“Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.” With that phrase, actress Norma Desmond in the film Sunset Boulevard (played by Gloria Swanson) calls on the famous director to fill the frame with her face; a well-crafted close-up is a commanding film statement. By recognizing the importance of image framing, Diana Mutz expertly explains how something at once so simple and yet so powerful can also have a profound effect on politics. More generally, she argues persuasively that presentation format powerfully drives viewer responses to televised political conflict. This book is a must-read for scholars of political communication, and for that matter anyone concerned with the lack of civility in our political discourse.

Incivility is the focus of Mutz’s book, which is particularly timely given the rise of Donald Trump as the GOP’s 2016 nominee for president; Trump’s own incivility is blasted to millions of followers on Twitter (more on this in a bit) and reinforced in the press. Mutz defines uncivil discourse as “communication that violates the norms of politeness for a given culture” and focuses on television, which remains the way most Americans get information about politics. Expertly combining studies using multiple methods—lab experiments, survey research, and content analysis—Mutz examines the rise and implications of incivility on our TVs and thus in our politics.

For Mutz, extreme close-ups on television provide a “symbolic appearance of proximity” (p. 27) and so may influence people in ways similar to actual proximity. Basically, the media emphasizes conflict, gets in our faces, and shouts at us. This arouses our emotions. The problem, Mutz argues in Chapter 8, is not so much that televised conflict has increased over time. Instead, the presentation of conflict has become much more personal through the increased use of extreme close-ups of the political combatants, their faces filling the screen as if they were actually in our living rooms.

One might think this increased personalization of conflict is inherently dangerous. But Mutz finds a few benefits. For example, increased incivility causes people to pay attention. An experiment shows that incivility plus close-up camera shots—a double-dose of impropriety—actually improves recall of political information. These findings reinforce work by scholars of emotions who have shown negativity to be memorable and in some cases to even drive efforts to learn about politics.

So great news, right? Not exactly.

Mutz shows that incivility—especially of the close-up kind ubiquitous on television—lowers the legitimacy of both sides and their arguments. Events since she wrote her book may actually be outpacing our expectations of the damage incivility might cause. In a world in which Donald Trump claimed the general election would be rigged (months prior to the voting), and Bernie Sanders repeatedly accused the Democratic National Committee of rigging the primaries to favor Hillary Clinton, this disdain for the opposition may well become dangerous to democracy, especially after a close election where the winner is not readily evident.

Why? As Mutz writes, “The democratic process rests on the premise that each side in any given controversy perceives the opposition as having some reasonable foundation for its positions” (p. 50). As the incivility promoted on television reduces the legitimacy of opponents, it makes it easier to believe that those we do not like have no reasonable bases for their positions. In a zero-sum election game, like the U.S. two-party system, if you do not win, you lose, and if you lose to illegitimate opponents, the loss itself is illegitimate. It becomes a very small leap to begin to believe the system itself is rigged. As Mutz explains, “in-your-face politics unintentionally promotes antigovernment policies” (p. 91).

As well designed as the studies are, and as well developed are the analyses, we cannot help but view Mutz’s book in the context of the 2016 presidential election, even though it was written some time before. As we noted earlier, that election is being fought not only on TV, but also the internet, and especially on Twitter, thanks to Donald Trump. This is where the book has trouble keeping up with political reality.

Mutz provides a brief section (pp. 170–177) in which she hypothesizes how her findings would extend to the online world, reviewing a few studies about internet incivility and pointing out methodological flaws. Mutz appears to dismiss, though, the likely impact of outlets such as Twitter, writing that text is “especially poor at transmitting a sense of incivility (p. 171).” Perhaps so, but users have learned to counteract this by drastically increasing the “loudness” of their online incivility. It is possible to savage somebody with 24/7 tweets. TV programs, though, generally last an hour, and usually do not use death threats as a means of signaling disagreement. And, there are very racist/sexist comments every day on Twitter—recently, an actress in the 2016 Ghostbusters movie remake was led to close her Twitter account due to racist abuse. We would argue that while political television regularly features insults and incivility, it is nothing compared to what one can read in the comments section of political websites and a Twitter timeline. People can be far more acrimonious than their favorite politicians or pundits, especially given the often impersonal nature of tweets and comments. This use of text as the instigator needs no close-up to arouse passions. It might be that such attacks directly incite people more than Crossfire ever did, close-ups and all.

In this election cycle, these tweets have been considered so important to cable news networks that they have felt compelled to cover them. Moreover, when discussed, the tweets are usually shown full screen—in text form—while being read by the newscaster. Such tweets are also shown verbatim on the ubiquitous text crawler at the bottom of the screen. Thus, what happens in the social media world potentially influences even what voters see on TV.

While it is not really fair to critique an author for not doing something she did not intend to do, if 2016 is any indication, the role of social media may be on its way to surpassing that of television. While it is true that television is still the dominant source of information for most voters, social media is becoming a dominant source of stories for the traditional media. Reporters and politicians are on Twitter even if the average voter is not.

For example, in late July 2016, Donald Trump—using clearly uncivil language on Twitter—attacked a father of a Muslim U.S. soldier killed in Iraq who had spoken critically of Trump at the Democratic National Convention. This fit Trump’s general profile using Twitter, where despite a massive (and emotional) backlash, he followed up with even more incivility. While perhaps not carrying the immediacy of a televised close-up, the explosive reactions to so many of Trump’s tweets have dominated political news over the past year, reinforcing the dynamic of attack and response that is actually at the core of Mutz’s argument about incivility.

In sum, Mutz is correct in her point that “figuring out the implications of new technologies for in-your-face politics is complex” (p. 177). Figuring out these implications is also critical as social media continues its rise. The work Mutz has done on television lays an excellent path for these necessary extensions.

The apparent rise in incivility whether driven by television, the internet, or both, is a cause for concern. While we have previously expressed our belief that negativity in campaigns has a positive side, we do worry that as incivility increases among both elites and the public, contempt for one’s opponents may be an increasingly-important driving emotion, something we are now investigating. A contemptuous politics may be a dangerous politics; if the primary emotion it fans is one that belittles the other side and questions its legitimacy, there is reason to worry.

What might be done to counter the in-your-face incivility? Mutz generally gives a pass to the media, saying that their choices on what to show and how to show it are justifiable because without this approach to coverage, nobody would watch. She writes that her “findings can be viewed as a classic case of a market failure—the kind of presentation that attracts audiences and builds television revenues is not the one that best serves democratic citizens” (p. 206). To us, this ratings-first focus also seems detrimental because it means that voters have fewer ways to recognize when candidates are lying to them. Do the TV media have any responsibility as an arbitrator, holding candidates responsible for the accuracy of their words or actions? For instance, ESPN regularly features analysts shouting about sports. Yet on ESPN, they generally attempt to appeal to actual facts to bolster their arguments. Perhaps political shows could do so as well. We recognize, however, that this is unlikely. Perhaps the only solution will be a potential catharsis offered by the extremity of the Trump 2016 campaign. Assuming, of course, he loses.