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Pro wrestling depends on the core format of a villain versus a hero, in industry terms a heel versus a “babyface,” or “face.”
Out of this format springs an infinite number of storylines—partner betrays partner, hero “turns” heel, adversaries unite to fight for the flag or a woman. But it all starts with a bad guy, entering the ring with a swagger, shouting vile stuff at the crowd to get things nice and warm in the arena.
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Without crowd engagement, you’ve got a bunch of goons in underpants flipping each other, a meaningless story. The presence of a big howling crowd confers legitimacy and power to the event. Everything therefore becomes about building crowd energy. Without that, there are neither villains nor heroes.
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The notion that you are reading the truth, and not consuming a product, is the first deception of commercial media.
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You will never have the political power to do something about all the terrifying problems we wave at you.
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It’s the same with conservative or liberal brands. In both cases, the product is an attention-grabber, a mental stimulant.
The core commercial activity involves an ad stuck in front of an eyeball, though you may also pay a subscription, or less commonly, a newsstand charge. The involuntary surrender of your personal data may also be part of the consumer price.
In all cases, however, you’re paying something in exchange for the experience of reading an article or watching a report.
All the commercial actors make more money the more you read or watch. The business, therefore, is geared toward keeping you glued to the screen.
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In fact, the tension between the sheer quantity of horrifying news and your real-world impotence to do much about it is part of our consumer strategy.
We create the illusion that being informed is a kind of action in itself. So to wash that guilt out—to eliminate the shame and discomfort you feel over doing nothing as the world goes mad—you’ll keep tuning in.
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Irony alert: the most important news story in the world is the inability of the ordinary news consumer to understand the news.
This is no dig against readers. The world has just grown so complex that the majority of serious issues are beyond the understanding of non-specialists.
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WE ARE NOT INFORMING YOU. WE CAN’T, ACTUALLY
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YOU DON’T NEED TO WATCH THAT MUCH NEWS
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THE NEWS IS A CONSUMER PRODUCT
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Most journalists are failed humanities majors. Literature degrees are common among our kind (I have one). If we have expertise in anything, it’s telling stories.
That’s mostly what we do. Rather than try to get you up to speed about complex problems, we build up characters and storylines, using soap-opera techniques.
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If we in the press were being honest with audiences, we would tell them: the world is so complex, you cannot ever hope to be truly informed. We can tell you a few broad strokes, but that’s it.
Or, if we were truly acting out of concern, we would make educating audiences about the basics of complex fields urgent priorities.
But we could never make that stuff sell. So we find other material.
Most journalists
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a curious episode in the late eighties and early nineties, when the press randomly decided to care about homelessness.
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WE SELL IDENTITY
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most audiences did forget about homelessness pretty much instantly once we in the media stopped babbling about it.
By an amazing coincidence, the drop in coverage came exactly as officials in cities like New York began forcing the homeless out of “civilized” areas by mass-arresting them for things like obstructing pedestrian traffic. Out of sight, out of mind.
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most of us, when we read the news, are really just telling ourselves a story about who we like to think we are, when we look in the mirror.
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The main difference between Fox and MSNBC is their audiences are choosing different personal mythologies. Again: this is a consumer choice. It’s not the truth, but a truth product.
People who watch Fox tend to be older, white, and scared. They’re tuning in to be told they’re the last holdouts in a disintegrating empire, Romans besieged by Vandals.
Fox runs the stories that pop out of Nexis, featuring a standard list of cultural villains, usually liberals, feminists, atheists, immigrants, terrorists, or any of a number of handout-seeking political constituencies.
When a liberal celebrity says something stupid—which happens about once every two seconds—it goes straight on the air (they have a whole archive of Lena Dunham bits).
Fox is basically a neverending slasher flick for the Greatest Generation. The only thing that varies is what Marx-fluent monster leaps out of Camp Crystal Lake. Antifa is a good recent foil. The network was trying to squeeze content out of the New Black Panthers for a while.
People who watch MSNBC, meanwhile, are tuning in to receive mega-doses of the world’s thinnest compliment, i.e. that they’re morally superior to Donald Trump. The network lately has become a one-note morality play with endless segments about Michael Flynn, Michael Cohen, and Paul Manafort. This isn’t the first time they’ve used this model.
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The coverage formula on both channels is to scare the crap out of audiences, then offer them micro-doses of safety and solidarity, which come when they see people onscreen sharing their fears. There is a promise of reassurance that comes with both coverage formulas.
This is critical, that you’re encouraged to have consumer expectations, even though news should be unpredictable. Even sports fans expect disappointment about half the time. Not news audiences today:
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WE’RE SELLING SAFE SPACES
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The worst sin in the tobacco business is to upset customer expectations. Every cigarette must be the same. If even once you light up a Camel and taste strawberries or pelican guano, your brain will never forgive the brand.
The news business now works the same way, even though it shouldn’t.
Reporters are supposed to challenge their audiences. Did you buy one of the 110 billion non-biodegradable plastic bottles sold by Coca-Cola last year, and if so, would you like to see a picture of where it might have gone?
Did the politician you voted for go back on his or her promises? Did your tax dollars pay for the bombing of women and children in foreign countries? Do you even know where we’re at war?
There’s a widespread belief now that “bravery”1 in a reporter is someone like Jim Acosta asking tough questions of someone like Donald Trump. But Acosta’s viewers hate Donald Trump. Wake me up when he takes on his own Twitter followers, or gets in his boss Jeff Zucker’s face about the massive profits they’ve all been making off Trumpmania.
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pure manipulation: creating expectations in emotionally vulnerable audiences, holding out the possibility of huge imminent news, which guaranteed people would keep checking not just daily, but by the hour, the minute.
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Companies are nurturing emotional dependencies for cash. The key is to always report negatively about the other audience, but never about your own. They’re bad equals you’re good, and endlessly spinning in that cycle creates hardened, loyal, dependent followers.
School conditions people to be emotionally dependent
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A 2016 Pew survey found remarkably similar numbers of Democrats and Republicans—58 percent of the former, 57 percent of the latter—said members of the opposing party made them “frustrated.”
The survey showed 52 percent of Republicans believed Democrats were “closed-minded,” while 70 percent of Democrats felt that way about Republicans.
We’re not encouraging people to break these patterns. If anything, we’re addicting people to conflict, vitriol, and feelings of superiority. It works. Companies know: fear and mistrust are even harder habits to break than smoking.
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Pick up any major newspaper, or turn on any network television news broadcast. The political orientation won’t matter. It could be Fox or MSNBC, the Washington Post or the Washington Times. You’ll find virtually every story checks certain boxes.
Call them the ten rules of hate. After generations of doing the opposite, when unity and conformity were more profitable, now the primary product the news media sells is division.
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- THE TEN RULES OF HATE
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- HOW READING THE NEWS IS LIKE SMOKING
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the easiest media product to make is called This Bad Thing That Just Happened Is Someone Else’s Fault. It has a virtually limitless market.
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The problem we all have is the commercial structure of the business. To make money, we’ve had to train audiences to consume news in a certain way. We need you anxious, pre-pissed, addicted to conflict. Moreover we need you to bring a series of assumptions every time you open a paper or turn on your phone, TV, or car radio. Without them, most of what we produce will seem illogical and offensive.
The trick is to constantly narrow your mental horizons and keep you geeked up on impotent anger.
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It’s a twist on Manufacturing Consent’s description of an artificially narrowed debate.
The Herman/Chomsky thesis in the mid-1980s highlighted how the press “manufactured” public unity by making sure the population was only exposed to a narrow range of political ideas, stretching from Republican to Democrat (with the Democrat usually more like an Eisenhower Republican). So long as you stayed on that little median strip, you accepted a broad range of underlying principles that never popped up in the sanitized, Nerfball version of debate that op-ed pages exhibited.
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The difference now: we encourage full-fledged division on that strip. We’ve discovered we can sell hate, and the more vituperative the rhetoric, the better. This also serves larger political purposes.
So long as the public is busy hating each other and not aiming its ire at the more complex financial and political processes going on off-camera, there’s very little danger of anything like a popular uprising.
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The news today is a reality show where you’re part of the cast: America vs. America, on every channel.
The trick here is getting audiences to think they’re punching up, when they’re actually punching sideways, at other media consumers just like themselves, who just happen to be in a different silo. Hate is a great blinding mechanism. Once you’ve been in the business long enough, you become immersed in its nuances. If you can get people to accept a sequence of simple, powerful ideas, they’re yours forever.
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- THERE ARE ONLY TWO IDEAS
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There are only two baskets of allowable opinion: Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative, left or right. This is drilled into us at a young age. By the time we hit college, most of us, roughly speaking, will have chosen the political identity we’ll stick with for the rest of our lives. It’s the Boolean version of politics, pure binary thought: blue or red, true or false, zero or one.
Aristotelian if you will
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- THE TWO IDEAS ARE IN PERMANENT CONFLICT
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politics is a fight, and that Democrats and Republicans not only must never come to an agreement about things, but must debate to the end in a sports-like forum.
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“These TV debates are not about ideas or solutions or ideology, but simply partisan sniping and talking-point recitation,” Cohen says now. “I enjoy a genuine right-left philosophical debate, when it’s between serious analysts or journalists—as opposed to Democrat vs. Republican BS artists, and party hacks.”
In his book, Cohen referenced an old joke: What do pro wrestling and the U.S. Senate have in common? Both are dominated by overweight white guys pretending to hurt each other. He said, “The intellectual level of cable news is one step above pro wrestling.”
Cohen wrote that over a decade ago. Today the news is at the level of pro wrestling. This is one reason we have a WWE performer in the White House. It’s the ultimate synthesis of politics and entertainment, and the core of it all is the ritual of conflict. Without conflict, there’s no product.
Once you accept the “two, and two only” idea, we basically have you. The only trick from there is preventing narrative-upsetting ideas from getting onscreen too often. Hence:
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- HATE PEOPLE, NOT INSTITUTIONS
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Though most of our problems are systemic, most of our public debates are referendums on personality.
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Meanwhile, a vast universe of systemic issues is ignored.
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In the years after Manufacturing Consent came out, big corporate conglomerates bought up most major media outlets. Station directors and publishers without reporting backgrounds suddenly became common. Now when you went to your boss to press for an important story, you were often talking to someone who looked back at you the way an auto executive might at an engineer pushing production of a car with a super-cool optional exploding-tire feature. As in, why the hell would we try to get sued?
The biggest outlets learned there’s no percentage in doing big exposés against large, litigious companies. Not only will they sue, but they’re also certain to pull ads as punishment (this was a big consideration in the Monsanto case, as Fox had 22 stations that could all have used NutraSweet ads). Why make trouble?
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The reason these tales are important is that, when media companies aren’t doing the right stories, they start self-sorting for the wrong ones. You could call this the Worthy and Unworthy Targets principle.
Worthy targets are small-time crooks, restaurant owners with rats, actors, athletes, reality stars, and other minor miscreants. In the nineties, to this list of worthy subjects, we added two more: “Either of the two approved political parties.”
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- EVERYTHING IS SOMEONE ELSE’S FAULT
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Here’s how we create political news content. Something happens, it doesn’t matter what.
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Whatever it is, our task is to turn it into content, quickly running it through a flow chart:
BAD THING HAPPENS
Can it be blamed on one or the other party?
YES (we do the story)
NO (we don’t do the story—see rule #5)
The overwhelming majority of “controversial news stories” involves simple partisan narratives cleaved quickly into hot-button talking points. Go any deeper and you zoom off the flow chart.
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The best news stories take issues and find a way to make readers think hard about them, especially inviting them to consider how they themselves contribute to the problem. You want people thinking, “I voted for what?” Most problems are systemic, bipartisan, and bureaucratic, and most of us, by voting or not voting, paying taxes or not, own a little bit of most disasters.
But we veer you away from that mental alley, and instead feed you stories about how someone else did the bad thing, because:
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- NOTHING IS EVERYONE’S FAULT
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If both parties have an equal or near-equal hand in causing a social problem, we typically don’t cover it. Or better to say: a reporter or two might cover it, but it’s never picked up. It doesn’t take over a news cycle, doesn’t become a thing.
The bloated military budget? Mass surveillance? American support for dictatorial regimes like the cannibalistic Mbasogo family in Equatorial Guinea, the United Arab Emirates, or Saudi Arabia? Our culpability in proxy-nation atrocities in places like Yemen or Palestine? The drone assassination program? Rendition? Torture? The drug war? Absence of access to generic or reimported drugs?
Nah. We just don’t do these stories. At least, we don’t do them anywhere near in proportion to their social impact. They’re hard to sell. And the ability to market a story is everything.
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- ROOT, DON’T THINK
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By the early 2000s, TV stations had learned to cover politics exactly as they covered sports, a proven profitable format. The presidential election especially was reconfigured into a sports coverage saga. It was perfect: eighteen months of scheduled contests, a preseason (straw polls), regular season (primaries), and playoffs (the general), stadium events, a sub-genre of data reporting (it’s not an accident that sabermetrics guru Nate Silver fit so seamlessly into political coverage).
TV news stations baldly copied visual “live variety” sports formats for coverage of primary elections, debates, election night, and soon enough, Sunday “discussion” shows like Meet the Press. If you’ve noticed, the sets bear an eerie resemblance to NFL pre-game shows. There’s a reason for that.
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“Panels are typically two conservative advocates versus two mainstream reporters/analysts who are obviously moderate libs but not allowed to admit it or strongly advocate much of anything,” is how Cohen, formerly of Crossfire, puts it. Chuck Todd is Chris Berman is James Brown is Wolf Blitzer. The professional talker stands on one side of the panel and tosses to the various energetic advocates for and against the team’s chances (Ana Navarro is Terry Bradshaw is Steve Mariucci is Van Jones), then they mediate the blather when everyone agrees and it all breaks down into conventional wisdom.
By the election of 2016, virtually all the sports graphic ideas had been stolen. There were “countdown to kickoff” clocks for votes, “percent chance of victory” trackers, “our experts pick” charts, a “magic number” for delegate counts, and a hundred different graphic doodads helping us keep score in the game. John King fiddling with his maps with Wolf Blitzer on the “magic wall” has become as much a part of our election mindscape as watching ex-athletes like David Carr or Jalen Rose chart football or hoops plays with civilians like Zach Lowe or Rachel Nichols.
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See how often you read/hear one or more of these words in a debate story: “spar,” “parry,” “jab,” “knockout,” “knockdown,” “glass jaw,” “uppercut,” “low blow,” “counterpunch,” “rope-a-dope,” “rabbit punch,” “sucker punch,” “in the ring,” “TKO,” or any of about a dozen other terms.
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This nonsense has all had the effect of depoliticizing elections and turning them into blunt contests of tactics, fundraising, and rhetorical technique (CNN even pioneered the use of real-time dial surveys of focus groups, to help “keep political score” in debates). It also hardened the winner-take-all vision of politics for audiences.
By 2016 we’d raised a generation of viewers who had no conception of politics as an activity that might or should involve compromise. Your team either won or lost, and you felt devastated or vindicated accordingly. We were training rooters instead of readers. Since our own politicians are typically very disappointing, we particularly root for the other side to lose.
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in this business, everyone is on a side, and we’re always fighting, never looking for common ground. It ruins everyone’s suspension of disbelief if we do.
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But the fact that “objectivity” was less about principle than profit, stylistically silly, and easily manipulated into masking all sorts of awful political realities (historically, from racism to American military atrocities abroad), didn’t mean it was worthless.
“Objectivity,” above all, was great protection for reporters. Having no obvious political bent was a prerequisite for taking on politicians. If you announced yourself as an ally of one party or another, you lost your credibility with audiences.
“Balance” didn’t mean having to quote science-deniers. It was mainly a way for journalists to stay out of unspoken political alliances. Once you jump in that pit, it’s not so easy to get out.
Two years ago, unnerved by a lot of the same comments about “false balance,” I wrote: “The model going forward will likely involve Republican media covering Democratic corruption and Democratic media covering Republican corruption.”
This is more or less where we are now, and nobody seems to think this is bad or dysfunctional. This is despite the fact that in this format (especially given the individuated distribution mechanisms of the Internet, like the Facebook news feed) the average person will no longer even see—ever—derogatory reporting about his or her own “side.”
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- NO SWITCHING TEAMS
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This is another feature of the new media environment: conventional wisdom is now capable of doing full U-turns virtually overnight. Spayd was taking heat essentially for defending an approach that less than a year before had been industry standard: “objectivity.”
The neutral-sounding third-person tone we used to understand as “objectivity” was itself primarily a commercial strategy.
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- FEEL SUPERIOR
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We’re mainly in the business of stroking audiences. We want them coming back. Anger is part of the rhetorical promise, but so are feelings of righteousness and superiority.
It’s why we love terrible people like Casey Anthony or O.J. as news subjects a lot more than we’d like someone who spends his or her days working in a pediatric oncology ward. Showing genuinely heroic or selfless people on TV would make most audiences feel inferior. Therefore, we don’t.
It’s the same premise as reality shows. The most popular programs aren’t about geniuses and paragons of virtue, but instead about terrible parents, morons, people too fat to notice they’re pregnant, people willing to be filmed getting ass tucks, spoiled rich people, and other folks we can deem freaks.
Why use the most advanced communications technology in history to teach people basic geography, or how World Bank structural adjustment lending works, when we can instead show people idiots drinking donkey semen for money?
Your media experience is designed to nurture and protect your ego. So we show you the biggest losers we can find. It’s the underlying principle of almost every successful entertainment product we’ve had, from COPS to Freakshow to, literally, The Biggest Loser. We’re probably just a few years way from a show called What Would You Suck For a Dollar?”
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politicians should be fair game. But the obsession with winners and losers runs so deep in the press that it has become the central value of the business.
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We count on your shame in the same way. We know you know the news we show you is demeaning, disgusting, pointless, and not really intended to inform.
But we assume you’ll be too embarrassed to admit you spend hours every day poring over content specifically designed to reenforce your point of view. In fact, you’ll consume twice as much, rather than admit you don’t like to be challenged. Like Tolstoy’s weak hero, you’ll pay to hide your shame.
It took a while for news reporters to figure out how to deliver the same superiority vibe you can get from reading local crime blotters or watching bearded-lady acts like Fear Factor, Who’s Your Daddy?, and The Swan. The idea behind most political coverage is to get you to turn on the TV and within minutes have you tsk-tsking and saying, “What idiots!” And, from there, it’s a short hop to, “Fuck those commie-loving tree-huggers!” or “Fuck the Hitler-loving freaks!”
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- SCARE TACTICS: ALL THE FOLK DEVILS ARE HERE
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The narrative had taken the nation, and the world, by storm.
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were not yet fully distinguished and had little concrete group identity.
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Moral panic has as a result become a permanent part of our lexicon. “Folk devils” were what Cohen called the targets of these instant manias.
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Reporters depicted ordinary life, then showed it disrupted and distorted by contagion. The scare coverage implied future problems and put audiences in a siege-like mentality. They’d been trained to wait for delivery: more violence, more social disruption, more headlines.
This set of circumstances led to something that another sociologist, Leslie Wilkins, deemed the “Deviancy Amplification Spiral.”
This was an academic term for “using invented problems to drive people actually crazy.” It went something like this:
-
LESS TOLERANCE leads to
-
MORE ACTS BEING DEFINED AS CRIMES leads to
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MORE ACTIONS AGAINST CRIMINALS leads to
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MORE ALIENATION OF DEVIANTS leads to
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LESS TOLERANCE OF DEVIANTS BY CONFORMING GROUPS leads back to #2, etc.
With this circular method, you could take small incidents and blow them into national terrors in a snap, and God only knew when any of it would stop.
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Moral panics were once very likely to involve a “something is corrupting your otherwise angelic youth” theme.
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Moral panics tended to have the most profound consequences for “folk devils” who were politically underrepresented. The War on Drugs has arguably been the most devastating ongoing panic of all, dating back to the unintentionally comic Reefer Madness
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A few sociologists over the years have noted that moral panics benefit the interested players in a particular way. There is symbiosis between big commercial news outlets and state authorities.
Scare the crap out of people, and media companies get richer, while state agencies get more and more license for authoritarian crackdowns on the “folk devil” of the moment. A perfect partnership.
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This is the hallmark of the moral panic scenario. It’s a real story, but it’s exaggerated, often wildly, and comes wrapped in proposals for authoritarian solutions.
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Accelerated by social media, moral panic has become the last dependably profitable format of modern news reporting.
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Today, in a politically cleaved media landscape, reporters know there is less danger than ever that their target audiences will be exposed to dispositive information. Rival publications do not reach rival audiences. MSNBC viewers do not read the Daily Caller and vice versa.
Moral panics therefore rage on, essentially unchallenged, in every corner of the political universe.
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In America in the eighties and nineties there were usually people to counter such public panics. For every Tipper Gore, there was a Frank Zappa or Dee Snider appearing for the defense.
In our new cleaved and atomized landscape, those brakes are gone. Every demographic has its own folk devils, who go undefended.