Roundtable No. 1 “The Future in Public Discourse: The Role of the Media”.
“Media Fragmentation: When Does Diversity Become Division?”
St. Petersburg, Russian Federation
23 October 2026
Public discourse is on a trajectory to not be a tool for cohesiveness, but rather an instrument for divisiveness. Decisions by media will be the fuel source.
Derived from a popular 1890’s comic strip featuring a bald character in a yellow nightshirt known as the “Yellow Kid,” a style of newspaper reporting, “yellow journalism” was born.
Defined as “eye-catching headlines, sensationalized exaggerations, and unverified stories to boost sales and public interest rather than relying on well-researched facts.”
In 1897, the phrase “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war” was attributed to the publisher William Randolph Hearst. Although he denied saying it.
We are three centuries removed from those two moments: more than one hundred and thirty years. Yet, those practices and intentions remain not only relevant, but continue to serve as educational tools for the media- and, specifically, those who control the media.
Is public discourse taking what was wrong and replacing it with what is right? Not really. Is public discourse meant to have an outcome or is it a component of a larger influence determining apparatus?
Is public discourse a tool for the many or a weapon for the few?
We are informational infants living an accelerated future- where fragmented media, customized media, and government media will account for an increasing share of public discourse.
Society lacks maturity to rein-in disruption to public discourse introduced by the media through the use of ever-changing technological means of delivery.
In 1848, Marx and Engels wrote in their Communist Manifesto the phrase “Workers of the world, unite!” In 2026, the dispersiveness that media brings to public discourse would have as a result no one agreeing as to the definition of “unite.”
We need be less concerned about how many are among the diversity of voices, and more concerned about what they are saying, to whom they are speaking, and who is listening.
The twenty-first century has at its core changes to how we communicate with one another and what we use to communicate with one another.
Technology has brought about advances into the marketplace that were previously found in comic books, science fiction magazines, and novels.
We have in our pockets more technology, more computing power, more reach than did all of computers in the 1950’s and 1960’s that sent rockets Apollo, Saturn, Sputnik, and Vostok into space. Imagine cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and astronauts John Glenn and Neil Armstrong having had yesterday the tools that we have today?
When I was a child, there were four television networks- ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS, the public television presence.
Back then, each evening at 6:30 pm or 7:00 pm, there would be a thirty-minute newscast; subtracting commercials, there was twenty minutes of information. Each network had a presenter who was a seasoned journalist having covered stories throughout the world. They reflected a safe space. They had gravitas. The ratings were high for each. The same goes for local newscasts which would begin at 6:00 pm as lead-in to their connected network evening news programing. There would be a second at 11:00 pm where audiences turned for the latest news, latest sports scores, and most importantly, weather forecast.
My hometown of Buffalo, New York, near Niagara Falls and across a river from Canada, is known for a presenter who in the 1970’s at the beginning of the 11:00 pm broadcast would say, “It’s 11:00, do you know where your children are?”
In the same vein, most communities had two daily newspapers. One was delivered to homes in the early morning and another in the early evening. They too had a robust subscriber base.
Today, we do not have that localized connectivity with media because media has become concentrated through national ownership resulting in ever-decreasing budgets. Cable provides a platform to deliver additional channels. The Internet provides what is today for practical analysis an unlimited information delivery service. Think Yandex Eats, Uber Eats, Wildberries, and Amazon as plug-and-play access points- no speed limit, little to no content monitoring, and access to 193 countries twenty-four-hours per day seven-days-per-week.
Anyone with a modem can create a blog, channel, or podcast. And, the use of platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Truth Social, and X among others to create a presence.
Critically important to the impact of all of this is the consequence of this new and expanding diversity. Not only are we confronted with increased choices- tens of thousands each day, but increased content within each of those choices. What I mean here are links- click to one location and show other locations or automatically directed to another location.
And who decides where you go? Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, Super Intelligence, and a small number of companies primarily located in the State of California.
Increasingly, governments, including yours and including mine, are demanding a seat at the public discourse table.
Governments are creating and funding communication operations not only to deliver their desired messages, but to compete with private sector communication operations. Concerning, and I use that term politely, governments are deploying administrative, judicial, and legislative weaponry to target with a goal of destroying independent media- and the vital role that it has in protecting those who are governed from those who are governing.
I arrive at this roundtable having engaged with media in more than one hundred countries- with travels to one hundred thirty countries.
My arrival in the U.S.S.R. was in the mid-nineteen eighties. The architectures that would become Glasnost and Perestroika were yet to be adopted and implemented as government policy and then become synonymous with the Gorbachev Era.
This was during the Reagan-Bush Administration (1981-1989). Until the arrival in 2016 of candidate Donald Trump, President Reagan was considered the most gifted political messenger in United States political history. He was described as the “Great Communicator” with a resume including actor, union leader, governor, and political party switcher.
A mentor of mine, Sergei Losev, the General Director of the TASS News Agency, introduced me to Dr. Georgy Arbatov, founder of the Institute for United States and Canadian Studies of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, who in turn introduced me to Aleksandr Yakovlev, the architect of Glasnost.
Soon out of university, I was on the inside of the U.S.S.R. global messaging operation looking outward. An extraordinary moment that prepared me well for next life chapters.
I proceeded to visit each of the fifteen republics of the U.S.S.R. and engaged with media throughout those journeys.
In the early nineteen nineties, I began and continue a role with the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council. The roots of the organization were in Moscow.
My work in government, particularly in campaigns and in offices, and then in public relations, afforded a front row seat at manipulating media. Please note that “manipulate” also means “handle with care.”
I was in Kharkiv, Ukraine on 24 February 2022, when the armed forces of the Russian Federation invaded further into the internationally-recognized territory of Ukraine. I continue to travel frequently in Ukraine, in Belarus and in the Russian Federation.
My experiences have brought me into moments when the role of the media was consequential to determining outcomes.
Some countries with secular democracies continue to evolve and devolve their communications and media architecture. Unfortunately, there is an increasing focus upon not only control of messaging, but control of who delivers the messaging.
Every day, we listen to, we read, we view media content where we say to ourselves and/or to others that “it can’t possibly get worse” and “this will be the moment it has gone too far.”
But, the media- the analysts, commentators, hosts, journalists, and presenters, do consistently and with some perverse satisfaction get worse and go too far. Why? Because redefining worse and redefining too far is the new normal, the new informational elasticity.
Speaking of the new normal, the word “normal” no longer has generally-acceptable parameters. One person’s normal is another person’s weakness.
During the Trump-Pence Administration (2017-2021), a White House staff member when confronted with a correction to a statement responded that her answer was based on “alternative facts” and, thus, required no correction. Now, there were official facts, unofficial facts, fake news, and lies.
That moment was foundational for where public discourse is today- fluidity absent a single foundation of fact.
Because now, with new media branding and re-branding towards an increasingly narrow set and sub-set of demographics, there is an audience, whether they know it or not, prepared to accept that mathematician Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, his calculation of E=MC2, astronomer Galileo’s surveys, and chemist Mendeleev’s Periodic Law are no longer globally accepted facts.
What are facts, what should be accepted as facts, are in today’s fragmented public discourse transitioning into opinion, widespread, widely accepted, but opinion.
Visualize the difference between clothing purchased off-the-rack and bespoke and how they fit the body. More importantly, how you feel when wearing the garment.
Media has become a hybrid of off-the-rack and bespoke.
The danger for society is when we no longer differentiate between off-the-rack and bespoke.
Diversity transitions into conformity and then a quite slippery pathway towards apathy.
Public discourse must include differentiation.
Private sector media increasingly competes with government-controlled media, government-favored media, government-influenced media, and government-operated media.
The significant threat to robust public discourse, whether by individuals or groups, is the appetite by governments to seize control of media, directly or indirectly, where the government rewards those in agreement and punishes non-conformers.
Increasingly, a goal of government is to obtain additional verbal, visual, and written real estate to eventually crowd out undesirable occupants.
Governments use an ideological version of eminent domain to argue that it, as the representative of the public, is best positioned to determine who occupies messaging space and what those occupants in that space express.
The phrase “in the public interest” is shifting from comforting to terrifying.
Governments increasingly believe that diversity in messaging reaching taxpayers and voters is anathema to government interests. Rather than competing in a fair and transparent informational landscape, governments adjust the informational landscape to suit them.
The common result can be increased diversity. But, not increased diversity of opinion. Just increased diversity of those delivering the desired opinion. More voices, but those voices are not delivering and protecting diversity, they are simply part of a larger herd of the same animal.
Governments are engineering the media they want. Punishing those who stray outside of official parameters and rewarding those who parrot. Individuality is only a virtue if the result is what the government is seeking.
Diversity is a trigger for division because politicians- heads of state and heads of government feel less encumbered by truth. Administrative, constitutional, legislative, and statutory guardrails are adaptable, bendable, flexible and, for some, removable.
They know as the information space expands, gains elasticity, there are fewer moments to explore a lie. The next news cycle is not twenty-four hours away; it is twenty-four seconds away.
Stare intently at the sources of information, entertainment, and infotainment for an increasing percentage of the global population- TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and Telegram.
Stare further at the amount of time the global population spends online- hours per day. The amount of time the global population is listening to, reading, or viewing entertainment rather than data, facts, information, and reason.
Attention spans continue to decrease. Content creators know they need to use fewer words, fewer images, fewer sounds.
The result is a robust quantity of diversity, but a painful ever decreasing amount of time explaining.
The most creative, exciting, humorous, insulting, and terrifying draws the most attention.
The casualty is an educated discourse.
I conclude with two quotes which exemplify the downward slope of public discourse, led by politicians, and fueled by an ever-fragmented media:
From President Trump: "More Americans are working today than at any time in the history of our country." Says federal workers hated him but now they like him because they went out and got private sector jobs. ... "I let over a million [federal workers] go." Says they've gotten better jobs, "they [women] get much more turned on" by their husbands who now make more money.
From Politico: In Georgia, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) and Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) faced off in "an hour-long brawl dressed up as a debate," The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. Ossoff accused Collins of having a "childlike devotion" to President Trump and ties to white nationalists and neo-Nazis, saying, "You've hired half the Third Reich." Collins called Ossoff an out-of-touch "radical."
