Guest Commentary: Not Another Election Post

Last Tuesday night , I went to bed early, but it was already too late.

Before I lose those of you who want to avoid reading anything political right now, I get it. Really, I do.

But this isn't another election night post-mortem about who won or lost. This is about something bigger — how we're losing our grip on shared reality. It's about how two essays, written 15 years apart, help explain why our collective imagination has become so warped that we can barely process political reality anymore.

Full disclosure: I may not be your typical news consumer. I don't watch cable news and I mostly stay away from social media. I have carefully curated my media intake ever since listening to the renowned scholar and political activist Noam Chomsky speak when I was a student at The New School in 2001. I love PBS News Hour , but otherwise my news diet skews local, which in fact, comes from my time working here, as managing director at The Citizen.

But, wow, re-listening to Chomsky now feels like picking up a prophetic radio broadcast from the 1980s, except with the signal remixed by TikTok's algorithm — it's as if the core message is eerily prescient, but all the key players have been uncannily rearranged.

For an example, watch this four-and-half-minute video that explains the "Manufacturing Consent" model Chomsky created with Edward Herman in 1988. It still hums with truth, but the gatekeepers have been replaced by algorithms, the flak machines now run on retweets, and we've all become our own media elite.

My point is that I'm pretty methodical about what news I consume, and how I consume it. I try to read / listen to both sides (nod to Tangle News .) But, I've also come to appreciate that understanding media bias doesn't mean surrendering to cynicism. In fact, the loudest voices telling us to distrust all traditional media are often selling their own carefully packaged version of reality . Yes, there's wisdom in media skepticism, but there's also wisdom in recognizing that even flawed institutions (eg: mainstream media) can deliver vital truths. The trick is learning to read the bias without letting it blind you to the facts beneath.

"A republic requires citizens; entertainment requires only an audience." — Megan Garber

But even with all my careful filtering, my well-curated media diet couldn't help but collide with the chaos of real-time political theater on election night. I was struck by how each screen and channel was offering its own version of reality, its own narrative of what was happening across America. Each felt simultaneously true and incomplete.

It was too much. I went to bed.

In the aftermath, I couldn't stomach another hot take or think piece on what happened, or what to do next, or worst of all, how I should feel. Instead, my mind kept wandering back to the two essays I mentioned.

The first essay is George Saunders ' , which was published as the title essay of his 2007 collection of nonfiction (in the days of the Iraq War), and on its surface it's about media criticism — but really, it's about how storytelling shapes our ability to imagine complexly.

Saunders sets it up like this: Imagine you're at a party where everyone's having these great little conversations. Then some guy shows up with a megaphone. He's not the smartest person there, or the most interesting — but suddenly everyone's talking about whatever he's talking about, just because he's the loudest voice in the room. People begin discussing what he's discussing, using his phrases, adopting his worldview — not because he's right, but because he's unavoidable.

Saunders describes how

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In an age of commercial media, these mistakes compound with devastating consequences. His party guest with a megaphone isn't just loud — he's rewriting the stories we tell ourselves about what's possible. He goes on:

Saunders recognized, even back in 2007, that this phenomena of sensationalistic, profit-seeking media isn't necessarily new, but says:

Which brings me to essay two, Megan Garber 's , published in March, 2023 in The Atlantic. Garber argues that we've already created the immersive alternative reality that tech companies have been promising — not through VR headsets, but through our phones, screens, and social feeds. As the subtitle describes, "Reality is blurred. Boredom is intolerable. And everything is entertainment."

Garber writes:

When we finish one series, the streaming platforms humbly suggest what we might like next. When the algorithm gets it right, we binge, disappearing into a fictional world for hours or even days at a time ...

Each invitation to be entertained reinforces an impulse: to seek diversion whenever possible, to avoid tedium at all costs, to privilege the dramatized version of events over the actual one ... it is not shocking but entirely fitting that a game-show host and Twitter personality would become president of the United States.

Garber traces these developments through the way we've become "conditioned to expect that the news will instantaneously become entertainment." For example, after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Quinta Brunson, the creator of shared how she received messages from fans that she write a school shooting story line into her comedy:

People are that deeply removed from demanding more from the politicians they've elected and are instead demanding "entertainment."

Garber explains how we've come to live in multiple realities simultaneously, each with its own rules, language, and version of truth. With a nod to the prophetic social critic, Neil Postman , and his 1985 book, , Garber explains how he diagnosed the nation with a "vast descent into triviality," and worried that "the distinction that informed all others — fact or fiction – would be obliterated in the haze."

Garber also subscribes to Hannah Arendt 's studying of societies that were "held in the sway of totalitarian dictators" and how the "ideal subjects of such rule are not the committed believers in the cause. They are instead the people who come to believe in everything and nothing at all: people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists."

Simply put: "A republic requires citizens; entertainment requires only an audience."

Reading these essays side by side, something clicks into place.

Perhaps that's where we start? Not by shouting louder, or by swiping faster, but by sharing and seeking out the kind of stories that break through our forces of habit.

Our problem isn't just that we're divided — it's that we're losing our ability to imagine each other as real people. The technology we use every day isn't helping us understand each other better; it's just making the loudest, angriest voices easier to hear.

The challenge isn't just that we're divided, but that our very ability to imagine each other, to think complexly about our shared future, is being shaped by technologies that prioritize volume over understanding, conflict over complexity.

Garber shows us how this technological fragmentation has evolved beyond Saunders' party guest with a megaphone. Now we're all starring in our own personal reality shows, where algorithms feed us exactly what we want to hear and the line between politics and entertainment has completely vanished. Meanwhile, here's the kicker:

We're not just listening to the wrong stories; we're trapped in multiple, parallel storytelling machines.

The antidote

But there's hope in recognition. As Saunders suggests:

What I propose as an antidote is simply: awareness of the Megaphonic tendency, and discussion of the same. Every well-thought-out rebuttal to dogma, every scrap of intelligent logic, every absurdist reduction of some bullying stance is the antidote ...

Or as Garber puts it:

This could be how we lose the plot. This could be the somber finale of "America: The Limited Series." Or perhaps it's not too late for us to do what the denizens of the fictional dystopias could not: look up from the screens, seeing the world as it is and one another as we are.

I've walked around these last several days thinking a lot about our storytelling impulses, our fractured narratives, and if I'm being honest: Why do we bother? And I find myself returning to George Saunders one more time:

If the story is poor, or has an agenda, if it comes out of a paucity of imagination or is rushed, we imagine those other people as essentially unlike us: unknowable, inscrutable, inconvertible ...

Perhaps that's where we start? Not by shouting louder, or by swiping faster, but by sharing and seeking out the kind of stories that break through our forces of habit— that make us pause, think, and remind us of our shared humanity.

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