Angertainment is the deliberate use of anger to attract viewers, listeners and readers. It is different from simple political communication in that presenting alternate solutions to problems rarely (if ever) enters the picture. The purpose is to grab the attention of the populi by their privates, and solutions just get in the way…as does honesty. Get them angry, then give them something else to be angry about before they get the chance to actually think about previous topic of anger. Where solving problems can warm the heart, angertainment is akin to a house fire at 3 am-exciting, confusing and memorable. Only before you get the chance to start thinking about what happened, suddenly a car blows up, then a bunch of nuns escorting blind orphans to a concert are hit by a drunk semi driver etc.
It’s easy to make people angry, it’s hard to solve problems. The media is driven by engagement, and anger gets engagement, from both sides. It’s a very unfortunate part of our political discourse. I wish sober analysis and pragmatic ideas were as profitable as the outrage of the day.
However, I think the anger farmers continue to make a big miscalculation. There is this assumption that social media engagement translates to votes, but every recent election shows this to not be the case. I think part of it is that most people don’t pay attention to the daily outrage machine. The American electorate > the number of people that are online regularly > the number of people that use social media > the number of people that participate in arguments on social media. The loudest subset gets all the attention, but the majority of voters are not being affected by it regularly. The new GOP house is trying to play the outrage Olympics in its hearings and all it’s doing is turning off more voters. I hope I’m correct about this anyway.
Most perfectly conveyed in 1976
Of course back then it was an extrapolation as to where things were going, while now it reads as an observation of where things are.
Unfortunately, it seems that if they grab the hearts of the MAGAs, enough of the more timid will go along to make this method feasible.
Not if you look at independent voters. They aren’t buying it, and the GOP needs to win over independent voters to win.
It’s the same issue they have with primaries in a lot of cases. You can’t win the GOP primary without MAGA, but you can’t win a general election (other than in blood red areas) being MAGA. Almost every election denial candidate at the state level lost in 2022. Hunter Biden’s laptop isn’t a winning issue in a general election.
Again, I hope I’m right.
Perhaps you may be unaware, but a bunch of us have been compiling a list of these issues, @Czarcasm, which you can find here:
There are over 300 of them so far, they come right after the other (especially since 2012, but it wasn’t a new problem then- it just accelerated) as if these controversies are industrially manufactured to cause said outrage.
In the thread I go into the ‘rules’ for inclusion which go into some of the issues mentioned in the OP:
Anyway, yes, your OP is spot on.
It’s certainly the driving force behind social media. Though I suppose the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter were doing the angertainment schtick way back in the 90s. That’s a pretty good name for it.
Basically the only media development that Chayefsky didn’t anticipate was online streaming.
Stranger
More recently done (similarly) by Jeff Daniels in “The Newsroom”. It’s a different rant but I think along the same lines.
I’d argue there are two different but related uses of anger. The first is as you said, just getting your followers angry at something, and keep adding new things to get angry about, so they never stop and think about whether it made sense in the first place.
But there’s also doing things to make their opponents angry, to play into their followers’ vindictive streak. In fact, you can even mix the two, coming up with something to be angry at their opponents for, but also that makes the opponents angry. See this thread for an example.
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/new-florida-senate-bill-would-eliminate-state-democratic-party
They have no intention of that actually passing. But that isn’t the point.
Sorkin nailed it better with this monologue:
Stranger
I’m sorry I missed that show. I’ve seen the previous clip before of course, but not this one.
(Jeff Daniels is amazing!)
Any old-timers remember Buck Henry in the SNL “Talk Back” skit from 1976:
A radio talk show host is desperate for people to call in, so he gets more and more extreme hoping to get the phones to ring. It ends with him taking the stance:
It’s funny on SNL, not so funny in real life.
Anger from a candidate can also convey conviction, and that can be reassuring and appealing in politics. “Hey, at least he means what he says and he says what he means!” Of course, that anger can be faked and manipulated. I think a lot of electoral politics works more like professional wrestling and fake anger is key there.
I have thought about this a lot for a number of years, I refer to those in the media engaged in this tactic as “Outrage Merchants”. You can see this in Tucker Carlson et al, and just as much in Jon Stewart/John Oliver. The main difference being that those on the Right play fast and loose with the truth, whereas those not on the Right try to be diligent about basing their outrage on factual information.
In addition to the Outrage generators, there are softer approaches that elicit “Deep Concern”.
Last Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I was treated on my YouTube feed to a video by a young Black activist, making sure that anyone who’s not already heard, learns how when the day’s namesake was wheeled into the ER, the white doctor spat in his face and held a pillow over it until he was dead.
Which according to Snopes and other sources is hogwash.
Entirely separately, anger is a form of engagement and is cultivated in social media. Twitter, You-tube, Facebook, and via a different process this message board (which unlike the others has no algorithm). Recreational outrage also qualifies as a subcategory.
The late Kevin Phillips wrote, author of The Emerging Republican Majority (1969) and later critic of wealth inequality and much favored commentator on NPR and PBS, worked for Nixon during the 1968 campaign and was the architect of the GOP’s Southern Strategy. Gary Wills profiled him in 1970:
There, in a cubbyhole next to Mitchell’s office, a brilliant young lawyer named Kevin Phillips served as the house expert on ethnic voting patterns. Formally, he was subordinate to Professor David Derge, the haruspex of all polling operations, but in fact he was in charge of his own specialty, which as he bluntly puts it is “the whole secret of politics—knowing who hates who."…
Always animated by one ambition—to know who hates who. “That is the secret,” he says with a disarming boyish grin, one that snags a bit on his front tooth, like an unmalevolent Richard Widmark’s. “In New York City, for instance, you make plans from certain rules of exclusion—you can’t get the Jews and the Catholics. The Liberal Party was founded here for Jews opposing Catholics, and the Conservative Party for Catholics fighting Jews. The same kind of basic decision has to be made in national politics. The Civil War is over now; the parties don’t have to compete for that little corner of the nation we live in. Who needs Manhattan when we can get the “ electoral votes of eleven Southern states? Put those together with the Farm Belt and the Rocky Mountains, and we don’t need the big cities. We don’t even want them. Sure, Hubert will carry Riverside Drive in November. La-de-dah. What will he do in Oklahoma?” …
I asked Phillips if the growth of Negro registration would not recompense Southern Democrats for their losses to the Republican Party. “No, white Democrats will desert their party in droves the minute it becomes a black party. When white Southerners move, they move fast. Wallace is helping, too—in the long run. People will ease their way into the Republican Party by way of the “American Independents”—just as Thurmond eased himself over by way of his Dixiecrat candidacy in 1948 and his independent write-in race in 1956. “We’ll get two thirds to three fourths of the Wallace vote in nineteen seventy-two.”
Hate isn’t quite the same as anger, but they are cousins.
(Word for today: Haruspex).