The core flaw in our democracy

Our understanding of what politics in a democracy should be like is sadly lacking. In fact, the yawning chasm between how we act and how we should act is big enough to swallow the world, leaving nothing but a sad memory of a nice place behind… and is likely to do so.

Everyone has heard of Machiavelli, made famous through his (tongue-in-cheek) advice to his patron about sly deceptions and the pursuit of power over all else. That’s how politics in undemocratic and chaotic societies works; there are no rules and power is everything. That’s our history.

In the modern world we have tamed that conflict. Instead of the barbaric power-mad conniving of our overlords we let rival factions compete peacefully for votes. Who wins power is decided by who persuades voters the best. This has its subtleties: do you persuade people to think you have the best position, or do you concentrate of persuading those who already think so actually to make the effort to vote? Do you hope that by energising your base they go out and convert others for you?

This is fantastic progress. But it’s still basically the same idea: rival groups compete for power through a mixture of trickery, generous promises to the wavering and flowery rhetoric that wins broader support. Of course, the generous promises come directly from public taxes without going through the intermediate step of becoming our leaders’ personal wealth. That wealth, and the wealth of their supporters, pays for the promises to be made – it pays for the research to find out what to promise, and the advertisements to let everyone know. We pay for those promises that are kept.

What hasn’t changed from our barbaric past is the focus on rival factions. What else should we be thinking about? Well, truth and facts seem to have got lost in all this. Yes, the supposition is that truth is more persuasive for the voters, but all the evidence is that this is, well, not true. Does this persuade you? If not, it merely proves my point that truth doesn’t persuade!

People derisively dismiss technocratic government, which they summarize as allowing experts to run things; it’s a matter of faith that democracy is best. It protects us against tyranny and complete meltdown of society, because the people can trust themselves to vote in their interests – and if they don’t, at least they chose the result deliberately. Yet at the same time we put our trust in the science that has achieved modern society: our food production, our communications technology, our transport…

Where does the science of government stop and the legitimate arena of political conflict begin? At the moment, we assume that wherever the politicians choose to go is a legitimate place for them to bring their conflict. Just like when Roman gladiators left the arena and started hacking at the spectators, everyone cheered, munching their dormice and leaded wine and … no, wait. They had guards to send any straying slaves back to where they belonged. Actually, comparing modern politicians to gladiators is laughable. It makes them seem much braver and more macho than they are. But they are public servants, and modern politics is as much about the spectacle and as much about revealing truth or persuading people. Perhaps a sports simile is more appropriate? They’re like footballers, and we should expect the ‘game’ to be played on the pitch and according to the rules.

In fact, it’s very like a sport, in that most people have their favourite side, and the most important thing to them is that that side wins. If one of their players dives for a penalty, it’s clever gamesmanship; if an opposition player does it, it’s dishonourable and dishonest. The rules should apply strictly to others, but are a guideline for us.

We invoke modern concepts of ‘the marketplace of ideas’ to suggest that the wisdom of the crowd is best and democracy will always reach the truth. And yet apart from these occasional passing references, we ignore the truth as a goal. Maybe a crowd could collectively determine what is true (a dubious claim in itself), but not when the crowd isn’t even looking to buy that particular product! The goal is always for our side to win! Truth matters only because lies and lack of understanding are a convenient way to mock and belittle the opponents. Truth isn’t the goal; it’s just one way to make the other side look bad.

Imagine if science worked that way, not only in academic research (where people are people and there is often rivalry) but also more widely? Imagine if half the passenger flights in the world were planned as if the world were flat, mostly driven by a few powerful organizations that demanded it. Imagine that all the discussion over which holiday to go on focussed on rival advertisements claiming that their location was sunnier, and occasionally on mocking the other airlines because a spokesman hadn’t worn a tie. Imagine if public broadcasters had all the airlines on some sort of Watchdog programme, and gave the flat-worlders as much airtime as anyone else, or possibly more.

Would that be a sensible way of doing things? And if holiday-makers ended up in the wrong places all the time, and the airlines with the most flat-world flights were the most sympathetic, offering discount return flights for people stranded, would you buy more tickets from those airlines?

A lot of government is exactly the same. We know that parties’ policies won’t work, or won’t achieve their goals, or cannot be combined with some of their other policies. But we value the assertion of intent more than the truth: we value the statement of identity more than expertise.

Identity politics; tribal politics; democratic politics – these are all the same, and they are all based on the same barbaric notion of politics as conflict and beating our opponents. Plato, 2,000 years ago, tried to imagine a different mode of governance, of philosopher kings who governed with wisdom. We mock his ideas because we have seen countless seemingly benign tyrants become tyrannical, but a core part of his observation remains as valid now as it was then: it is truth and justice that are the foundations of society, and a mob isn’t the best way to find either.

We should be co-operating, as scientists do, to find the best ways to run a country. Our political parties should be exploring different possibilities, sharing data and coming up with results… and we should reward those who have the best findings, not those with the most appealing conclusions. The space for genuine conflicts of opinion is minimal compared to what can be understood and known for certain. Not all opinions are equal, even if those who hold them are.

If we don’t value expertise; if we give platforms to liars and charlatans time after time without asking them to recant and repent; if we care about entertainment instead of truth and complex debate, then we might as well be in a dictatorship. After all, neither system will provide what is best for us, but at least a dictatorship doesn’t involve the soul-corrupting self-deceit that currently defines us. Without a drive for truth, we are just semi-wild apes following our leader because he has covered his rival with more mud.

Media consultation

I was interested to see that the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has started a review of the sustainability of the press industry. I didn’t see anything in the news about this, which is strange. I’d have thought that the press would love to tell everyone how important they are to a functional democracy. But then again, since most of the press are engaged in subverting democracy rather than genuine journalism, perhaps they wouldn’t want to remind their readers of the fact. It’s precisely this ability to set the news agenda that makes media companies so powerful. Also, it’s never fun to remind everyone how badly your business is doing, especially when you rely on advertising.

              Anyway, the review hasn’t even started yet, but DCMS has commissioned a very interesting report into the state of the press sector, and it’s worth pulling out some highlights from the 90-odd pages.

Background

              First of all, the report tells us that the press sector has a combined advertising revenue of £1.9bn, a 70% drop from 10 years ago. That’s a lot of money, but we need to remember that total advertising expenditure in the UK is put at £22.2bn by the Advertising Association, a few % of GDP. This tells us a lot in itself, as advertising expenditure has grown considerably over the last few years, whilst print media’s revenue from it has shrunk from over £4.6bn in 2007 (25% of all advertising). Newspapers get about as much from their sales prices (£1.7bn) as advertising and although they reach almost half the population, only 9% use papers as their main source of news. The average profit margin has dropped from 12% to 0%, and many traditional brands have legacy debts to pension funds that they cannot meet.

There has been a 50% decline in weekday newspaper sales (11.5m to 5.8m in last 10 years). It might be the case that those suffering least are those offering 'quality' content, but they have still seen massive drops. And Daily Mail has done well despite having lowest quality of all – but ‘well’ in this context means limiting the drop to a mere 40%. Price increases helped to stem the revenue loss at first, but have risen by 89% over 10 years (RPI was 36%) and consumers are much less willing to accept further increases. Similarly, online paywalls work well for niche content such as in the Financial Times and Economist, but people are unwilling to pay for news. And we’ll get to the question of whether they should later.

The entirety of the press has only a bit more reach (for news) than BBC 1, which reaches about 54% of the population. This is partly a sign of how dominant broadcast news still is, even with online news growing in power. The other sources (online, print and radio) are about even. However, despite some newspapers’ constant BBC-bashing, 90% of the population gets news from the BBC and most still trust it. In the UK, as Nick Cohen wrote, news is hardly news until the BBC reports it.

Internet is taking over

Digital advertising is now over half of the whole advertising sector but search sites, social sites and aggregators take most of the money and data, leaving little for traditional newsbrands in a far more competitive market. This is a global problem, but the UK stands out because people are especially unlikely to pay for online news, and because digitial advertising is a such a big share of the market.

For a relative fogey like me, it’s surprising that so few people use desktops and only 2/3 own a laptop. Most internet access (73% is the estimate) is from mobile devices and 1/4 of adults only access the internet from mobile devices. That's vastly different from my life of sitting at my desk at work or home and forgetting that I own a mobile for days. When people talk about ‘mobile’ being the target market, they mean it’s getting on for the only important market.

Digital advertising is less valuable because of the high overlap in reach. Pre-internet a newspaper was very likely to have a loyal cohort of customers whom would be hard to reach another way. But internet users reach multiple articles from a variety of publishers and digital advertising can follow them around, helping advertisers to reach many people even without large newsbrands.

Some outcomes

The effect is most severe on local press, which often are the only ways for people to discover local issues or concerns and engage with their immediate community. The most local paper closures have been around big cities, because young people are a growing portion of residents in suburban areas as they are priced out of cities proper, and are more likely to commute into the centre by car rather than be an engaged member of the local community. Commuter society and the housing crisis are killing communities, as we already knew.

              Finally, journalism is changing. The number of front-line journalists has shrunk from 23,000 to 17,000. That’s a decent cut right there, but we should not ignore that the population has grown, and that the journalists who remain will, like many people nowadays in the creative industries, no longer have steady jobs, but will be low-paid, often junior staff, or doing piece-work rather than having salaries. The amount of solid, reliable journalism with expertise and time-consuming research behind it must therefore have shrunk far beyond the 26% cut in journalists that we’ve seen over the last 10 years. Mediatique’s report notes that the press contributes to newsgathering and serious journalism (my phrase) more than other media areas; about 50% of all original journalism. Cuts to press journalists will disproportionately affect genuine journalism (as opposed to listicles or PR recycling).

Their conclusion

The short of it is that revenues are dropping to the small fraction of income provided by sustainable online advertising and no funding model is anywhere near able to sustain the £1bn or so of direct expenditure on quality journalism. The report does not consider public policy options, but the implicit message is that this is the only way to ensure that journalism survives. The press is dying, slowly but surely.

[What follows are my thoughts, not the report’s]

Democracy

              It’s an old argument that a free and flourishing press is essential for a healthy democracy. If people don’t have correct information and good debate then they cannot make good decisions. The only way that journalism is going to survive is if people either willingly start to pay for good journalism, which seems unlikely, or the BBC and other broadcasters take on the burden of doing investigative journalism as well as merely reporting others’ work factually. We can’t rely on the press any more.

              It is in this context that Nick Cohen’s recent article about the BBC’s failure is so insightful. We live in a country in which right-wing outlets such as the Daily Mail and Sun insult and attack the BBC continually. They and right-wing politicians complain that its factual, conservative (small-c) biases are against them, for the simple reason that facts are indeed contrary to their delusional world-view. Similarly, the cultish left-wingers complain that its conservative leanings (of not rocking the boat too much)  are right-wing bias, and that the BBC is the mouthpiece of the rich and powerful. There is no conspiracy here; the BBC is not colluding with the right-wingers. It has simply been cowed by the vicious attacks, and has become hugely risk-averse. The fear of doing anything that might attract the attention of yet another excessive political backlash has led the BBC to retreat from real journalism, or from eliminating bias. Instead it pursues policies of giving all opinions equal weight.

              Without good journalism protected in our national news outlet, we’ll end up with a few niche outlets and bloggers unable to expose all the corruption in the country, and most of the population unaware of the stories that they do uncover, as it will cost too much and be mostly unknown.

              The decline of the press, and the inability for people to make money from good news any more, underlines even more the need for a publicly-funded broadcaster that isn’t threatened by Conservative austerity. Good journalism is a public good that benefits the country, and the country needs to pay for it, no matter what the whingers at the Mail, or Murdoch’s subordinates say. Once the press dies, perhaps the BBC will no longer be scared of their clout. But I doubt that they will die before either our democracy or the BBC suffers from the lack of journalism. There are too many rich people willing to pay their losses for the chance to sway public opinion.

Competition

              Competition authorities are wary of further newspaper mergers even though no group comes close to the dominance of Facebook and Google in the digital world. We need to get a grip on the online world. It has been an unregulated ‘wild west’, and the dominance of two major corporations is finally producing the inevitable fruit, of electoral manipulation by Russia and vast data-tracking scandals and fears.

              The belief seems to have been that as the services are free there is no risk of monopoly pricing. But pricing isn’t the only bad thing about monopolies. The EU has just fined Google 5 billion euro for keeping other organizations out of mobile by using their market power to bundle Android with their own apps for other things. They have stifled innovation, as the Chinese market shows: they have multiple competing possibilities doing impressive things. Strange that the supposedly capitalist West has a monolith, and the single-party state has innovative competition.

              That’s before we consider that the value Google and Facebook get is from the data. If we had genuine competition, it’s likely that people would be paying us for our data. In that sense we do have monopoly pricing: we are giving away for free what has value, simply because we have no other choice if we are to participate in the modern world.

              This is beginning to consider more than just news, but the point is clear. We need to break up digital monopolies if ‘new’ entrants, such as the old press brands and new competitors, are to stand a chance of survival. That means fines that are more than just small change, it means forcing Facebook and Google to provide genuine APIs so that developers can interface with their customers (and vice versa). For those who don’t understand, it means that I can be on a new social network and still be friends with people on Facebook. That would give us competition in social media, and it has to be law, because no company is willingly going to do it.

In this context, the new GDPR regulations are also massively important. People have been given ownership of their data, and organizations are forbidden from using it except as they need to provide the service they are offering.

This should be rigorously enforced, and powers expanded to allow this, if necessary. And if we exclude advertising as a service to the consumer, it will ensure that no-one can collect your personal data on the sly when providing another service.

My conclusions are simple: the markets are failing in this area of public good.

• We need wider national support for journalism.
• We need the BBC to be given an explicit mandate for investigative journalism, possibly at the cost of entertainment, which profit-making companies can definitely do themselves, with no need for state funding.
• We need the BBC to be protected from political interference, even at the cost of Conservative or Momentum agendas.
• We need the creation of a better online market, which needs the quashing of anti-competitive practices. 

-          Facebook should create an API so that it no longer has the power of already having everyone on Facebook. People can join a new network and retain their friends.
-          Google should be forced not to bundle products, even if it claims that makes it easier.

• GDPR should be policed rigidly, if necessary through expanding the powers of the tiny commissions currently overseeing it.
• Collections of the public’s data should be taxed, heavily, or forcibly made public (but anonymised) for anyone to research. The ability to distort public opinion or form insights into it that the rest of the country does not have is an obvious threat to democracy, and that externality should be priced.