Introducing the Class of 2025: New America Fellow Megan Garber on Entertainment, Misinformation, and More

This month, New America announced the Class of 2025 New America Fellows—an impressive group of 15 scholars, journalists, and filmmakers who have been selected from a large pool of competitive applicants. This year’s fellows will dive into an exciting array of topics, from immigration and prison reform to American intelligence abroad and the dynamic world of high school mariachi competitions.

Among this year’s talented fellows is journalist Megan Garber, known for her sharp analysis at the intersection of politics and culture. Her work explores the nuances of modern society with a unique perspective that challenges conventional thinking.

In this exclusive extended Q&A from The Fifth Draft—the Fellows Program’s newsletter featuring exclusive content about and from our Fellows—Megan Garber gives us an exciting preview of her forthcoming project on our relentless craving for entertainment and its unsettling link to the rise of misinformation in popular culture. Dive into the Q&A to see how Garber’s keen observations and groundbreaking ideas are poised to challenge and inspire new ways of thinking about our future.

Don’t miss your chance to discover how the world’s most innovative storytellers are shaping the future. Sign up for The Fifth Draft today.

Your Fellows project will be a book, which expands on an article you wrote for The Atlantic about how Americans’ demand for constant entertainment is reshaping culture, politics, and everyday life. Why did you decide to pursue the idea as a book-length project?

“Entertainment” has a double meaning. In one way, it’s something people consume: the stuff we turn to for escapism, togetherness, and fun. In another way, it’s permission. We entertain arguments. We entertain ideas. The interplay between the two [arguments and ideas] captures a lot, I think, about the broader challenges Americans face right now, as the web has created so many new ways to be both passive consumers and active participants in the world. To me, that tension is important enough to warrant a book-length exploration, as along the way it captures so many other critical issues—among them the ever-blurrier lines between reality and fantasy, fandom and political identity, the people we dismiss as characters and those we see as fully human, complicated, worthy, and real. We experience each other, ever more, through our screens, and the book will explore the consequences of this shift.

In The Atlantic article, you reference Newton Minow’s very critical description of television in 1961 as “a vast wasteland.” How would you characterize our current media landscape?

In some ways, I disagree with Minow’s diagnosis—in part because I’d be a hypocrite not to. I’m a lifelong lover of TV; as a kid growing up in a fairly small town, TV shows were part of my education, their characters expanding my social circle and their stories offering early lessons about the unruly breadth of the world. Newton Minow loved TV too, I think. But he was an idealist who believed that the medium that shaped his moment could be more and better than it was—a source not just of distraction, but also of democratic engagement. With that one little “vast,” he anticipated a lot: TVs now hang on the walls of homes like pieces of art and are carried in pockets and purses. They are, to borrow a phrase, “everything, everywhere, all at once.” Where does TV end, and life begin? I’m not fully sure. That’s partly why I’m writing the book.

You have used the phrase “banal theatricality” in your work, can you explain the concept? How do you think it plays into our current political moment?

The idea that social interaction is a performance is a very old one, but I think the current moment is changing “all the world’s a stage” from a metaphor into a mandate. There’s no business but show business, and now the rules of the show stretch into everyday life. People now have “personal brands,” “soft-launch” new relationships on social media, and buy t-shirts proclaiming their “main character energy.” Some—many—treat life itself as an endless performance. This theatricality expands into politics, becoming almost banal. We no longer just accept that our actors and artists will be politicians by other means; we demand it. We expect professional politicians to manage their profiles as celebrities do, offering themselves to the public through both iconography and carefully calibrated authenticity. Meanwhile, the policy decisions that actually affect people’s lives are too often relegated to the backstage.

Do you think the metaverse as it exists now has a role in the fight against populism and in the preservation of democracy, not just in fostering divisiveness?

I’m looking at “the metaverse” not just as a technological concept but as a broadly cultural one: as a desire for entertainment so wide-reaching and politically potent that it doubles as an ideology. The changes it is bringing, like those brought by the web itself, are both beneficial and problematic in ways we’re just beginning to understand. Yet the mere fact that people can now speak for themselves, using their own words, images, and voices, is a revolutionary shift. Every day, I’m dazzled by the creativity, humor, weirdness, and wisdom on display in social media’s endless talent show. When this human energy is summoned for civic engagement, it can make politics much more participatory and humane. It can enhance consciousness-raising, collective action, and other efforts that have been key to the justice movements of the past. Essentially, it can turn a group of people into a public, something both elemental and crucial in a democracy.

Who do you see as the audience for your book? What impact do you want it to have on the individual, on policy?

The transformations the web has brought affect every American, each in their own way. Because of this, I think the potential audience for the book could be as broad as “anyone who believes that reality is worth fighting for.” And I hope the book’s pages can bring some clarity to a cultural moment that can feel sometimes dizzyingly chaotic. Words are the atomic units of democracy: we can’t create good policy without first defining, in precise and sometimes painful detail, the problems we’re trying to solve. We can’t move forward meaningfully without articulating where we’ve been. As the great scholar Hannah Arendt wrote, “We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it.” With the book, I want to offer some language that can help people talk to—and, more importantly, with—one other, offering words that might bring just a bit more humanity to the story we’re writing together.

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