Spencer’s 2024 Holiday epistle:
Peace on earth
…
and how I think you can contribute to it.
2024 was another good year for Spencer Graves but a dramatically worse year for many others. Political polarization and violence have been increasing in the US and around the world.
Since July 30, I’ve been producing a fortnightly series of interviews via Zoom, editing the audio to 29:00 mm:ss for my “Media & Democracy” show syndicated for the Pacifica Radio network of over 200 community radio stations. I post the videos to Wikiversity under “Category:Media reform to improve democracy”. In 2024 I published such 14 interviews to Wikiversity. Some of the most important things I’ve learned so far from doing this are summarized in Figure 1. I created this plot from data in a 2024 research paper by Neff and Pickard; I interviewed Pickard Dec. 13.
For this study, Neff and Pickard only considered 33 countries that are either “full” or “flawed democracies”, according to the Economist Democracy Index (EDI), compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit, associated with the conservative British news weekly, The Economist; Neff and Pickard omitted regimes considered “hybrid” or “authoritarian”. Among those 33 countries, the total funding for media was the best predictor of EDI. When they split that between public and private funding, they found that publicly funded media generally sought to inform everyone, while privately funded media focused primarily on people with more money to spend.
I do not want government bureaucrats nor corporate bureaucrats censoring the media. There are major problems with government censorship in authoritarian regimes. However, in the best democracies, Neff and Pickard’s statistical models documented how relatively high levels of public funding with effective firewalls that mostly eliminate political interference in the content are better for democracy than private funding. That’s partly because the only limit on the influence of major advertisers on the content of commercial media is often its ability to attract an audience: Every media organization sells changes in audience behaviors to the people who give them money. The media available in Cheyenne County, KS, as I was growing up on a farm there, suggested that adults who were unemployed were either lazy or stupid. In the 1930s with a third of the workforce unemployed, that did not sell newspapers. By the 1950s, that had changed in conservative regions like Cheyenne County. By 1968, such arguments helped get (Republican) Richard Nixon elected as President.
December 20, I interviewed Michael Novick, former interim general manager for KPFK radio in Los Angeles. He said, “One of the first things that Richard Nixon did was introduce the Tax Reform Act of 1969, [which] said that any … organization that wanted nonprofit status could not support voter registration drives or … activities that … affected legislation.” Evidently, President Nixon and majorities in the US House and Senate did not want everyone to vote. Eleven years later, Republican Christian Conservative Paul Weyrich said, “I don’t want everybody to vote. … [O]ur leverage in the elections … goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
Many Republicans in recent years have made increasingly strident claims of massive voter fraud, including claims that voter fraud cost Trump the 2020 election. The reference I’ve found most credible on the prevalence of vote fraud is Fish v. Kobach (2018): Figure 1. Level of democracy vs. government funding for public media as a percent of national economy (Gross Domestic Product, GDP; numbers in the appendix below.)
Steven Wayne Fish and others sued (Republican) Kris Kobach in his capacity as Kansas Secretary of State over voter registration procedures that Fish et al. claimed were designed to disenfranchise likely democratic voters. Kobach was able to document 39 cases of noncitizens who had registered to vote in Kansas. He insisted that was just the tip of an iceberg. Meanwhile, his Election Voter Information System included 400 individuals with “birth dates after their date of registration, indicating they registered to vote before they were born.” Judge Julie Robinson, who had been appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush (a Republican), concluded that it was “only an icicle, largely created by confusion and administrative error.”
The primary divide in US politics is NOT between Republican and Democrat / Conservative and Liberal: It’s between the people who control most of the money for the media and elected officials on one side and the bottom 99% on the other. I’ve documented elsewhere how military and political leaders are NOT selected on their ability to secure broadly shared peace and prosperity for the long term: They are selected on their ability to please the people who control most of the money for the media. Many politicians cannot get elected without betraying the humans they allegedly represent.
In armed conflict, a primary difference between the different parties is the media that each side finds credible.
How I think you can help
If you want to contribute to peace on earth, good will towards humans, I suggest the following:
⦁ When news media and others claim that we must protect ourselves with violence, ask yourself, “Under what circumstances might I see myself on the other side?” If you cannot, you are likely ill-informed.
⦁ Push yourself to talk politics with others with whom you might disagree, calmly, with humility and respect, because the alternative is killing people over misunderstandings.
⦁ Ask local elected officials (city council members, county legislators / supervisors) to match what they spend on accounting, advertising, media and public relations with citizen-directed subsidies for local news nonprofits.
I feel a need to expand on “3”: In the US, accounting and advertising have long been roughly 2% of GDP each. If local governmental entities are between 5% and 10% of the local economy, then such subsidies would provide money comparable to most of the “Full democracies” in Figure 1.
Picard recommended organizing local multimedia centers funded with this tax money staffed with journalists managing lower paid observers and volunteers with a board selected at random, like jury duty. I’ve recommended doing experiments with different funding levels and ways of managing that money: We need to be able to document the impact of such experiments, preferably with randomized controlled trials.
We can do this: We can improve our media system and the extent to which our democracy responds to the concerns of most voters. I’ve never felt I knew what I was voting for. The position of the US in Figure 1 helps explain that ignorance and what we can do about it.
And I think we must do this, because political polarization and violence are increasing while advertising revenue for news is disappearing. This has created news deserts and ghost newspapers, where political polarization and violence have been most extreme. The alternative could be another civil war, as promised by some involved in the attack on the US Capitol, 2021-01-06.
Comments?
I’ve been wrong in the past. I will be wrong in the future. That’s why I routinely cite sources: If you have a source that conflicts with my claims, let’s compare sources and reason together.
Spencer Graves
4550 Warwick Blvd 508
Kansas City, MO 64111
m: 408-655-4567
email: spencer.graves@effectivedefense.org
Appendix. Economist Democracy Index and public funding for media as a percent of national income (Gross Domestic Product, GDP) for selected full and flawed democracies per Timothy Neff and Victor Pickard (2024) “Funding Democracy: Public Media and Democratic Health in 33 Countries”, The International Journal of Press/Politics, 29(3)601-627.
Full democracies Flawed democracies
Country country dem pub media
code index %
Norway NO 9.87 0.166
Iceland IS 9.58 0.154
Sweden SE 9.39 0.148
New Zealand NZ 9.26 0.061
Finland FI 9.25 0.197
Ireland IE 9.24 0.059
Canada CA 9.22 0.056
Denmark DK 9.22 0.155
Australia AU 9.09 0.070
Germany DE 8.68 0.253
United Kingdom GB 8.52 0.173
Uruguay UY 8.38 0.066
Spain ES 8.29 0.144
Mauritius MU 8.22 0.134
France FR 8.12 0.154
Chile CL 8.08 0.001
South Korea KR 8.00 0.035 Country country dem pub media
code index %
Japan JP 7.99 0.123
United States US 7.96 0.005
Estonia EE 7.90 0.143
Israel IL 7.86 0.053
Botswana BW 7.81 0.102
Cabo Verde CV 7.78 0.216
Taiwan TW 7.73 0.001
Czech Republic CZ 7.69 0.139
Italy IT 7.52 0.101
Lithuania LT 7.50 0.085
Latvia LV 7.49 0.077
South Africa ZA 7.24 0.016
Colombia CO 7.13 0.001
Argentina AR 7.02 0.024
India IN 6.90 0.018
Tunisia TN 6.72 0.026