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The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility by Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj (review)

The poisoning of American political discourse with insults, name-calling, misrepresentation, character assassination, and false, abusive, incendiary, hysterical tones and claims (“born in Kenya,” “death panels”) is not a new subject, but the book under review is illuminating in a number of ways. Undertaking a quantitative study, the authors show clearly that, while media aiming to evoke outrage is scarcely new, its volume is unprecedented. Talk radio is the leader, where, at the time of writing, “there are 3,795 all-talk or all-news stations in the United States, more than triple the number in existence just 15 years ago” (12). Their 2009 content analysis showed an average of one outrageous statement per minute on talk radio. Historical comparisons of technologies and cultural forms that did not exist a generation ago are obviously impossible, but it’s striking that widely syndicated newspaper columnists in both 1955 and 1975 were virtually outrage free, in comparison to almost six outrages, one might say, per column in 2009. Why the outrage boom? It’s not because of deepening polarization in the population at large. Rather, a perfect economic-technological storm has raged. In 1987, the Federal Communications Commission repealed the Fairness Doctrine. Political speech no longer had to be balanced. Limits on the number of stations a single company was permitted to own went through the roof. Meanwhile, the proliferation of outlets made it possible for broadcasters to profit handily by directing niche programming to relatively small audiences of a few million devotees. (In 2012, Fox Cable alone accounted for 61 percent of total News Corp profits.) The brand is the great product differentiator. Television is no longer required to be the market maximizer once enshrined by, in the words of a former network executive, “least objectionable programming.” Some of it, at any rate, along with political blogs, could be reserved for fanatics who feel a certain comfort knowing that their blowhards who speak to them—and for them—will go uncontradicted. For them, the bubble is not the price they pay for their cramped ideological quarters; it is the benefit. Book Review 1