Jon Stewart

This is the first of a three-part series of posts on the media:

  1. Media & the Selective Outrage Machine
  2. The Culture War Is Not Really Taking Place
  3. The Big Hit:: CBC v. The Canadian Cancer Society

While it’s not new that news journalism is a business in financial dire straits and the newspaper already has its death date set in 2043, the pressure to remain relevant has pushed it from infotainment into a neo-Hearstean monster. While William Randolph Hearst would engage in fabrication, known for his quote, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war”, news these days is about dramaturgy in the narrative in a cynical grab for viewers, subscribers, and pageviews.

Jon Stewart coined the term “selective outrage machine” to characterize Fox’s outrage at the Common-White House controversy. In order to be fair, the same tactics can be seen on MSNBC, as well as on the far right and left of the political spectrum. It’s how the game is played in the attention economy.

I think in our current culture of optics, the other side of the “fail” coin is the blatant attempt to manipulate the news media’s thirst for the dramatic. It’s a Goffman world, ruled by the tenets of The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life.

DSK & Roman Polanski

Watching the Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape allegation was particularly cringeworthy. I thought Cyrus Vance’s {Manhattan District Attorney} mouthing off to the press was setting the stage for disaster. While some were playing the angle, I was thinking of the Duke lacrosse players. Let’s face it, the story as it unfolded was red hot. A rich, powerful champagne socialist with a history of womanizing rapes an asylum-seeking Islamic immigrant  housekeeper at in his pricey suite at the Sofitel. It was one of those divisive stories where even being neutral was deemed as tacit complicity in violence against women. The media frenzy created an indefensible whipping boy in DSK, which, to me, seemed premature given that the facts surrounding the case left some ambiguity with respect to its supposed airtight nature. The case started to unravel, with allegations that the accuser lied and had inconsistent stories, along with supposed assertions by the NY Post that the victim was part of a prostitution ring.

Salon.com has annoyed me over the years by actively creating an adversarial mosh pit, where feminism is positioned in ways to extract maximum ire. I would argue that Kate Harding’s 2009 piece on Roman Polanski, reminding readers that the self-exiled director raped a child, served the single purpose of invoking the outrage machine against someone Harding deems as indefensible. Rather than explore the nuances of the case and the strange prosecutorial and judicial circumstances of 1977 that was the crux of the matter in 2009, readers were reminded what a monster Polanski is and implying that due process be damned. My post on Roman Polanski was a reaction to Harding’s piece, which I felt was troubling to say the least, in its knee-jerk simplicity that plays to generating controversy. Then again, 722 comments and 236 Facebook likes probably added up to mission accomplished.

Fast forward to this month. Salon posts an OpenSalon blog entry by Heather Michon in the same vein as Harding’s as a Editor’s pick. The focus is on the discrediting of the accuser because of her past lies, some of which are more material to the case than others. Michon is concerned that there’s a gulf between what transpired and whether the government thinks it has a case to make a conviction. This supposed “disconnect” is due process. So, how does this all play out? Salon selectively ignores the accuser’s conflicting stories that can sink the case, while focusing on the scrutiny of the accuser’s past. Meanwhile, others in the media pat the system on the back for “working”, by eventually coming to some “truth”. The reality is that this is all pure theatre and a theatre that’s entering into the logical calculus of those within the institutions that should be above using the media to generate hype for publicity and political gain. This isn’t new, but the ubiquity of media is and this should concern us. The alignment of interests of the media and the state is the logical extension of infotainment presaged by Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and my sense is that the genie is out of the bottle with little that can be done to put it back.

Casey Anthony & Nancy Grace

The public outrage regarding the Casey Anthony acquittal was pretty predictable. The stage was set for this generation’s OJ trial, fuelled by another media frenzy. The most interesting article I read in the aftermath was Brian Dickerson’s column on how Anthony’s #1 detractor, Nancy Grace, made her acquittal possible.

Nancy Grace became part of a media hype machine, using her punditry soapbox to paint Casey Anthony as incarnate evil, complete with the derisive moniker, Tot Mom. Dickerson argues that the publicity given to Anthony vaulted her from indigent defendant obscurity to a criminal defence lawyer career maker. Grace used Anthony as a punching bag in her well-orchestrated drama of the indefensible defendant. Polanski raped a child and Anthony killed hers. Manufacturing the outrage provides for a clear and easy target to direct the hate in the name of justice. Through the outrage, everyone can participate in meting out justice for the victim, Caylee Anthony.

The problem again is that due process takes a back seat to the hype. Let’s face it, due process isn’t sexy. Particularly when it evokes examples of “technicalities”, allowing the “guilty” to go free.

In another media twist, the defense team used social media to fine tune their approach by analyzing public sentiments. While the efficacy of such maneuvering is still up in the air, crowdsourcing opinions of testimony in high profile cases is likely to be de rigueur.

The selective outrage machine has the potential to morph how we the public form opinions. Appealing to a sense of justice in a juicy narrative is where the media is at, while social media digests it and puts it back out there. This further influences others and serves as a feedback loop into social institutions, such as the courts. I don’t see news as getting better or journalists becoming more ethical about their craft because, frankly, the market could care less and I don’t see any way of legislating style or professionalism, in light of free speech.

YouTube Preview Image

I just saw this and CBS has a good run down of what went down. I think this exchange highlights one of the themes of today’s “infotainment”—confirmatory bias. Confirmatory bias is the psychological tendency to seek information that confirms existing beliefs. The news network pundits on Fox and MSNBC have made careers out of selecting issues and tailoring coverage for their respective conservative and liberal audiences. The audiences have grown accustomed to the “selective hate machine”, a term coined by Jon Stewart in describing Fox News.

Foxes & Hedgehogs

Stewart has made a career out of being a lampooning satirist who doesn’t stick to a strict ideological script, but he also knows who his audience is. Ironically, Stewart is more of a fox than a hedgehog, as he’s free to be an equal opportunity basher, er, critic. A few years back, Philip Tetlock used the fox and hedgehog metaphor to describe economic punditry::

“The most important factor was not how much education or experience the experts had but how they thought. You know the famous line that [philosopher] Isaiah Berlin borrowed from a Greek poet, ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’? The better forecasters were like Berlin’s foxes: self-critical, eclectic thinkers who were willing to update their beliefs when faced with contrary evidence, were doubtful of grand schemes and were rather modest about their predictive ability. The less successful forecasters were like hedgehogs: They tended to have one big, beautiful idea that they loved to stretch, sometimes to the breaking point. They tended to be articulate and very persuasive as to why their idea explained everything. The media often love hedgehogs.”

The Culture War

Stewart has cultivated an audience looking for infotainment with a ton of snark and less of a penchant for sacred cows. His positioning as a “fox” is smart, as it differentiates him from the ideologues. Conservative hedgehog pundits like O’Reilly who whip up frenzy for an older demographic serve as particularly good fodder. In the clip, he loves poking fun at O’Reilly’s positioning in the political punditry market by taking jabs by using pop culture rap references with more than a hint of condescension. Stewart used similar tactics lampooning Newt Gingrich’s announcing of his candidacy on Twitter.

Nevertheless, Stewart brings up a good point that this is all manufactured outrage against Barack Obama. While O’Reilly is just revisiting the culture war, I’m not sure the same levers used in the past are going to work against Obama. He’s not an easy target. In fact, I would argue that the dissatisfaction the hard left has with Obama has everything to do with him positioning his administration to win the culture war, not put it to rest.

José’s last post made me think of visualizing processes.  Of late, I’ve been thinking about how Jim Cramer had his head handed to him by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show (link to 3/12 Cramer episode).  Stewart mentioned how markets are two-tiered, one for the insiders and one for the rest of us.  The warnings were out there that the system is broken.  One Frontline from a few years ago, Dot Con (2002),  talks about how during the dot com boom, initial public offerings (IPOs) of stock were rigged by the powers that be.  Another, The Wall Street Fix (2003), discusses the circumstances that led to the World Com bubble that led to a meltdown and eventually a $1.4B settlement between regulators and 10 Wall Street firms.

Sociologists often view markets as social constructions.  I tend to view markets as like sausage.  You really don’t want to know too much about the details of production.  An example of this is Google IPO in 2004, a novel approach which became riddled with turf wars involving the status quo.  Google sought to price its initial offering of stock in a more fair and equitable manner, eschewing the “insider” bias typical of IPOs.  A 2005 American Sociology Association presentation by Martin Barron noted Google’s intentions:

“Google’s IPO eschewed the traditional method for pricing and allocating shares for an unconventional auction format. This was an attempt to minimize the underpricing of its shares and allow a broader class of investor access to IPO shares. By pursuing this more equitable approach, however, Google threatened the enormous profits that IPOs had previously generated for entrenched Wall Street interests.” —The Google IPO

This NYTimes graphic tries to explain what Google intentions with a modified version of what is called a Dutch auction.

dutch-11

Personally, all you viz kids out there, I think the above is a horrible graphic.  I reworked it, as I do for when I teach data visualizations and highlight my (ahem) mad Photoshop skillz:

dutch-corrected

In my graphic, I have price on the Y-axis & number of shares on the X-axis.  Generally speaking, investors bid a given number of shares at a given price.  Starting at the highest price, the number of shares bid for is tallied until all the outstanding shares are allocated.  The price at which the last bid that allocates all shares becomes the offer price.  So, even if you’re the highest bidder, you buy shares at the offer price .

I like the idea of markets actually moving towards satisfying the underlying assumptions that economists make.  I feel the Dutch auction moves towards that by reducing the transaction costs that often go to the investment banks and increases fairness by not allowing insiders to buy at a deflated price, only to flip (dump) the stock just after it’s offered and reap huge profits.

Of course, there are consequences for countering Wall Street, as Barron notes:

“… far from passively accepting this challenge to the status quo, these interests actively worked to ensure that Google’s IPO—and hence the auction format—would be seen as a failure.”  —The Google IPO

Lo and behold, look at how the business press framed the IPO, despite it being a “success” in Slate:  “Four Ways Google Failed: How the IPO didn’t change Wall Street.”  So, we arrive full circle to Jon Stewart who quipped that maybe the business press should be more than cheerleaders for the status quo.  Perhaps business schools should consider this, as well.