The Pros and Cons (mostly cons) of Satire

Last week in our news literacy class, we had a great, thought-provoking guest lecture by Dannagal Young. Young’s work is part of a growing body of research providing evidence of the benefits of watching satirical news programs such as The Daily Show.

So far, we have evidence suggesting that Daily Show viewers vote more than non-viewers, participate more in political campaigns, score higher on political knowledge, and consume more news from other news sources. This seems to answer the critics who worry that satirical news programs might lead to cynicism. But perhaps it doesn’t.

There is an assumption that cynicism would manifest itself as (or co-occur with) apathy. If The Daily Show made viewers cynical, then we wouldn’t expect them to be more civically engaged than non-viewers.

Cynicism or Being Principled?

I’d critique the assumption that cynicism’s connection to apathy is the real worry. I’d define and measure cynicism as negativity about something combined with an inability to respond to evidence. So, would a liberal person acknowledge evidence that, say, unions make countries or states less competitive, or would a conservative acknowledge evidence that gun control laws dramatically reduce injury and deaths. Would they just say "you're misinterpreting the evidence" or "you're not looking at the evidence in proper context" or "you're ignoring this other important piece of evidence". An inability to change one's view based on new evidence is, to me, a problem.

But other people (highly partisan people) might refer to this orientation toward new evidence as “principled”: you think that unions are good no matter what, military intervention is bad no matter what, corporate mergers are bad no matter what, government regulation is bad no matter what. So, are you being cynical or are you being principled? In either case, I suspect that exposure to certain kinds of satire news (The Daily Show, or Rush Limbaugh, who could be understood or defended as a satirist) increases the frequency and intensity of this orientation. Meanwhile, websites that present information on the same topics but do so through presenting evidence in a more-or-less straight-faced manner, like fivethirtyeight, might decrease the frequency or intensity of this orientation.

Dannagal Young pointed out, rightly, that getting people to really consider evidence that contradicted existing beliefs would be pretty hard. In some sense, we are “hard-wired” not to do such a thing. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the resistance to certain kinds of evidence is a matter of identity preservation. But it seems worth considering the extent to which media can reinforce this instinct to preserve one’s identity.

Angrier Candidates

Consider the difference between the rhetoric and reputation of two candidates: Bill Clinton vs. Elizabeth Warren. Or, if you’d prefer to compare conservatives: George W. Bush as a presidential candidate in 1999 vs. Ron Paul. In both cases, the former candidate runs a campaign based on a kind of compassionate rhetoric while the latter candidates run based on distrust and anger at established authorities. Which of these candidates’ rhetoric resonates with voters? I’d argue that the satire of Michael Moore and perhaps that of Jon Stewart cause viewers to favor rhetoric that is based on anger against the status quo rather than rhetoric of compassion. Is this necessarily bad? I’m not sure. But it certainly doesn’t move us any closer to a world in which an informed electorate is selecting a candidate based on evidence as to who might be the most effective candidate. It’s just survival of the angriest.

Increasing skepticism, but of whom?

As Young pointed out during her guest lecture, humor and satire have been used to prompt audiences to question authorities since the days of ancient Greece. But the humor also stops the audience from questioning the arguments made by the comedian (or to view the evidence differently). Humor prompts audiences to let their guard down and cultivate a kind of affinity for the comedian and his.her views. Humor is an effective way to stop people from questioning the authority of the comedian. It reduces people’s ability to counter-argue. Again, will this help people select the best candidate? I think it just makes people less likely to consider evidence that is inconsistent with the worldview implicitly endorsed by the satirist.  

Hard-wiring is not fate

So, can media challenge our existing worldviews by cultivating mindful consideration of the issues of the day? Last week, I hosted a symposium on media choice at Drexel University. One of our guest speakers, Talia Stroud, had an argument similar to Young’s about how we are “hard-wired” to defend our ideological in-group or “tribe”. We are predisposed to political or ideological polarization. The instinct to read other viewpoints and arguments as somehow biased and flawed reflect deep-seated, automatic way of acting and thinking. Stroud presented the results of years of research that, I thought, reflected a terrific persistence and a refusal to accept hard-wired predispositions as unchangeable. She presented the result of study after study in which she and her colleagues tried to reduce ideological polarization when people are exposed to viewpoints that differ from their own. Time and again, the interventions not only didn’t work, but often made people more polarized! Finally, she had seen evidence of reduced polarization when she presented news website users with a “respect” button alongside the ubiquitous “like” button. When people are prompted to respect a viewpoint other than their own along with the ability to endorse it through a comment or a “like”, some of them will do so. This subtle change to websites can affect discourse, and I think this change in discourse could potentially reduce ideological polarization.

Even if a large number of people weren’t ever oriented toward objectively considering evidence for or against a politically-charged topic (e.g., man-made climate change, effects of reducing unemployment benefits) in the past, are we to let this dictate what we’re capable of? Are we mistaking predispositions for unchangeable fate? Are we not to even explore the possibility of change? To do so would seem, well, cynical. And Stroud's research shows that there is already evidence that simple tweaks to the media choice environment cause changes in behavior and, perhaps, thinking, despite whatever hard-wiring we have. 

Against The Daily Show

After reading a slew of paeans to The Daily Show in Flow and after seeing plenty of conference talks about how wonderful The Daily Show is, I have reached the conclusion that media/comm studies folks have an alarmingly univocal (and ultimately uncritical) love for this show.

The arguments usually go something like this: "legitimate" news organizations aren't doing their jobs as well as they could or should. Evidence: their failure to cry foul before the start of the Iraq War, their failure to cover Hurricane Katrina in a fair, accurate manner, the failure of taking x conservative politician/member-of-the-press/business leader to task before he ruined a bunch of people's lives. The Daily Show picks up the slack. It speaks the truth when no legitimate news source can. It is effective satire in the tradition of Mark Twain. You may think that young people are watching TDS instead of watching or reading other news sources and that its making them more cynical, but studies have revealed the opposite: they're less cynical than the average person and they read and watch more news than non-viewers. Thus, evidence suggests TDS makes viewers more engaged, more skeptical (as opposed to cynical), and more aware of the world around them.

Allow me to present the counter-argument. First, some ground rules. Let's acknowledge the third person effect: the idea that we all tend to think that the media exerts a strong influence on other people but not on ourselves. We tend to think of ourselves as individuals who have free will, who make intelligent decisions as to what information to consume and how we think about issues, while others are susceptible to the influence of demagogues. My political beliefs lead me to seek out TDS and NPR but my exposure to those information outlets does not change those beliefs, whereas Fox News and Rush Limbaugh have the power to influence viewers' and listeners' beliefs. If they did not, then we wouldn't have any reason to criticize them. If they're just entertainers, then what's the problem?

I'm familiar with the argument that b/c Stewart frames his show as comedy on a comedy network and various conservatives like O'Reilly and Limbaugh frame their programs as news, that one is less likely to influence the views of listeners or viewers than the other. This logic has an appealing obviousness to it, but the intentions of Stewart and the framing of his show are beside the point. It is possible that satiric content, which viewers acknowledge to be "just comedy," is just as likely to influence views as non-satiric content. Both pointed satire and that which poses as "hard news" are capable of altering (even more capable of bolstering) our views of the world. This isn't to say that the intentions of the creator or genre classifications don't play some role in the ways that viewers/listeners/readers process the information, but Stewart is mistaken in thinking that his role as comedian determines the degree of his influence. Its his prerogative to not see himself as responsible for the alteration or bolstering of viewers' beliefs, but his take on his own personal responsibility as a satirist has nothing to do with the question of effect.

There is ample empirical evidence that suggests we are all mistaken in our assumptions about the effectiveness of media to alter worldveiws, that neither conservative nor liberal, well-informed nor uninformed, over-educated nor under-educated, fans of satire and fans of supposedly hard news are any less susceptible to having our views of the world altered (against our will, so to speak) by what we watch, listen to, and read than anyone else.

So, premise #1: TDS could lead to people thinking a certain way about the world around them without those people being aware that their views of the world are being altered by that program.

How do we know if that's happening, and how do we know the ways in which it is happening?

The idea that TDS and other sources of "soft news" substitute for "hard news" sources in viewers' media diets has been debunked. Also, viewers seem more likely to vote, more likely to join civic organizations and volunteer, more able to cite objective facts about what's going on in the world.

That leaves the following likely negative effects that i don't think have been addressed by scholars:

• the tendency for viewers to be more partisan - viewers make decisions as to whether or not an idea is good based on whether it is associated with conservative or liberals and not based on evidence that suggests that the idea would work in certain circumstances and not in others. Decisions are made based on principles (which are cultivated by the show) or based on whether the sources of information have contradicted themselves at any point in time (if they have, then everything they ever say is called into question).
  
• the tendency for viewers to focus on blame rather than solutions, the exacerbation of the its-not-me-its-you tendency that we all have (that is, viewers of the show and other shows that focus on the blaming-others narrative of news will be more likely to focus their energy on ferreting out other people's evil doings and less likely to spend time thinking of possible solutions to those problems and trying them out than non-viewers)

If I had to speculate on the kinds of thinkers that TDS turns its viewers into, I would say that its people who believe that when a person in power (govt, media, finance) says one thing and later says something different, then that person loses all credibility and should be ousted in favor of someone who has yet to be proven as hypocritical. If everyone thought this way, then we would end up with political, media, and financial leaders who were ideologues. Say what you will about ideologues, at least they're consistent. You can't play a tape of them saying something they will later contradict because they never change their opinions about anything regardless of how circumstances change. Is that a good thing?

And yes, veiwers of TDS seek out other source of news, but what orientation do they approach that news with? I would argue that when they watch those other news sources, they take the bits of it that are consistent with TDS's view of the world and ascribe the rest to traditional news media's inability to tell it like it is, the failure of traditional journalism in the face of powerful governments and corporations. They're not making critical decisions about the information from other news sources based on anything but a need to see the world in a way that conforms to their existing view of it. Again, people have this tendency in the first place, but I would argue that TDS exacerbates it.

I also believe that the "people were always this way" argument is inadequate. I can imagine a world in which a lot of people think about an issue and make a decision on what to do or who to vote for based on evidence that suggests that the policy or action proposed will bring about good things for many people. How many conservatives actually examine the intricacies of the circumstances in which taxing the rich or running of deficits leads to long-term gain instead of just saying that taxes in a recession are bad? How many liberals consider the implications of the constant risk of nuclear war given the existence of over 10,000 active nuclear warheads?

Many people don't want to think about the other side of an issue. They want to get angry, and they want to laugh. TDS helps them do that. In fact, maybe it leads to more and more people getting angry and laughing instead of looking for solutions. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it does something totally different. We have a responsibility to find out the answers to such questions.