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“Modern politics generates demand by manufacturing grievances.”

Julian Sanchez says:

Some products satisfy preexisting needs; some need to manufacture a perceived deficiency to move units. Modern politics generates demand by manufacturing grievances.

This is pretty much the Fox News raison d'être. Like the makers of many useless cosmetic products, they can exist only if they create problems their buyers never knew existed and then convince them that only using their product will solve these previously unrecognized problems.

Masks? An invasion of your freedom! CRT? They're brainwashing white kids! The 2020 election? It wasn't lost, it was stolen! Some judge had to take down his Ten Commandments plaque? Your Bible is next!

There was a time when this kind of thing was restricted to mimeographed newsletters mailed to maybe hundreds or thousands of people. But Fox News is the Henry Ford of outrage: the first to truly industrialize and then mass produce feverish outrage.

Their secret? Better technology and better motivation. Better technology requires money, and that in turn provides the motivation for creating an outrage machine that works at industrial scale. Unlike the lunatics of yore, they don't do it because of sincere if muddled beliefs. They do it because it makes lots of money. Deliberate and profit-driven business processes are far more efficient, scalable, and sustainable than any barmy halfwittery could ever be.

32 thoughts on ““Modern politics generates demand by manufacturing grievances.”

  1. George Salt

    According to October numbers from TV Newser, the three major cable networks attract an average audience of only 4.2 million viewers during primetime, which is when viewing peaks. In a nation of 330 million, that’s just a little over 1 percent of the population. Meanwhile, the three nightly news broadcasts together can reliably pull in 21.5 million viewers a night.

    https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/week-of-oct-4-cable-network-ranker-fox-news-remains-no-1-in-total-day-viewers-while-sports-networks-rise-in-primetime/491418/

    Compare the cable news audience to that of country music (31 million listeners daily) or Netflix (74 million subscribers) to gain another perspective.

    A Pew report finds that 52% of the adult population use Facebook daily. That's like 1-1/2 Superbowls happening every day.

    https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/11/11/social-media-update-2016/

    Fox News is insignificant compared to Facebook.

    1. Ken Rhodes

      What an absurd oversimplification!

      My daughter uses Facebook every day. She shares news about her kids, pictures of where she's been and what she's done, recipes, ideas about news events, etc. She watches CNN and she reads two mainstream newspapers every day.

      My neighbor's daughter uses Facebook every day. She uses it for all the same purposes as my daughter. But she watches, and believes, Fox News as her primary source of information about news events and current events and issues. Thus, she shares that information with everybody she reaches through Facebook.

      Facebook is the amplifier and broadcaster for every originating source. So when 10 million Fox devotees broadcast the incessant disinformation of their trusted source, they don't preface it with a disclaimer, they broadcast it as the truth that other sources are trying to hide.

      1. zaphod

        Yes, it is not so much that Fox is insignificant compared to Facebook, but that there is a very significant symbiosis between the two. Facebook is indeed and amplifier for every originating source.

        You know, as one who appreciates and uses some modern technology (not Facebook though!) I often wonder if putting it in the hands of human monkeys was such a good idea. It amplifies the base human emotions of our species more than it does reasoned and enlightened discourse. And enables those who exploit these base instincts for profit.

        1. zaphod

          From the Washington Post front page today:

          "Between Joe Biden’s election win and the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 posts attacking the election’s legitimacy, with many calling for violence, an investigation by ProPublica and The Washington Post has found."

          Would someone like to argue that the coup attempt would have happened without the existence of Facebook?

    2. Leisureguy

      I have the strong impression that the majority of Facebook users don't really see it as a source of news. Those I know use it to exchange family information or information via interest groups (neighborhood, hobby, music, and the like). Facebook doesn't seem to offer much news, though I suppose that depends on the whims of algorithms.

      1. Ken Rhodes

        You're correct, as regards Facebook as a source. My analogy is Facebook as a medium, providing the airwaves to make every user a broadcaster.

        So when my daughter shares news about her kids' successes in school, Facebook enables her to reach lots of friends and relatives. And when my neighbor's daughter listens to Tucker Carlson, she shares his hoorah with lots of folks. But instead of saying "Tucker Carlson says so-and-so, which means you should do your own fact-checking," she says "did you hear the latest about how the government is screwing us all over?" And her Facebook friends take that as factual, because "it comes from Elizabeth, and we know how closely she follows the news."

  2. buhallin

    I think this is true, but let's not pretend that progressives aren't on this train too. Both sides have figured this out and ramp the outrage over every issue they can get their hands on.

    1. golack

      Group 1. Outraged that they are asked, or God-forbid, told, they have to take steps to help curb a Covid outbreak.

      Group 2. Outraged that a Covid outbreak is swamping local hospitals, and a large part of the population are refusing to take even simple measures to help stop it.

      Yep, both sides are outraged.

    2. dausuul

      I mean... yes, we are also on the train, but we're sitting in one of the cars reading a newspaper and Fox is in the engine shoveling coal and screaming "FASTER!"

  3. Total

    Father Coughlin, whose radio addresses in the 1930s reached 1/3rd of the country (about 42 million people), would like a word to point out that Fox's position or role is not new by any stretch.

    1. Ken Rhodes

      Oh, well I guess that means we shouldn't worry about it. After all, Father Coughlin was just an earnest fellow who simply didn't always agree with us.

      1. Total

        Well, that's a dumb remark. It means that we should figure out what the problem actually is, rather than defaulting to the 'THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFOORREEEEEEE' cluelessness that characterizes so much policy discourse.

  4. George Salt

    Pretty good piece in today's WaPo:

    "Facebook groups topped 10,000 daily attacks on election before Jan. 6, analysis shows"

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/01/04/facebook-election-misinformation-capitol-riot/

    Facebook groups swelled with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory between Election Day and the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol, with many calling for executions or other political violence, an investigation by ProPublica and The Washington Post has found.

    The barrage — averaging at least 10,000 posts a day, a scale not reported previously — turned the groups into incubators for the baseless claims supporters of President Donald Trump voiced as they stormed the Capitol, demanding he get a second term. Many posts portrayed Biden’s election as the result of widespread fraud that required extraordinary action — including the use of force — to prevent the nation from falling into the hands of traitors.

  5. skeptonomist

    No, Republicans and Fox News do not "manufacture" grievances, they exploit existing ones. Racists are in a perpetual state of grievance because they think that their privileged position is being taken away - as it is. Religions are in a perpetual state of grievance if they don't have complete control. If a religion does get complete control, there are splits and conflicting sects arise.

    While Murdochs and the Fox News talking heads make lots of money by arousing conflict, there are further reasons for how they choose to arouse people. "Social" conflicts distract from the way that the rich are winning the class war - this has been a fundamental Republican strategy for over 50 years. The media might choose to arouse feelings against plutocracy and get viewers and make money that way, but they don't (anymore). Of course all the media are supported by big-business advertising, so income would be reduced if the media really took a true populist approach. True populism is not supporting racism, it is supporting lower-income economic interests.

    1. golack

      A little more complicated than that.
      Most people have grand dreams in high school--then have to deal with reality. I won't make it in the NFL/Olympics/Music/etc. Then you grow up and deal with it. Or not. Those who don't grow up then channel their grievances into different outlets---and charlatans are their to give them an outlet while taking their money...

    2. KenSchulz

      Disagree. The War on Christmas was totally manufactured by Fox News. This goes back at least to Reagan’s ‘welfare queen’ fabrication.

  6. GrumpyPDXDad

    Just from the headline I thought this was going to be a piece about how the woke left seems to have an endless supply of grievance rabbits to pull out of a hat and keep the stage. While Fox certainly deserves all the opprobrium it gets for manufacturing outrage, lets not forget that elements of the left seem to do the same although for funding and votes and feeling good instead of viewership dollars. And then the two sides have some weird symbiotic relationship, feeding eachother's outrage and then coming up with ever more weirdness.

    Both make me sick as it seems they are distracting us into re-arranging the deck chairs of the Titanic instead of, you know, actually getting off the sinking ship.

  7. Jimm

    Good points by Kevin, although the breakthrough moment was really radio talk show hosts, particularly Rush Limbaugh, who took the John Birch Society mailers and mainstreamed them, and was so popular (along with "liberal media" and "government racket" pop books) that Fox News was a natural progression.

    1. Jimm

      "Lippmann feared the consequences of bias, of the limitations of ‘facts’ in revealing the world, and the distorting power of the ways in which ‘facts’ are organized to serve particular interests, the relativity of knowledge etc. But none the less, he upheld the usefulness in journalism of dividing ‘opinion’ from ‘fact’ (‘science’ from ‘values’) and the science of objectivity (even though he had ceased believing in science as savior). For Dewey, on the other hand, the relativity of truth was to be celebrated because it called attention to the problem of authority in determining what will be called the truth. The test for truth must be in its consequences for people, and judged by the people who experience those consequences. To pretend that science was some form of independent knowledge divorced from the interests or concerns of the people, established the conditions for the powerful to use science for their own interests. Public opinion could be engineered by playing down the “public” in the formation of that opinion."

      1. galanx

        In the novel "Stranger in a Strange Land", written in the early 1960s, the author's mouthpiece Jubal Harshaw is expounding to reporter Ben Caxton about ther evils of the media, and Ben indignantly replies "I'm a lippman, not a dewey"- small l, small d, i.e. they're used as common nouns, not names. I always wondered about that sentence; thanks for the explanation.

  8. kenalovell

    Once again, for inexplicable reasons, Kevin overlooks the pernicious influence of talk-back radio. Its shock jocks were manufacturing and selling grievances long before Fox came on the scene, and it reaches far more people. Not only that, but many people listening are sitting in their cars or trucks, concentrating on what they're hearing much more than Fox viewers who have Carlson on in the background while they get dinner or check their text messages.

    I remember a neighbor coming to ask me a question once. She was literally shaking with fury, having just listened to a radio shock jock ranting about the evils of "political correctness".

    She wanted to know what it was.

  9. Jfree707

    Certainly Fox has made an art form of outrage, but even some of the liberals thrive off it as well. I used to watch John Oliver, but his whole gig is to pick some topic designed to outrage his viewers and riff on it for an hour. Most of the time, it is not a major issue that anyone can do anything about, so he gets them all fired up for nothing on a Sunday night right before the work week. You may say he is addressing topics of import, unlike Fox, but the playbook is the same. Ditto Maddow, it’s just the subjects are more left leaning. I’m all done with outrage and find no value or interest in it at all. I got bills to pay, I only have so much bandwidth to offer

  10. Pingback: Manufacturing grievances for profit at an industrial scale | Later On

  11. kenalovell

    Sean Hannity, the Fox News anchor, also ranked highly in the Brookings data. His podcast and radio program, “The Sean Hannity Show,” is now the most popular radio talk show in America, reaching upward of 15 million radio listeners, according to Talk Media.

    “Underage people voting, people that moved voting, people that never re-registered voting, dead people voting — we have it all chronicled,” Mr. Hannity said during one episode.

    Claims about voter fraud came not just from Mr. Hannity but also his guests, including the pollster John McLaughlin, who shared a private exchange he had with Mr. Trump.

    In the exchange, according to Mr. McLaughlin’s on-air account, Mr. Trump said that the election was stolen.

    “Yeah,” Mr. McLaughlin said to the president. “I said it yesterday on Hannity radio.”

    “Keep saying it,” Mr. Trump replied.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/04/technology/apple-google-spotify-podcast-election-misinformation.html

  12. gesvol

    "They do it because it's makes lots of money."

    This is why I tend to think even if there was a way to get rid of Fox News specifically it wouldn't matter that much. Rupert Murdoch is hardly the only person who likes to make money and there are competitors waiting in the wings should Fox News faulter. Fox News just has the 'first to market' advantage.

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