I hesitate to write at all about the politics of incivility, partisan-inspired venom, and outrage right now, in early summer 2017, given the fluidity of contemporary American political culture. Years from now, as always, the period we occupy will be framed and perhaps even understood, as time passes and we achieve the distance necessary for more accurate analysis. But the dynamics of political culture demand study even while we are deep in them, or the visceral sensibility of the moment is lost to history. In any case, it is difficult to recommend policy or organizational change without analysis: We may be mucking around in the depths of an ugly morass, but journalists—pressed by deadlines and without social-scientific tools—cannot always help, even with a shrewd eye and dedication to their public mission.
Against this backdrop, The Outrage Industry makes excellent mid-range theoretical arguments about the nature of mediated political discourse and argues that we are witnessing the explosion and hardening of an “industry”—one that bulldozes over the quaint incivility of past decades. While we have not reached (and hopefully will not reach) the crater of the 1850s, we are without question living in a period that makes past nastiness and incivility look like child’s play. Call it what you will with the current lingo—“alternative facts,” “fake news,” or just plain lying—we have lived with it a long while, and the Founding Fathers excelled at it. But something is different now, very different, Jeffrey Berry and Sarah Sobieraj argue.
While incivility is, of course, part of outrage politics, that concept does not quite capture the personality-centered, reactive, and intertextual magnificence (outrageous commentators feeding off, and legitimating, their ideological compatriots) of current media content. The authors write: “Outrage discourse involves efforts to provoke emotional responses (e.g., anger, fear, moral indignation) from the audience through the use of overgeneralizations, sensationalism, misleading or patently inaccurate information, ad hominem attacks, and belittling ridicule of opponents. Outrage sidesteps the messy nuances of complex political issues in favor of melodrama, misrepresentative exaggeration, mockery, and hyperbolic forecasts of impending doom” (p. 7). It is beyond hurtful, since assaults on people, their integrity, and their honesty are of no interest to the purveyors of outrage discourse. Media personalities are on to bigger things, warning us exactly how our world will fall apart, and keeping us engaged through fear, humor, anxiety, and a vast panoply of well-known rhetorical devices.
The players in the outrage industry are studied (Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Michelle Malkin, Ed Schultz, and Rachel Maddow, to name a few), and their blogs and broadcasts are content-analyzed with vigor. The authors develop a 13-item coding scheme to compare language across media, which is extraordinarily helpful, parsing the nature of outrage discourse and its characteristics—from name calling and mockery to obscene language and emotional display. This is all very interesting, and leads to intriguing findings about conservative versus liberal outrage peddlers (conservatives win the contest of who is more outrageous, after an issue gets some legs) and the sheer frequency of outrageous content, among other things.
So what explains the new outrage, a form of discourse that tops the incivility that has always been part of our political life? The authors, while cognizant of the partisan split in our nation, do not believe that split to be the root of the problem. They argue, after studying the media industry itself and speaking with activists and industry insiders, that outrage has far more to do with profitability. With the segmentation of media, an ability to generate profits by aggregating smaller audiences (or creating large ones, in the case of Fox News or MSNBC), and the cheap production costs of talk radios and blogs, ideologues and businesspeople alike have found fertile ground to make money. Of course, this punditry draws upon partisan divides and some actual policy differences of import. But the way agents of outrage frame, converse, and rant is lucrative if done smartly, using the multiple complex platforms available to grab our hearts, minds, and eyeballs. Advertisers seek to embed their ads in engaging programs, and outrage keeps us tuned in, anxious and coming back for more. And it is often just too dangerous and time consuming to converse with our neighbor, engaging as he or she might seem. Better to turn on our favorite outraged ideologues, learn from them, and not disrupt a community still primarily based on friendliness, soccer games, barbeques, and the congeniality of the workplace.
Berry and Sobieraj see that the negative effects of outrage politics are daunting—furthering partisan divides, making compromise among legislators more challenging, and just scaring the living daylights out of any thinking person. But they do recognize what many other scholars have acknowledged: that the overheated rhetoric oddly expands the public sphere, draws newcomers to politics, and invigorates the citizenry. Maybe not in the way democratic theorists hope, but we feel the energy, and it can be directed, at least in theory, to boosting political involvement across age cohorts, ethnicities, and borders.
The Outrage Industry is not quite a hopeful book, but the authors try their hands at battling the more gruesome effects of our hyperdriven new forms of incivility. They propose a review of the regulatory environment, for example. How can Congress transform the incentive patterns within the media industries or even disrupt ownership patterns in a way that diminishes the outrage and boosts the rational and constructive? Can courageous, progressive, thoughtful CEOs find their way to a more aggressive approach to advertising purchases, encouraging programming that highlights civil discourse and lessening support for the hate-mongering ideological broadcasts? And can legislators shape the totality of the political environment in ways that enable their work, further their important debates, and at the same time keep expanding and invigorating the public sphere? Good thoughts all, and though not the focus of this book, these queries are fodder for those who might continue lines of research stimulated by this fine work.
I have quibbles with some aspects of the book. As is often the case with media research in political science, there is a lack of citation and understanding of 60 years of work in other fields (sociology, economics, and communications, in particular) on media ownership and industry change. The segmentation of audiences and financial opportunities it provides have already been well documented by some rather sophisticated scholars for many decades now. So there is some reinvention of the wheel here, and the dearth of knowledge of media studies means that the authors cannot use critical concepts (e.g., Robert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld’s “narcotizing dysfunction,” or the outstanding mid-twentieth-century work on “parasocial interaction” of audiences with media personalities). As an overall result, the authors are not able to theorize or study the audience very much in the book, and it drives them toward speculation on media effects instead of vigorous exploration, or at least well-informed scholarly discussion.
Current discourse is indeed outrageous, and the authors build a powerful case for what that is exactly, how it is generated, and what it all means. But to my mind, there is another even more horrifying phantom floating over the outrageous cable hosts and edgy blogs: the not-so-hidden drive toward chaos, anarchy, nihilism, and distrust of all institutions. It seems to me that the current political outrage has a generally misanthropic underpinning, perhaps the most dangerous and depressing phenomenon of all. Aristotle warned us in The Ethics that the state is held together through friendship and social bonds. So as the peddlers of outrage turn us against each other, they risk destroying a nation. The Outrage Industry pushes us toward systematic reflection on the characteristics of bombast and divisiveness. But to get to the truly ugly stuff of nihilism, we will inevitably find ourselves back in the interdisciplinary, Nazi-inspired, and largely abandoned mid-twentieth-century study of “mass psychology.” It will turn out to be extraordinarily relevant in our own century.
