Why the Media Moves in Unison
Journalists don’t stick to the same talking points because they get the same memo—but because they’re worried about their next dinner party.
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- Yascha
For much of the pandemic, mainstream publications confidently rejected the possibility that an inadvertent lab leak may stand at the origin of Covid. The New York Times and The Washington Post, The Guardian and Vox all referred to this notion as a “conspiracy theory.” Fact-checkers at Politifact and other leading outfits claimed that the idea had definitively been “debunked.” Renowned scientists were banned from Facebook and YouTube for dissenting from the approved line.
Then, in the course of a few weeks, the theory suddenly stopped being taboo. The evidence that there was reason to take the theory seriously had gradually accumulated on social media. Finally, in January 2021, a major article in New York Magazine marshaled some of the strongest evidence for the theory. Though it did not contain much new information, serious consideration of the topic started to appear in all the most prestigious outlets over the following days and weeks. Before long, the theory was routinely being described as a plausible, and perhaps even likely, explanation for the start of the pandemic.1
The media’s change in how it covered the origins of the pandemic is one of the most extreme examples of groupthink in recent history. But it is far from the only case in which journalistic coverage of an important topic has radically shifted over the course of a stunningly brief span of time.
Even once voters had grown deeply concerned about Joe Biden’s mental acuity, mainstream journalists hesitated to write about the topic. Even once evidence about the harmful side effects of cross-sex hormones administered to teenagers had mounted, mainstream journalists insisted that the science on the topic had long ago been settled. And even once it was becoming very clear that prolonged school closures were having a devastating effect on learning outcomes, mainstream journalists dismissed and ridiculed those who expressed concerns. Only long after the evidence which warranted a change of tune had started to accumulate did all three taboos crumble, seemingly from one day to the next.2
These kinds of cases are a big part of the reason why trust in the media has fallen so dramatically. It is rational, and even laudable, for journalists to change their mind as new evidence emerges. But when journalists ignore such evidence for weeks or months, only to change their tune all of a sudden, it is understandable, perhaps even inevitable, that many people will smell a conspiracy. When so many journalists march—and pivot—in lockstep, the simplest explanation seems to be that they are obeying a shared set of orders.
But it doesn’t take some grand conspiracy—which is unlikely for the same reason most conspiracies supposedly involving thousands of disparate individuals with competing incentives are implausible—to explain why the media coalesce around the same taboos. The real reason is rather more prosaic. Writers care about being read. They care about building a following. They care about making money. But more than any of these, they care about not being cast out of their social milieu.3
This helps to explain how journalistic taboos form and wane. A certain fact or point of view seems to give succor to the wrong people. For rational or less-than-rational reasons, it is perceived to open the door to prejudice against Asian-Americans (lab leak); or to harm the fight for trans rights (cross-gender hormones); or to undermine efforts to contain the pandemic (school closures); or to weaken American democracy (Biden’s mental acuity). This is enough to render anyone who reports this fact or expresses this point of view suspect.4
Over time, however, as evidence accumulates that the taboo belief is true, or that admitting to it would not lead to the terrible consequences journalists had previously imagined, it becomes harder and harder to ignore reality. What was once an organic social consensus is now propped up by the fear of social ostracism. And so the time is ripe for one person to break ranks, lowering the costs for subsequent people who dare to say in public what long ago they had started to whisper to each other in private.
The reason for the striking homogeneity in the opinions expressed in the mainstream press at any one time, and the seemingly choreographed manner in which these can suddenly change is not a conspiracy. It is, to put the phenomenon in the simplest terms, the desire of many journalists not to face awkward questions when they attend their next dinner party.5
The Deep Roots of Dinner Partyism
Humans are social creatures.
We crave money and power. We pursue physical safety and physical pleasures. We have ideals for which some of us have, on occasion, proven willing to die. But one of the most fundamental drives we have—one that, in many circumstances, trumps all these others—is the need for social connection and social approval.
The reasons for this go deep. For much of our history as a species, individuals who were cast out from their group were far more likely to die. Even today, many people find social humiliation as hard to bear as physical pain. Solitary confinement is, for good reason, considered a form of torture. In the history of warfare, many more people have been willing to die by marching in lockstep with their comrades than to save themselves by deserting from the group.
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The need for social approval has always loomed large; for many hunter-gatherers, being expelled from their band vastly increased the likelihood of imminent death. But other needs, especially those for sustenance and physical security, were just as pressing, and could at times compete. When you are on the brink of starvation, you may risk stealing a loaf of bread, whatever the consequences for your social standing. That is why the fear of social isolation looms all the larger for those who have grown up in physical safety and material comfort—for those who cannot imagine their house being bombed or their plate going empty at dinnertime. One way to describe a member of the upper middle-class in an affluent capitalist society is to say that he or she is the kind of creature for whom the prospect of social disapproval is one of the most salient disasters that looms over their lives.
And that, it seems to me, is a more powerful motivator of human action in many milieus than the explanations that are more commonly offered. According to Hanlon’s Razor, we should never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Similarly, it seems to me that we should never attribute to conspiracy that which is adequately explained by not wanting to be singled out at your next dinner party.6
The deeply-rooted need for social approval explains why people are so willing to defer to social taboos. But it does not explain why the nature of the social taboos that are binding on society can shift in such rapid—and seemingly unpredictable—fashion. To solve that puzzle, we need to turn to the work of Timur Kuran, a Turkish-American economist who, back in the late 1980s, set out to explain the origins of political revolutions.
The Causes of Revolutions and “Revolutions”
Two days before her husband was deposed from the throne, and few months before her whole family was brutally murdered, Tsarina Alexandra of Russia dismissed the importance of the “young people [who] run and shout that there is no bread, simply to create excitement… If the weather were very cold they would probably all stay home.” She was not the only contemporary to miss that momentous changes were afoot. Around the same time, the British Ambassador cabled London to report that “some disorders occurred today” but insisted that these amounted to “nothing serious.”
It may seem curious that the best-informed observers in the Russia of 1917 failed to anticipate the dramatic events that were about to unfold, but it is not at all unusual. Even though it was with the benefit of hindsight easy to point to widespread discontent in each of these cases, the most intelligent contemporaries failed to anticipate the advent of the French Revolution in 1789, the end of the Persian monarchy in 1979 and even the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe in 1989.7 Why?
The key to understanding why revolutions tend to come as such a surprise, Kuran argues, lies in the gulf between the views people privately hold and the views they are willing to express publicly. In any oppressive regime, there will be strong penalties for expressing the “wrong” views. This leads to the widespread adoption of what he calls “preference falsification.”8
In societies in which a lot of people engage in “preference falsification,” it will be hard for everybody—from the most humble citizen to the most powerful government minister—to know the true distribution of views in the population. This, Kuran points out, creates the preconditions for a “preference cascade”: A small and seemingly insignificant event can reveal to what extent the officially sanctioned narrative has become unpopular, making it far easier for people to say in public what they have long believed in private.
To see how this dynamic plays out in a bit more detail, let’s imagine two different authoritarian regimes, A and B.9
Each regime contains ten citizens. Based on their private views about the regime, the benefit they expect to derive from compliance with it, and perhaps the extent to which they can psychologically tolerate engaging in preference falsification, each of these citizens has a subjective revolutionary threshold. An individual with a subjective threshold of 0 will be willing to protest the regime even when the prospects of a successful revolution are non-existent. An individual with a subjective threshold of a 100 will stay loyal to the regime even when it’s obvious that it’s about to lose power.
The action that each member of this society takes will also depend on objective conditions. These objective conditions, assumed to be the same for the whole society, are based on such factors as popular discontent with the current state of affairs and the anticipated cost of ceasing to engage in preference falsification. We’ll assume that this condition starts at 0. We’ll further assume that it goes up by 10 points each time an additional person publicly opposes the regime since this decreases the risk any one individual runs for voicing their discontent (because it is harder for the regime to punish a larger percentage of the population) and increases the potential payoffs from doing so (because broader discontent indicates that the opposition is more likely to topple the regime, which would enable it to improve social conditions and reward its supporters).
Let’s have a look at the distribution of subjective revolutionary thresholds in each of these societies:
Which of these regimes is more likely to fall?
The obvious answer is Regime A. After all, the subjective revolutionary threshold is, on average, much lower in this society. To put it plainly, most people are much less content with the government. Even so, Kuran’s answer is Regime B. Though people are on average more satisfied with the regime, the subtly different distribution of views allows for a preference cascade to form—and topple the regime.
Take a closer look at Regime A. When Citizen 1 goes out to protest, the objective revolutionary threshold rises from 0 to 10. But this is not enough for anybody else to join the protest, since the subjective threshold of Citizen 2 (and 3 and 4 and 5) stands at 20. Citizen 1 is quickly arrested. Other citizens who would privately love for the regime to collapse may never realize how many of their compatriots share their disdain. The preference cascade that is necessary for a revolution to take place does not get going.
Things play out differently in Regime B. When Citizen 1 goes out in the street, the objective revolutionary threshold rises to 10, bringing Citizen 2 out into the street. This raises the threshold to 20, activating Citizen 3. A preference cascade quickly gets going, encompassing even citizens who rather like the old regime, and sweeps it aside.10
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Kuran originally focused on political revolutions. But as he himself soon recognized, his model is helpful in explaining a much broader set of phenomena. It can explain why scientists hold onto an erroneous paradigm even as its limitations become painfully obvious, only to abandon it for a competitor at a seemingly random juncture.11 It can explain how activists come to dethrone a party’s nominee to whom they are supposedly unwaveringly loyal, only to rally around a successor about whom some of them had until recently expressed serious reservations. And, yes, it can also explain why the media so often moves in unison until, equally in sync, and without any obvious precipitating incident, it suddenly marches off into a different direction.
Reasons to Conform
There is of course a difference between the preference cascades that precede political revolutions and those that precede a change of the implicit editorial line in the mainstream press. Opponents to dictatorial regimes risk being beaten up by thugs, getting thrown in jail, even being executed. Journalists who deviate from the editorial line favored by their peers risk… facing awkward questions from their friends or, in the very worst case, losing their job. But while the severity of the punishment for expressing unpopular beliefs may be wildly different, the incentives towards conformity are surprisingly similar across these two cases.
There is a big pay-off to being a successful revolutionary. You get to “live in truth.” You advance a cause you care for. With a bit of luck, the new government will even reward you for your loyalty. But the cost of being a failed revolutionary is immense. If your cause falters, you may well find yourself on a literal chopping block. And even if, after your time, the glorious day of victory finally comes, your comrades won’t be able to resurrect you.
Similarly, there is (adjusting for the vastly lower stakes of the entire enterprise) a significant pay-off to setting in motion a preference cascade that effectively does away with a taboo in the mainstream media. Your article goes viral. You earn praise for your courage. There may even be a promotion in the offing. But here too the cost of failure is (comparatively) high. If the taboo ends up holding, you could find yourself denounced on social media and iced out of your friendship circle. And even if everyone eventually comes round to your point of view, being out of the gate too early can easily inflict permanent damage on your reputation.
This explains a phenomenon about mainstream journalism which has long struck me as strange and important in equal measure. You might think that the people who were first to argue that we should take the lab-leak theory seriously or that there are some serious questions about cross-gender treatments for teenagers would be rewarded for their prescience. But that is not how the social dynamics of the media seem to work. If you violate a taboo before other reputable journalists have done so, you earn a reputation as a crank—and that reputation tends to linger even after all of your peers have finally come around to your point of view.12
The Dinner Partyist View of History
The history of the humanities and social sciences has, for the last three centuries, been deeply informed by a battle over what makes humans act and history tick.
On one side of this grand debate stand the so-called idealists. They believe, as their name implies, that it is ideas which motivate behavior. Hegel, perhaps the archetypical idealist, insisted that history should be understood as the progressive realization of “world spirit.”
On the other side of this grand debate were the so-called materialists. They believe that it is material factors which motivate behavior. Marx, perhaps the archetypal materialist, believed that a society’s mode of production determines both the form that the struggle between different social classes would take and how those in power would justify their rule.
When I studied intellectual history as an undergraduate and immersed myself in political theory and comparative politics as a graduate student, I spent many hours thinking about these competing modes of explanation. Even now, I believe that an understanding of them is helpful to anybody who is trying to think about the social world. But I have increasingly come to believe that a much simpler concept better describes what most of the time drives the actions of most people, whether they be journalists, other white collar professionals, even statesmen and CEOs.
Our world is not driven by either idealism or materialism. What makes people tick is dinner partyism.
The truth remains murky, and perhaps always will. There is some strong evidence which favors a lab leak theory. But in a recent 15-hour debate with prize money of $100,000, the side arguing that the virus had likely been transmitted directly from animals to humans won, changing the minds of many well-informed observers in the process.
The striking thing about each of these cases is not just that journalists changed their view, something that can be rational and even laudable. It is that they held onto the same taboos long after the evidence which warranted a change of tune had started to accumulate—only to change their mind from one day to the next. In some cases, like that of Biden and his disastrous performance at the debate, this change was preceded by a precipitating incident, which made more people aware of the underlying facts, and made it harder for those who knew all along to keep pretending. But in other cases, this kind of precipitating incident was conspicuous by its absence, the reasons why a particular taboo was abandoned at a particular moment, rather than a month earlier or later, seemingly random.
Like most people, journalists have a strong desire for social approval from their peer group. But if you want to get prestigious assignments or win literary prizes, the approval of mainstream tastemakers is a necessary prerequisite. So both people whose primary desire is for social approval and people whose primary desire is for the traditional hallmarks of a successful media career will have a strong motivation not to overstep widely respected taboos.
Some journalists may explicitly believe that these are good reasons to sweep embarrassing truths under the carpet. But in most cases, the mechanism is a little more complex than that. Many journalists move in such tight echo chambers that they simply never encounter the information that would disconfirm their views or mistrust those who bring it to their attention. Others do have private doubts, and may even feel embarrassed by their own failure to write about them, but don’t want to upset the explicit partisans which serve as a taboo’s enforcers.
This tendency has also been intensified by the hyper-concentration of contemporary media. In the past, the majority of print journalists worked at local papers scattered around the country. While they too cared about their professional standing, they primarily socialized with other notables or white-collar professionals in their local community. Repeating some line because it is de rigueur within media circles but seems wildly implausible to anyone outside of it would have hurt their social standing. Today, by contrast, a much bigger share of journalists live in New York or Washington, D.C. They mostly socialize with other members of the “culture industry,” including a lot of journalists. Being seen as ideologically misaligned is a much greater threat to their social standing.
There is, I know, always something slightly cringeworthy about talk of “dinner parties” and “cocktail parties” and other default categories writers commonly use as a stand-in for social occasions in which people are likely to encounter those with whom they share weak social ties. So consider dinner parties a shorthand for a much broader class of ostensibly social or explicitly professional events that looms large in the minds of writers, journalists, and members of other white-collar workers: happy hours, workshops, holiday parties, barbecues, networking coffees, house parties, conferences, picnics, birthdays, dates, work lunches, and so on.
Kuran points out that this should make us skeptical of the journalists and historians who, in retrospect, explain the deep causes for the inevitable downfall of the old order when, like everyone else, they failed to predict it. It also, as he shows, makes mincemeat of the most prevalent explanations for why revolutions happen, which tend to emphasize the kinds of structural factors which would make it much easier to predict what is about to happen.
Note that Kuran is not making any pessimistic assumptions about human nature here. He recognizes that most people dislike—and some people absolutely hate—lying about their private views. Indeed, the mental cost of engaging in preference falsification is, on his account, a key driver of unrest in authoritarian societies.
The following paragraphs are based on Kuran’s work, especially his two seminal articles “Sparks and prairie fires” and “Now out of never.” But for the sake of simplicity, I have somewhat adopted both his terminology and the description of the model.
It’s worth noting that this cascade includes some, like Citizen 8 and 9, who rather like the old regime—a preference they used to shout from the rooftops but may now start to conceal.
As Kuran notes, the account of scientific progress articulated in Thomas Kuhn’s classic 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions shares many of its features with his own model.
One more parallel: Kuran points out that his theory reinscribes agency into the revolutionary process. Social scientists who exclusively focus on structural factors tend to believe that the decisions and qualities of individual revolutionary leaders don’t matter; the outcome is predetermined by factors that are far outside their control. But on Kuran’s model, revolutionary leaders may succeed in lowering the individual revolutionary threshold of some citizens by inspiring anger about their current suffering; by convincing them that discontent with the current regime is more widespread than they’d realized; or by making the success of their uprising seem very probable. And since—as in the case of Regime A—a relatively slight lowering in the revolutionary threshold of a few citizens may suffice to bring about a preference cascade, this kind of action can make a major difference.
The same, it seems to me, is true in the case of journalism. Most journalists are not stupid, and many dislike having to hide their private views in their work. When they start to recognize that a certain position is hard to justify, some part of them will start looking for an out. This means that a few journalists and editors who are seemingly beyond reproach because of their own reputation or the prestige of their publication can make an enormous difference; if they break the taboo in a clear and well-reasoned manner, they can easily inspire a preference cascade.
Mounk’s Razor: “Never attribute to conspiracy that which is adequately explained by not wanting to be singled out at your next dinner party.”
I think this is the piece I have been waiting for.