You Misspelled "Made"
Yesterday’s “shared into my timeline from a dozen places” article is “We Found Rage in a Hopeless Place” from Katherine Miller at Buzzfeed, about how angry everybody is these days. Toward the end of this, she offers a list of 13 possible explanations for the current spate of anger, which is pretty comprehensive, but leaves out what I think is maybe the most important factor, but also the one least likely to be confronted forthrightly: modern journalism and media. They didn’t just find rage in a place that happened to be hopeless, they helped create both the rage and the hopelessness.
Okay, technically there’s a media item in the list of possible explanations, but it’s phrased in an exculpatory way: “that the breakup of centralized media has good and bad elements to it, but it makes it harder to understand the basic narrative of reality.” I think that’s almost exactly backwards: the problem, or at least a very important component of the problem, is that the way modern media works is helping create and sustain a narrative that fuels toxic rage. And I think this isn’t so much a function of the lack of “centralized media” as a consequence of a kind of second-order centralization that’s happened to journalism.
What I mean by that is that the collapse of ad revenue has led to a ton of consolidation and nationalization of news at the local level. Coverage of local news is way less thorough than it used to be because far too many papers and tv stations are owned by national conglomerates. That means that a greater fraction of what’s in local papers and on local newscasts is drawn from wire-service copy, or pulling from national networks.
Put that together with the “If it bleeds, it leads” mentality of journalism generally, and you’ve got a perfect recipe for creating the impression that everything is going to shit. This is not a new phenomenon— it’s well documented that during the 20-plus years that crime rates were dropping dramatically (from the mid-90’s through 2019 or so), solid majorities of Americans thought that national crime was increasing (see polling data here, for example). It’s intensified recently as the news has become ever more nationalized and algorithm-driven. Good stories stay local, bad ones go viral.
Please note that I’m not saying that this is “Fake News,” some deliberate fraud by journalists to create a narrative of their choice. It’s more insidious than that— it’s the same problem with deeply ingrained professional norms that I complained about in the context of vaccine stories. The way journalists are trained to select and construct stories drives the media toward promoting the very worst stuff, all the time.
Put that together with the increasing nationalization of the news, and you’ve got a huge sample from which to draw Bad Things. If some guy lost his shit on a plane in Salt Lake City in 1991, that was a local story that you likely wouldn’t hear about in New York. In 2021, it’s a viral video, and every NYC-based writer is rushing to the keyboard to either QT-dunk on it or embed it in a thinkpiece about the age of rage.
I definitely agree that when I look at the news that comes to me via the media-heavy channels of my feeds (Twitter and national papers and pundit blogs), there’s an undeniable sense that everyone is angry and spoiling for a fight all the time. At the local level, though, I don’t really see that. Our local paper (which remains locally owned and operated) is about the same as it’s been since I started subscribing to the online version in 2016— occasional crime stories, but mostly boring reports about zoning disputes, school board meetings, and community events. I’m not seeing a ton of rage locally, not in the paper or when I’m out and about in the community— I do nearly all of our shopping, and I’ve never seen an angry dispute over masking or anyone abusing service-industry workers.
This also carries over to the non-media parts of my social feeds. My Facebook feed is largely apolitical, current colleagues and friends from high school and college, and what I’m seeing there isn’t fear and anger. I’m seeing vacation photos, and kids going off to college. It got kind of dark last spring and summer, but I’ve seen a lot more optimism than lockdown freakouts this year.
Admittedly, I live in an affluent liberal suburb in the Northeast, and I’m mostly friends with sensible people, but the disconnect between the parts of my feeds that are media-dominated and the parts that are friend-dominated is so huge that I think there’s something real there. I think the narrative of rage is largely a kind of inverse survivorship bias, the mirror-universe version of that plane-with-red-dots image: the only stories that make it through the journalism filter are about the folks who got shot down.
(There’s probably an angle for some data-journalism sort of thing, here, for somebody with coding skills and Lexis-Nexis access to go through news stories about angry people and see how they’re distributed. Are these coming from genuine concentrations of rage, or is this more a matter of promoting isolated incidents that are large in absolute number but rare in percentage terms? Seems like there ought to be a way to test that.)
Anyway, I think this is a problem: the way our news is produced and promoted naturally leads to a distribution of stories that supports a narrative of rage and hopelessness. Which in turn makes people consuming that news angrier and less hopeful.
I don’t really know what, if anything, can be done about this, because again, the norms involved are so very deeply ingrained in the profession. I think this is something that needs to be acknowledged and discussed as at least a contributing factor, though. Getting there, though, requires an acknowledgement that journalists and editors aren’t merely neutral observers passing along the truth about the world, but are actively (if unconsciously) creating the world they’re reporting on.
There’s an obvious Copenhagen-interpretation analogy to be made there, which I’m not doing, because I think it’s silly. Anyway, if you would like to observe this sort of thing more frequently, here’s a button:
and if you’d like to foist it on someone else, here’s a different one:
If you’d like to get angry at me, the comments are open.