Speaking to each other

In an age of polarisation and performative outrage, our shared public space for debate is shrinking fast. James Naughtie argues that the fragmentation of media and discourse is not just a symptom of political volatility, but it’s a root cause.

In this era of volcanic politics it is surely obvious that one of the causes – not a mere symptom, but an underlying reason for the disruption – is the fragmentation of our public discourse. We talk to each other with less civility and understanding. There is more shouting, and abuse. More often than at any time in living memory, social division is presented in politics as desirable.

For about two decades we’ve been getting used to the revolution in communication among ourselves, to a point where our social media skills have, for many people, led to isolation instead of connection. Togetherness is the illusion; atomisation the reality.

Meanwhile, the media landscape has become a quagmire.

A grey-bearded journalist is open to a charge of nostalgia, of course. As late as the early 1980s, Linotype machines would cast pages in molten lead as they’d been doing unchanged for a century, and we loved the sound of the presses churning. That’s gone with the wind, as was inevitable one day, and new technologies can produce better and bigger newspapers. But where are they?

Circulations have fallen precipitously, standards of basic literacy have plunged, the desire to inform often gives way to a temptation to satisfy the prurient mood of the moment. A former editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, was widely derided in the 1990s when he predicted the demise of the press as we know it. Unfortunately, he was right.

But surely, it’s said, there are more readers of newspaper titles online than ever before. Why does it matter? Because a valuable public space for information and discussion has given way to an auction for cheap thrills, determined by website editors who are interested to an obsessive degree only in how many clicks they can get on a page. Increasingly, that is how success is measured in a downward spiral.

If you want to measure the effect this culture change has had on political discourse, look to the United States. As so often, it’s ahead of us (whether we like it or not). Everyone serious in American politics – across most of the spectrum – will talk to you privately about the consequences of changes in the consumption of news that mean vast number of citizens will choose, as they’re encouraged by big-money campaigns, to watch or listen only to content that will reinforce their views and hardly ever challenge them.

I spoke recently to the proprietor of a public radio station in the Midwest, defunded by the Trump administration and depending now on listener-subscription alone (a very rickety business model). He believes in straightforward balanced journalism, regrets the polarisation of journalism in line with high-octane politics, and said to me wistfully: “The middle is a lonely place to be right now”.

Lonely indeed. Divisiveness is the badge of the Trump era: not an unfortunate consequence, but too often its very purpose.

So where is the public space for debate and rational argument, when consensus is presented as the wimps’ option? Getting it back means first talking about why it matters.

We may like to believe that there was a time when this wasn’t necessary. Forget that. Now it is needed. Not only journalists but anyone in any segment of the public sphere has to prioritise the need for truthfulness in public comment and argument. Claims must be tested and refuted when they’re found wanting. Dangerous social and political tropes have to be exposed for what they are; above all, demagoguery has to be challenged. The pinprick lights of independent, brave and thoughtful journalism must be cherished.

How obvious this all sounds. But anyone who tunes in sensitively to the cacophony of much of the contemporary American political debate will realise that if we don’t struggle for the right to disagree civilly, that freedom could be grievously eroded, or even disappear.

If this seems too doom-laden, so be it. But it is hard – trying to hold on to the journalistic values of the BBC and shared by our other mainstream broadcasters, which remain intact – not to fear the danger of sliding hopelessly into a public debate that offers lots more mud and gore but very little enlightenment.

That outcome would not only be a disaster for the way we speak to each and exchange information, but for our politics too. The two are intertwined and feed off each other, so often to their own detriment.

What was the price of liberty? Eternal vigilance, certainly. But now it needs action too to defend what might be lost.

By James Naughtie FRSE, Special Correspondent, BBC News

This article originally appeared in ReSourcE ReSourcE Autumn/Winter 2025.

The RSE’s blog series offers personal views on a variety of issues. These views are not those of the RSE and are intended to offer different perspectives on a range of current issues.