Journalism’s <em>What If </em>Problem

When I was growing up in New York in the 1970s, the city was at its nadir—bankruptcy, burned-out buildings, rampant crime. I started in public school, then switched to private in the fifth grade. My parents made the change because they said that if I went to the local middle school, I would be “knifed in the halls.” This was an act of fiction.

I say it was an act of fiction not because getting knifed was an impossibility, but because it was speculative, one of many potential futures. In reality, thousands of kids went to Intermediate School 70 that decade and were never knifed or threatened with a knife, though some were. In my house, the fear of that potential future was strong enough for my dad to take on extra work and make the change.

As a novelist and filmmaker, I spend a lot of time thinking about the value of fiction. I tell stories to help me understand my world and the people in it. My job is to create feelings in the audience—fear and longing, joy and anger. When I consider the author’s role in our culture, I picture the following sequence: first comes news, then comes history, then comes fiction. Novelists and filmmakers are the cleanup crew, parsing meaning from the historical realities we have shared. But over the past 10 years, I’ve noticed something at first puzzling, then alarming. Fact and fiction are trading places in the sequence.

[Tom Nichols: The Trump marathon]

I first saw evidence of this phenomenon during coverage of the 2016 Republican National Convention. Halfway through the week, a CNN anchor noted in an interview with Newt Gingrich, the Republican politician and former speaker of the House, that violent crime was down across the country. But Gingrich argued that this was just one “view” and that people “feel more threatened.” The CNN anchor insisted, “Feel it, yes. They feel it, but the facts don’t support it.” Without missing a beat, Gingrich said, “As a political candidate, I’ll go with how people feel, and I’ll let you go with the theoreticians.”

This was an early sign that we were moving, perhaps had already moved, from a fact-based world to a fictional one, where how people feel about crime is as real as the crime itself. My feelings, your feelings, everybody’s feelings are facts—and facts of equal value to actual reality. Crime is up because I feel like crime is up. And you will never convince me otherwise, because my feeling is a fact.

Now, feelings, as I’ve suggested, are meant to be the purview of fiction writers. We construct our stories around the feelings of our characters. How they feel drives their actions. Feelings are not, traditionally, how we as humans understand reality, how we filter events into first news and then history. Those are assembled—in a perfect world—from actual facts, an objective recording of events that occurred. The motivations of the players matter, certainly. But the feelings of the reader? Of the observer? How we feel about what happened in the world cannot change what happened. Can it?

That was one sign. Another was the rapid proliferation of alternative narratives. In the old days, when news happened, the media would report the facts—two planes crashed into the Twin Towers, which then collapsed. Only later would conspiracy theories emerge—9/11 was an inside job, for example.

Then came January 6, an event that unfolded as fact and fiction simultaneously. While the mainstream media showed us footage of Donald Trump supporters storming the Capitol in real time, Fox News, other right-wing outlets, and social media told people that the riot they were watching was actually the work of antifa. And so, before our eyes, the fictional version of the moment was born at the same instant as the reality.

These days, MAGA’s fictions focus primarily on the present—“They’re eating the dogs; they’re eating the cats”—and the past, a stolen election, stories of when America was “great.” But this process of fictional thinking is not restricted to the right. More and more, mainstream news sources are also engaging in acts of fiction. Rather than the past or present, however, their fictions focus primarily on the future. During the 2024 election, that fiction revolved around what could happen if Trump were reelected: dark speculation about all the ways in which it would bring the end of democracy. Early this year, for instance, this magazine published a collection of essays under the headline “If Trump Wins.” Now that he has, the speculation has only increased.

Think of it as the opposite of fan fiction—Donald Trump: Tales of a Day-One Dictator. A revenge fantasy starring Matt Gaetz as the grim reaper. As with many stories of the Trump era, this one has echoes of World Wrestling Entertainment, a violent soap opera populated with larger-than-life characters driven by grievance and a need for payback.

Each new Cabinet appointment produces speculation about soldiers in the street, 10 million migrants deported, Nancy Pelosi thrown in jail. Like my potential knifing in the middle-school halls, these consequences are not impossible: Trump has, in fact, threatened to do all of these things. Nor are they even unlikely. But their exhaustive discussion, in the same sources that report the facts of the day, confuses Americans about what role the news media are supposed to play in our society—which is to report the facts and let audiences form an opinion.

Speculation is not the function of journalism. It is what an anxious brain does, worrying about all the ways things could go wrong, sending the worrier into a panicked and angry state—the same state of mind, I would add, that consumes Fox News viewers. In the past 20 years, Fox has made billions off its viewers’ anxiety, the fear its hosts inspire motivating those viewers to watch more and more Fox in a cause-and-effect spiral. In the online age, this is known as doomscrolling.

You can argue that there’s no equivalency—that replacing fact with fiction in the present is dangerous, while painting pictures of potential disasters is simply being prepared. My point, though, is not that news organizations are inventing the threat to democracy. My point is that when they fill their feeds with what ifs, they degrade the exercise of journalism, turning news into gossip and journalists into pundits.

This is not a new phenomenon. Twenty-four-hour cable-news networks and talk radio were the original alarmists, but in a country where the news media itself are polarized between “our” sources and “their” sources, we should consider the idea that how journalists report the news may be as important as the news itself. And if the definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, then journalists should examine the possibility that nearly a decade of “resistance” has had the opposite effect as was intended. After all, major news organizations have been warning for years that Trump is dangerous, yet he has only become more popular. The mainstream media may be trapped in an emotional call-and-response with the audience that escalates fear and anger at the expense of our shared reality.

[From the March 2023 issue: We’ve lost the plot]

There is a larger story here about how algorithms push content with high emotional impact into our feeds, and how clicks and likes drive advertising dollars. That is, a story about how news is a for-profit business. But to the degree that this is a story about how news organizations approach the job of informing Americans about the events and personalities of the day, I’m going to keep it simple and say that by using the tools of fiction to stir feelings of fear and anger, news platforms undermine the real value of their news and impair people’s ability to consider it clearly. After all, fear, as the novelist Frank Herbert once wrote, is the mind-killer.

One day in the not-too-distant future, history books will be written about what actually happened in the second Trump term. Then the fiction writers will descend, looking for meaning, having meditated on the realities we’ve experienced, the truths we’ve uncovered. And if it turns out we were all knifed in the halls, we will write about that as well. But until then, I think we are all best served by focusing on what is happening, not what might.