How Politics and the Media Crashed Our Democracy

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Something has gone badly wrong: people loathe politicians, distrust the press and increasingly fear each other.

It’s easy to blame Russian trolls, Facebook news feeds, or the sinister manipulation of ‘big data’ — but these are all symptoms of an abusive thirty-year relationship between politics, the media, and a new information age.

Having interviewed everyone from Tony Blair to Michael Gove, top journalists to Russian bloggers, and tech giant execs to online activists, political insider Tom Baldwin describes a vicious battle for control of the news agenda, at the expense of public trust and the value of truth. He visits the RSA to show how technological change has hollowed out space for virulent new populist alternatives, including the so-called ‘alt-right’ and ‘alt-left’. And he warns that not only extremists, but also the progressive centre, may now decide to press ‘delete’ on liberal democracy altogether.

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