Pluralism and the Epistemic Basis of the Democratic Form of Life

Broadcasting Versus Narrowcasting

Some weeks ago, while lazily scrolling on Substack Notes, I noticed an interesting comment made by someone (I don’t remember who) about an essay on Noah Smith’s blog. In substance, the comment was saying something like “this essay sounds very interesting, as most of Noah Smith’s essays, but I can’t read it entirely as I’m not a paying subscriber” and it was adding, more interestingly, “I don’t understand why people are paying for individual newsletters when there is a large offer of newspapers professionally run by competent teams of journalists for similar prices.” This struck me as a sensible remark and I mostly agree with it. I’m subscribing to about half a dozen newspapers but I don’t subscribe to any individual newsletter on Substack, though I appreciate many of them (including Smith’s, though I’m not able to read most of the essays in their entirety). As an academic, I pay 75$ per year for a subscription to The Economist, which is ridiculously low given the very high quality and quantity of content.[1] Most newsletters on Substack would cost me more, for one or two essays at most per week. Of course, you can choose to subscribe to an individual newsletter because you want to support somebody’s work as a prosocial gesture, but then the motivation is different.

My intention here is however not to comment on whether or not it is rational to subscribe to individual newsletters but rather to briefly reflect on the implications for the “democratic form of life” of the fact that more and more information is produced and disseminated through a large variety of “small” newspapers, newsletters, blogs, and other kinds of media of the same type. Indeed, when I first discovered Substack three years ago I was immediately reminded of an episode from The Simpsons in which Mr. Burns tries to gain control of the local newspapers. In response, Lisa creates and publishes a newsletter that Burns soon tries to buy too. Not only Lisa refuse, but her initiative triggered similar ones among the people of Springfield who soon started to publish their personal newsletters, leading Burns to give up any attempt to control the media. At the very end of the episode, Homer remarks to Lisa: “You see, instead of one big shot controlling all the media, now there’s a thousand freaks xeroxing their worthless opinions.”

As often with Homer, behind the funny joke, there is some wisdom. There is a general agreement that a healthy democracy depends on the existence of a free press permitting the expression of opinions and the circulation of information. A free press is indeed a basis for pluralism (of thoughts, of practices) without which there is no freedom and no democracy at all. The proliferation of newspapers and other expression platforms is prima facie a factor of pluralism because it permits the expression of a diversity of views. However, as Homer remarks, this all depends on the kind of views that are actually expressed. The proliferation of views that are too diverse and whose truth-value or reasonableness is too difficult to assess can have adverse effects on democratic practices. In particular, it may destabilize the very possibility of what I would call democratic disagreement, i.e., the fact of disagreeing within a set of shared common rules that settle the limit of acceptable/reasonable beliefs and practices and that define procedures to adjudicate any disagreement.

That the very possibility of disagreement necessitates an anterior agreement of some sort based on which disagreements can be expressed and settled has been noticed for instance by the late Wittgenstein. Disagreements emerge within shared forms of life, starting with a shared language without which the statement of disagreement is impossible. Agreement in forms of life is a prerequisite for learning and thus for revising one’s beliefs and practices. Another way to put it is that, more generally, our beliefs hinge on firmer commitments about the truth of some propositions that are beyond justification. What I’m calling here the democratic form of life is such an agreement whose specific content can vary through time and space but where some facts and judgments are taken for granted, for instance, that it is okay to express your political disagreement with someone but not okay to do it by insulting the opponent; or that in general factual judgments can and must be checked using all the available evidence, especially scientific evidence.

Historically, the development of modern democracy is tightly associated with the rise of broadcasting, i.e., the emergence of mass media targeting the whole population above partisan considerations. This leads to two major evolutions. First, in some cases because of technical constraints, the number of suppliers was limited. There cannot be an infinite number of newspapers targeting a wide audience as readers’ resources (time and money) to read them are limited. Second, the fierce competition to reach a large audience favored objectivity and a convergence toward reasonability standards to communicate information and opinions. In other words, the broadcasting model of media has been a crucial contributor to the constitution of what Jonathan Rauch the “epistemic liberal order” that until now has provided the epistemic basis for the kind of agreement needed to the democratic form of life.[2] As Rauch puts it, the liberal epistemic order is maintained by a “reality-based community” made of individuals and organizations (universities, media corporations) committed to providing objective and truth-tracking judgments based on which informed democratic choices can be made.     

Referring to the American context, an article in The Economist recently noted however that the broadcasting model is put under pressure by technological change and that we are slowly reverting the to “narrowcasting” model that was prevailing in the 19^th century:

“Today, however, the smartphone has caused fragmentation and American media are back in a narrowcast age. As much of the advertising revenue that once paid for reporters has flowed to Google and Meta, this has created new business models. There is a lot to like about the subscription-based outfits that now rule: what better test of the quality of the work than whether people will pay for it? But such businesses can also be built on pandering to people’s prejudices. Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News only to create a new venture as a subs-based, one-man broadcast company. This is closer to a business model the Founding Fathers would have recognised, but rather than creating content for curly-wigged merchants steeped in 18th-century learning, he wants to tear down such Enlightenment values.”

In a way, narrowcasting evokes Homer’s description of a world where “there’s a thousand freaks xeroxing their worthless opinions.” By definition in the narrowcasting model, media outlets address factions and are organized based on editorial lines that largely follow from partisan considerations. This leads to several difficulties. First, because of the importance of partisanship, providers of information in the narrowcasting model reinforce partisan divisions and weaken the epistemic basis for democratic disagreement. In the narrowcasting model, information consists more of opinions (which can be peculiar for each outlet) rather than of facts (which are the same for everybody). Second, in the narrowcasting model, the task of assessing the truth-value and reasonability of any claim made by an outlet is left to the reader. On the contrary, in the broadcasting model, this task is delegated to information providers who, armed with their competence and professional ethics, filter information and judgments that are delivered to the reader.

The difference between the two models becomes especially significant when we consider the implication in terms of pluralism. At first sight, the two models can favor pluralism and the narrowcasting model may even seem to have an edge. In the latter, you have a large diversity of providers addressing different small factions in the population. There is in principle no limit to the spontaneous diversity that may emerge in this context. In the broadcasting model, the diversity is less to be found between but rather within the providers themselves. For instance, while identified as a center-left newspaper, the New York Times opens its pages to conservative columnists. The two models are not equivalent, however. The risk associated with the broadcasting model is that information providers fail in their job of maintaining pluralism and guaranteeing the truth-value and reasonability of the information they provide. But the risks of the narrowcasting model seem more serious. By turning pluralism into a kind of epistemic anarchy where truth becomes relative to one’s partisanship or, even worse, truth and reasonability become outmoded values, narrowcasting may just destroy the basis for democratic disagreement.

Now, there is no point looking back and arguing for reverting to the good old broadcasting model. Cultural evolution and technological change are largely irreversible. So, looking forward, there are two plausible directions. Either a new basis for democratic disagreement will emerge within the modern version of the narrowcasting model, or our political forms of life will progressively evolve toward non-democratic ones where collective choices are even more than now made by a small political and economic elite sharing some epistemic norms.

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[1] Sure, for non-academic, the price is substantially higher (probably around 300$/year for an online-only subscription). But still, the price is relatively low considering that you have new content everyday.

[2] Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2021).