News as Entertainment
“I just don’t know why we have to tell the people what they need to hear. Why can’t we just tell them what they want to hear?”
With the election over and Donald Trump out of office, one might have hoped for a more civil, conciliatory tone in the media. So much for that idea. Love him or hate him, Donald Trump was great for ratings. For four-plus years, we were in a constant state of crisis. Liberal media outlets saw the end of American democracy in every Trump misdeed. Conservative media outlets allowed unhinged conspiracy theories to become their lead stories.
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
Post Trump, both sides are now grasping for the next drivers of outrage to retain their audiences, who have grown accustomed to the dopamine rush of perpetual sky-is-falling crises. For conservative outlets, this is a much easier task — arguably a return to their comfort zone, born during eight years of Clinton and refined under eight years of Obama, of constant complaining about the “deep state” liberals and “coastal elites” conspiring to relegate them to the minority party. The modern conservative message isn’t about doing anything, but rather complaining about everything. Even with Trump in office and control of Congress and most governors and state houses, conservatives talked as if they were still outsiders. They had to invent bogeymen they could still rail against in spite of holding office. They aspired to destroy the thing they controlled. Now conservatives can return their full-throated energy to Biden, Harris, Schumer, Pelosi, Bernie, AOC and all their other specters bringing about the end of the world. And their audience loves it. The red meat of red politics.
For liberal media outlets, the challenge now is tougher. Who wants to read about a competent administration doing appropriate and rational things? That’s so boring. It was much more interesting to opine about Trump’s insanity, or potential ties to Russia, or blatant, likely corrupt, conflicts of interest. Where’s the outrage in good governance? What’s more insufferable than good news? We need the next source of outrage! Or else we might start watching TikTok or binging Schitt’s Creek.
See the problem is we all treat news like entertainment in America. Don’t believe me? Tune in to a BBC broadcast. If you’re not asleep within 10 minutes, you’ll immediately notice the contrast to U.S. “news” coverage. The cat was really let out of the proverbial bag in the 80s and 90s with the rise of CNN and other 24-hour cable news outlets. The immediate and obvious challenge became, how do you maintain an audience when that audience can easily switch channels to ESPN, MTV or HBO? What was spawned to give the news a fighting chance against empirically more interesting content was the “news as entertainment” model. Don’t just report the mundane facts of what’s going on, tell breathless, sensationalized stories accompanied by dramatic theme music, continuously scrolling graphics, and drumroll-introduced “breaking news” every ten minutes.
Keeping audiences on the hook requires continuously activating their emotions. If you conclude that “everything seems pretty good in the world,” you turn off the TV. Nothing to see here. So producers spin a never ending buffet of fear, outrage, lust, anger, and any other triggering emotion that allows them to keep your attention, so they can keep milking the revenue from their advertising sponsors. “Something in your kitchen could kill you! More after this break!”
The news-as-entertainment phenomenon, of course, became even more pernicious in the last twenty years with the internet. Faced with literally limitless choices, our attention is pulled ever more to the fringes. Forced to sift through a daily barrage of information overload, our fractured attention only notices the new, bizarre, unusual and outrageous — and news outlets, driven by ratings and clicks, just feed us more and more of it. The news has to keep up. There are cat videos, and Instagram lifestyle influencers, and TikTok memes to keep up with for God’s sake! Whether we’re liberal or conservative, we crave that stream of drama. Even when we know it’s sensationalized, it’s interesting. It’s entertaining.
Now, with multiple generations of Americans who don’t know any different, the consequence of this exploitation is becoming clear. If all we consume is a tainted feed of misinformation, biased and Balkanized by our own political dispositions, how do we reach common ground? How do we agree to a common set of facts, a common understanding of our problems? How do we compromise on decisions that will improve our country? How do we even have a democracy?
In other words, how do we shove that mangy, howling, feral cat back in the bag? It’s nice to imagine government regulation might be the answer, but that’s a pipe dream. The Federal Government has all but given up on fairness and objectivity in the media. They’ve defunded public broadcasting, abandoned existing media laws, and allowed unlimited cash into the system in the name of free speech. Regulating something so unruly is practically impossible anyway. We can’t even track down criminals on the internet, what makes us think we can set up and enforce some system to make it fair and factual?
We certainly can’t count on the media itself (and by that, I mean ALL media, not just the so-called “lame stream” media conservatives love to vilify) to stop this vicious cycle. If anything, the Fox News’s and MSNBCs of the world are only going to get more extreme, to shore up their flank from the onslaught of increasingly fringe content their audiences seem to crave.
The solution, if there is one, lies with us. We need to stop confusing Tom Clancy and Sean Hannity. We need to recognize our attention as the valuable asset that it is, and stop spending it unwisely. We need to identify the signs of content and outlets that are seeking to manipulate us — to watch, to like, to share. We need to value truth and honesty, and vote with our eyeballs and mouse. Instead of fuming over the latest story designed to elicit our outrage, we need to focus on things in our control — actions we can take to foster communication and make our communities better. If enough of us tune it out and turn it off, maybe the media will eventually listen.