No Wars But The Culture War

 Elliott Morris (behind a paywall) talks about a new academic paper that looks at how cable news broke out brains and made us - particularly on the Right - obsessive culture warriors. The interesting link is that we all know how social media algorithms prey on our outrage. Stories that anger you engage you more than stories that inform you. It is not at all surprising to me, because I grew of age in the era of Rush Limbaugh and the emergence of Fox News.

There were no algorithms back then feeding us outrage inducing clickbait. There were just radio and TV ratings that showed what played and what didn't. Limbaugh's culture war got listeners; NPR did not. 

Cable news, as such, really begins with Ted Turner's - at the time - fantastical idea that we somehow needed 24 hour access to the news. Before that, we waited for the 6 or 11 o'clock news and then waited again for the morning paper. ESPN was crazy, because you could find out if your team won without waiting for the morning sports page. 

Early CNN coverage was pretty dry. It felt a lot like the BBC World Service does today. The pivot was during the 1991 Gulf War, with Bernard Shaw and Wolf Blitzer describing the bombs falling on Baghdad from their hotel window. The sensational always sells better than information. Over time, dramatic stories were not only prioritized, but sought out. One staple of cable news is Missing White Girl, because it stokes a certain amount of interest and outrage in a population that devours true crime stories. 

Culture war issues are natural hot button topics. Arguments about trans girls in sports are engaging people in ways that are disproportionate to their actual impact on society. What I find interesting and disturbing is not just the prevalence of these stories, but the way they short circuit whatever reason and logic people possess. I've written before about how the Madisonian theory of government is dependent on people being rational about their interests - at least in theory. 

We have abandoned reason for outrage, and I'd like to blame it on Rupert Murdoch, but I fear it's simply how we are wired and how we are being catered to, not how we are being led astray.