Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj ask whether Americans are addicted to outrage:
On cable news networks, talk radio and in the political blogosphere there is a constant stream of name-calling, belittling, character assassination and falsehoods. Americans tell pollsters they dislike this kind of talk and believe it degrades our political system.
But the audience data tell a different story: In fact, Americans find this type of political commentary quite compelling. By our calculation, part of an analysis we did for our new book, The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility, the aggregate daily audience for such content is roughly 47 million people. In a cluttered media landscape where advertisers have a sea of choices, anxious television and radio producers hungry for revenue have sought new ways to break through the clutter—to stop the channel surfers as they peruse other options—and reach audiences. And the popular agent provocateurs of political talk media not only do the job—they also do it relatively cheaply. (Consider that CNN’s administrative expenses make up about twice as much of its budget share as at Fox or MSNBC.) As a result, America has developed a robust and successful Outrage Industry that makes money from calling political figures idiots, or even Nazis.
In a review, James Boylan puts Berry and Sobieraj’s book in historical context:
While The Outrage Industry offers a thorough survey of recent and present developments, it does little to convey the historical depth of the phenomenon. Although the authors present liberal and right-wing outrage as roughly equivalent in technique if not in size, in fact their foundations are profoundly different.
The historian Richard Hofstadter, who died too young in 1970, foresaw the persistence of right-wing outrage in his 1965 book, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. He saw in what he called the “pseudo-conservative” movement, which had pushed forward Barry Goldwater’s failed run for president, the appearance of an ostensibly patriotic faction that was, paradoxically, deeply unhappy and angry with America and the American system. Hofstadter understood that elements of this movement would survive: “In a populistic culture like ours . . . in which it is possible to exploit the wildest currents of public sentiment for private purposes, it is at least conceivable that a highly organized, vocal, active, and well-financed minority could create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.”
In an excerpt from their book, Berry and Sobieraj explain why we don’t have a liberal analog to Rush Limbaugh and aren’t likely to get one:
One basic reason for the modest size of the market for liberal talk is that much of the potential audience listens to other types of radio. Together, African Americans and Hispanics constitute somewhere near 30 percent of the nation’s population, but they constitute a much larger proportion of the nation’s liberal population, and these listeners can choose programming that is specifically targeted toward them. Talk programming is particularly popular among African Americans and there have long been stations catering to that market in urban areas. There are also Spanish-language alternatives that appeal to many Hispanic listeners. The potential audience for liberal talk radio is further reduced by the popularity of National Public Radio (NPR), which is more popular with liberal listeners than with conservatives. NPR rejects the charge that it reports news from a liberal point of view, but conservatives consistently deride NPR as biased. Ratings put the weekly audience for NPR at around 34 million and it is a major force in radio nationwide.
The Dish 