In the immediate aftermath of Donald J. Trump’s election to the office of president of the United States, many Americans were left with a sense of disorientation, wondering what exactly had just happened, how it had happened, and whether it was indicative of a larger social, cultural, and political trajectory. Before too long, journalistic accounts—whether supportive of President Trump, horrified by his election, or ostensibly objective—filled bookstore shelves. Many focused on the most alarming and sensationalistic aspects of the story, such as Russian interference. Only more recently have social scientists begun to publish their own book-length treatments aimed at providing theoretically grounded, empirically supported analyses of the conditions that may have paved the way to the 2016 election and its aftermath. The two books under consideration join an expanding literature on the media’s role in the rise of right-wing populism. Khadijah Costley White’s book, The Branding of Right-Wing Activism: The News Media and the Tea Party, focuses its attention on events taking place during the early Obama presidency, but Donald J. Trump appears in the very first sentence of the book’s preface, as well as in its conclusion: he is never far from the reader’s consciousness as a reminder of where things are headed. The other book, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization of American Politics, deals explicitly and in great detail with the media landscape in which the 2016 presidential campaigns took place. Both books lend insights into the role of a complex and quickly evolving media ecosystem in the recent rise of right-wing politics in the United States, and I recommend both to anyone interested in the role of the media in contemporary American politics.
In The Branding of Right-Wing Activism, White takes a social constructivist approach to the Tea Party phenomenon, using discourse analysis in conducting a case study focused on media representations of the Tea Party. This is less a book about the Tea Party per se than a reflection on contemporary media and culture, with the creation and marketing of the “Tea Party” illustrating how journalists and activists together participate in brand creation and management in the digital media age. In framing her arguments, White relies on the apt metaphor of “headphone culture,” in which the public behaves like stereotypical teenagers, mostly tuned out of the world and into their own stream of music, movies, and video games, but just aware enough of the outside world to briefly interact when a worthy stimulus catches their attention. Thus, media must compete through their storytelling about—or even construction of—phenomena in a manner designed to tempt us to momentarily lift the headphones from our ears.
White’s central claim is that the Tea Party emerged, at least initially, not as a social movement, but rather as a “mass-mediated brand” (p. 5) created more by journalists and reporters than by activists, even as the line between journalist and activist blurred. Overall “brand culture” played a central role in this emergence, with news and opinion media acting as promoters, in effect granting the Tea Party its power.
Scholarly books on the Tea Party have had to grapple with the matter of what exactly the Tea Party is. Some authors, such as Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson (The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, 2012), argue that it is a genuine grassroots social movement. Others, such as Christopher S. Parker and Matt A. Barreto (Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America, 2013), consider the Tea Party to represent simply the latest reactionary outburst by members of long-dominant groups coping with anxiety evoked by a perceived loss of status. Rachel Blum, in a forthcoming book from the University of Chicago Press (How the Tea Party Captured the GOP: Insurgent Factions in American Politics, 2020), characterizes the Tea Party as a party faction, an insurgency within the Republican Party itself. Given that the Tea Party has proven to be a veritable Rorschach test for scholars—serving to reflect their own theoretical predispositions—it is fitting that White’s interpretivist take is that the Tea Party was itself forged through journalistic acts of interpretation. The Tea Party as mass-mediated construction is an interesting premise and one worth considering. As the author leads us through various excerpts from some of the most widely consumed newspapers, television news programs, and both news and opinion websites, the branding story makes a lot of sense and leaves the reader thinking often of a certain marketer extraordinaire whose greatest accomplishment would be to turn himself into a brand and ride that brand to the presidency.
The book’s strongest contribution comes through the theoretical reorientation that it demands of its readers. A number of puzzles posed by the Tea Party phenomenon seem less puzzling once one looks with fresh eyes on it as the result of semiconscious marketing. Dueling representations of grassroots versus Astroturf “movements” need not be in conflict when the construction of a Tea Party brand appeals to both the anxious masses and the anxious elites who wish to safely channel the populist anger toward anything but themselves. Considering that the moment of genesis came in the form of a television personality (CNBC’s Rick Santelli) ranting about the unfairness of taxpayers being asked to bail out deeply indebted homeowners, it should come as no shock that the media would lead the way in identifying, defining, promoting, and sustaining the Tea Party throughout its meteoric rise. Nor is it shocking that it eventually fizzled once its appeal as a storytelling vehicle grew stale. White succeeds in enticing the reader to view the Tea Party story through her own interpretive lens. A social constructivist framework for political analysis proves most fruitful when the awareness of our joint construction of meaning facilitates insights about the topic at hand. Far less interesting are works that concern themselves more with simply using the topic as a vehicle to convince us that social construction is real. Fortunately, this book offers more of the former than the latter, directing the reader’s attention in the heart of the book toward journalists’ and activists’ use of class, race, and gender in constructing the Tea Party.
The second book under review also depicts news and opinion media as playing a pivotal role in the recent successes of right-wing populist politics in the United States. Network Propaganda is a big book with big ideas that are examined using big data; however, its success lies in its authors’ ability to bring these ideas down to earth, communicating and visualizing them in concrete terms, through a deep analysis of the relationships among media entities likely to be familiar to everyone with an interest in American political media.
The first thing one notices is just how beautiful a book it is. Chock-full of striking glossy color figures depicting networked connections among potential sources of propaganda, illustrations of text data, time series tracking the ebb and flow of sensational—often false—stories, and screenshots from cable news, political websites, and social media posts, it is a pleasure to hold and page through. Although as scholars, we often tend toward the more austere presentation of our work, this topic in particular benefits from its visually captivating yet analytically purposeful examination. Particularly because it covers so much ground over so many pages, the volume’s aesthetic qualities coax the reader to read it thoroughly rather than simply scanning for key takeaway messages.
The overarching theme of the book is technology as a potential threat to democracy, with disinformation, misinformation, fake news, and propaganda increasingly tailored to take advantage of the networked architecture comprising the modern media ecosystem. Grounded in a long tradition of research on propaganda in its various forms, the book gives us a close look at how these play out in the intricately networked world of modern media. The authors analyze around four million stories published between 2015 and 2018, covering not only the 2016 presidential campaigns and the early Trump presidency but also the linking behavior connecting them on websites and through social media mentions.
The first three chapters should be read in their entirety, because they provide the theoretical roadmap for the remainder of the book. After receiving an orientation to the “architecture of our discontent”—in which right-wing media are deeply isolated not just from liberal and leftist sources but from even mundane mainstream news sources—and the “propaganda feedback loop” that sustains and exacerbates this asymmetry, one may either continue straight through or jump around among the remaining chapters.
The book’s greatest strength is how it takes the networked nature of modern propaganda seriously, harnessing some basic tools of network analysis to provide a macrolevel view and then leading us down the proverbial rabbit hole to trace the dynamics of how outlandish claims spread and absurd preoccupations become ingrained via communication feedback loops and intentional manipulation.
With its big data visualization approach to understanding the media dynamics at play in the contemporary American ideological landscape, the book runs the risk of reading more as data journalism—in the tradition of FiveThirtyEight.com or the New York Times Upshot—than as careful scholarly treatment of the subject matter. Indeed, the layperson who enjoys theoretically motivated data journalism on the media and politics will likely find this book accessible and a worthwhile read. However, the authors are doing serious scholarship here; the book tries to do a lot and mostly delivers. It also demonstrates that systematic empirical research can be motivated by consequential normative concerns such as the outlook for democracy in the age of digital media.
Both books ground detailed description of a multifaceted modern media landscape in sound theory, one through qualitative analysis and close reading and the other through data analytics. Both deserve the attention of political communication scholars as well as anyone struggling to make sense of the past few years in U.S. national politics.
