Published in Quadrant (Sydney), 29 May 2026
By 1974, at the Allensbach Institute she had founded a quarter-century earlier, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann had given a name to a puzzle first visible in her election research of the 1960s. West Germans would tell her pollsters one thing in private; in public they would say something else, or nothing at all. The gap was not new. But by then it had a name.
She called the phenomenon the Schweigespirale, the spiral of silence. Public opinion, she argued, is not what people privately believe but what people think others will let them say. Those who sense themselves in a minority fall quiet, which makes other minorities fall quiet, until only one voice remains audible in public while private dissent survives in corners.
Noelle-Neumann’s biography is complicated. As a young journalist in the early 1940s, she wrote for Das Reich, Goebbels’s weekly, and some of what she wrote has been read by later scholars as anti-Semitic. She spent decades afterwards defending or explaining her wartime record, not altogether convincingly. The extent and significance of that record remain contested.
None of which disposes of her theory. It does, though, give it a particular weight: she had seen public speech and private belief diverge from inside the regime that imposed the divergence.
Her spiral assumed what then seemed permanent: a shared environment of mass address, a single space in which the climate of opinion could be read. West Germany of the 1970s had two public broadcasters (ARD and ZDF), a handful of national newspapers and the Tagesschau, the main evening news at eight, which Germans watched together or knew everyone else was watching. You could sense what was sayable because you could sense what was being said, and to whom.
Fifty years on, in Britain, one household has BBC News at Ten on, another, across the road, has GB News. They are told about the same country and the same events, but they inhabit two different evenings.
The spiral Noelle-Neumann described has not vanished in either household. The same mechanism still runs: people sense the climate of opinion around them and adjust what they say in public to fit it.
What has changed is that the climate is no longer shared across the whole nation. It is the climate of the media environment that the household has chosen. One spiral has become many, with each broadcaster running its own spiral inside its own audience.
What gets switched on at six o’clock is not just a choice of broadcaster. Tell me whether someone’s default evening bulletin is the BBC or GB News, and I can make a reasonable guess at much of the rest: which newspaper they read, which magazines they subscribe to, which podcasts they download, which causes attract their attention and which they are predisposed to dismiss. The broadcaster anchors an ecology of newspapers, podcasts and magazines that mostly point in the same direction. Escape would mean leaving not one institution but a whole environment of mutually reinforcing voices.
The American political scientist Michael Chwe gave the intuition a formal name in his book Rational Ritual (2001). The political product of mass address, he argued, is not merely information but common knowledge, meaning not just what everyone knows but what everyone knows that everyone else knows, up the chain.
A constitution every citizen privately accepts but will not stand up for is not really protected; a constitution is only protected if every citizen knows every other citizen will publicly defend it. It is the difference between a norm that holds and one that has already fallen, in slow motion, while each private observer waits for somebody else to shout.
Broadcasting used to produce exactly this. The BBC’s main evening bulletin reached Conservative and Labour households alike, not because those households agreed about anything, but because there were only a handful of channels and most people turned on the television to watch it. When an event was news, it was news for everyone at the same moment. Each viewer knew that every other viewer knew it too.
That common knowledge was the raw material of civic life. It was what made shame work, what made outrage convergent and what made constitutional violations feel like constitutional violations rather than partisan grievances.
This was not the natural state of media. The pre-twentieth-century world was one of explicitly partisan pamphlets and newspapers; the post-1990s world is one of partisan broadcasters and algorithmic feeds. The thirty or forty years in the middle, when a handful of legacy broadcasters held the centre, was a built thing rather than an inheritance.
It was a response to mass democracy and a mass franchise: the conditions that made the building necessary, not the conditions that made it inevitable. The fact that earlier societies lived without common knowledge created through mass address tells us little about what mass democracies need. We did not have universal suffrage then either.
Mass address worked best when legacy broadcasters carried a broader range of voices than they do now. The BBC of the 1980s at least seemed to many viewers to reflect a wider slice of British opinion than the corporation does today; much the same could be said of the ABC and the ARD. The newer broadcasters exist partly because of this narrowing, carrying presenters, guests, and views that the legacy broadcasters quietly let go.
The harder issue is whether carrying them separately produces the same political good as carrying them together. I would suggest it does not.
Broadcasters like GB News in Britain, Sky News Australia or Fox News in the United States are real broadcasters. They have studios and anchors, scheduled programs and evening bulletins. Structurally, though, they are a different kind of institution from the one they sit next to in the program guide.
These broadcasters may have real reach, and in some slots, impressive audiences. But their reach is self-selected. Their loyal viewers tune in by affinity rather than habit, knowing, before the program starts, roughly what it will tell them.
This is not an accusation of bias. The BBC is biased, and so are the ABC and ARD. Every legacy broadcaster has a class profile and a settled sense of what is sayable.
What mattered was reach. A Brexit voter in 2016 was likely to encounter BBC referendum coverage because the BBC retained unmatched scale and routine civic authority, even when alternatives existed.
A committed Fox News viewer today could plausibly have made Fox the centre of a near-complete political information diet for a generation, an option no previous generation had. A consequential minority did. What made mass broadcasting civic was that no one tuned in for ideological reassurance.
I am a classical liberal, and that commitment comes with an uncomfortable admission here. Absolute free choice of news producer is corrosive of the thing classical liberalism most needs, which is a public that can be addressed.
Free speech is not the issue. The issue is the freedom to consume only the news version flattering to one’s priors. That freedom is novel, and its consequences are still arriving.
Sorted audiences produce something that looks like common knowledge inside themselves. A Fox viewer knows what other Fox viewers are watching, and that they are all watching the same event framed the same way. That is a real shared experience.
But it is not shared at the level of the polity. It is common knowledge only within the audience, and the audience easily mistakes itself for the country, or at least for the country that matters.
That mistake is one of the conditions populism feeds on: not necessarily a majority of support, but the appearance of no real opposition. Whether the audience believes itself to be the whole country or the silent majority, demagoguery need not win; it only has to manufacture the other side’s silence. The room next door cannot hear it. Broadcasting was the first crack; algorithmic feeds widened it.
In November 2025, the BBC found itself caught by exactly this dynamic. A Panorama documentary broadcast the week before the 2024 American presidential election spliced together parts of Donald Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021, to make it falsely appear as if he had called for violence at the Capitol that day.
A leaked memo by Michael Prescott, a former external adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, set out serious concerns about the edit that had been raised internally and ignored. On November 9, 2025, the Director-General Tim Davie and the head of news Deborah Turness resigned.
After the memo leaked, the legacy broadcaster behaved as a legacy broadcaster should. The leadership accepted responsibility, and the chair, Samir Shah, apologised publicly and conceded that the speech had been misrepresented. The apology was reported by the institution itself and by every other legacy outlet in Britain. Resignations at the top, a public apology: the response of an institution that knows it can be held to account. Whether the response was adequate is itself contested.
Yet the audience that most needed to hear the correction was watching somewhere else. Nigel Farage declared the resignations the BBC’s “last chance”. Donald Trump thanked the Telegraph for exposing what he called corruption. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, described the BBC as “100 per cent fake news”.
GB News ran the story for days as vindication: proof, its viewers were told, that the institution they had always distrusted was the propaganda outlet they had always known it to be. The BBC’s admission of error was absorbed not as evidence of a functioning correction mechanism but as confirmation that the thing being corrected was rotten to its core, and the correction was belated, partial, and forced.
The BBC’s problem is that it now needs the very authority its critics say it has forfeited. The BBC can apologise, and it has; but it cannot make the apology common knowledge across audiences that have already been told the apology is meaningless.
The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen has drawn a useful distinction. In an epistemic bubble, the other side has simply not been heard. In an echo chamber, the other side has been heard and discredited. Mere exposure can break open a bubble. It cannot break open a chamber, because the trust needed to believe the other side has already been destroyed.
When the BBC defends itself through legacy channels, it reaches people already persuaded. When its critics attack through GB News, they reach people who no longer trust a BBC apology. For decades, the corporation could convert its own errors into public reassurance. That power has thinned to the point where it cannot save the institution itself.
At the same time, Britain’s broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, meant to hold the newer broadcasters to the same kind of standard, has been steadily outmanoeuvred. In February 2025, GB News won a judicial review against it. The High Court found that Ofcom had wrongly applied Rule 5.3 of its Broadcasting Code, which restricts politicians presenting news, when it ruled against a program presented by Jacob Rees-Mogg, a sitting Conservative MP. Ofcom had treated a program containing news as if it were a news program.
Ofcom subsequently discontinued its remaining investigations into politician-presenters, including those into Nigel Farage on GB News and David Lammy on LBC. It was later decided not to expand Rule 5.3 to cover all programs containing news. The ban remained confined to news programs; the regulator instead amended its guidance.
The temptation is to reach for regulation. I would resist it. Impartiality mandates have been in place for decades, and the Ofcom story is what they look like in operation: a regulator outmanoeuvred in the courts, narrowing its remit step by step. Whatever the answer to the spiral is, it is not another impartiality code.
So the BBC fails within a mandate, and the failure is public, named and paid for by the resignations of its most senior leadership. GB News has no comparable public-service mandate to fail within. Its impartiality breaches, when found, draw fines that the channel can absorb; when the fines are challenged, the regulator retreats.
To describe this as a symmetrical fight between two partisan broadcasters is to misdescribe the contest. One is a broadcaster answerable to a standard, which it sometimes fails. The other is answerable to an audience that it always satisfies. The BBC can fail. GB News, by design, cannot, because it has no standard against which failure could be measured.
None of which means the conservative critique of the BBC is wrong. The Panorama edit was indefensible. The internal culture that overrode the staff concerns is the culture conservative critics have been naming for years.
The BBC has a specific profile: graduate, metropolitan, progressive, drawn from a narrow slice of English life. Its editorial instincts on Brexit, immigration, gender, Israel and the monarchy have consistently reflected that profile and alienated much of the audience the licence fee was meant to make it speak to. The BBC has genuinely drifted, and I would say the same of the ABC and of the ARD. That drift is part of how we arrived at a fragmented public. It does not tell us what to do next.
Sky News Australia’s sympathetic viewers have their own reason to be troubled. A scoop that exposes what the legacy outlets miss matters only if legacy viewers encounter it, which sorted audiences prevent. The alternative broadcaster reassures its own audience. It shifts the country’s conversation only when its story escapes the audience for which it was first produced.
The question is what remains if the BBC is removed, defunded, or reduced to the same status as GB News. What remains is a set of audiences, each knowing what its own audience is watching, each assuming itself to be the country, or the part of it that matters, and no institution with the reach to show each audience what the other audiences are seeing.
That is not a victory for free speech. It is the conversion of a country into a marketplace of audiences without a public, each addressed in private, flattered in private, sealed off from the others by architecture rather than by law.
Inside such audiences, reality begins to drift. What is contested in one room is settled in another; what everyone in one room knows to be false is known in another to be obvious. Political disagreement used to mean interpreting the same facts differently. When people live within different sets of facts, the audience built around them makes escape from either set harder year by year.
Germany is not exempt. Its public broadcasters remain stronger than Britain’s, and newer television challengers are weaker. But the pressure comes from elsewhere: online outlets such as NIUS, AfD-linked video ecosystems and protest movements that build their own channels of attention before legacy broadcasters can frame them.
The legacy broadcasters survive and still frame a national agenda. The mechanism still operates, but it now works through different channels. The common-knowledge function of mass address can be starved from outside the broadcaster as well as from within. Where the newer broadcasters are the dominant disrupting force, they are not the only ones. Noelle-Neumann’s spiral worked through one set of broadcasters. Today’s work through many channels at once.
None of which is to suggest that public broadcasters are unfailing instruments of common knowledge. They are not. They have their own histories of political capture, of editorial drift, of executive interference; New Zealand’s NZBC era is one such history, and there are others. The case for them does not rest on their being above reproach. It rests on the alternative being worse.
I still listen to Deutschlandfunk and, for what it is worth, to the BBC. I read and listen, knowing the BBC is not what it once was, and that Deutschlandfunk is less dominant in Germany than it used to be. Yet I continue to listen.
The BBC is imperfect. The BBC may no longer even be very good. I use it as I use the badly maintained public road, not because it is good, but because it is the public road.
Continuing to use an imperfect public institution, despite its imperfections, is a refusal of the spiral. So is the harder discipline, for those of us who use the BBC, of occasionally tuning into what the other side is hearing. They are small civic acts, and the only ones left for most of us.
