Political Junkies Are Killing Our Democracy

How digital media made everything into an ideological Rorschach Test

This essay is adapted from a portion of my book, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020). If you like it, or you are looking for a holiday present for the political junkie in your life, you can:

Photo credit: Fibonacci Blue/Wikimedia Commons

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On the evening of January 20, 2019, as I scrolled aimlessly through Twitter, a short video shot that day in Washington, D.C., grabbed my attention.

“This MAGA loser gleefully bothering a Native American protester at the Indigenous People’s March,” read the original caption on the video. Covington Catholic high school student Nick Sandmann, a young white man surrounded by friends, smiled stiffly. Facing him was 64-year-old Nathan Phillips, an Omaha Nation elder and military veteran, beating a drum rhythmically, inches from Sandmann’s face.

Hashtagged #CovingtonBoys, I observed the video going viral in real-time, with clicks, likes, and shares ticking rapidly upward. In the first wave of news coverage and in my own progressive social media feeds, the event was understood as it was framed by those who posted it: typical Trumpian racism performed by a teenager.

But conservative partisans and right-wing Twitter jockeys told a different story: Sandemann was innocent, and the Native-American elder was a political activist trying to provoke them. As it turned out, they were not entirely wrong.

Predictably, from the moment this video populated social media feeds, Sandmann and his family became targets of anonymous violence. Covington High closed temporarily because of bomb threats. As news outlets corrected their hot takes, the Sandmann family sued them. Eighteen months later, Nick Sandmann, now a student at a small liberal arts college, won retractions, apologies, and two settlements. A federal judge threw out five additional lawsuits against media companies last summer: Sandmann intends to appeal.

The #CovingtonBoys video became a Rohrschach test for political junkies on the right and left, a synecdoche for the fun-house media world that the 2016 election created. “Tell me how you voted, and I’ll tell you what you think you saw,” wrote Jack Shafer in Politico.

In other words, right or left, we are all political junkies now: we want political narratives that feel true to be true. Sometimes we want them to be true even more when, in the back of our minds, we suspect they may not be.

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Point of argument: I became interested in the #CovingtonBoys story because something about the story—the camera angles, the speed with which it was spinning across digital platforms—didn’t smell right. And as I worked on verifying it, I strongly suspected that Nick Sandmann had been framed.

But pushing back on the villainy of a MAGA teenager and pointing out evidence and reporting that didn’t add up made me unpopular on Facebook and Twitter. Progressive friends were angry and disappointed when I urged them to stop sharing the video. Why? Because it felt true to them. As supporting evidence for this “feeling,” many went on at length about how Sandmann reminded them of Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Brett Kavanaugh, another Catholic school alumnus who had recently been confirmed amidst allegations of sexual assault.

As it turns out, I was right, and a good many people (or many good people, depending on how you see it) were wrong about what happened in Washington that day. Then, they quickly forgot about Sandmann, who, like Kenosha gunman Kyle Rittenhouse, remains a popular figure on the far right, perceived as a martyr to liberal media persecution.

Yet digital media outlets still shape stories that grab eyeballs by creating conflict, and mainstream media outlets still lean on social media feeds as tiplines.

These practices hurt all of us. And they will continue to hurt all of us until we grapple with what digital media has become, what role it plays in our political imagination, and why we are so unwilling to put our responsibility to be informed citizens ahead of the pleasure and excitement that being a political junkie brings.

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Political junkies used to be the most informed people. They were the ones who read two or three newspapers a day and subscribed to National Review or the New Republic (or both). They read polls like the pros.