The Modern Origins Of Our Epistemic Crisis A Media Democracy

The SSRC’s Media & Democracy program has launched a series of workshops that put current controversies and debates into historical and cross-disciplinary perspectives. Here, Mike Miller and James Kirwan provide the key takeaways from a recent event on “A Modern History of the Disinformation Age.” Scholars at the workshop engaged the roots of our “epistemic crisis” regarding... A well-functioning democracy, it is commonly held, depends on an informed citizenry, and that informed citizenry in turn depends on the Fourth Estate—the collection of organizations that constitute the news media. Alas, in recent years, this pillar of democratic politics has been eroding. A 2018 report by Gallup and the Knight Foundation showed a significant decline in trust in media, with the majority of US adults, and more than nine in ten Republicans, reporting having personally lost... and James L.

Knight Foundation, 2018). Indeed, there is an argument that the combination of political polarization, declining trust in media institutions, and asymmetric media ecosystems2Analysis by Benkler et al. found that “While concerns about political and media polarization online are longstanding, our study suggests that polarization was asymmetric. Pro-Clinton audiences were highly attentive to traditional media outlets, which continued to be the most prominent outlets across the public sphere, alongside more left-oriented online sites. But pro-Trump audiences paid the majority of their attention to polarized outlets that have developed recently, many of them only since the 2008 election season.” “Study: Breitbart-Led Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda,”... are the foundation of an epistemic crisis: a state of affairs in which partisans disagree not simply on policy, but on facts themselves.3Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, “Epistemic Crisis,” chap.

1 in Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). In an effort to understand the origins of this crisis of epistemology, the Social Science Research Council’s Media & Democracy program convened a research workshop on December 13–14, 2018, at George Washington University’s School... “There is an argument that the combination of political polarization, declining trust in media institutions, and asymmetric media ecosystems are the foundation of an epistemic crisis: a state of affairs in which partisans disagree... The workshop cochairs were Lance Bennett, University of Washington, and Steven Livingston, George Washington University. was complemented by an expert panel discussion moderated by SMPA’s director, Frank Sesno. The panel included three scholars from our workshop—Yochai Benkler (Harvard University), Naomi Oreskes (Harvard University), and Paul Starr (Princeton University)—and New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer.

Here we highlight and summarize three overarching themes from the workshop, and share an accompanying set of video clips that reflect the breadth of conversation on the expert panel. Over the course of the two-day workshop, three themes emerged as key for understanding the ongoing epistemic crisis: the coordinated efforts of ideologically motivated actors, the failure of traditional bulwarks, such as legacy media,... The coordinated efforts of ideologically motivated networks of actors to cast doubt on the institutions we rely on to generate public knowledge—the academy, the media, and, in perhaps less salient ways, the government—are not... To give one example, it is now well established that efforts to undermine scientific consensus on the effects of tobacco use were mobilized by lobbyists for the tobacco industry for the purpose of insulating... This goal was achieved primarily by privately lobbying politicians and publicly amplifying marginal scientific claims that sowed doubts about the link between smoking and cancer. Scholars at our workshop argued that the tobacco model of disinformation has been repurposed and augmented in recent years, incorporating extended networks of funders, think tanks, academic research centers, pollsters, marketing agencies, political parties,...

The goal, it appears, is not necessarily to prove that one position is more valid than another, but rather to make it too difficult for consumers to judge whether consensus exists at all. Much of our knowledge of the world comes not from direct sensory experience, but from reliance on epistemic authorities: individuals or institutions that tell us what we ought to believe. For example, what most of us believe about natural selection, climate change, or the Holocaust comes from our reliance on epistemic authorities (scientists, historians). Sustaining epistemic authority depends, crucially, on social institutions that inculcate reliable second-order norms about whom to believe about what. The traditional media were crucial, in the age of mass democracy, with promulgating and sustaining such norms. The internet has obliterated the intermediaries who made that possible, and, in the process, undermined the epistemic standing of actual experts.

This essay considers some possible changes to existing free speech doctrine to remedy the epistemological crisis brought about by the internet. Brian Leiter is the Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values at the University of Chicago Law School. Leiter’s research interests are in moral, political, and legal philosophy, in both the Anglophone and Continental European traditions. His books include Marx (with Jaime Edwards, 2025), Teoría del Derecho realista: Ensayos selectos (2024), Moral Psychology with Nietzsche (2019), Nietzsche on Morality (2015), Why Tolerate Religion? (2012), and Naturalizing Jurisprudence (2007).

Every society has mechanisms for inculcating in its citizens beliefs about the world, about what is supposedly true and known. These epistemological mechanisms include, most prominently, the mass media, the educational system, and the courts. Sometimes these social mechanisms inculcate true beliefs, sometimes false ones, and most often a mix. What the vast majority believe to be true about the world (sometimes even when it is not) is crucial for social peace and political stability, whether the society is democratic or not. In developed capitalist countries that are relatively free from political repression, like the United States, these social mechanisms have, until recently, operated in predictable ways. They insured that most people accepted the legitimacy of their socioeconomic system, that they acquiesced to the economic hierarchy in which they found themselves, that they accepted the official results of elections, and that...

Although ruling elites throughout history have always aimed to inculcate moral and political beliefs in their subject populations conducive to their own continued rule, it has also been true, especially in the world after... One cannot extract wealth from nature, let alone take precautions against physical or biological catastrophe, unless one understands how the natural world actually works: what earthquakes do, how disease spreads, where fossil fuels are... This is, no doubt, why both authoritarian regimes (like the one in China) and neoliberal democratic regimes (like the one in the United States) invest so heavily in the physical and biological sciences. In the half-century before the dominance of the internet in America (roughly from World War II until around 2000), the most prominent epistemological mechanisms in society generally helped ensure that a world of causal... There were, of course, exceptions: the panic over fluoridation of water in the 1950s is the most obvious example, but it was also anomalous. Even false claims about race and gender (that were widespread in the traditional media until the 1960s and 1970s) were met with more resistance from the pre-internet media, especially from the 1960s onwards.

The basic pattern, however, was clear: social mechanisms inculcated many true beliefs about how the natural world works, while performing much more unevenly where powerful social and economic interests were at stake. In this conversation, hosted by the SSRC’s Media & Democracy program, program officer Mike Miller revisits an often overlooked topic—expectations and predictions for the internet in its early days—with Sarah J. Jackson (Northeastern University) and David Karpf (George Washington University). Understanding the pessimistic and optimistic outlooks journalists, entrepreneurs, and others had for the internet, where these predictions fell short, and whose voices were listened to, sheds light on the digital age’s present and future... The SSRC’s Media & Democracy program has launched a series of workshops that put current controversies and debates into historical and cross-disciplinary perspectives. Here, Mike Miller and James Kirwan provide the key takeaways from a recent event on “A Modern History of the Disinformation Age.” Scholars at the workshop engaged the roots of our “epistemic crisis” regarding...

In this conversation hosted by the Media & Democracy program, program officer Mike Miller discusses the trajectory of campaign financing in recent elections with Ciara Torres-Spelliscy (Stetson University) and Heath Brown (John Jay College... In particular, they address the impact of online fundraising and small-dollar contributions. The Media & Democracy program has released a report on the proceedings from its April 2018 conference on "Social Media and Democracy." Here, program codirector Kris-Stella Trump provides an overview of the report and... Die epistemische Krise und der Aufstieg des Rechtsextremismus: Zur Konzeptualisierung von Gegenwissensordnungen in der digitalen Wissensgesellschaft You have full access to this open access article Years of global crises since the turn of the millennium and recently the coronavirus pandemic have made the opening fault lines of rationality in digital knowledge society more visible.

This paper draws from work on the digital transformation of knowledge societies. It considers how the conditions of this transformation have not only profoundly influenced the established knowledge order but also facilitated the emergence of counter-knowledge orders. Counter-knowledge orders dissolve knowledge contexts, reorganize hierarchies and claim roles in digitalized knowledge societies to create and maintain subversive alternatives freed of the established order’s rules and impositions. To exemplify the analytical power of counter-knowledge orders as a concept, this paper considers the far right as a counter-knowledge order. This approach is shown to help reconcile the apparent contradictions and inadequacies that are criticized in the dominant counterpublic framework for studying the far right from a knowledge centered perspective. For the far right, the allure of counter-knowledge orders lies in the simultaneous assumption of different social power positions that the established order grants and withholds.

The paper concludes that the far-right struggle for hegemony can ultimately be understood as an attempt to (re-) gain control over the entire knowledge process. The anti-democratic, illiberal and exclusionary presuppositions of far-right ideology at the basis of all dimensions of the far-right counter-knowledge order are well-documented in the literature. From a social-epistemologist perspective, however, it is important to stress that counter-knowledge orders are not a‑priori assuming any illiberal ideology per se and may, in different contexts, even be seen as a necessity for... The simultaneous danger and necessity of counter-knowledge orders in liberal democracy merit further exploration in the future. Moreover, it is important to scrutinize the societal conditions that uniquely enable the far-right counter-knowledge order to capitalize on these dynamics. Die globalen Krisen seit der Jahrtausendwende, zuletzt die Coronapandemie und Kriege in Nahost sowie der Ukraine, haben Bruchlinien digitaler Wissensgesellschaften deutlicher sichtbar gemacht, die nicht nur entlang von Überzeugungen zum jeweiligen Gegenstand verlaufen, sondern...

Dieser Text befasst sich damit, wie die digitale Transformation der Wissensgesellschaft und deren Bedingungen die Entstehung von Gegenwissensordnungen begünstigen. Gegenwissensordnungen nutzen die Bedingungen einer digitalisierten Wissensgesellschaft zur Auflösung von Wissenskontexten, zur Reorganisation von Hierarchien und zur Beanspruchung von Rollen innerhalb dieser Kontexte. Gegenwissensordnungen konstruieren so eine subversive Alternative, die nicht an die Regeln und Zumutungen der etablierten Ordnung gebunden ist. Zur Veranschaulichung des Konzepts der Gegenwissensordnungen, wird hier die extreme Rechte (far right) betrachtet und gezeigt, wie dieser Ansatz unter anderem hilft, scheinbare Widersprüche und Unzulänglichkeiten in der Analyse der Far Right in der... Die Anziehungskraft einer Gegenwissensordnung für die extreme Rechte liegt in der Gleichzeitigkeit der Inanspruchnahme verschiedener Positionen sozialer Macht, die von der herrschenden Ordnung zugestanden und vorenthalten werden, d. h.

in der Verknüpfung von Widerstand und Defensivität. Abschließend wird betont, wie wichtig es ist, die extreme Rechte als eine Gegenwissensordnung zu untersuchen, um ihre potenziellen Auswirkungen auf die liberale Demokratie zu verstehen. Die antidemokratischen, illiberalen und ausgrenzenden Voraussetzungen der rechtsextremen Ideologie, die allen Dimensionen der rechtsextremen Gegenwissensordnung zugrunde liegen, sind in der Literatur gut dokumentiert. Aus einer sozialepistemologischen Perspektive ist es jedoch wichtig zu betonen, dass Gegenwissensordnungen nicht von vornherein eine illiberale Ideologie voraussetzen und in verschiedenen Kontexten sogar als Notwendigkeit für eine gerechtere Wissensordnung angesehen werden können. Die gleichzeitige Gefahr und Notwendigkeit von Gegenwissensordnungen in der liberalen Demokratie verdienen es, in Zukunft weiter erforscht zu werden. Darüber hinaus ist es wichtig, die gesellschaftlichen Bedingungen zu untersuchen, die es der rechtsextremen Gegenwissensordnung ermöglichen, aus dieser Dynamik Kapital zu schlagen.

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