The political atmosphere in America seem to have deteriorated a lot in the last few years. A lot of yelling. A lot of arrogance and overconfidence. A lot of trusting of stories that confirm what we already believe as opposed to stories that challenge what we only think we know. And a lot of trusting of stories that are literally not true.
People don’t just disagree with each other. They can’t imagine how a decent human being could disagree with their view of immigration or the minimum wage or President Trump.
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It’s related to tribalism — our desire to join together with people and be part of something larger than ourselves — our embrace of religion, sports, politics. Tribalism is very old. Probably embedded in our DNA. So what has changed?
What has changed is our ability to feed and indulge our tribalism, particularly with news and politics. This new-found ability is the result of the transformation of the news and information landscape. It began with cable news. The internet has taken it to a new level.
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Think of news and information as a buffet.
In the old days, the news buffet came from three suppliers — ABC, NBC, CBS and maybe your local newspaper. It was a pretty cushy environment for the networks. They jockeyed for market share but they all had a pretty good deal. Bland was the order of they day.
They served the informational equivalent of meat and potatoes. There was some variation but not much. Each station pretty much served up the same meat and the same potatoes. Oh, maybe one had french fries while the other had baked potatoes and the third had hash browns. But it was just potatoes. And it was only open a few hours a day.
When there’s only one television in the house, quality tends toward the lowest common denominator. Carving out a niche for programming that only a minority wants to watch isn’t profitable. Carving out a niche that a minority doesn’t want to watch is also unprofitable. They’ll veto that channel in a house with only one television. But as America got richer and televisions became cheaper, suddenly there’s an opportunity to customize.
That let cable create a lot more variation. You could have Fox News and MSNBC. You could have fish. And even some tofu. They were open pretty much all day.
And when the internet comes along and everyone has a smartphone, everyone watches what they want to watch and the world gets a lot more interesting. With Twitter and Facebook there’s ethnic food and fancy cuisine and diner food and paleo and even some crazy stuff on the edges, the news equivalent of chocolate covered locusts. You can go back for more any time you like.
The news business suddenly became very challenging. It suddenly became a lot harder to make money. The organizations that figured out how to make money survived. A lot of newspapers didn’t. A lot of news sites on the internet struggled to pay their bills. There was a big shakeout that’s still going on. But one thing is very clear. Traffic is crucial. Visitors, eyeballs, attention are all scarce. Getting more of them helps pay those bills.
That’s the obvious part. Here’s the not so obvious part. When it’s a giant buffet with competitors all over the place and people able to customize what they see and read, the providers are going to change what they serve.
The providers are going to change what they serve.
The competition is fierce to get the viewer’s attention. There’s an increased urgency to give the viewer what the viewer wants. If you do what you’ve always done, you probably don’t survive. Nobody wants the same well-done steak and the over-cooked mashed potatoes anymore. Viewers put up with it when they had to. Now they don’t have to. So if you’re a news organization and you want to stay alive, you have to attract more viewers, more attention.
And that leads to some strange dynamics.
Who is CNN’s biggest competitor? You’d think that would be Fox News. But their competition is really MSNBC and the Huffington Post and the Daily Kos and people on twitter who give people what they want. People and sites that cater to those who lean to the left. The biggest competitor of Fox News isn’t CNN — it’s Breitbart, and Rush Limbaugh and sites that cater to the right.
To get more views, you need to be a little bit louder in favor of the home team and a little less nuanced. You can’t just politely disagree with the other tribe. You need to vilify them. Outrage sells when competition is this intense.
