We once believed that to tune in with the news was some sort of civic duty. Reading the paper meant the ticket to being literate, and in the text we placed our trust. The degradation of media in general has slipped from the canopy of trust to become … well, something else. And that something else relies on one essential thing – conflict. Everything is couched in terms of controversy. Interviewers go for the kill, inserting hot takes, raising controversies, digging up dirt, gotcha questions, trying to get a rise out of the readership and in general trying to be a hero – or dick – doesn’t matter which one as long at it gets clicks. What was set up was a conflict machine. And we’re totally addicted.
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In Matt Taibbi’s upcoming book, Hate Inc., which looks to be a barnburner, he breaks down how media pundits conduct the news by a set of rules. There are rules of this competition that boil down to their only being two sides to any issue. Anything that goes wrong in society is the fault of the other side foiling things. And the other side is literally Hitler. Hate the other while feeling solidarity with your own team. Libs and dems, us and them, right and wrong. There is no grey zone, no other type of people, no ambiguity, just these little prepackaged hobby kits of ideology. Like, unlike. Friend, unfriend. Thumbs up, thumbs down. You are either pro or anti environment, pro or anti abortion, pro or anti guns, pro or anti church, pro or anti wall, pro or anti #metoo, pro or anti american, and so on. We get our endorphin rush, our Orwellian two minutes of hate on the enemy and solidarity with our team. … Though those two feisty minutes seem to have expanded quite a bit to fast feed the salivating chops of 24 hour cable newsertainment product.
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Political discourse in the media has basically turned into sports. More specifically, it’s turned into wrestling. You have a hero “babyface” and a villain, or “heel.” And the stronger the heel, the better the dramatic outcomes in the infotainment. Trump, of course, is the perfect heel, as I’ve written. To catch up to wrestling politics, politicians are catching up with the times, learning to master the “hot take,” and how to set Twitter in a frenzy with 280 characters or less. Get the audience into a frenzy – hate the heel, love the hero. Solidarity with us. Hate for them. And the conflict machine lives on forever.
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The dualism of the 2016 election slogan “Love Trumps Hate” fit in perfectly here. Does it mean love is greater than hate, or that we love Trump’s hate as we love to pillory a villain. When the roles reverse and ur-parties eventually switch power, it’ll be the same.
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Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, and later Neal Gabler in Life: The Movie, showed how the news slowly devolved into entertainment. News and entertainment fused together on television. News is no longer cool headed facts, but hot headed rage, falling to the worst instincts of television to become melodrama. An axiom of screenwriting – television writing specifically – is that every scene has to have a protagonist and antagonist. The protagonist has an intention, and the antagonist has an obstacle. And every scene has to have conflict. These are the primary colors of television.
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Watching conflict, whether on the Bachelorette, Orange is the New Black, or Dateline, is like getting a hit of sugar. Even nature programs like the BBC’s Planet Earth are cut to show animals in conflict, fighting, hunting, struggling to survive. They amp up the social Darwinian “survival of the fittest” aspects, downplaying the kin selection and community building aspects of animal communities. Keep it exciting, keep them watching, turn the conflict up to eleven, let the chips fall where they may.
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In the heyday of printing press news, the axiom was “if it bleeds it leads.” This is ever true today where everything is framed in this Celebrity Deathmatch manner. Attention-seeking headlines exploit this edge of conflict and must do so to capture eyes scrolling through the news feeds. These feeds were created at places like Facebook by programmers who’ve got Las Vegas slot machines on their resume. They get eyeballs on their headlines and their ads and popups and banners. They get viewers to keep tuning in, believing somehow that they’re too participating in the incredible unstoppable rage machine. The consequence of all this, Taibbi writes, is that society becomes reshaped by the media, ever more resembling the echo chambers of its algorithms. Divided into camps, or teams, or audiences, that hate each other. People begin to think their are literal Nazis next door, fanning the flames of conflict in this totalitarian pomo simulacrum.
A Fragile Dignity 