Smoking

The news is an addictive product. 

Like cigarettes, this product can have a profound negative impact on your health. Almost without exception it will make you lonelier, more anxious, more distrustful of others, and more depressed.

We do this on purpose. Even at the reporter level, some of us know what we’re doing. 

When you order a Double Whopper and fries, nobody at the BK counter tells you to stop jogging and lay off salads and apples. But the cashier can probably guess that’ll be a consequence.

It’s the same with us. We know we’re in the emotional manipulation business. We know we’re training you to unmoor yourself from reality and adopt self-destructive habits.  

After a lifetime of following the news, most customers will lose – usually forever – the ability to understand what they’re getting into. There are no warning labels on the news. If there were, here is what they might say: 

THE NEWS IS A CONSUMER PRODUCT

If you take away nothing else from this book, please try to remember this. 

Years ago I trained myself to use a trick. Before clicking on any article, I imagine the title of the news outlet emblazoned on a cigarette box or candy wrapper (as in, “I’m going to run outside for an MSNBC”).

This news-as-smoking similarity begins with the ritual of consumption. 

Especially in the cell phone era, consuming both products is idiosyncratic, private, and designed to be pleasurable.

You get the same rush from pulling the dense metal phone out of your jeans that a smoker gets withdrawing a softened cardboard Marlboro box. 

My phone cover has a waffle-patterned back to it. If I close my eyes, I know exactly how it feels. You can probably do the same thing.

Before they target your lungs, cigarettes win you over with smell and touch and sound: that coffee-like aroma, the brittle feel of the rolling paper, the whooshing noise of a spark becoming a flame.

When you read news, it’s the same. The feel of the depressed circle of your phone control button pleases. Scrolling is similar tactile trigger to grinding a lighter with a thumb. 

The bright color of your favorite news outlet’s logo is designed to be as soothing as the familiar mint green of Kools, or the red circle of Lucky Strikes.

The magic begins after you click.

In 2017, Facebook’s former VP for growth, Chamath Palihapitiya, said he was guilt-ridden over helping push a socially-destructive product that fed off “short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops.” 

Napster founder and fellow onetime Facebook executive Sean Parker said something similar, talking about the “little dopamine hit” that you get from likes and other rewards. It was, he said, an experience designed to exploit human “vulnerability.” 

Most educated people understand addiction is a danger of Internet use generally. The hunched-over, phone-obsessed individual has become a meme in modern art and commentary.  

But few have tied it to the news. 

Internet-fueled addiction is frankly just a new quirk to the crass consumer experience that is (and has been for some time) the news. 

The notion that you are reading the truth, and not consuming a product, is the first deception of commercial media. 

It’s the same with conservative or liberal brands. In both cases, the product is an attention-grabber, a mental stimulant. 

The core commercial activity involves an ad stuck in front of an eyeball, though you may also pay a subscription, or rarer still a newsstand charge. The involuntary surrender of your personal data may also be part of the consumer price.  

In all cases, however, you’re paying something in exchange for the experience of reading an article or watching a report.

All the commercial actors make more money if you read or watch more. Therefore the business is geared toward keeping you glued to the screen. 

This leads to the second deception of the news business: 

YOU DON’T NEED TO WATCH THAT MUCH NEWS

Even if coverage were edited ideally, with time and space apportioned to stories according to their importance, there would be little benefit to reading five hours a day about nuclear hazards or the declining water supply or [insert monstrous international emergency here]. 

You will never have the political power to do something about all the terrifying problems we wave at you. 

The human brain just isn’t designed to take in a whole world’s worth of disturbing news. Most of us have enough trouble with the more mundane problems of finding inner peace and securing happiness for our loved ones.

We know this, but keep winding you up anyway. 

In fact, the tension between the sheer quantity of horrifying news and your real-world impotence to do much about it is part of our consumer strategy. 

We create the illusion that being informed is a kind of action in itself. So to wash that guilt out – to eliminate the shame and discomfort you feel over doing nothing as the world goes mad – you’ll keep tuning in. 

This is the press version of the “ring around the collar” marketing trick: shaming you into being a better consumer.  

The “You don’t actually need to be watching this all day” rule would be true even if news stories were sorted logically and according to social importance. 

They aren’t:

WE ARE NOT INFORMING YOU. WE CAN’T, ACTUALLY

Irony alert: the most important news story in the world is the inability of the ordinary news consumer to understand the news. 

This is no dig against readers. The world has just grown so complex that the majority of serious issues are beyond the understanding of non-specialists. 

Take “the economy.” The average citizen has basic ideas about money. We shouldn’t spend more than we have. People should pay their debts. And so on. 

But how many people know what a derivative is? An interest rate swap? An auction rate security? 

Just the process for issuing the public bond used to pay for the skating rink where your kids play is a morass so complex it took federal prosecutors nearly a decade to train themselves in the language of it, when they tried (and failed) to bust bankers who rigged that game to steal money. 

I covered the Dodd-Frank financial reform act in 2010–2011. The Senate and the House were working to come up with new guidelines for the clearing of derivatives. In layman’s terms, they were trying to establish a mechanism for settling swap transactions in the way exchanges settle stock trades. 

But not a single elected member knew anything about derivatives clearing. Only one or two had staff members who were in any way acquainted with the issue. Except for one or two academics who volunteered time between classes, the only people who could understand the bill were paid lobbyists. This issue had profound importance because the opacity of the swap market was a major factor in the 2008 crash. 

So, talk about horrors: not only is the structure of the modern economy inaccessible to ordinary consumers, it can be inaccessible to the people setting public policy. Often, it’s beyond the CEOs in relevant industries (AIG sank in part because executives did not understand its own financial products).

There are similar complexity issues in almost every field, from energy to medicine to pollution science to nuclear weapons maintenance. 

If we in the press were being honest with audiences, we would tell them: the world is now so complex, you cannot ever hope to be truly informed. We can tell you a few broad strokes, but that’s it.

Or, if we were truly acting out of concern, we would make educating audiences about the basics of complex fields urgent priorities.

But we could never make that stuff sell. So we find other material. 

Most journalists are failed humanities majors. Literature degrees are common among our kind (I have one). If we have expertise in anything, it’s telling stories.

That’s mostly what we do. Rather than try to get you up to speed about complex problems, we build up characters and storylines, using soap-opera techniques.

About those stories:

WE SELL IDENTITY

In Bias, that Bible for people who loathe and fear the “liberal media,” Bernard Goldberg looked at a curious episode in the late eighties and early nineties, when the press randomly decided to care about homelessness. 

Goldberg cited a study examining 103 network TV stories on homelessness, along with 26 news articles. He quoted analyst Robert Lichter:

“Only one source in twenty-five,” Lichter concluded, “blamed homelessness on the personal problems of the homeless themselves, such as mental illness, drug or alcohol abuse, or lack of skills or motivation. The other 96 percent blamed social or political conditions for their plight…”

In sum, Goldberg’s gripe was that reporters didn’t interview enough people who thought homelessness was a personal failing. 

He’s right. I would argue he’s also an asshole. But, technically, not incorrect. 

Homelessness, generally speaking, has always been a serious problem. Current levels are about three times what they were when Ronald Reagan became President. Goldberg was in the ballpark of the right question: were the networks freaking out about it back then, and not before or later? 

Among other reasons, reporting on homelessness in the Reagan years was a popular means of decrying the “Greed is good” era. Talking about the issue became a way of showing you cared. 

This was satirized by Bret Easton Ellis in American Psycho. His deranged killer Patrick Bateman, while dining at an upscale restaurant called “espace,” interrupts everyone’s overpriced dinner to give a speech about all of the things the news tells him to care about. 

Bateman’s fellow moussed-banker pal Timothy Bryce had challenged the table guests, saying, “What about the massacres in Sri Lanka…? I mean, do you know anything about Sri Lanka, about how, like, the Sikhs are killing tons of Israelis over there…?”

This is basically everyone who reads the news, though most don’t know it.

Anyway, Bateman corrects him (“Come on, Bryce, there are a lot more important problems than Sri Lanka”) and gives a list of things “we” must do to fix the world.

“We have to provide food, and shelter, for the homeless,” he deadpans.

Like Bateman’s Oliver Peoples glasses and his herb mint facial mask, concern for the homeless was just another fashionable thing he wore.

The Bateman character later kills a homeless person and his dog for fun, which I doubt many news consumers did. But most audiences did forget about homelessness pretty much instantly once we in the media stopped babbling about it.

By an amazing coincidence, the drop in coverage came exactly as officials in cities like New York began forcing the homeless out of “civilized” areas by mass-arresting them for things like obstructing pedestrian traffic. Out of sight, out of mind. 

American Psycho was a book about how the American idea of personality is constructed around things we buy. We may be insane monsters inside, but we work hard to have good consumer taste on the surface. Ellis understood that most of us, when we read the news, are really just telling ourselves a story about who we like to think we are, when we look in the mirror.

The main difference between Fox and MSNBC is their audiences are choosing different personal mythologies. Again: this is a consumer choice. It’s not the truth, but a truth product. 

People who watch Fox tend to be older, white, and scared. They’re tuning in to be told they’re the last holdouts in a disintegrating empire, last Romans besieged by Vandals. Fox runs the stories that pop out of Nexis featuring a standard list of cultural villains, usually liberals, feminists, atheists, immigrants, or any of a number of handout-seeking political constituencies. 

When a liberal celebrity says something stupid – which happens about once every two seconds – it goes straight on the air (they have a whole archive of Lena Dunham bits). 

Fox is basically a neverending slasher flick for the Greatest Generation. The only thing that varies is what Marx-fluent monster leaps out of Camp Crystal Lake. Antifa is a good recent foil. The network was trying to squeeze content out of the New Black Panthers for a while. 

People who watch MSNBC, meanwhile, are tuning in to receive mega-doses of the world’s thinnest compliment, i.e. they’re morally superior to Donald Trump. The network lately has become a one-note morality play with endless segments about Michael Flynn, Michael Cohen, and Paul Manafort. This isn’t the first time they’ve used this model (more on that in a moment).

The coverage formula on both channels is to scare the crap out of audiences, then offer them micro-doses of safety and solidarity, which comes when they see people onscreen sharing their fears. There is a promise of reassurance that comes with both coverage formulas.

This is critical, that you’re encouraged to have consumer expectations, even though news should be unpredictable. Even sports fans expect disappointment about half the time. Not news audiences today:

WE’RE SELLING SAFE SPACES

The worst sin in the tobacco business is to upset customer expectations. Every cigarette must be the same.  If even once you light up a Camel and taste strawberries or pelican guano, your brain will never forgive the company.

The news business now works the same way, even though it shouldn’t.

Reporters are supposed to challenge their audiences. Did you buy one of the 110 billion non-bio-degradable plastic bottles sold by Coca-Cola last year, and if so, would you like to see a picture of where it might have gone?  Did the politician you voted for go back on his or her promises? Did your tax dollars pay for 23 children to be killed in the bombing of an Afghan wedding (we regularly bomb weddings by drone, among other things because men in some countries celebrate by firing weapons in the air)? 

There’s a widespread belief now that “bravery”* in a reporter is someone like Jim Acosta asking tough questions of someone like Donald Trump. But Acosta’s viewers hate Donald Trump. Wake me up when he takes on his own Twitter followers, or gets in his boss Jeff Zucker’s face about the massive profits they’ve all been making off Trumpmania.

We don’t challenge audiences. I know one TV reporter who did a story about a murder in a poor region of the South. After the piece was cut, the news director ordered that interviews of chief characters be re-shot as standups by the reporter, a typically good-looking, well-dressed, educated northeasterner.

The reason? Images of poor, inarticulate people are disturbing to audiences, especially upscale ones [read: people with disposable incomes who can respond to advertising]. That’s what we don’t show poverty on TV unless we’re laughing at it (Honey Boo Boo)or chasing it in squad cars (Cops). 

In the same way, if we’ve spent time building your identity as a person who despises and fears Donald Trump, and has ardent hopes he might soon be removed from office, we can’t upset that.

Which brings us back to MSNBC. The network’s all-Russiagate format is indistinguishable from the pioneering way the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal was monetized in the late nineties by – MSNBC. 

People forget that MSNBC, before it found its current niche as an anti-Trump network, was just a conventionally crappy news organization.

Launched in July of 1996, it had just a few hundred thousand households tuning in heading into 1998. Then they made a decision to become, as former NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard put it, the “first all-Monica, all the time network.” 

Keith Olbermann, then host of “The Big Show,” began running a nightly segment, “The White House in Crisis,” which spun Lewinsky stories virtually every night.

Another MSNBC show, Hardball with Chris Matthews, extended its breathless format and began rebroadcasting at 11:00 p.m. during the Lewinsky period. All its top-rated shows were about the Clinton scandal. 

Olbermann’s audience grew 148 percent in 1998. Hardball went from 252,000 households in 1997 to 559,000. Most conventional media did the same. The AP ran a whopping 4,109 stories on Monicagate in its first year of coverage, and had 25 reporters on the story full time. 

The top three networks devoted 1,931 minutes to the subject in 1998, more than the next seven subjects combined (and much more than a 1998 story that would have major implications for a later economic collapse, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act).

As they are now, talk shows were full of speculation that the president would imminently leave office. “I think [Clinton’s] Presidency is numbered in days,” said Sam Donaldson on ABC in the fateful last week of January, 1998.

This was pure manipulation: creating expectations in emotionally vulnerable audiences, holding out the possibility of imminent huge news, which guaranteed people would keep checking not just daily, but by the hour, the minute.

Fox did all of this and then went a step further. It milked the Lewinsky story through unapologetic cheerleading for the demise of Clinton. Unlike other outlets, which merely sought to cash in on sensation, Fox openly villainized Bill and trashed all the characters in the story. They even ran a poll asking if Monica Lewinsky was just an “average girl” or a “young tramp looking for thrills.”

Openly taking sides gave Fox a consumer advantage. For certain viewers, it was more like a pep rally than journalism. No matter what happened, Fox was always going to have a predictable take, one it was unembarrassed by. Meanwhile, Keith Olbermann was leaving MSNBC and moving back to sports, later claiming his “White House in Crisis” work gave him “dry heaves”.

The new model was what author Deborah Tannen called “two side fighting.” In the Lewinsky affair, outlets began either being for or against the Clintons, and you knew what you were getting before you tuned in.**

Not long after Monicagate, Fox assumed the top spot and stayed there for fifteen years, making $2.3 billion in profits in 2016 alone. 

I’ve run into trouble with friends for suggesting Fox is not a pack of lies. Sure, the network has an iffy relationship with the truth, but most of its content is factually correct. It’s just highly, highly selective – and predictable – about which facts it chooses to present. 

For instance, the same Fox that spent years going ape over would-be perjury, obstruction of justice, and extramarital sex in the Starr investigation is suddenly dead silent about a somewhat similar narrative involving Donald Trump paying off porn stars. People don’t tune in to Fox to hear bad news about their team.

Sadly, this is now the same business model of most every news outlet.

MSNBC for instance has run a number of interviews with Watergate hero Bob Woodward since he released a book this year on the Trump administration called Fear. 

In the most recent appearance, Woodward repeated a common trope in anti-Trump media, one borrowed from the Lewinsky era, i.e. that the “investigative walls are closing in.” The walls involved the felony campaign finance charge admitted to by Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.

But MSNBC has never asked Woodward about his pronouncement – which to date has only come in an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt – that in two years of research for Fear, he found no evidence of collusion with Russia, an almost constant coverage focus of the network. 

“I did not [find espionage or collusion],” Woodward said to Hewitt. “Of course, I looked for it, looked for it hard.”

This quote has not even appeared in Woodward’s own Washington Post. It’s been left to The New York Post, Real Clear Politics, and The Daily Caller to report on the comments of someone else’s journalist. In the exact inverse of Fox, people do not tune in to MSNBC to hear anything that could be construed as good news for the other team.

Similarly, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Greg Miller went looking for evidence that Cohen had been in Prague for a secret meeting with Russians, as is popular Russiagate theory. “We sent reporters through every hotel in Prague,” Miller said, explaining that weeks and months of searching were conducted.

But when, in all that, he found no evidence of a Cohen visit, that news didn’t make it into either his own book on the subject, or into the pages of his employer, the Washington Post. He only mentioned his findings on CSPAN. Once again, it was left to the Daily Caller to do someone else’s story. 

I point this out not to make a point about Russiagate – I’m content at this point to wait until the investigations are done to worry about this maddening affair – but to talk about the structure of media, especially in the Trump era.

Before the Russia story was even on the popular radar, I predicted the press would soon be divided in a way that left media audiences permanently sheltered from any narratives their “side” might find troublesome. 

We’ve safe-spaced the news! If you’re a consumer of one media brand, the polls will tell you Trump is trending up: he’s five points ahead at the beginning of 2018. Pick another brand and you’ll learn only 38 percent of Americans plan to vote for him. You can tell yourself any story you want about the future.

Choose one brand and you’ll read that this is the “beginning of the end” of the Trump Presidency; pick another and you’ll read there are basically no legal avenues for removing Trump prematurely that don’t involve a Republican Senate’s unexpected cooperation.

I work in this business and don’t know whom to trust. The situation recalls the landscape of third world countries, where the truth has to be pieced together from disparate bits reported by outlets loyal to different factions.

Our situation isn’t about politics so much as money, however. Companies are nurturing emotional dependencies for cash. The key is always reporting negatively about the other audience, but never about your own. They’re bad = you’re good, and endlessly spinning in that cycle creates hardened, loyal, dependent followers. 

A 2016 Pew survey found remarkably similar numbers of Democrats and Republicans – 58% of the former, 57% of the latter – said members of the opposing party made them “frustrated.” The survey showed 52% of Republicans believed Democrats were “closed-minded,” while 70% of Democrats felt that way about Republicans. 

We’re not encouraging people to break these patterns. If anything, we’re addicting people to conflict, vitriol, and feelings of superiority. It works. Companies know: fear and mistrust are even harder habits to break than smoking. 

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Footnotes:

* This kind of behavior is braver in places where journalists get killed, like reporters I knew who investigated Vladimir Putin, including Anna Politkovskaya and Yuri Scheckochikhin. 

** Because of this, the real scandal of the Lewinsky affair – what we later came to understand as a #MeToo question – was largely uncovered. The conservative Fox, run by serial harasser Ailes, was obviously never interested in that angle. The increasingly pro-Clinton non-Fox media, however, wouldn’t cover it either, focusing instead on the legitimacy of the special prosecution investigation and subsequent impeachment. The popular take on the case was epitomized by Chris Rock’s “He got impeached for what?” take.