Best Of: How TV, Twitter and TikTok Remade Our Politics

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 13 December 2024

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This election felt like the peak of the TV-ification of politics. There’s Trump, of course, who rose to national prominence as a reality-TV character and is a master of visual stagecraft. And while Trump’s cabinet picks in his first term were described as out of central casting, this time he wants to staff some positions directly from the worlds of TV and entertainment: Pete Hegseth, his choice to run the Pentagon, was a host on “Fox and Friends Weekend”; his proposed education secretary, Linda McMahon, was the former C.E.O. of W.W.E.; Mehmet Oz, star of the long-running “The Dr. Oz Show,” is his pick to run Medicare and Medicaid; and he’s tapped Elon Musk, one of the most powerful figures in American culture, to lead a government efficiency effort. Two years ago, we released an episode that helps explain why politics and entertainment are converging like this. It’s with my old Vox colleague Sean Illing, host of “The Gray Area,” looking at the work of two media theorists, Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, who uncannily predicted what we’re seeing now decades ago. And so I wanted to share this episode again now, because it’s really worth stepping back and looking at this moment through the lens of the media that’s shaping it. In his book “The Paradox of Democracy,” Illing and his co-author, Zac Gershberg, put it this way: “It’s better to think of democracy less as a government type and more as an open communicative culture.” So what does our communicative culture — our fragmented mix of cable news, X, TikTok, YouTube, WhatsApp and podcasts — mean for our democracy? This episode contains strong language. Mentioned: “‘Flood the zone with shit’: How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy” by Sean Illing “Quantifying partisan news diets in Web and TV audiences” by Daniel Muise, Homa Hosseinmardi, Baird Howland, Markus Mobius, David Rothschild and Duncan J. Watts Book Recommendations: Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann Mediated by Thomas de Zengotita Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rogé Karma. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Sonia Herrero, Carole Sabouraud and Isaac Jones. Our production team also includes Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin, Jack McCordick and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Transcript

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0:00.0	So as the year comes to a close, I wanted to dust off some episodes I think have some renewed relevance right now.
0:06.7	If you've listened to the show for a while, you've probably heard me bring up some of the mid-century media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, these people who were thinking about how TV and visual media would reshape politics and society.
0:20.1	And this election felt like, I mean, it was beyond,
0:23.7	I think, what they would have predicted. There's Trump, of course, a reality TV star who runs his
0:29.4	campaigns in some ways his administrations, like a reality TV show. Many of his picks come from
0:34.9	the TV and entertainment world. Of course, you had people like Dana White and Hulk Hogan introducing Donald Trump on the final night of the Republican National Convention.
0:43.7	So the episode I'm sharing today, which was taped in 2022, offers a framework for thinking about that TVification of politics.
0:50.8	It's a conversation by friend Sean Elling, the host of the Gray Area podcast, and a co-author of the book, The Paradox of Democracy. Enjoy.
1:34.5	From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. In a new book, The Paradox of Democracy,
1:38.9	Zach Gersberg and Sean Elling make a simple but radical argument.
1:40.0	They write, quote, It's better to think of democracy less as a government type
1:43.7	and more as an open communicative
1:45.8	culture. Their point there is that democracies can end up in many types of governments. We
1:52.9	tend to think of liberal democracies, but that's only one possibility. You can have illiberal
1:57.7	democracies. Democracies can vote themselves into fascism.
2:02.2	Democracy doesn't guarantee you any particular outcome.
2:06.2	And so what drives a democracy, what decides what it becomes or what it stays, is that open communicative culture, the way its members learn about the world, debate it, and ultimately
2:18.0	persuade each other to change it or not change it. And communicative cultures are shaped by the
2:24.3	technologies upon which they happen. Oral cultures are different than textual ones. Radio is different
2:29.3	than TV. Twitter is different than TikTok or Facebook. Political scientists spend a lot of time theorizing about
2:36.4	democratic institutions and how elections work, but communicative institutions and the cultures and
2:42.7	technologies by which we communicate, they get a lot less attention. And I guess I'm a member of the
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