to ethos, or the position of the rhetor. It seeks a consensual form of knowledge that has been tested by both parties to the conversation.
Persuasion via the elenctic method does not operate via the principle of force, but rather on a principle of truth—the Greek word aletheia signifies that which is “unconcealed” or brought forth into the open, presumably for all to see and judge for themselves. At first glance it is not all clear that this differs significantly from a model in which a rhetor just reveals the truth to his audience. But Socrates’ argument is that “philosophy” is different from “rhetoric” because the dialectic encourages the emergence of truth that is shared by the collaborators out of an allegiance to a rational, impersonal logos which is not simply the property of a rhetor.1
We might say that what separates democracy from kratocracy, or the rule of the strong, is that truth in democracy is contestable.
Socrates’ accusation against rhetors like Gorgias is that they do not really practice a craft or techne at all. A real craftsman, like a doctor or a builder, learns things about the world through hands-on experience and time-tested wisdom about what works. They can then apply that knowledge to make good things, things that actually work and can be demonstrated to work. A rhetor, on the other hand, practices only a “knack,” and offers an “experience” that can be convincing, but which only amounts to the mere appearance of truth. The proof of this is that politicians who are good speakers do not end up actually making their cities better.2 They are capable of persuading, but they do not demonstrate any special political expertise that has knowledge about how to make the polis better. Perhaps even worse, they offer up tempting images, but their vision is anti-democratic. They rule because they can persuade, and persuasion is for all intents and purposes identical with force.
As Robert Wardy suggests, however, Socrates’s method for pursuing the truth is not obviously more amenable to democratic government.3 The elenchus seeks the impersonal truth of the logos through very personal dialectic. Socrates seeks only to convince the individual he is conversing with of the truth. He is ultimately sentenced to death for corrupting the youth by turning them to philosophy and away from active political life.4 It is hard to see how this limited method could operate as the sole means of truth seeking in a large democracy. Yet if political expertise with a claim to political knowledge is limited to at most a few individuals, then how can “democracy” legitimate itself as an egalitarian system where every citizen has the right to contest the truth and no one individual is authoritative about justice?
The problem is much worse in our highly complex, hypermediated society. As I’ve pointed out before, fact-centric arguments are commonly marshaled to establish the truth of propositions—the safety and efficacy of vaccines, anthropogenic climate change, immigration statistics, labor statistics, economy statistics, etc. These truth-claims are often multiply mediated. First, the data is collected and analyzed by scientists and/or other experts. These facts never speak for themselves, but always stand already-interpreted for us by the experts. Second, that data is relayed to the public through the media.5 So when a journalist makes an argument appraising something, whether that is a policy proposal, changing cultural norms, or other consumer choices, they are usually interpreting the data that they are presenting as a non-expert.
Is Journalism Anti-Democratic?
That raises a question: are journalists, like rhetors, “persuading without knowledge”? Are they simply engaged in power struggles like the rhetor-cum-tyrant who seeks to be a “producer of persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right or wrong [concerning truth]”? Or do they claim to be doing something else? Are they more like the technical expert or are they more like a convincing wordsmith, attempting to flatter the public and present a captivating picture?
I would argue that this is a meta-rhetorical problem.6 Insofar as journalists are just rhetors, “persuading without knowledge,” they occupy a structurally anti-democratic position in which they convince the ignorant through ethical appeals based in authority of things that journalists themselves cannot claim to know. The more they rely on the notion of incontestable “brute facts” that speak for themselves, the more they adopt the position of the clergy, speaking of revealed truth. And every time that they say something that does not flatter the public, they diminish their own ethos as a trustworthy purveyor of truth. If all that they can point to in order to demonstrate their trustworthiness are “the facts,” both they and “the facts” take a reputational hit. They become purveyors of appearances and alternative facts, which are just apparently true, but are really deceptive.
The public’s loss of trust in institutions and the crisis of “misinformation” is partly a loss of trust in journalistic method. Journalists themselves, particularly those attached to the idea of “misinformation science” seem confused about why. Here is an example from Columbia Journalism Review talking about how people don’t trust the news. The article largely finds fault with the reading public for lacking the cognitive “toolkit” it needs to inoculate itself against “misinformation.” But it’s not just the public at large that has lost trust in journalists. It also includes the experts, sources, and insiders that journalists depend on. As Nathan Young of
says:Currently I deal with journalists like a cross between hostile witnesses and demonic lawyers. I read articles expecting to be misled or for facts to be withheld. And I talk to lawyers only after invoking complex magics (the phrases I’ve mentioned) to stop them taking my information and spreading it without my permission. I would like to pretend I’m being hyperbolic, but I’m really not. I trust little news at first blush and approach conversations with even journalists I like with more care than most activities.7
Journalistic ethics and methods have increasingly been suborned by two external pressures: the need to seek attention (clicks) and the need to choose a side. Both are obviously “rhetorical” in precisely the sense that Socrates attacks in the Gorgias. The first flatters or outrages. The second privileges a hierarchical model where the rhetor persuades the audience of a personal truth over one where truth is impersonal and arrived at via collaboration.
recently went on to talk about his book We Have Never Been Woke, where he argues that the recent “Awokening,” as he calls it, was driven by a distinctly WEIRD8 moralizing underpinning most elite discourse, including journalism. Needless to say, a self-consciously “elite” discourse that preaches down to the hoi polloi is hierarchical discourse. Both attention-seeking and the self-conscious adoption of mantras like “the personal is political” erode journalism’s claim to be a democratic institution for truth-seeking.Socrates’ case for “philosophy” in the Gorgias points beyond apparent facts to a method for seeking truth. The Socratic method is to be trusted because it collaboratively searches for a compelling, internally consistent picture of reality and is conducted according to a set of rules for testing truth-claims. The trick in the Gorgias is that Socrates ultimately grounds his argument in a rhetorically constructed myth. Likewise the meta-argument that Socrates is making in favor of his method is unavoidably an epideictic one that relies on showing the reader his worldview, showing how the method works, and asking the reader whether they assent to it. Everything else, all the details, follow from that irrational assent.
Journalists are ultimately limited by this meta-rhetorical horizon as well. They can only demonstrate through practice and method that they are good faith actors seeking a truth that is available to anyone who accepts their methods as reliable. But that shared conviction in method comes first, and it cannot be demonstrated through brute recitation of “fact.” It is not a techne akin to engineering or medicine, it is an interpretive method that garners legitimacy by providing an account of things that can be tested and found trustworthy.
One might object, however, to this notion of “democracy” in favor of a more minimalist version of democracy that is conflictual to its core. Socrates might have claimed that he was one of the few “true politicians” because he sought the truth rather than to gratify the demos, but really democracy is just about picking a side and urging others to join you. Journalists like to think of themselves as “white magicians” who use their magic for good against the sophistical “black magicians” of misinformation. But if democracy is just a conflict between two competing visions, and rhetoric just is power like any other, it is no wonder that journalism as a profession has lost its credibility as a neutral observer of truth. Even the conservative right, the traditional side of naive realism and objective fact, has started to turn to theoreticians of power like Foucault. White magic and black magic are relative under a unitary theory of persuasion and force. And from that vantage point, the merits of “democracy” itself start to lose their luster.
p. 83
See Callicles’ accusations that Socrates essentially “never grew up” to embrace the political duties of an adult. Gorgias § 485c-e
although twitter and other social media are increasingly used by experts to communicate directly about their findings
which is to say, a rhetorical problem about a rhetorical problem
"Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic"