Narrowcasting Hate

Jan 9th at 2:57 am by tas

Here’s some things to ponder from a recent Matt Taibbi column at Rolling Stone, “Keep on Hatin’“:

Some say that networks like CNN have struck back by presenting the news with “personal flair” or “attitude”; others believe that the Fox ratings dip (a 21 percent decline in total viewers compared with the last quarter of 2005) is just a reflection of viewer sentiment toward a flailing White House that is closely tied in the public imagination to Rupert Murdoch’s information empire. […]

Sadly, this is bullshit, and we all know it. What happened this year was not an abatement of the Fox phenomenon. It was a super-acceleration of the Fox era. This idea that what Fox is selling is a specific policy or ideology is a myth that is going to be furthered in every corner of the media landscape. What Fox has been selling in the last ten years is a formula for building and retaining a mass media demographic. The formula is Blame, Hate, Coalesce: You address the widest possible political demographic, blame their problems on a numerically smaller group, and then you solidify the collective identity of the first group by feeding them a regular and addictive diet of warnings and dire threats to their existence. […]

What everyone seems to now forget is that Fox’s blame game works in reverse as well. When you demonize a certain group, you not only build the collective identity of your own target market, you build a sense of collective identity among your chief demographic’s enemies as well. […]

Thus, after a time, a media strategy aimed at coalescing a broad middle under a paranoid umbrella against a smaller common enemy has the effect of backing said enemies into their own paranoid corner, where they in turn are ripe to be seized and eaten by some other canny media predator using exactly the same tactics.

That’s what’s happening now. When I go to a bookstore now, I don’t see any relief from the same basic Blame, Hate, Coalesce strategy Murdoch started rolling half a generation ago. I just see it working in reverse. We had Bernie Goldberg’s 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America and now we have Keith Olbermann’s The Worst Person in the World: And 202 Strong Contenders. We had Bill O’Reilly’s Culture Warrior and we now have Sweet Jesus I Hate Bill O’Reilly. We had Ann Coulter’s Godless, which in turn spawned Brainless: The Lies and Lunacy of Ann Coulter and Soulless: Ann Coulter and the Right-Wing Church of Hate and even the inspired I Hate Ann Coulter! by Anonymous. You had Rush’s The Way Things Ought to Be and the way things are according to Al Franken, which is that Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot. [tasnote: The Limbaugh/Franken books Taibbi cites actually came out before there was a Foxnews, though that doesn’t drastic much from his point.] For those who don’t want to buy all the new liberal books, you can get it all in one volume in The I Hate Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity. . . Reader: The Hideous Truth About America’s Ugliest Conservatives, edited by Clint Willis. […]

It is amazing to me that people can walk into a bookstore, see a pair of books whose titles begin with I Hate… , and still believe that the two books are different, simply because the politics of one are conservative and the politics of the other are liberal. Even though it is astoundingly obvious, I’m beginning to think that the vast majority of Americans will not realize until it is too late that this is the same shit.

Give Taibbi’s column a full read, no matter what side of the political fence you’re on. One question it brings to my mind is whether or not we’re being duped to turning against each other because of capitalism. Foxnews is successful not because it captivates a whole nation, but because it uses a great marketing strategy called narrowcasting. To be a hit on cable, as far as advertisers are concerned, a show has to hover around 500,000 viewers — not exactly a huge qualification in a nation of 300 million people, most of whom have a television in (at least) their living room. Foxnews programs like The O’Reilly Factor have managed to get over two million viewers, a figure that makes advertisers orgasm with glee, and Foxnews has accomplished this not by being a news organization but by targeting a rightwing audience. Throwing objectivity to the wind, Foxnews will air the news that their target audience wants to hear. Instead of feeding their viewers the truth, Foxnews gives them more of the same… Which is exactly what you expect a network to do for a target audience with, say, a sitcom like “Friends”. The problem is that, often, the news isn’t pretty, isn’t simple, and it doesn’t support your beliefs. You can’t narrowcast actual news, it just is.

In short, Foxnews is peddling hate because there’s an audience for it, so they know they’ll make a buck. As Taibbi points out, there’s a negative reaction to this and we’re all living through it:

We are being split up into rigid camps and kept doped up on fear, hate and invective. At the end of 2006 we are a country without life-threatening economic or political problems whose population is utterly consumed with paranoia, divided into two insoluble groups, with each genuinely afraid of being exterminated by the other.

Isn’t that a bit fucked up? Does this political divide exist simply because ole Rupert wants to make a buck?