On bullshittification
Addressing retail politics, journalism, and the bullshit industrial complex
#winning
A Democratic operative called me up during the week and asked me if I thought there might be a worthy story in Nella Domenici spending little time and few resources in Las Cruces. Bantering a bit, I pointed out that Martin Heinrich isn’t lavishing much attention here either. Doña Ana County’s vote is hardly a matter of suspense in the Senate election. If either campaign were doing saturation advertising here and turning up in person often, I would wonder what internal polls were telling them.
These are not stories I’m inclined to chase, though it is what political news outlets are expected to do; and readers have come to expect it of political coverage, despite the utter impoverishment of a political journalism reduced to summarizing polls, social media posts and data about ad buys and fundraising.
There is a great deal of “most important election of our lifetimes” discourse going on (like always), a lot of “democracy in the balance” commentary, which, if true, would imply there is no time or appetite for bullshit. And yet there is still so much bullshit.
Political journalism fails the public, and loses its trust, to the extent that news organizations kowtow to retail politics instead of skewering it. Campaigning, as we know it, is a field of marketing in a professionalized politics. It holds to conventions and priorities that – to state it politely – exist in tension with the forthright, transparent and genuine communication voters deserve from candidates.
The phrase “retail politics” dates at least as far back as a Chicago Tribune article in 1901 (per the Oxford English Dictionary), so the condition isn’t new.
…the two presidential pretend-debates this year became consequential when candidates lost control of a venue set up to serve them.
Newsrooms will typically assert a boundary between advertising and marketing messages on the one hand and news reporting on the other. If advertising is designed to look like an article, ethical newspapers will prominently label it as advertising or paid material. A newsroom that allowed advertisers to influence or even direct news coverage would come under scrutiny and criticism. Yet when it comes to election campaign coverage, marketing and reporting are openly holding hands.
A case in point: Every presidential campaign forum this year, including the recent vice-presidential event, has been covered and analyzed through a frame that asks which candidate “won.” Look, we know the Lobos won last week’s rivalry game against the Aggies because we understand football as a game with clear rules, officials who can blow whistles and stop the proceedings, and a rubric for assigning points, unlike these pretend-debates.
What are these candidate forums but lucrative “content” for selling advertising, drawing viewers to broadcasts and streaming, and providing marketing material for the respective campaigns? The format neither encourages serious debate nor even insists that candidates answer the questions put to them. The campaigns hold sway over the events’ rules, including whether moderators will interrupt to correct falsehoods or mute microphones when candidates attempt to steamroll or filibuster. Candidates are free to pivot from direct questions and deliver remarks that have been prepared and rehearsed on other topics.
These are, in effect, joint campaign ads sponsored by the hosting network. They serve the campaign organizations well. The citizenry? Not so much.
Consider that the two presidential pretend-debates this year became consequential when candidates lost control of a venue set up to serve them: First, Joe Biden’s feeble appearance led to his withdrawal from the election; and then Kamala Harris, pivoting away from questions about her own record and positions, successfully needled Donald Trump into unhinged tirades about Haitian immigrants eating pets and the size of his rallies, demonstrating something important about his character and state of mind while deflecting some scrutiny of herself.
Most recently, the vice-presidential candidates were praised for keeping their arguments civil and mostly focused on policy during their own pretend-debate. Pundits and podcasters chewing this cud tended to pronounce J.D. Vance the winner because he seemed smooth and comfortable while Tim Walz did not, and because he achieved certain goals in service to his campaign (i.e., marketing). The same panels pronouncing this more likable version of Vance as the forum’s winner did not typically consider it disqualifying that Vance refused to answer a direct question about who won the 2020 presidential election, which tells us more about him in a post-Jan. 6 environment than his performance of kindness and empathy.
The pervasiveness of bullshit that besieges us on a daily basis is surely not conducive to emotional or epistemic health.
We need more critical perspectives on retail politics from journalism, but the game has influenced how reporters, pundits and readers understand politics.
Just this weekend, D.C.-based reporter Emily Heil has an entertaining article in the Washington Post about the perils of campaign appearances involving food. The word “marketing” appears not once in the article, but that is entirely what this story is about: The role of food, local eateries and beloved chain restaurants in the marketing of presidential candidates. However interesting it is as a story about the art of advertising, with several political consultants interviewed for the story, there is no acknowledgment that fitness for office has nothing to do, in fact, with John Kerry asking for Swiss on his cheesesteak, Sarah Palin using a fork to eat pizza, or Gerald Ford not knowing how to eat a tamale.
Yet consultants (read: marketers) say it matters, as one comments, “Not being able to make small talk in New Hampshire diners tracks pretty closely with your ability to win the state.” Supporting data is not offered, but supposing it exists, would it show that Americans truly look for indicators about leadership in a staged diner photo op, or that Americans are starved for substantive, critical reporting about candidates for office?
J.D. Vance being awkward at a doughnut shop compared to Walz enjoying a milkshake with North Carolina’s governor supplies sugar-water for the hummingbirds of late night television; but if this is supposed to be the most serious election of our lifetimes, from which democracy dangles by its fingers like the rugged hero of some adventure flick, how is this significant?
This is the supremacy of marketing, in tandem with shallow yet self-satisfied political analysis, and it culminates in the bullshittification of politics.
How much substance do we need?
It may seem from the foregoing that I am some kind of sour-faced substance scold when it comes to politics, but I am rather more relaxed on this than I used to be.
How much policy detail is required to choose a presidential candidate? Do we want graduate-level presentations on, say, monetary policy, or are we served by a sensible overview of how the candidate intends to address, if we stick with economics, price inflation, conditions for working people, controlling health care costs and other essentials, and how government can realistically affect supply chains, manufacturing and distribution and international trade (while discussing its limits, too) – and how this all affects the voter?
Presidents are not omniscient and all-knowing, and shouldn’t pretend to be.
It has been strange to see pundits call for finer and finer detail on Kamala Harris’s economic plans while Donald Trump repeatedly argues, for instance, that tariffs are paid by foreign exporters and guarantee lower prices on consumer goods.
How much detail can the general public use and how many will use it in making a decision? And how important is it in 2024, which is not a policy election so much as a fitness election?
As a voter, I would like to see a candidate’s grasp of essential policy concepts and how they function in the real world, and their capacity to make sound decisions based on expertise as well as their own judgment. I would like to see an ability to think outside the box and question limits on what is perceived as possible. Presidents are not omniscient and all-knowing, and shouldn’t pretend to be. Their receptivity to good information, ethical fiber and imagination mean a great deal to me.
Third-party candidates can get my attention on these grounds, too. The dominant parties have no monopoly on common sense, leadership or expertise, and they hold no inherent claim on anybody’s vote. Still, it would be easier to argue for more coverage and inclusion in forums if alternative nominees were more credible. It’s awfully easy to dismiss a socialist candidate who suggests they could simply abolish the Supreme Court and U.S. Senate and seize private corporations if elected. Alternative parties can, and should, do better than this, especially at a time that one of the “major” parties is collapsing into nonsense itself.
Make-believe and bullshittification
The citizenry could serve its interests by exercising better media hygiene, but this requires addressing a certain public health challenge: the way internet dependence, and social media in particular, strengthen our attachment to toxic make-believe, weakening our geographical and personal connections and training us to spend ever more time and imagination in this increasingly sophisticated sandbox.
I had a beer not long ago with a Las Cruces political activist and sometime-candidate who was incensed that I wrote an opinion article stating that 2020 election conspiracism was based on “bogus” claims. A man who, long ago, had a career as a news reporter had come around to the view that newspapers have no business describing a proven falsehood as false, even on the opinion page.
Conspiracism is a strain in American politics that reaches back to the founding of the republic. But digital media and our unhealthy relationship with it is supercharging the forces of speculation and paranoia and making more of us susceptible to manipulation.
“Disinformation campaigns do not work by telling us lies, so much as by offering us opportunities to make-believe the kinds of half-truths we already wish to credit (as commercial advertising does). The truth of the matter is more frightening than the Russians: that when we see what we want to believe online, we don’t make an active effort to make sure we are not misled; that we prefer to disseminate the juicy to the true; that we would always prefer to have confirmation for what we already think; and that we now have unprecedented options to do so.”
Antón Barba-Kay, “A Web of Our Own Making” (2023)
The pervasiveness of bullshit that besieges us on a daily basis is surely not conducive to emotional or epistemic health.
Now that we have phones in our pockets, we take measures to protect ourselves from them because of the volume of fake calls, marketing, surveys and call centers trying to fool us and compromise our private information. It’s not just that advertising messages reach us throughout the day wherever we go, online or not, but that even these messages clamor for our attention in ways that abuse trust in communications.
There are companies that use machines to “hand write” addresses and messages on pieces of mail, as it is believed this makes it more likely someone will open them. Another way, practiced by loan companies and scammers, is to make the mail look like a legal notice or a personal check (with “pay to the order of” just barely visible on the edge of the address window).
Political organizations and nonprofits engaged in legitimate fundraising like to send surveys by mass mail, inviting people to answer questions expressing their views on subjects of interest to the organization. Signs that these surveys are bullshit include a lack of evident survey methodology and a certain pathway through stimulating questions to the suggestion that you make a donation to the organization.
Even if we throw these things away without looking at them, as most of us do, I would say the damage is already done: The counterfeits are a familiar annoyance, a nuisance rather than an outrage. To the extent we still feel these appeals are insulting, we have learned to feel helpless that anything could make it stop.
This bullshittification of communications conquered the mailbox long ago, followed by its conquest of email, and it is extending its control over text messages and social media. Generative software produces video, audio and text with convincing facsimiles of human creativity. Professors report spending much of their time checking for signs that student work was authored by machine. Election officers are training on how to spot “deepfake” videos. Google now has an app that will produce realistic human voices discussing articles fed into its program in a podcast format.
The counterfeits are metastasizing, multiplying and expanding their claims on our attention. It’s not just that one may be fooled by some of these presentations, but that we may cease to care or expect any communication or spokesperson to be genuine.
Time to return to town criers… and the pillory!