Can American Democracy Survive the “Fake News” Crisis

Can a nation survive as a democratic republic without an honest and trusted news ecosystem? Is it an actual fact that truthful and reliable news — combined with the kind of cultural trust people have in both government and each other as the result of a shared reality — are both historic and necessary preconditions for a democracy to work at all?

Thomas Jefferson once famously said that if he was given the ultimatum of choosing to live in a functioning nation without newspapers or a place with newspapers but no national government, he’d surely choose the latter.

It was a statement of his generation’s love of newspapers, literature, and free speech far more than the anti-government spin that rightwingers try for when quoting the author of the Declaration of Independence. No republic in the history of the world had ever survived without an informed, participating electorate, and this nation’s Founders knew it.

This truth was echoed two generations later when the young French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, spent half a year traveling America and wrote one of the entire century’s best-selling books, Democracy in America, published in 1833.

Astonished, he repeatedly mentions in the book how blown away he is that the dirt-poorest farmer or remote-hollow hillbilly is as literate and enthusiastic about discussing current world events and politics as an upper-class resident of Paris.