Reviewing Through the Grapevine (June 2025)

Through the Grapevine: Socially Transmitted Information and Distorted Democracy by Taylor Carlson was published four months before the 2024 U.S. presidential election, and looking back the book does offer some insights into that election. Carlson is Associate Professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. In this her latest book, Carlson makes the case that the social transmission of political information(1) is, and always has been, an important means of political communication. She goes further and maintains that it is “a dominant way in which people [learn] about politics.” Though she never outright defines the term, for her the grapevine is all of that interpersonal communication that takes place on/in conversations, gossip, church, craft guilds, barbershops, watercooler talk, phone calls, chat rooms, AOL Instant Messenger, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and the like. Observing that political communication via the grapevine has mostly been neglected in academic studies, she attempts a foray into this relatively uncharted region of studies and encourages further research to extend her preliminary work.

In her analysis, Carlson relies on the standard two-step social transmission of political information. In the first step, news media initially present information to the public, after which, what Carlson terms the ‘actively informed’ share the information downstream among their peers—friends, relatives, acquaintances as well as people they bump into on social media. The ‘casually informed,’ she classifies as those who get their political news mainly through social interaction rather than directly from mainstream news organizations.

In her own words, Carlson writes,

In this book, I argue that learning about politics through the proverbial grapevine fuels distorted democracy. Distorted democracy is marked by an underinformed, polarized, but engaged public, driven by changes to the information environment created by members of the public. As people discuss what they read in the news, the information exchanged in conversations becomes distorted: it becomes sparse, cloaked in partisan bias, less accurate, and more mobilizing relative to the information initially communicated by the news. This means that when individuals primarily learn about politics from others instead of the news, they are likely to be exposed to distorted information that can affect their decision making. Specifically, individuals could learn less, believe more misinformation, and develop more polarized policy preferences, but engage more in politics.

As indicated in the quote, Carlson is especially interested in studying the causes of distorted news that occurs between and among people. She notes that most research in the field to date has focused on distortions of the news during the first step of information transmission, i.e., from news producers, typically originating with journalists and editors, to news consumers. The second step is what Carlson intends to address—the sharing of news in mostly informal social settings.

Curiously, Carlson believes the distortion of information is significant in the second stage, while at the same time acknowledging that it is difficult to quantify. One obvious limitation of her studies is that only social media tweets and replies are analyzed as real-world political conversations. Analyzing the full spectrum of political conversations, e.g., including bidirectional messaging on complex issues would be an order of magnitude beyond tweets. Just imagining how researchers could access troves of private (and even public) communication raises nightmarish privacy issues. Collecting real-world communications data, while respecting personal privacy, is one of the challenges prompting her advocacy for greater collaborative work from her peers to complement her telephone game experiments.(2)

What cannot be forgotten in focusing on grapevine information distortions is that news media groups still set the talk agenda. And, one glance at this editorial cartoon by Lalo Alcaraz in the CALÓ News speaks volumes about the media bias in favour of sensationalist news, which has a long history in America. This particular cartoon illustrates how the news media often obsess about isolated instances of high drama and violence to the exclusion of the vast expression of grievances that political violence exploits.

©2025 Lalo Alcaraz / CALÓ News.

Cartoon appears courtesy of Lalo Alcaraz and CALÓ News.

And it isn’t just the yellow or tabloid media. For tens of millions, graphic images of violence can be consumed and related over and over again through the grapevine without having to think . . . of context. This is the media playing to the paying audience, and there’s nothing new here.(3)

In addition, there is the partisanship of news organization, also not new to the stage in America. A fellow social scientist, Omar Wasow, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Berkely, in an interview with Politico posted on June 11^th shares the following comments:

Not to sound too technical, but what’s going on in Los Angeles is what’s called in social science a “contentious event.” It’s not just contentious in the sense the National Guard and LAPD are in conflict with local protesters. It’s contentious in the sense that it gets read very differently by different constituencies. When I went to Fox News over the weekend, its language was, '"Riots are gripping Los Angeles.” Conversely, other headlines emphasize a military-style crackdown.

It is interesting and perhaps noteworthy that loaded language is so common that it is often difficult to identify. Even Carlson uses the term ‘insurrection’ to describe the events in the Washington, D.C. on January 6^th, 2021. But a term that seems accurate to this reviewer would be rejected out of hand by a large part of America’s citizenry who have seemingly convinced themselves that this was an historic act of American patriotism in defiance of an oppressive and illegitimate government.

With her inimitable style, Hannah Arendt speaks to this phenomenon of being unable/unwilling to distinguish between true and false statements in The Origins of Totalitarianism where she writes

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

One such example of this sort of fantastic turnaround is provided in President Trump’s recent decision to exempt the ‘good illegals’ in the agricultural sector. In the June 14^th article entitled ‘Inside Trump’s Extraordinary Turnaround on Immigration Raids’ in the New York Times, Representative Tony Gonzalez, Republican of Texas, is quoted with this memorable pronouncement regarding the ICE raids on American farms:

We all need to focus on convicted criminal aliens. If we focus there and we’re not going after the milker of cows who’s, you know, in 103-degree weather, going after that guy and we’re going after the convicted criminal, I think we’re on the right path.

This sort of knee-jerk realignment demonstrates that the unflinching loyalty to the leader that was so evident in the Nazi Germany of Arendt’s day lives on—unmindful and unembarrassed— in 21^st century America.

The purpose of this diversion into media bias and political history should make clear just how high the hurdle is for Carlson as she argues that the distortion of political information in everyday communication may be a threat to democracy. She never goes so far as to suggest that the distortion of political communication in the U.S. has resulted in a dysfunctional democracy. The one noteworthy instance of the distortion of reality producing gross political dysfunction is the January 6^th insurrection. She argues that the rarity of such episodes is evidence that the U.S. has not descended into dysfunction. Unfortunately, she does not define exactly what she means by dysfunction, but she makes clear that she means more than simply “a situation in which a large group of Americans are ill informed but politically engaged.” This is as if to say that the problem is not in and of itself that Americans are politically ill informed. What becomes problematic is when the ill informed become politically engaged.(4)

Having invoked Nazi totalitarianism, one has to wonder just how bad the distortion of political communication has to get before the U.S. approaches the dysfunctional stage of democracy.

Carlson repeats ad nauseam these exact words—“sparse, more biased, less accurate, and more mobilizing”—to characterize and emphasize how communication in the second step is impeded by ordinary people. She believes that consumers of mainstream news will tend to render less complete and less accurate information when they communicate with their peers. And, their cognitive and partisan biases will change the original news content, and generally speaking, their communication will be more likely to prompt their peers to engage politically, e.g., vote, contact a lawmaker, donate to a campaign, add their name to a mailing list, sign a petition or attend a protest.

Notwithstanding the biases that exist in the news media, Carlson contends that we are responsible for re-presenting the news to suit our own political preferences. We edit and omit, use loaded terms and often incite others to action. It is here that Carlson makes one of her better points when she writes that “everyday people, not just the media or political elites, share some responsibility for shaping attitude polarization,” adding that “Just as journalists have a responsibility to communicate accurate, objective information to the public, so too do the actively informed have a responsibility to communicate accurate, objective information to their peers.”

On the whole the book is a useful but trying read for someone not accustomed to the language and logic of social science experiments. For example, when talking about confirmation bias, Carlson relies considerably on conditional language, e.g., modals of conditionality such as ‘can,’ ‘could,’ ‘might,’ ‘may’ and other conditional terms such as ‘likely’ and ‘perhaps.’ This doesn't instill confidence in the scientific claims of the author when talking about psychological phenomena such as cognitive biases. Second, in addition to the repetitive use of language, Carlson’s writing is filled with what appear to be excessive citations. This latter point reflects badly on a work that seems to be trying too hard to pass itself off as science—a common enough trap in the social sciences. It reads more like speculative theorizing.

Nevertheless, the topic is interesting and worthy of further consideration. A better and more accessible introduction might be an interview with Yanna Krupnikov, Professor of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan. The interview can be found at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/18/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-yanna-krupnikov.html. In the interview, Ezra Klein and Krupnikov discuss not the differences between the Left and the Right in American politics but the divide between the actively involved and the casually involved. Incidentally, Krupnikov recommended Through the Grapevine before it was actually published.