2025

“A Theory of Media That Explains 15 Years of Politics”

THE NEW YORK TIMES

(25 February 2025)

by Ezra Klein

In 2016, when Donald Trump won for the first time, there was this self-published book by a former C.I.A. media analyst named Martin Gurri that became kind of a phenomenon in Silicon Valley. The book was called “The Revolt of the Public,” and it described how politics was changing because media and information had gone from scarce to abundant. This new informational dynamic creates constant recurrent crises for whoever is in power: The ability to control a narrative is gone. And in this world of fractured media, there is always an incentive and ability to show what is wrong with whoever is in power. Gurri argued that this dynamic is fundamentally unstable. It’s one that knows how to destroy but not how to build.

Gurri is a visiting research fellow at the Mercatus Center, and he writes for The Free Press, Discourse magazine and City Journal, among others

Ezra Klein: Martin Gurri, welcome to the show.

Martin Gurri: Great to be here.

In 2014 you published this book, “The Revolt of the Public.” Lay out the basic argument you were making about attention, media and publics.

The argument of the book goes back to my days at C.I.A., where I had one of the least sexy jobs you could have. I was an analyst of global media, and it was a relatively straightforward job. If the president asked you: How are my policies playing in France? You went to two newspapers that were considered authoritative sources — that’s what we called them.

Around the turn of the century, this digital earthquake generated this tsunami of information that was essentially unparalleled in human history. And there’s numbers backing that up. And we just got swamped. My first response, of course, as somebody who deals with authoritative information, was: What’s authoritative in this infinite mass of stuff? The second part was: What is the effect of going from a world where information is extremely valuable to one that is so abundant that you don’t know what it’s worth? We could track it. As different countries digitized, we could see ever increasing levels of social and political turbulence right behind it. So the book is trying to explain that. What became very clear was that the set of institutions that hold up modern life in the 21st century — the government, the media, business, academia — were shaped in the 20th century. Very top down, very hierarchical.

So what the internet did, what the digital revolution did, was essentially create the possibility of this gigantic information sphere that was outside the institutions. And it turned to the institutions, and the first one it turned to was media. It was this big fight between the blogs and the mainstream media, which was the enemy. And sure enough, when that happens, you can find many errors and many mistakes, some bad faith, in the institutions. It’s institutional failure and elite failure that set the information agenda on the web. I mean, that’s pretty clear. It can be any number of things. But the total effect of that is a gigantic erosion of trust in the institutions, which then builds up even stronger in this digital world that is noninstitutional.

I believe that the information structure is one of the most determinative factors in any society. It shapes the landscape. It’s an ecological force. So if you’re dealing with mass media, 20th-century style, it’s top down: You need to have a printing press or a TV station, which takes a certain kind of overhead and money. And you can’t talk back to it. So the mood of information — that’s Marshall McLuhan-ish —

Make my heart beat faster. [Laughs.]

Yeah. I’m a semi-McLuhanist. I think he was right on about a lot of things. And I think one of the things he was right about is that everything else is downstream from how we exchange information. Politics is downstream. Even culture is downstream. Because it gets exchanged in certain media. Now, I would say, in part, you’re right, that the rise of digital media just crashed into a world constructed around analog media and broke it to pieces. And there’s the question of how the digital media in and of itself stimulates controversy and hostility and uncovers a lot of negation toward the institutions that was almost certainly already there but was masked by that former top-down system — where, if The New York Times is talking down at you, you didn’t get or go to the comment section or on X and say, “New York Times, you’re wrong.” No, you just got to either throw it away or write a letter to the editor or something along those lines.

I think a lot of the hostility, a lot of the negation, a lot of what’s happened with the public is now a global phenomenon. We Americans are very provincial, but it’s by no means an American monopoly. This rise was there. It was just masked by the previous information system. And this information system stimulates it but also releases it.