Welcome to ‘Post-Journalism’: How Polarization Became the Business Model–Martin Gurri

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “Post-journalism essentially is the idea that journalism commodifies polarization,” says former CIA media analyst Martin Gurri.

Instead of seeking objectivity and broad appeal to the general public, media seek to become a refuge for a subset of the population: “a temple of ideology” for people who share the same worldview, Gurri argues.

“If you take the Russia story where [Trump] was supposed to have been basically Vladimir Putin’s agent, [the New York Times] published at least 3,000 (by my estimate) stories on Trump being manipulated by the Russians. … They got millions and millions of subscribers because of that,” Gurri says.

He’s the author of the “The Fifth Wave” Substack column and author of “The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.”

In this episode, we dive into the radical transformation of the media and information ecosystems.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Martin Gurri, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Martin Gurri:
Happy to be here.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s talk about post-journalism. I’m very excited actually to have this conversation because we live in a world today where the media do not work the way that we thought they did. And you’ve been looking into this.
Andrey Mir, who wrote the book Post-Journalism, has been looking into this. Let’s dive in.

Mr. Gurri:
It’s best to go back and say we never really understood what was going on with the media. For example, in the old days of newspapers, the newspapers were never sold to the public. No American newspaper ever survived by selling newspapers to the public. They sold airspace or eyeball space to advertisers. Now when you have advertisers more or less dominating your business model, you can have a special kind of style.

That’s the old journalistic style that was so kind of remote and abstract. And you will very much make a case that you are being objective. You’re not taking sides. If you take opinion to be this dangerous, volatile substance, and you kind of put it in the little corner of your newspaper and say, this is opinion over here. You can look at it or not. But the rest is fact. It’s reporting. It’s great. It’s objective.

Well, that model blew up with the internet because all the advertisers went online. So now what is post-journalism? It’s an entirely new business model, and it was stumbled on by The New York Times. The New York Times may be the only one who can be successful because I’m not sure you can have more than one. You are now a temple of ideology for a specific set of people who believe in that ideology.
In this case, obviously, it’s very liberal, very progressive people, very anti-Trump people. When I say The New York Times stumbled into this, it was 2016. In 2016, The New York Times had less than one million digital subscribers and was struggling. Trump comes. By the end of the Trump administration today, The New York Times had 10 million digital subscribers.

By trial and error, they realized that by posing as the hand-holding, almost religious, safe garden where everybody who was terrified by Trump could come trooping into this protected garden and be told the right words. They would be told that he’s going to get impeached. No, don’t worry. Look at all the horrible things that he did. For example, take the Russia story where he was supposed to have been basically very near Putin’s agent. By my estimate, they published 3,000 stories on Trump being manipulated by the Russians. Was that correct?

In the old journalistic world, it would have been very incorrect because when the report was made on that particular subject, there was no collusion whatsoever. Was it correct from a business model sense? Well, yes. They got millions and millions of subscribers because of that. So now you have a very different model and you have a very different tone and you can call Trump a liar. The word is used all the time. You can censor certain news.

If you talk to Bari Weiss, who lived at The New York Times for a while, she’ll tell you she could not get certain stories published because they went against the great story that they’re trying to promote. Post-journalism essentially is the idea that journalism commodifies polarization. And so far The New York Times has done it really well. As I say, there can only be one Pope, there can only be one church.

I’m not sure that any other newspaper can survive doing that particular trick, but they’re doing it pretty well. And by the way, the word is not mine, it’s my friend Andrey Mir, who wrote a book called Post-Journalism, who I would recommend to anybody who’s interested in the subject.

Mr. Jekielek:
I would also recommend that book and many others, and of course, your book, The Revolt of the Public, which was updated in 2018, but you first wrote it in 2014. You were seeing a lot of the, I guess, you saw the beginnings of the disruption and then you foresaw a lot more of what was going to happen already as early as 2014.

Mr. Gurri:
Yes, okay. I get accused a lot of being prescient and having prophesied all kinds of things. You know, if you look at the very first page of that book, I say, prophecy is a bad business model, right? You want to be wrong? Make a forecast. I come from the CIA, I can tell you this is a bad idea. What I had working at the global media analysis wing of the CIA was a very high place, a very high perch, and I could see farther than most people from there.
So I could see this thing coming. I could see the internet coming, and I could see not only that it was changing communications and changing, but that there was something very political and socially disruptive, tremendous.

As countries digitize, I could see behind that tsunami of information sweeping through, I could see just ever increasing levels of social and political turbulence. And at the time, of course, it sounded naive. Now, of course, we know that it’s probably the most disrupting medium that has come since at least the printing press, and that the disruption that it began way back at the beginning of the century, it hasn’t even come close to being over yet.

Mr. Jekielek:
Why don’t I tell you how I’ve been describing what has happened? And this is actually from my reading of Andrey Mir, which, you know, frankly, has changed a lot of my thinking about the media. He’s really coming from the vantage point, I mean, as you do, that it’s actually the nature of how media works has this profound, even a greater influence on what we, how we communicate than the actual topics that are being discussed, or the opinions.

Mr. Gurri:
Right. Andrey is a McLuhanist, and I am somewhat of a McLuhanist.

Mr. Jekielek:
With Marshall McLuhan, please give us a thumbnail of what he’s doing.

Mr. Gurri:
He was a very brilliant, very eccentric writer. If you read his books, you end up scratching your head a lot, because he talks about everything. He talks about everything with a lot of confidence and says a lot of weird things, but basically had, what you just said, the principle that technology as a whole, not just media, but technology as a whole has a structure that determines human behavior. It’s an ecological force. It changes the landscape. Technology changes the landscape. So you are forced to behave differently, because the landscape is different.

Now, the information landscape, to me, is the most important. He’s famous for saying the medium is the message. The medium is the structure, right? You and I tend to, most everybody tends to just bicker over, well, he said this about that. This is a lie. This is truth. Deal with content. McLuhan dealt with structure. Andrey Mir does the same thing. He believes that the structure of communications, of information, determines a great deal of our behavior, simply by being an ecological force, by being transformative of the landscape that we live in.

So if you have a television set, you have the whole family gathered there, passively taking things on. If you have the internet, you’re sitting pounding away, going, I like, I dislike, I’m going to yell at this guy. It’s very different. The structure is different different your landscape is different you’re going to be different it can’t help and you can deal with a little tactical content questions but what matters is the bigger picture the structure has been imposed on the landscape

Mr. Jekielek:
I’m going to explain in my very glib way what I see Andrey’s argument is and I’m going to get you to comment on it, because actually maybe I can learn a bit more and add to my story or fix it. Back in the day, before the printing press, before the Gutenberg press, human beings lived and tended to live in smaller groups. They would share a value system, the whole kind of cosmology and psychology. A lot of our communication is actually nonverbal right. Our emoting can be much more important in a way, what we’re emoting with the eye contact and everything maybe has a much bigger influence than even the words that I’m using, some people would argue.

Mr. Gurri:
If you ever talk to somebody who speaks a foreign language you don’t understand, that’s true, because you can communicate.

Mr. Jekielek:
Exactly, 100 percent. Then with time, we get to the Gutenberg Bible. Of course, you get to the written word and there’s a few steps now. And suddenly you can actually mass produce information and send it out as a single message. Right. But the written word is much more abstract than this type of communication. Right. So it’s actually hard. You need, you know, Shakespeare was good at transmitting emotion. And of course, there’s pamphleteers and propaganda, things like that. But it’s actually difficult. You have to be really good at it to transmit that stuff in the written word.

But what happens subsequently, we get radio, then we get television, we get the internet, we get social media, and then we get AI juiced up social media. This is a very rapid progression. We have this way of transmitting a single idea or a single video to millions of people in many cases. But now we have that ability to emote, that ability to communicate in all these other ways than just the written word, and for people to receive them that don’t share that same value system necessarily.

And so we basically end up in this situation where we either pick the people that we agree with, and we push away the people that we don’t or the messages and that’s inherently polarizing and hence what I think Andre said that he says that polarization is the software of media today which when I first read that I was really kind of stunned, but I think there’s truth to that you know so okay here we go there’s my story what do you think?

Mr. Gurri:
What Andrey says of course is that he estimates in some way that I’m not sure I can follow, that there were possibly, in the 2,500 years of literacy, there were possibly 300 million people who consider themselves to be authors to an audience. 300 million. In the last 40 years, we have 5 billion. This has just exploded exponentially. The number of people, he calls it the emancipation of authorship. Now, when you have 5 billion people in a room, what happens? Well, it’s this gigantic noise.

What you needed in the olden days of top-down communication was enough money to get a printing press, to buy a newspaper, to get a delivery system. If you had that kind of money, you could hire the reporters. You could do it. That’s what you need. What you need now is attention. How do you get attention in this enormous, gigantic room with 5 billion people in it, all talking at the same time?

Well, number one, you want to talk louder than anybody else. So yelling and screaming is favored by the structure. Number two, if I can get you to start yelling at me, and then people start lining up behind me saying, yes, he’s a bad guy. He’s one of those guys. Suddenly, I’m a leader of my tribe. I get way more attention. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist who has written some wonderful books, calls it the Tower of Babel.

We’re in a strange situation where we’re all speaking foreign languages to each other. And I’m yelling at you and you’re yelling at me and we’re both gaining from it because our people are lining up behind us but in fact I’m not listening to you because I barely understand what you’re saying and it’s the same with you there’s no communication, so polarization is as much a factor of our rhetorical posture and it’s a question I have it’s a question I have okay and I don’t have the answer which is to what extent is internet anger, which everybody talks so much about, real.

Back in the day of the Elizabethan lovers, the gentlemen would write sonnets to their girlfriends. I’m pretty sure the sonnets didn’t come trippingly out of their mouths. That was just what was expected. You know, if you were a gentleman in Elizabethan England, you’re supposed to write a sonnet to your girlfriend, and it better be a good one. If you are an opinionator, as all of us are in the Tower of Babel, you better pretend to be angry, whether you are or not. Is it a rhetorical posture? To what extent is it real underneath that? I don’t know. It’s a question.

Mr. Jekielek:
Because again, the medium is dictating the nature of the rhetoric. I think you’re right. Is there room for people that don’t want to be angry in their communication?

Mr. Gurri:
This is an enormous room with 5 billion people. I think there’s room for everybody. I think if you want increased attention, follow the New York Times. Start your own little church of progressive elitism and say, this is a protected garden. Come to us, you know, and you will go from one million to 10 million subscribers in five years. Otherwise, there will always be people who, you know, don’t want to be yelled at. And I never, to my knowledge, have ever written in an angry or enraged mode. People read what I write. So yes, you can do it, but you’re swimming upstream.

Mr. Jekielek:
Another way to talk about this, right? And of course, I’m particularly interested in this because it is of profound significance for what we want to do with The Epoch Times. It’s never been our purpose to make people angry. It’s never been our purpose to polarize people. Our purpose, actually, has been to inform. But what you and Andrey would say would be, well, no, the purpose of media these days is to validate, not inform.

Mr. Gurri:
Well, yes. In a sense that’s true. I would say, though, that in what the web does, and I think in some sense this is even more depressing than everything else we’ve been talking about, because it’s making up for a
lack of what should be happening in the real world, is creating communities, so there is a possibility.

You, representing The Epoch Times, have a possibility of creating a special kind of community. It doesn’t have to be angry. It can be a specialization. You’re interested in this particular part of the world or this particular topic. But we all, you come here and you are now in my protected garden. We’ll talk about the things that we want to talk about, and you’re safe from the Tower of Babel. Yes, I think it’s community as much as anything else.

Mr. Jekielek:
Again, the thing that keeps me up at night, right, since we’re talking about this is I have to believe that there’s enough people out there who want to learn new things, who want to be challenged, who want to figure out how to communicate with people that have dramatically different ideas than they do. Because my concern is, to me, the logical conclusion of this Tower of Babel setup where you have the people that are most effective at kind of, let’s say, harnessing their particular tribes, we’ll just end up fighting each other.

Mr. Gurri:
I hesitate because there is such a gigantic air gap between the Tower of Babel, the digital world, and you and I sitting here in this room in the flesh. Such an air gap. And the people who go and rage online, you know, go feed their cats and take their puppies for a walk and are probably the meekest of the meek. It’s hard to tell how those two worlds interact. Far more so than it’s been with any previous information structure with a
possible exception of the printing press, which was terribly disruptive.

Mr. Jekielek:
Basically, you’re saying in real life, you can be this super nice, compassionate person, but suddenly you’re on X or some other place and you’re just a terror.

Mr. Gurri:
That’s what I’m talking about. Because you’re expected to be. Because the structure is telling you, if you just kind of become this mealy-mouthed, nice guy, nobody’s going to listen to you. And nobody talks their way on the web. You have brash, loud scream rage. So is that really what’s happening?

On the streets, we’re seeing almost staged versions of the online conflicts, for example, between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups. Maybe the bad future would be that suddenly this becomes real. But honestly, if you look at a lot of the people who have been, for example, I have looked at the protests at Columbia University and I wrote about that. These are a bunch of privileged characters that say a lot of harsh words about killing Zionists, for example.

Mr. Jekielek:
Most of them aren’t ready to do that.

Mr. Gurri:
They would just basically go into fetal position and hope that somebody would rescue them because they’re not killers. They’re not really ideological warriors. They’re internet warriors, which is an entirely different thing. They’ve taken it on enough in a university environment where that is rewarded. They have been very vocal, and in some ways, very vicious toward the opposite side.

Mr. Jekielek:
Media has been democratized, right? And then, on the other hand, one of the constructs I’ve heard it described as is, you know, there’s the sort of the vestiges of the traditional media model trying to, you know, basically stop that, you know, the revolt of the public, so to speak, right? But you’re making me think about this differently, because you just explained to me how the New York Times, you know, built its business, which is definitely not the old model.

Mr. Gurri:
No. Everything is going to change. Everything’s going to be old. The people, and there’s no question in my mind that it’s not just media, which was obviously, for pretty understandable reasons, first to be disrupted by the internet. There was a class of individuals, with a following, by the way, that ran the world in the 20th century. I call them elites, you can call them whatever you wish. They basically ran these very important institutions, not just government, but for example, the universities, the media, of course, scientific establishment, business, entertainment.

These are people who ran these institutions and they expected a certain deference and respect and control particularly. And that got blown away, got blown away. All the institutions of the 21st century started in the 20th, which was the heyday of the top-down, I talk, you listen, model of organizing humanity. And that model required a semi-monopoly over information to be legitimate, and that got blown away by the internet.

In the last 20 years I’ve seen this. Revolt of the Public is the title of my book, but the subtitle was, a crisis of authority of the institution, the crisis of authority in the 21st century. The elite have had their, seen their authority completely hemorrhage away and they are on the warpath about it. They are on the warpath about it right now. They’re trying to create censorship structures.

They’re giving us reasons why democracy can’t survive unless we censor material and limit the amount of material information and communication that the everyday public has access to. Because the public, in this view, is very gullible and can be easily misled by these populists like Donald Trump through means like fake news, for example. Therefore, some set of guardians who don’t share this weakness of gullibility, must be interposed between the origin of the media, of the source, and the public.

In other words, they must censor and detoxify the flow of digital information. We are at the present moment, in this very politicized pre-election moment, that without ifs or buts says, we need to censor free speech. Things are not like they used to be. Back in the days of the Constitution framers, information was very different. Things have changed. You need to allow us to censor it so we can protect the truth. Of course, those of us who come from Cuba have heard this story before. It’s not about truth—it’s about control.

Mr. Jekielek:
But what’s interesting, though, is that I’ve come to realize that a lot of the people that are advocating for this fact checking, I say that in quotes because I think fact checking is actually a good thing in general. You have to do it every day when you’re doing news. But they believe that this is the right and good thing to do for the good of humanity. So many people I’ve encountered believe that.

Mr. Gurri:
Yes. And the argument they give is, I’m perceptive enough to see when somebody like Trump is trying to manipulate me with fake news. But there’s millions out there who are not perceptive. And it is my duty to protect them. Between that proposition and what the Cuban Communist Party put out as its policy for media, there isn’t that much space. It’s essentially asserting that there is a vanguard that is wiser than the public that should be in control of information so the public is not misled. And I don’t know how you square that with our traditional democratic values.

Mr. Jekielek:
Yet, we are in this unbelievably chaotic situation, which is leading to all sorts of problems. And the question is how to deal with it. I think that’s part of the situation where we have all these different solutions to deal with the problem of this new communication structure.

Mr. Gurri:
Yes. Number one, it’s not a problem. It’s a condition. You have now been hit by the tsunami. You’re kind of flopping around in the tsunami in this gigantic wave of information. Yes, it’s nice to say, well, if you listen to me I will be like The New York Times. I will shrink your information down to this tiny little bit of very comforting news, using words that are very soothing to you so that your particular ideological slant is protected from all this wounding world that’s tossing you around so much.

And you can do that. It’s a business model, and many people are doing it for other ideological stances. It could be Breitbart or whatever. But we’re caught in the wave. We’re caught in the tsunami, and there are no solutions. We have to ride this thing out. We have to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Basically, we’re in the very first stages of this colossal transformation, and I’m not going to live to see the end of it. I’m looking at you. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t.

But to give you a parallel so that we are not overcome with moroseness and pessimism, it’s a story that a friend of mine, Antonio Garcia Martinez, a very smart human being and fellow Cuban, tells a story, which is suppose you went on a time machine to the Thirty Years’ War. Now, the Thirty Years’ War, including World War II, was the most horrific war ever fought in Europe, you know, in terms of slaughter, percentage of slaughter of the population. It took Germany two or three generations to recover, all right? It was horrible, and it was horrible for a reason.

Suppose you go there and you ask a typical bystander, say, well, what do you think of the printing press? Well, he would say, it’s the most destructive and vicious invention that has ever been foisted on the human race. Because look, these people are coming out of this church over here with their creed, and those people are coming out over there with their creed, and there’s four words missing here that are not in there. And now they, I got to kill you. They have to kill each other.

Because why? Because they have little books that have different words about what you’re supposed to believe in terms of religion. All right. So it took the printing press years and a lot more disruption and a lot more horrible disaster and human tragedy for it to be, you know, we learned what to do with it.

Today we know that without the printing press, we wouldn’t have had the scientific revolution. We wouldn’t have had the American revolution. Basically, the world today is what it is. It’s probably the most liberating, the most liberating information transformation in the history of the human race. But go back to the 30 years war when it was beginning, and people would say it’s terrible. It’s terrible.

So right now we’re in the middle of this tsunami flipping around and it looks terrible. It need not be. It need not be. As you have said several times, it’s a democratization of information. It need not be a bad thing. In fact, you can see how our democracy, which is, by the way, a word that we use for these enormous constructs like the federal government, which are democratic in some abstract way. You know, we vote for somebody and then they disappear. Our democracy could become a lot more participatory and a lot more interactive thanks to the internet. Now, is that going to happen? I don’t make predictions, but it could.

Mr. Jekielek:
Right, it could. Then what does it mean to protect rights? I mean, this is, this question is suddenly at the forefront. We’re actually arguing, we’re having that argument too. What does it really mean? What are the real foundational rights that we have? I don’t think we all agree on this question.

Mr. Gurri:
Let’s put it this way. The disagreement has to do with people who, so Justice Brown, who said, looking at the First Amendment, it may go too far because it hampers the government in carrying out its duties. Well, that’s the whole point of the First Amendment. There are people who are looking at it. By the way, I can show you a poll that has a majority of Americans saying the First Amendment does go too far. And I can show you another poll that shows a substantial minority of Americans saying we should censor the Internet.

These are people who feel like their point of view can only survive if these rights are somehow smothered. And there are people who would like to control the institutions in a way that they used to back in the 20th century who find themselves very uncomfortable. If you’re an elite today, it’s a very uncomfortable thing. They’re always looking at you. They always know who you are. Every mistake you make, every misjudgment, every shady deal, every sexual escapade, everything that you do is being talked about endlessly.

And you don’t want that. You want to be back in your sealed room where you make decisions that nobody knows about it. So there is a pressure to maybe we should, you know, abridge these rights so that we can go back to being the way we’d like to be.

Mr. Jekielek:
I keep thinking about Viral Inquisitor, the title of Andrey’s new book, a collection of essays. But you tell me that that’s your word.

Mr. Gurri:
It’s my phrase, yes, and it happened as follows. If you read his first book, Human as Media, he explains, which I thought was a brilliant argument, because most everything he writes is brilliant. He explained that there’s this thing about lies online. There’s this terrible feeling of lies online. And he goes, no, the internet has what he called the viral editor, which is, how do you know there are lies online? How do you know? Well, because somebody online caught it and put it out that it’s a lie. So he says, it’s a viral editor. Many, many people, it’s far more accurate than the fact finders or the actual editors of magazines.

Mr. Jekielek:
This is what Elon Musk’s idea of the community notes, right? It’s basically the viral editors.

Mr. Gurri:
The community notes, it’s a version of that. But it doesn’t have to, it’s unstructured. It’s a completely unstructured thing. It happens because of the structure of the medium. People are going to find out if you’re lying,
and they’re going to put it there. And if you want to see whether it’s a lie or not, you will find out.

Now, me being sarcastic, and sometimes having passed after that moment when Andre wrote that, I realized, well, now people are hunting lies to cancel you, right? They want to find out whether you are one of us or you’re one of those bad people. And so the viral editor has become sort of like the digital equivalent of the Spanish inquisition, the viral inquisitor, constantly hunting for heretical opinions that they can then pound on and criticize. So that’s the origin of that phrase.

Mr. Jekielek:
You see a future, because there are foundational questions here.

Mr. Gurri:
Many.

Mr. Jekielek:
Okay, give me some that are coming to mind.

Mr. Gurri:
The foundational question is how do we ride this tsunami without breaking apart somebody like myself? How do we make sure that liberal democracy, whatever it is that we mean by that, and it includes very much, maybe primarily those rights we were talking about before, is conducted at the end of this process without being damaged, number one, or maybe even being improved.

Number two, how do we come to terms with the fact that the public left to its own devices is mainly against? Because we were fractured. I say the word public, but it’s many publics. It just sounds stupid to speak of the public in plural, so I always call it the public. For an old guy like me, back in the day, the mass media world looked like a gigantic mirror in which we all saw ourselves reflected. It was meant for all of us and all of us were there, right?

Online culture has just shattered that mirror and the public lives on the pieces. It can’t unite or mobilize around any program, any ideology, any organization, or any leader. It’s too fractured. It organizes and mobilizes around repudiation. The public is always against it.

Now, you push that to the logical conclusion and you get nihilism, right? You get the idea that destruction is a form of progress. So on the one hand, you have the public heading in that direction. On the other hand, you have these elites who are wanting to drag us back into the 20th century. So we’re going to talk about foundational questions. How do we get beyond this?

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s this nihilism, because we’re seeing that even people that traditionally or groups of people that I wouldn’t expect very kind of forward-thinking American dream people buying into or accepting these incredibly nihilistic narratives. I could give a bunch of examples, but I’m seeing that a lot in a lot of different areas. There can be no future in that.

Mr. Gurri:
Right, it’s barbarism. If you are into bashing at the institutions that the elites control, as a view of the public and hate what’s going on with the institutions, and if you look at opinion surveys, they do, you just take a hammer and go after them. You have really no alternative in mind. In the olden days, radical groups wanted power so they could impose a program based on some ideology.

The public today doesn’t even want power. It has no ideology. It is opposed on principle to ideologies and programs. It thinks those are the kinds of things that the elites do. So they just go after the institutions and bash at them. And bad as these institutions are, helpless and useless as they seem to be in this new age of the tsunami, they are necessary. You cannot do away with them. So yes, the consequence of nihilism is barbarism.

Mr. Jekielek:
You told me you are optimistic, though.

Mr. Gurri:
I have always been a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist. I think being Cuban helps. For example, when people start talking about Donald Trump and saying dictator, I laugh inside. I was 10 years old and I had already known two dictators. I was basically trained on dictators as a kid. I can smell them. I know what you need to have. Forget it.

Americans have no idea about dictators. The situation in this country is dire to those who have no perspective from outside the United States. It is not as dire as you think. Our institutions, and this is the brilliance of the framers that put it together, are a lot stronger than we think. Yes, they’re being battered, no question about it. We’re all tumbling along in the wave, but they’re stronger than you think.

The American people are undergoing a psychotic moment, but compared to what I experienced when I was in Cuba, it’s a fundamentally sound and sensible people. In the end we will recover our wits, and in the end we will see this end in a way that is enhancing democracy. This is not an analytic judgment. It’s an act of faith. I’m not a Marxist who believes that history is inevitable. It all depends on what we do. Each of us has a part to play. We’ve done this before.

The 18th century, the actual democracy, which was not a democracy, called it a republic, that the framers came up with was kind of a gentleman’s club. It was very egalitarian if you belonged to a certain set of people. But women were left out, along with poor people. Originally, if you didn’t own property, lots of people were left out. The original republic was remade in the early 20th century. It’s going to have to be remade again, and hopefully can be remade in a more democratic way.

Mr. Jekielek:
There seems to be this AI revolution happening. When I say AI revolution in the sense that AI is becoming democratized. There’s something profoundly
impactful. Even in terms of elections, you see an image, however fake it was, however completely created out of thin air, basically, by an AI. It could change your behavior and change your decision-making because you just saw it at that first moment. And even you know later that it’s fake. But we just have no idea how all this is going to impact us. Or do we? Is this really as profound as I think it is right now?

Mr. Gurri:
We have no idea. And I actually know a little about a few things. But I know a lot about images. Actually, I did a study of visual persuasion when I was in the CIA with two very, very smart people. And I think in an earlier conversation, I said that I’m skeptical that I can give you words that are going to change your mind, right? No matter how I give you words, you’re going to be sitting there thinking, I’ve heard all this before and it’s not what I believe. I’m hunkering down. Images are different. Images bypass your frontal cortex.

Literally, this happens because I think we’re trained to see images as part of the real world, as opposed to text and words, which are much more abstract. They come into your reptile brain, and you just respond to them. You just respond to images in a way that you do not to text. In some strange way, the internet is a triumph of the image over the printed word, and a lot of persuasion takes place that way. The problem is, how does it work? Who knows? Persuasion towards what?

Even if you know it’s false, it doesn’t even have to be, oh, you later find out that it’s false. Even when you know that it’s false, even when you know you’re being manipulated, you’re being manipulated. Now, you can then say, well, I won’t go that way, but I’ve seen, I’ve literally been present in studies where a young woman was being shown very emotive visuals in the video, and she was saying, this is nothing. And she had electrodes in her brain and her brain was going crazy. You could see it. She could not. She thought she was immune. She was not. So that’s another layer of complexity to throw at you.

Mr. Jekielek:
I see our duty in media is to inform effectively, give people good information so they can figure out what they want to do with it, what they want to do with a better understanding of reality by having a more complete picture. Is it possible to do that today?

Mr. Gurri:
I don’t think it was ever possible to do that, honestly. I don’t think it was ever possible.

Mr. Jekielek:
And here I am saying that you’re an optimist.

Mr. Gurri:
You guys are still adhering to the old model in some ways, The old model was all the news as fit to read, and Walter Cronkite saying, that’s the way it was, on whatever day it happened to be. Then you go, OK, that’s it. That’s all that happened. Well, no. Back then there was a tremendous distorting selection process. In other words, why do you pick this news and not that news?

Mr. Jekielek:
Because you do your best. Of course it’s always going to be through the lens of the journalist or the media.

Mr. Gurri:
But it’s more than that. There are, as in every structure, ways of guiding you to places. So for example, long before the current war in Gaza and the horrible massacre of October 7th in Israel, I would say a person that gets shot in Israel or the Palestinian territories is worth many hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions of people, who get shot in the Congo.
Because every person that gets shot in Israel or the Palestinian territory makes it to the news and becomes a controversy and an issue. Millions have died in the Congo, and we have paid no attention. Millions, all right?

Mr. Jekielek:
But that’s not a reflection just on their intrinsic value. It’s just somehow we’ve assigned this kind of value.

Mr. Gurri:
This is not McLuhan, but agenda setting theory says, you read the news as if they were the important, whatever makes it to the news, this was Trump’s, you know, highway to the White House, was, yes, everybody kept yelling at him, but they kept covering him. In people’s minds, he’s important because he’s being talked about all the time.

So if you cover Israel and don’t cover the Congolese because these are important and these are not. Okay. Plus, okay, the arts. Philosophy. Right? When’s the last time you saw anything that doesn’t exist? You get a little arts column and you get many aspects of human experience that are just simply not covered in the news. Politics gets this gigantic, disproportionate primacy. Why? I don’t know.

But parallel with that, we have come to believe that the most important thing in society is politics, right? When I came to this country many, many, many, many years ago, this is the first thing I noticed. I was a young kid in sixth grade, okay? And I’m looking around and I’m going, nobody’s talking politics. I’m not kidding you, in Cuba the sixth grade kids talked politics endlessly. It was the only subject, right?

In this country, politics is not that important. It really has a limited effect on our lives. But in the news it becomes this powerful thing. Now if you want a historical reason for that, it’s because in the olden days journalists were essentially cat’s paws for politicians and whatnot, and were putting out ideas that the elites found interesting.

So I say it has never been true that you can inform the world, you have to make dire, amputative choices. By the end, you’re not really representing reality. This is representing something very either personal or institutional to you, right? Something that you have been told is the important stuff, or that you feel is the important stuff, and you’re conveying that to somebody. So lots of information is dying out there.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re not a postmodernist. You believe objective reality exists, just for the record.

Mr. Gurri:
I absolutely believe objective reality exists, but I also believe that most reality that you and I think we know is mediated. It is a mediated reality. Now, we’re talking about a crisis of authority. Truth should be connected to reality, obviously. But truth is something we receive from trusted sources, unless we can confirm it with our own eyes, which is hardly anything these days. It’s all from trusted sources. When trust evaporates and authority goes into crisis, we enter this moment of post-truth, where anybody can say anything and pretend that it is true.

Mr. Jekielek:
We’re also trying to mitigate this now, because there’s so many things reported to be true.

Mr. Gurri:
I’ll tell you what Andrey says about that. It is the most fun, because he and I, I guess, both began in propaganda analysis, right? So he says the most interesting news you can read is fake news. And the most interesting part of fake news is the fake part. Somebody can say, the sky is blue and I saw it and it was blue. It really was blue.

But somebody tells you the sky is puce and you go, I don’t even know what that means. But why is he saying that? Who is this person? Who is behind him? Who is he aiming this report at? Is it me? Is it somebody else? What does he expect to happen because of this?

So a whole range of intellectual questions get asked about this fake news that is blatantly fake. Far more interesting than somebody honestly trying to just tell you the sky is blue. I think young people should be trained to think that way. In other words, don’t think in terms of platonic truth, because us being perspectival animals in a vastly mediated society, you can only get at it sideways. Think of it in terms of perspectives and why you’re being told this information.

Who is it that you’re being told? Why did it come out this way? Why would anybody tell a blatant lie? Why do people lie? Much more interesting is why do people lie? What do they think is happening? Are they lying to themselves? Or are they actually trying to, you know, force that on you?

When I was in government, we did, we studied the jihadi videos and jihadi pronouncements, and I read more bin Laden than you would ever want to. It was clear to me that these people believed deeply that they could murder 3,000 innocents, and they were heroes to themselves. You think that’s not an insight.

It’s a big insight because inside the CIA, when the people talked about them, they called them the bad guys. You know, so the bad guys did this. The bad guys did that. Well, you had the feeling that bin Laden woke up every morning thinking, what bad thing can I do today? He was a hero to himself. That’s an insight into the people you’re dealing with.

Whether you’re lying to yourself, whether you’re lying to the other person, you achieve a much richer understanding of the information set by looking at what’s false than you do by looking at what’s true. You may not learn as much in terms of platonic truth, but in terms of what’s going on in the world, maybe so.

Mr. Jekielek:
There’s a whole discussion we could have possibly about how important ideology is in understanding somebody. Because somehow we assume that people we’re dealing with, or countries we’re dealing with, or cultures have the same assumptions we do. In many cases, they’re not. If we don’t factor that, we don’t take that into account, we could have dramatic foreign policy failures, for example.

Mr. Gurri:
Totally. If you’re standing on top of the Empire State Building and you’re looking at the Manhattan skyline, it looks like the heavenly city. If you’re at the bottom of the Empire State Building and the cars are choking you with fumes and there’s a bum there looking like he’s a dead man and maybe throwing up and everything, it looks like hell. It’s the same New York City with two very different perspectives.

The first thing you have to understand when you get information is what’s the perspective? Who is this person at the top of the Empire State Building or at the bottom? If you ask me, my definition of analysis is to strain yourself as much as you can. You can never do it. You can never do the 360 degree of seeing every possible perspective.

God maybe can do that. I can’t. The exercise has to be what do the people who disagree with me completely, what perspective is that? Where does it come from? So you at least have a more rounded idea of any given proposition than, is it platonically true, platonically false, or Trump said it, or Hitler said it, so it must be false.

Mr. Jekielek:
That’s Andrey’s thing, right?

Mr. Gurri:
Two plus two. Andrey says two plus two. In the current environment, two plus two equals four is false, if said by Hitler. So the truth is who is attached to and what ideological cluster it belongs with.

Mr. Jekielek:
Yes, but I reject that foundationally. But I think we’re on the same page when it comes to really trying to understand where the perspective is coming through, because that gets you closer to that approximation of reality, if you can capture that.

Mr. Gurri:
You’re trying to get a grip on what’s going on. If what you’re getting is mostly a bunch of either very tendentious to the point of almost being false or actually false or actually propagandistic, use that. Ask yourself, where does that come from? Why are they lying? Why are they being tendentious?

Why do they expect to gain? Are they gaining? It’s working, right? Who’s the audience? Is it me? Is it somebody else? That’s an endless game, by the way. You can get lost in it. But it’s a lot of fun, and in the end you come away understanding how the information streams and players interact a lot better that way.

Mr. Jekielek:
As we finish up, for the typical person that might be watching this show, what’s the best way to stay sane in this environment?

Mr. Gurri:
That’s a really good question. I’m not sure that I’ve succeeded. But I always say, read books. Read books. Everybody says, well, why did they do this? Newspapers are going away. How will people know? OK, read books.
It’s fine to read articles. I write them and please read them. But there is such a surfeit of people basically opinionating and explaining and lying that if you dive too deeply into it, you may lose your mind. Do what I said before, which is to get a perspective.

But the only way you can do that is to read the books and go in depth. Don’t read something that is half an inch deep, read something that gets you to the bottom of things. Read Andrey’s books and that will get you halfway there. Read books, and not necessarily books you agree with, but a book gives you enough data and enough argumentation that you can interact with it and learn whether you are going too much in one direction or not, or whether you’re just right, and this is an interesting perspective, but you can see the false falsehood in it.

Read books. In my own personal life, what do I do when things really get me down? Fortunately, I have never had a depressed moment in my life, I tend not to be that way. But when things get me down, I go to poetry. The human soul is spoken to by poetry in a way that no amount of prose can ever get there.

You read the Rubaiyat or read a lot of Spanish poetry as well. I actually read poetry in several languages, way better than I speak them. And it’s just nourishment. Because in most poetry, the tendentiousness is very human. Every poet is getting you somewhere, but it’s a very human place, okay? So now you know my secret. I don’t think I’ve ever said that in public.

Mr. Jekielek:
Who should I go read right now?

Mr. Gurri:
I love T.S. Eliot, for example. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is one of the great pieces.

Mr. Jekielek:
There’s my homework assignment.

Mr. Gurri:
Yes. Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient ether eyes upon a table. I could quote you a line from that thing. That is an amazing poet. He has several others. The Hollow Man. We are the hollow men, headpiece filled with straw. So I love T.S. Eliot.

I love this guy, Manrique. He’s a Renaissance Spanish poet who has this long view of things. When I get really down, it’s like nothing matters. Everybody’s died and moved on and nothing matters. So why are you worried about this? You and I with a loaf of bread and a flask of wine, and let’s just go out and chill.

And there is Shakespeare, of course. Some of the soliloquies of Shakespeare are amazing things. If the English language had produced Shakespeare only, it would be one of the greatest literary languages in the world, in my opinion.

Mr. Jekielek:
Martin Gurri, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Gurri:
I’ve enjoyed this a lot. Maybe we can do it again sometime.