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The Demise of American Civil Society and The Institutionalization of Press: A Necessary Evil?
-- By ZenongWang - 11 Mar 2024
"Everyone" Can Be The Press
“It is passing strange…,” wrote Justice Scalia in his concurrence opinion for the famous, or infamous Citizens United v. FEC, “... to interpret the phrase ‘the freedom of speech, or of the press’ to mean, not everyone’s right to speak or publish, but rather everyone’s right to speak or the institutional press’s right to publish.” This almost anti-press-establishment tone should not come as a surprise for people familiar with Scalia as he was known to repeatedly stray away from the conservative wing of the court on issues related to “fundamental individual rights,” but in this case, the “everyone” referred by the justice, means no other than corporations speaking through campaign funding, now better known as the money speech.
This ironic confluence of 1) languages seemingly showing deep sympathy toward broader protection for the more grass-root “press” under the freedom of press clause and 2) the stone-cold fact that under the veil of honoring individual rights, what is being protected is the alliance between big corporations and elected politicians hideously creating a tilted playground for themselves, I will argue, is not an exception, but something reflecting a more fundamental tendency of bigger corporate/political players taking advantage of fragmentation/atomization of social fabrics and the ensuing faltering of traditional forms of authorities.
The Demise of Civil Organizations
It is not an unfamiliar story for political scientists that the two decades leading to Citizens United mark the gradual but certain death of the community fabric within American civil society. The organic organizations in the forms of suburban churches and factory town bowling alleys, where groups of citizens with shared interests naturally meet and socialize, dwindled, along with citizen interest groups and union participation rates. (see, e.g., Robert G. Putnam, Bowling Alone.) The weakening of these socialization processes inevitably leads to the decline of what many may describe as social capital: heuristics based on affiliation/lifestyle choices that more readily lead to higher trust and lower communication costs. One natural result of such a decline is the greater difficulty for collective actions among the already harder-to-organize working/middle-class voters. (see, e.g, Udéhn, Lars. Twenty-Five Years with “The Logic of Collective Action.”) From this perspective, the emergence of algorithm-driven platforms is both a response to and a great facilitator of this development, as people are further carved into smaller bubbles of social circles with common but more shattered points of view and languages.
Fragmentation And Identity-Driven Information Source
However, people desire human interactions and a sense of belonging that comes with socialization. While the deficiency of common language and social cues may sentence long-term collective elaboration of interests to death, atomization and resultant social isolation gave rise to alternative media and re-organization of the civil society that focus more on triggering in-group/out-group responses and providing sentimental ascertaining of belonging. (in some way, I think this is part of human beings’ fundamental desire) Indeed, multiple studies have found that people affected by community/economic dislocations are more vulnerable to misinformation, radicalization, and alternative narratives, including conspiracy theories. (for a discussion of some of these studies, see Carol Graham and Emily Dobson, Despair underlies our misinformation crisis: Introducing an interactive tool; see also, Francis Fukuyama, The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order.) And the mobile internet provides the perfect platform for searching for such media outlets.
Abundance of Options As A Catalyst For The Worse
In some way, the transition from the old interest-group-based civil society to the current world is a transition from interest/ideology-driven politics to identity/belonging-driven politics. While the collapse of the relatively rigid social order (community/workplace organization/interest group) and the emergence of mobile internet provide a pretense or a true potential for liberty and more choices, many people also experience a sense of loss and disorientation. As people are fragmented into smaller and smaller social circles and their options for information sources multiply, their desire for belonging and certainty translates to a desire for simple sentimental in-group/out-group triggers. (see, e.g., Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment) Unfortunately, this desire and the fragmented civil society are easily exploitable and highly desired political resources for some populist politicians and their funders, as cultural war issues may often be freely and arbitrarily combined with their agendas (Id.).
Institutionalized Press As The Necessary Evil
In other words, when combined with society atomization, the abundance of media outlets does mean freedom of expression, but probably more so for the corporate interests and opportunistic populists, a scenario not unseen before. The age when the institutionalized press under the freedom of press jurisprudence was born was also, coincidentally or determinedly, another age of capital expansion, populist politics, and yellow journalism. As disorientation and radicalization spread and as the state is vulnerable to becoming seized by economic interests under Citizens United, maybe the so-called press’ “unique role as a check on government abuse” is precisely to provide some common ground/language to facilitate civil discourse/organization as we have seen in the interest-group age (Leathers v. Medlock, 499 U.S. 439, 447 (1991)). Maybe a group of the institutionalized elite press is the necessary evil, the consideration in a quid pro quo for “a mighty catalyst in awakening public interest in governmental affairs, exposing corruption among public officers and employees and generally informing the citizenry of public events and occurrence[,]” in a time of uncertainty and disorientation.
Uncertain Balancing of Interests and Rights:
Indeed, this institutionalization comes with many negative implications. As Justice Burger noted, favoring some communicators over others “is reminiscent of the abhorred licensing system of Tudor and Stuart England—a system the First Amendment was intended to ban from this country.” (First Nat'l Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, 435 U.S. 765 (1978) (Burger, C.J., concurring).) Moreover, potential collusion between the state and the press may, in effect, deprive interested citizens engaging in their own investigations of the necessary constitutional protections. But the alternative, fragmentation of society and the resulting identity-driven information outlets, as described above, may be an even bigger power vacuum for abusive political power. The results of balancing these conflicting interests may be far from determinate.
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