Why everyone is so crazy

Why everyone is so crazy

Slow Boring / by Matthew Yglesias / 1h

(Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Walking around day-to-day in Kerr County, Texas, where Donald Trump got 75% of the vote (down from 76% in 2016 and Mitt Romney’s 79% as part of the slow-but-steady bluing of Texas) for a couple of weeks, you notice two things.

One is that basically none of the stuff that bothers conservatives about contemporary life in America is happening. Nobody is introducing themselves with their pronouns, there are no Black Lives Matter signs, the local government officials aren’t talking about equity initiatives, and 100% of the virtue signaling is people putting up giant crucifixes or having Bible verses on the walls of their stores. It’s just a very conservative place where the overwhelming majority of people have conservative political opinions, and those who don’t are not incredibly eager to advertise that fact.

But the town is also not seething with rage in some obvious way against the Biden-era political order. People are just living their lives and will continue to do so as they vote to re-elect Chip Roy in 2022 and vote for whoever Biden’s opponent is in 2024. You would not get a sense talking to people who read the local newspaper that we are living through an era of massive political paranoia and social polarization.

But that’s a crucial caveat — the talking to people and reading the local newspaper things seem fairly calm. I’m just surrounded by people who don’t share my views about taxation and abortion rights. The non-calm exists elsewhere, not in conversations or local newspapers, but in an increasingly competitive national media environment. That’s what I thought about the recent back and forth between Kevin Drum, who wrote an essay arguing that Fox News is at the root of America’s rage-filled politics, and Ben Dreyfuss, who says we should blame social media instead.

I’m firmly on the side that Fox is under-studied as a causal factor in American politics. The handful of high-quality studies out there appear to show very large impacts, and the world is full of anecdotes about Fox-pilling tearing families apart. Social media is in some ways a sexier topic to study, and I do often feel that focus on social media phenomena obscures the cable news elephant in the room.

But Dreyfuss’s reply carries a lot of weight to it. I’d also say that the torqued-up nature of American politics is just too much of an asymmetrical phenomenon to attribute solely to Fox, and MSNBC’s audience just clearly isn’t that big. The real issue, though, isn’t exactly Fox or Facebook but something that they are both parts of — Americans’ increasing tendency to be customers in a highly efficient, highly competitive, highly nationalized (or even globalized) media market that optimizes for making people feel alarmed and uncertain.

If it bleeds, it leads

When I travel I like to read local newspapers, and because of the way NBC structures its Olympics coverage, I also caught a bunch of local television news which I don’t normally do. In both cases, you see that old clichés from the 1990s still largely hold, particularly an apparently disproportionate emphasis on crimes and grisly car accidents relative to their objective importance. This is the principle of “if it bleeds, it leads” — the idea that audiences will be most compelled by news that is gory and shocking rather than earnest rundowns of city council agenda items.

It’s a lot of this kind of thing, and it creates a fairly alarming tableau.

Now you dig into the details and we’re talking about a mom-murderer in the next county over who was sentenced for a crime that occurred two years ago. Someone was selling some meth. Someone else thought, wrongly, that he could make a quick buck by pretending that his Ditch Witch J-20 directional drill was stolen. We’re actually not looking at alarming threats to life and limb facing the good people of Kerrville.

That’s just how media is — alarmist.

But local media has two key attributes. One is that even in a place like this, where the partisan politics is lopsided, Biden voters are still 25% of the population and probably a bigger share than that of the newspaper audience. So being politically alarmist risks alienating people. The other is that even if you throw in the insurance scams and whatnot, there’s only so much interesting crime to write about. You end up filling a lot of the news hole with civically responsible stuff like reminding people about Texas’ Back to School sales tax holiday, feel-good stories about the Kiwanis, and human interest about a 46-year-old enlisting in the Air Force. And of course, even in rural Texas, there are NIMBYs trying to ruin everything.

In other words, even though the Kerrville Daily Times sort of wants to terrify you, reading it comprehensively is a pretty calming experience. The signature flaw of this style of newspapering has always been that it veers toward being dull and earnest. But it’s generally dull and earnest in a civically engaged, pro-social way. Which is fine as long as you don’t have any competition.

A world of abundance

I was over visiting some friends of my wife’s parents and they had Fox News on in the house, not the local TV news. And on Fox, there was lots of scary stuff happening. A Harvard professor was getting denounced for telling medical school students that the concepts of “male” and “female” are significant to biology. Crime was up a lot in Philadelphia. Hunter Biden was doing something shady. The CDC was contradicting itself. The walls of darkness were closing in.

I didn’t stick around long enough to really watch, and I’m sure if I’d stayed locked-in for all of prime time I would have found some lies or misinformation on there.

But the stories I saw were basically accurate and I basically agreed with all of them. The DEI officer who gave Carole Hooven a hard time was in the wrong. Crime really did go up in most American cities in 2020 and seems to have risen further in some others in 2021. Hunter Biden is absolutely a shady dude. And the CDC’s communications have been a little confusing. Now, on the other hand, Hooven’s book has blurbs from a bunch of famous Harvard professors, so it’s not actually the case that she’s been thrown under the bus by the institution. She got a favorable review in Kirkus. I bought the book, which I would not have otherwise heard of thanks to the controversy. Shootings and murders are now trending down in New York. The CDC Covid messaging has been a lot less damaging than Tucker Carlson’s constant platforming of Alex Berenson.

In other words, the Fox worldview is basically wrong, but it’s overwhelmingly composed of beats that are accurate.

When your mandate is to cover the whole country (or the whole world) rather than just Kerr County, you don’t run out of Libs Gone Wild stories to do. And when your addressable audience is the entire country, you don’t need to worry too much about alienating Biden voters. And I should also emphasize that it’s not the case that it only preaches to the converted and thus has no impact.

Preaching to the converted would be if every day the show says “it’s still the case that Democrats favor higher taxes, stricter regulation of guns, and less-strict regulation of abortions whereas Republicans favor the opposite.” Most people don’t actually need to consume any political news to decide which coalition they align with and then vote accordingly. But that would be boring. What’s entertaining is to tell people that we’re not just having the same old political arguments over and over again, but that the people on the other side of those arguments are a direct and immediate threat to you and your family.

And now we all live in that world, all the time.

The desert of the real

I would say the key thing about Fox isn’t that it’s unique, but just that it was the start of a trend. When there was one 24-hour cable channel, it made sense for CNN to replicate the staid view from nowhere sensibility. But as we got more and more of them, it made sense from a business perspective to do something like Fox. And now thanks to the internet, we are constantly in a world of infinite 24-hour news channels that are all fighting constantly for our attention.

And this is a really big country. There are over 100,000 K-12 schools in the United States. If you assume optimistically that in any given year, one out of every 100 teachers say or do anything racist at any school in the United States, that still leaves you with 1,000 racist teacher incidents per year. You could do a dozen “racist teacher” stories per week and still be leaving racist teachers on the table.

But at the same time, some other outlet could be doing 1,000 “woke administrator out of control” stories per week. And we’ll all be clicking and sharing and arguing about those stories nonstop.

And while one group of people are reading stories about soaring crime in Philadelphia, others are reading about Philly cops beating an autistic man while claiming to be the “town watch” while others face obstruction of justice and perjury charges related to covering up thefts. There are a lot of cops in America, and the state of our criminal justice data collection is really bad, so we only have the foggiest notion of what’s actually going on with crime or police corruption.

Obviously, lots of false or misleading stories end up going viral on Twitter or Facebook, and there are plenty of valid questions about how the platforms should manage that. But I think a lot of people misperceive why cracking down on misinformation is important. The main issue is that if you have any experience on the internet, it’s pretty easy to tell what kind of stories will get clicks. The difficulty is two-fold — it’s moderately difficult to find clicky stories to aggregate, and it’s very difficult to find them and write them up before competitors while simultaneously optimizing them for maximum engagement. A really appealing solution to these problems is to just make stuff up since you won’t face competition on the fake story. So if you allow fake stories to compete with real ones on a level playing field, the fake stuff will crowd out the real and kill your platform.

As a result, they do try to clamp down on misinformation. But the clampdown doesn’t do anything to dampen the crazy-making aspects of marinating 24/7 in an information marketplace designed to make you feel like you are constantly under threat.

Misery loves company

By making content mills do the legwork of finding accurate stories that conform to the broad templates of the fake stories that would be optimal for engagement, the platforms do themselves a favor.

People want to read stories that get them spun up.

Services that optimize to serve them lots of stories that spin them up will get lots of engagement.

The optimal way to create stories that spin the audience up would be to write fake ones.

But to get spun-up, you need to believe the stories are real, so the services need to be full of mostly accurate stories.

So services try to clamp down on misinformation — imperfectly, but with some real success.

As a result, social feeds are full of accurate stories whose content and framing have been designed to replicate the qualities of hypothetical engagement-maximizing fake stories.

You can see this in my favorite study of Facebook, “The Welfare Effects of Social Media” by Hunt Allcott, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer & Matthew Gentzkow where they paid people to log off, touch grass, and eschew Facebook use for few weeks. They found that deactivators were worse informed about politics than those who kept using Facebook. But they were happier. And even with the monetary incentive removed, they didn’t go back to using Facebook as much as they had before.

In other words, it’s an addictive/compulsive behavior like smoking or excessive snacking that caters to people's authentic short-term preferences but makes them unhappy over the longer term. The importance of bringing Fox into the picture, though, is that this is not a unique property of social media — it’s a generalized consequence of media abundance. Facebook is the highest form of this available in the world today, but the trend precedes it and is part of a steadily improving situation in Americans’ access to media.

What is to be done?

To an extent, I do kind of think we’re in the realm of “times change; you’ve got to deal with it.”

But there are relevant personal and policy considerations here.

One is just that if you recognize you have a limited amount of free time in your life to read about the news, you might want to consider the benefits of trying to really understand the community you live in rather than obtaining a superficial understanding of national and global affairs. It’s commonplace for media people these days to exhort people to subscribe to their local newspaper, and I’d gladly echo that. But even more, I’d suggest you try to read your local newspaper, not despite the fact that tons of articles in it don’t press on culture war hot buttons that you find emotionally engaging, but precisely because that’s the structure of local news.

Governments deal with a lot of banal problems.

Policy debates are often driven by people’s picayune self-interest rather than big ideological constructs.

Most people are reasonably happy with the status quo that prevails in their local community.

This stuff is all a bit boring if you look at it through one lens, though through another lens it’s interesting because it directly connects to things that touch your life in a practical way.

In other words, it’s not just good to support local media because they do important accountability work. It’s also important to support local media because when they have a lot of newsholes to fill, they pretty quickly run out of mind-blowing investigative scoops and Honduran insurance fraudsters and capture the humdrum routine of daily life. It’s not as “engaging” as learning about Viktor Orbán’s twilight struggle against the woke forces of Brussels, but it’s a more truthful depiction of what life is like.

On a policy level, I just think we should keep in mind that an ever-more-optimized media sphere is not really desirable and that this is relevant to regulatory debates.

When you think about air travel, by contrast, we want to regulate planes so that they’ll be safe. But it’s also really good for people to be able to travel, so at a certain point, we say “safe enough” and let the planes fly. Contemporary planes are super-safe and very affordable, but that’s created new environmental worries. Now we need to think about new regulations to make aviation more sustainable, but again, “this will make it way harder for people to travel” is a real downside to regulatory proposals that we need to take seriously.

By contrast with social media, whether we’re talking about ideas like Paul Romer’s proposal for a tax on digital advertising or various regulatory proposals around privacy or data portability or competition, shrinking the digital media industry is not really a serious cost. It’s like shrinking the potato chip industry or adopting a rule that has the unintended consequence of reducing alcohol consumption. Scrolling feeds and drinking beer and eating chips are also enjoyable activities (you can do all three together!), but none of this is really good for you, and if there are plausible policy ideas to nudge things in the other direction, that’s all good.

Last but not least (though this is really going to be a post for a whole other day), I think we should all challenge pundits and prognosticators who hold forth on the unprecedented nature of today’s threats to put those kinds of ideas in a broader context. It’s obviously not a great idea, business-wise, to tell people that your columns are on unimportant subjects or that the stakes in next year’s election are unimportant. But exactly for that reason, I think we should probably be suspicious of people’s efforts to sell the drama. “I’m just filling the air so bored retirees have something to do” is a terrible pitch for a cable TV show, but at the end of the day, that’s kind of the business.

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