In today's news, Piers Morgan's outrage about the previous night's television boiled over. Mr Morgan was a regular and highly opinionated presenter on ITV's breakfast show Good Morning Britain. On this occasion, the controversy led to his departure from the show.
As it happens, just last week I was listening to a BBC Media Show podcast, recorded late last year, in which he was discussing the phenomenon of outrage with Amol Rajan and Helen Lewis.
Jasper Jackson has observed the commercial purpose of outrage.
As digital publishers have learned, the best way to get the shares, clicks and page views that make them money is to provoke an emotional response. And there are few things as good at provoking an emotional response as extreme and outrageous political views.
Writing about a woman who has sometimes been described as a professional troll, Jackson notes how she benefited from broadcasters' attempts to create an illusion of impartiality.
It is ironic that Hopkins’s career was initially helped by TV’s attempts to provide balance. Producers could rely on her to provide a counterweight to even the most committed and rational bleeding-heart liberal.
Politicians can use outrage as a way of gaining media coverage, and some of them get elected as a consequence. (I'm sure I don't need to name any examples here.)
Besides outrageous statements and performances by media stars, politicians and general rabble-rousers, there is also a tendency to publicize outrageous comments from unknown or even anonymous sources. If hundreds of people respond on social media to some event, and one of them says something completely idiotic, there is a strong possibility that this is the one that will be selected by journalists keen to make the story more interesting. In her conversation on the Media Show, Helen Lewis referred to this as nutpicking, using a term coined by Kevin Drum in 2006.
This blog is named POSIWID, which stands for Stafford Beer's maxim: The Purpose of a System Is What It Does. While we don't regard this as a universal truth, it can often be a useful heuristic. President Obaba's digital chief Michael Slaby has just published a book on the relationship between the tech giants and the public sphere, in which he argues that the outrage is deliberate.
The systems are not broken,
he tells the Guardian. They are working exactly as they were designed for the benefit of their designers.
I have ordered a copy of Slaby's book, and I may have more to say when I've had a chance to read it.
Kevin Drum, Nutpicking (Washington Monthly, 11 August 2006)
Jasper Jackson, The Economics of Outrage: Why you haven't heard the last of Katie Hopkins (New Statesman, 26 May 2017)
Amol Rajan, Why Piers Morgan Left Good Morning Britain (BBC News, 9 March 2021)
Amol Rajan, Helen Lewis and Piers Morgan, The Economics of Outrage (BBC Media Show, 14 October 2020)
David Smith, Optimising for outrage: ex-Obama digital chief urges curbs on big tech (The Guardian, 1 March 2021)
Michael Slaby, For All the People: Redeeming the Broken Promises of Modern Media and Reclaiming Our Civic Life (New York: Disruption Books, 2021)
Wikipedia: Nutpicking
Related post: Trolls are like ghosts (December 2020)
No comments:
Post a Comment