Engines of Outrage Pt. 4

This episode may contain some strong language or violent imagery. Listen to discretion as advised. Like, the most popular YouTuber is Mr. Beast, right? The Atlantic writer Troy Worsell and I are talking about how the internet changes us. His example is Jimmy Donaldson, who goes by Mr. Beast. And Mr. Beast's big breakout video. Back in 2017 was, I'm going to count to, I think it was a million. One, two, three. It was 100,000. Six, seven, eight. The video is 24 hours long. And that's like a pretty intense thing, right? 1890, 1990, 1990. You watch him bleary-eyed, struggle to say the next number. And it went viral. He took the money he made from that video and invested it to make another video. And he never spent any of it. And he just kept doing that. And if you cut till like four years later. I just bought this train and it is currently fairly full of speed towards that giant pit over there. We're also crashing countless cars. Blowing up thousands of cars. And it's like, that's just it right there, right? Like, he is sort of the human expression of the algorithm, right? Which is just like, do more. Do more. Like, do something. Oh, you did something cool? Top it. This happens constantly everywhere or across internet media. And no matter how much you try to unplug, it's inescapable. It has like a real effect both on viewers but also on the creators. This is landslide engines of outrage. I'm Ben Bradford. We've spent the bulk of this main series exploring right wing media, alarming for its promotion of politically motivated misinformation and conspiracy theories. But now, let's look outside that ecosystem. Because many of the same forces tear at all of us all the time. The incentives of the internet, the hunt for engagement. It's reshaped all of our information diets. In a way, we all live in bubbles, choosing what media we consume or often not actually choosing it. How does that polarize us? Me, you, anyone? And how do we shield ourselves? Or can we? We started this many series by looking back at the origins of today's conservative media in the 1960s and '70s. So this time, let's first look at the primary building block of information outside of the right wing bubble, journalism, traditional news, and how that changed in the lead up to today. There was a series of stories in New York Times in 1966 about a spat between the NYPD and the mayor of New York City. You know, some shake up in the police department brass. This is media story in Matt Pressman at Seton Hall University. The stories sounded bureaucratic, involving who could control a board that reviewed complaints against police. The paper covered who wanted what, their arguments foreign against, all of that. But inside the Times, one editor was frustrated with his colleagues at what didn't make the pages. He said, you know, what this is really all about is that it threatens all the systems that the department has in place for basically shaking people down, right, for like getting illicit payoffs from bookies and prostitution rings and all this sort of stuff. And you know, how come none of that is in there, but none of that was in there. The fact that there was just massive corruption underneath all of it. Yeah. Yeah. And the editors knew that the public didn't end. Just a few years later, in 1970, the Times ran news stories about the NYPD. This time, it was in there. The whole series on police department corruption based in part on what he learned from the detective Frank Serpico. The articles were explosive. An article about how cops are often sleeping on the job and their squad cars when they're supposed to be on overnight shift, they even had a name for it, couping. Stories led to a major public investigation of the NYPD, the NAP commission. It exposed massive graft protection rackets. Said she didn't mind paying the police for protection, if she could get it. The reason for that remark was that apparently she wasn't getting it. The Times reporting required stellar investigative journalism, but pressman says that could have happened years earlier when the paper was printing bland reports about bureaucratic squabbles. The bigger change was a shift in how journalists and their outlets perceived the job. Prior to the 1960s, you didn't really do that much to interrogate what the people in power were saying and doing. You weren't really trying to address the question of why things were happening. You know, journalists sometimes talk about the five W's of who, what, where, when, and why. It's often just the four W's, just who, what, where, and when. The process of news gathering, even at traditional outlets aiming for fairness, does change over time. And I think it's worth asking how it's changed since the time of the NAP commission. Pressman, the media historian, great name, says, "As the 60s and 70s wound on, journalists became more willing to challenge the official record and provide context in their stories that didn't necessarily come straight from someone's mouth." And that interpretation could often be a lot more contentious, much more likely to call into question the motivations behind what people were doing, the possible implications of it. The change partially stemmed from the culture, the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, led to more skepticism of authority. But it was also just business, pressman says, for the publishers. As they felt like that's what the audience wanted, that if you, if you want to differentiate your news organization, well, you need to go into more depth and you need to try to explain to people why things are happening, why all this tumultuous change is happening in the country. For the rest of the 20th century, pressman says, newsrooms fluctuated in how hard they would push. Watergate casts a long shadow. It valorized the idea of the investigative reporter. You know, in some ways it got to be considered a sort of be-all-end-all, right? By the late 1970s in the early 80s, he says, newsrooms pulled back someone, the publisher of the LA Times, I believe it was, saying, you know, we got carried away all this stuff about trying to look under every rock for a scoundrel. The pendulum swings back and forth, and varies, newsroom to newsroom, even reporter to reporter. But the basic template pressman says, largely hasn't changed since the days of the NAV edition. So the next major change that did occur in traditional newsrooms is the one we touched on last episode. Well, the huge disruption, of course, is with the growth of the internet. Ad revenue dried up. New websites spun off key pieces of newspapers business. It was kind of a slow-motion disaster, and then after 2008, it became, you know, a fast motion disaster. Give me a sense of what we're talking about. I mean, what's the scale of this? Yeah, the newspapers have just been decimated, you know, many no longer exist. The ones that exist for the most part are operating with, you know, maybe 10% of the number of people that they had in the 1990s. It's not just that there are fewer news sources. It's what happened to the ones that were made. You know, frankly, those publications just, they got less good. Their pages grew thinner. The quality and volume of the coverage goes down. Researchers at those local papers are asked to do more, to produce video and social media posts, cover a wider variety of issues where they can develop less expertise. It makes it less likely that your typical news consumer is going to be spending as much time with sources or publications that are merely trying to give you the news without a huge dose of opinion or without an ideological slant. There have been other shifts, pressmen mentions the summer of 2020 in the wake of police killing George Floyd and mass protests it sparked. It had a really big impact on news organizations. Many newsrooms adjusted their reporting on police violence. Many added social justice speeds and scrutinized the diversity of their hiring and coverage. Pressmen says it led to criticism on the right and the left. And for the most part, it didn't go nearly as far as most of the advocates would have liked to see, but for many people on the right, it was a sort of confirmation of their suspicions that there was this underlying liberal bias to all mainstream media organizations. When we talk about people who are upset about mainstream media, which I think is just about everybody, on one end or another, right, to what extent is it that their processes change, their viewpoints change, and what extent is it that we have changed? Yeah, I mean, I think people have always gripped about media coverage that they don't like, but a crucial difference now is they just have so many other choices. In other words, the far bigger shift than in the pages or broadcasts of legacy media is the mountain of other options that's built on top of it. You know, I saw something that as I'm talking to you about this, it's just sticking in my head. Charlie Warzel covers the internet and media for the Atlantic. And he has an example of how news gets absorbed online today. There is a big investigative story by the outlet pro-publica about infiltrating a far-right militia. Yeah, it's crazy. I read it. vigilante who'd be. gone undercover and embedded in far-right malicious and it's and it yeah and so it's this like feat of reporting from somebody who you know had the trust of someone who was doing something truly life-threatening and wild and and it's exactly what investigative reporting is supposed to do right pro-publica produced the story but that's not where a lot of people saw it i was directed to a youtube video from this outlet called the mightest touch which is sort of like a political aggregation a lot of you know um virulently anti-trump mightest touch has four million youtube followers and a hit podcast it produces videos with titles like idiot trump screws over americans wow trump screws himself with public confession and trump loses stamina as his term starts collapsing to name just three of the latest as i look and there was a young guy working for them who's like an aggregator type and he was reading the tweets and showing them on the screen in this youtube video of the pro-publica reporter and then just going going through the story reading it sort of line by line discussing it but towards l what was more interesting were the comments the comments were like talking to the influencer who was reading the article and saying thank you thank you for your reporting thank you so much you're so brave yeah we need more truth tellers like this and it was this it was just this disconnect between where the information came from that base atomic unit of hard grueling you know factual work and the disconnect between that and you know the relationship that these people clearly have with this influencer online the dynamic he just described happens constantly on the internet americans absorb huge portions of their news this way from sources other than newsrooms where reporting originates asked warzel if he could detail what this information environment looks like yeah so i think that there's like you know maybe this is not totally correct but like good good story a food pyramid right kind of kind of thing right of of all this and you have sort of like the the base material right and then you have it getting more and more processed and refined and you know maybe of less nutrition the further you go up right yeah let's go down you know the the base thing here is on the ground original reporting someone goes and gets it and it's expensive as hell it's not really widely respected anymore by people but it is that like again it's the it's the base of the pyramid and then it starts to get disintermediated the reporting on that first layer of the pyramid becomes the grist for the rest of the internet ecosystem you know in the sort of the next level like influencers and personalities and the people who are often taking that original information and commenting on it in some way and repackaging it in the social media memes influencer videos podcasts or just opinion columns and newsletters not necessarily bad I for better or worse do a fair amount of that myself right like I am someone who ingest a lot of information and writes columns about I mean that's what I'm doing right now right yeah it's what a lot of people do and there's value in that but the prevalence of that repackaging that second layer of the pyramid creates two challenges for us first the more piece of reporting gets laundered through other sources higher and higher in the pyramid the more it risks losing context or being replaced intentionally or not with misinformation you know almost like like a game of telephone or something and second with so many options all vying for our attention it's hard not to embrace the interpretations we prefer and tune out what we don't and that's why I think we see huge disconnected people saying we need more factual information also cancels your subscription to the new york times because it's very biased and you know instead please like you know support these guys on patreon and it's like oh you're not seeing you know how this is somewhere right but that's just the nature of you know the internet it's an internet constantly presenting us with information of various quality shaped to our own beliefs and it encourages us to create our own bubbles it traps you in your worldview or zealanda co-author have a name for how the internet does this they call it the justification machine do you remember where you were when you first saw the footage of the storming of the capital on January 6th 2021 what you felt there were gallows outside the capital building there were people shooting there was violence people slamming flag poles into capital police people running for their lives trolley was all was watching how right wing sources covered it and it looked similar to most other coverage and there was outrage I mean even among Republicans about this happening right this was clearly an attack from a fringe group of people who were trying to overturn the election and there was a lot of outrage and you watched that have to collide with their worldview the audience for fox and other conservative media were used to the idea that they were the heroes very quickly you saw people starting to throw out these justifications right wing influencers fringe sites and just random posters picked through the footage for any alternate reason behind the attack actually the rioters are really anti-fascist protestors right and you can tell because of this tattoo here and here's a screenshot from from a video here you know the the capital police actually let the rioters in some insisted it was a peaceful demonstration others claimed it was an inside job like trial balloons right you're trying to see what sticks and over time the stories did begin to stick flash forward to you know it was a couple weeks later and you had sitting congressmen say you know this was nothing more than you know a peaceful tour of of the capital you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit and and you watch as those cracks start to build and then the thing just kind of explodes they may have had some connection to the government i saw moms and dads and grandma's and grandpa's in that crowd i didn't see people that were well went there to charge the capital did you no it's on video it's all right keep us and you have you know a completely different representation of something that we all saw we've talked about this before about the audience in the right wing media ecosystem believing the narratives there and reinforcing them but war cell is actually making a slightly different point about how all of us use the internet this is he says an example how the internet operates as a justification machine because we're humans right we we are you know quote unquote evidence foragers we're trying to always collect evidence to fit our world views or understand the world or you know whatever it is we're constantly evaluating the evidence we find whether posts videos articles word of mouth and trying to determine what's right and what's wrong everyone can relate to this feeling of scrolling online seeing something and going like all right I need to check that person's credentials right you know that kind of sounds propaganda ask well you know what have you and sometimes that's really good like that is a as evidence foragers right that that's a good instinct for us like we we should approach things that don't quite fit our world view with this idea of like all right let's prove it if something seems wrong we check it out that's what our brains evolved to do sort through all the stimuli we're getting and send an alarm when something seems off but flip it you know 180 degrees and it's if I encounter something that like it exactly fits with how I see the world right a study that proves X Y or Z there is a human desire to amplify that right you you repost it you share it you do whatever you comment without doing as much of that skeptical work we tend not to put information we agree with through the same intellectual ringer which also makes sense now added that the food pyramid of information on an internet looking to produce exactly what we want to see and we are attached to this internet where there's this you know bespoke ability to get any kind of evidence that you want to support your opinion and it's not that you are you know being brainwashed to think something you would never think it's that you think something new information comes in and misinformation acts is almost like you know a vaccine it inoculates you from having to take on something that would challenge your ideology as it exists and that's what happened after January 6th for so many people they saw an event that dramatically conflicted with their beliefs about their party the president they supported and their worldview and instead of changing those underlying beliefs which is emotionally painful they picked from the pyramid the misinformation that made sense of it for them that justified it the engines of outrage in the right ring bubble are particularly good at generating justification as we've covered but it's not exclusive to them in the lead up to the 2024 election or Zell saw a narrative built up among many democrats that you may remember throughout the 2024 presidential campaign you would see it on cable news a lot you would see it across social media of people taking photos or videos or interviewing Trump supporters who were leaving rallies early yeah right but it was this notion that support for Donald Trump is flagged clip circulated of the now president slurring his words or misspeaking and it was this idea that like Donald Trump doesn't have the juice anymore. He's kind of played out and there's really no energy. I think that makes perfect sense and then if you extrapolate that further, of course, you know, the poles were tight. They were tight all the way along. They were a toss up. We didn't know what was going to happen. And I think, you know, those rallies are an example of a narrative that built up trying to sort of argue, oh, the poles are wrong. They're under factoring something. Therefore, that's going to lead to a Kamala Harris win. And I saw a lot of people that were really baffled on election night when reality did not match. Yeah, I mean, I parsed through a lot of content online and some fringy like newsletters and things like that of people who were marshalling evidence in that same way. It was the internet as a justification machine. And so the question is, how do we do our best to sort through the machine combat its effect? Is that even possible? I'm going to ask three experts that we've heard in this mini series about how to fight against the justification machine and internet designed to feed our world views. Unfortunately, the answers start with pain. It's painful in so many ways. It's actually psychologically painful to have your worldview kind of dismantled or like picked apart. When we confront information that conflicts with our deeply held beliefs, our bodies were bell. There's a really powerful like governor in our heads that is trying to keep us from having to go through that painful work. And I think just being like really aware of it is key. It reminds me of an old web comic from the site, The Oak Meal, about this psychological phenomenon. I'll link to it in our source notes. The comic presents a series of facts starting with one about George Washington's teeth. So you may have grown up hearing about George Washington's wooden teeth. Forensic analyses have shown they were not actually made out of wood. One set were gold, lead, and donkey teeth among other materials. And the comic asks, how did it feel to hear that? The answer is probably fine, right? It's not kind of rock your worldview. I mean, that's a cocktail party fact. But then it presents another fact about a different set of President Washington's dentures. They were made from human teeth, from slaves. Again, just a fact presented without comment. How did you feel? Maybe you already knew it. I did. And it still creates a little bit of an emotional reaction at how it affects my school yard perception of our first president. That's the fight or flight mechanism in the brain. It is a natural human thing to want to protect your, the way that you understand the world. Charlie Worsell says, fighting the justification machine starts with just what we did with George Washington's teeth, being aware of our own emotional reactions. Ever since we wrote this piece, I have been trying to do this with information, right? When I feel, when I see something cross my feet and I feel like all these defense mechanisms come up, I'm just simply like letting myself know, okay, like, you're doing this, right? Just like, be on the lookout for this. It doesn't mean just accepting any new piece of information, but being wary of that emotional response and why it's being served to us by the engines of outrage. Yeah. And I also think too, just like, I think that just having a really healthy contempt for what these platforms are doing to us, we encounter a similar piece of advice last episode from disinformation researcher Nina Jankowitz. And the most engaging content on social media is the most enraging content on social media, and the most enraging content is often false or misleading. Jankowitz has an exercise that she does with her grad students. It's one we can all do on our own. They're all smart kids. And yet, one thing that we find every semester is that they, like all of us, are shocked at how much their information consumption is passive. So I have them track their information consumption for 24 hours. And the vast majority of stuff that they get is through push alerts. It's through scrolling passively on TikTok and Instagram. It's through looking at Twitter. It's text messages that they get. It's not stuff that they're seeking out. And I'm going to sit down with a paper or, you know, whatever the 2025 version of that is. I'm going to go to New York Times.com and look at all the stories that interest me. Nobody does that anymore, hardly anyone. We can take a more active role in deciding how we want to get information, how we can have a balanced diet from the pyramid, perhaps adding a bigger mix of straight news along with analysis or finding sources that we wouldn't necessarily agree with, but that we think are credible. And we can think more deeply about what is being delivered to us. And why? Understanding, okay, this weird AI slop made its way into my feed because for some reason, Facebook is prioritizing that right now. This is an advertisement that I got because I visited this website a couple of days ago. And now they know that I'm looking for shoes. So we can get better at choosing our own information diet, paying attention to what we're already being fed, keeping track of our feelings, and taking a closer look at the media that we react strongly to, whether it's because we agree or disagree. Daniel Young, who studies media and political psychology at the University of Delaware, has one more phrase to keep in mind. A counterintuitive way that we can fight misinformation in our own mind. The phrase is, maybe I'm wrong. It's called intellectual humility. And that is the extent to which people are willing to acknowledge that they might be wrong. And how open are they to new ideas? What I like about intellectual humility in general is that it is associated with a reduced belief in misinformation, which is kind of wild. So the more open you are to the possibility, you might be wrong. The more likely you are to be empirically right. Because you are constantly looking to update your views based on new information. Maybe I'm wrong. Young says it's important to keep in mind because it's also the opposite of what the engines of outrage are pushing at us. One of the things that I find really upsetting is that there are no mediated spaces where intellectual humility is modeled. In fact, it's usually punished. People who are like, oh, this is what I think, but I could be wrong. That is portrayed as weak. In the pundit panels on cable news, it's all about who is the most blustery, who is the most confident, who talks the fastest. Intellectual humility is quite the opposite. And I think that there's a hunger for it. I think it's lovely that just being aware of our own fallibility can help us resist the pull of misinformation, that understanding the polarizing content that's being presented to us and what it does to us can help us fight the engines of outrage. But those engines are strong and deeply embedded across our information environment. So I doubt these tactics that we've discussed on their own, spread by you and me to others can make a substantial difference in diffusing the engines, in healing our information divide. But who knows? Maybe I'm wrong. Landslide and this mini-series are a production of nuanced tales and partnership with WFAE and distributed by the NPR network. I'm the host, creator and producer, Ben Bradford. Noia Carr is the editor. J.C. Bolt is the sound designer and engineer. And all the music is by Matt Bradford. Thanks to everyone at WFAE and NPR who's made the series possible. Stay tuned to this feed and to nuancedales.com for updates about what's next for Landslide. And if you're interested in ensuring that there is more to come, you can help by sharing the series with friends and family, enemies, everyone. And letting us know that you want more by signing up for our mailing list at nuancedales.com. You also view a source list for this episode at nuancedales.com. Thank you again for listening. The state of the union is not good. The energy crisis has developed into a money crisis. Politics. Yeah, we know. It's a lot. And it's everywhere. Your phone, your feed, your dinner table, and probably your blood pressure. The politics is also the human story behind the headlines. Our hopes, disagreements, choices, and visions for what comes next. This fall, the American storytelling collection brings together six podcasts from the NPR network that take a closer look at the people, power, conflicts and turning points behind American politics from every angle. It's going to be carpet bombing, take no prisoners, you name total warfare. 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