Political Science Are Americans Addicted to Outrage? The real reason cable talking heads keep saying offensive things? We like it too much to stop them.

Jeffrey M. Berry is professor of political science at Tufts University. Sarah Sobieraj is associate professor of sociology at Tufts University. They are authors of The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility.

In December, MSNBC’s Martin Bashir made headlines for calling Sarah Palin a “world-class idiot” and suggesting that someone defecate in her mouth. Rush Limbaugh stirred the pot a few weeks earlier when he decided to take on the pope, calling the Holy Father a Marxist and then, some days later, claiming, “the left’s sacrament is abortion.” Just this past Sunday, a panel of comedians on Melissa Harris-Perry’s MSNBC drew criticism for mocking a photo of Mitt Romney’s family, including his adopted African-American grandchild, with one of Harris-Perry’s guests singing, “one of these things is not like the other.” Incendiary comments by both provocative pundits and charismatic hosts are now commonplace. On cable news networks, talk radio and in the political blogosphere there is a constant stream of name-calling, belittling, character assassination and falsehoods.

Americans tell pollsters they dislike this kind of talk and believe it degrades our political system. But the audience data tell a different story: In fact, Americans find this type of political commentary quite compelling. By our calculation, part of an analysis we did for our new book, The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility, the aggregate daily audience for such content is roughly 47 million people. In a cluttered media landscape where advertisers have a sea of choices, anxious television and radio producers hungry for revenue have sought new ways to break through the clutter—to stop the channel surfers as they peruse other options—and reach audiences. And the popular agent provocateurs of political talk media not only do the job—they also do it relatively cheaply. (Consider that CNN’s administrative expenses make up about twice as much of its budget share as at Fox or MSNBC.) As a result, America has developed a robust and successful Outrage Industry that makes money from calling political figures idiots, or even Nazis.


Foot-in-Mouth Disease One hundred percent of the cable TV episodes Berry and Sobieraj tracked, close to 90 percent of radio shows and about 80 percent of blog posts contained one or more of 13 types of outrage, including mockery, insults, name-calling, character assassination and more. The six recent examples below attest to just how outrageous the pundits can get. Michael Savage

Cumulus Radio’s Savage Nation, June 10, 2013, describing unnamed female Fox News commentators statements about Edward Snowden: “I heard the empty skirts on Fox News, and I was more appalled then I’ve ever been. From the lipstick-wearing empty skirts shifting their legs around as one after the other empty skirts said, ‘Oh, [Edward Snowden is] not a patriot. If he was a real patriot, he should’ve stood here and taken his medicine.’ … Shame on all of you empty skirts! You’re nothing more than lipstick with a pair of legs on it! Shame on you!” Chris Matthews

MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, July 31, 2013 , on Tea Party Republicans: “They are political terrorists, and like all terrorists, including those who use bombs, their number one goal—their only goal—is to blow things up. [Senators Ted] Cruz, [Rand] Paul and Mike Lee are on a mission to destroy, shut down the American government, destroy Obamacare, drive the country into default, destroy the U.S. credit rating. Terrorists with one purpose: to bring down not just this administration, but, let’s face it, the American government.” Glenn Beck

Premiere Radio’s The Glenn Beck Program, Nov. 4, 2013, in response to reports that the White House knew there would be a rocky launch for Healthcare.gov: “[Barack Obama] is a Marxist revolutionary, and the reason why you know this to be true is on health care. He knew that the website was going to go down. ... His own advisers came out and said, ‘Hey can you stop? Let’s stop with the website. It’s not ready.’ Security—think of this—security. The president cares about you and your family? They are not secure, so all of your health information—all of everything that you have is not secure. People right now are writing and saying, ‘I want my information off that website!’ Once you are in the system, honey, it’s Hotel California. There is no leaving. You never get out.” Martin Bashir

Martin Bashir, Nov. 15, 2013, reacting to Sarah Palin’s analogy between the federal debt and slavery: “One of the most comprehensive first-person accounts of slavery comes from the personal diary of a man called Thomas Thistlewood, who kept copious notes for 39 years. … In 1756, he records that ‘a slave named Darby catched eating canes; had him well flogged and pickled, then made Hector, another slave, s-h-i-t in his mouth.’ This became known as ‘Darby’s Dose,’ a punishment invented by Thistlewood. … When Mrs. Palin invoked slavery, she doesn’t just prove her rank ignorance. She confirms that if anyone truly qualified for a dose of discipline from Thomas Thistlewood, then she would be the outstanding candidate.” Mark Levin

Cumulus Media Network’s The Mark Levin Show (radio), Dec. 3, 2013, on HealthCare.gov: “[Reading from news story] ‘Obama told hundreds of hand-picked supporters gathered at the White House complex that America needed to move beyond the health care website to focus on the benefits of the law.’ [pause] A hand-picked group of supporters. All they need is special uniforms, Mr. Producer. And to learn how to march. And salute and carry flags. ... So Obama’s pivoting—that’s the news. [begins screaming loudly] Not that he’s destroying health care in this country! Not the misery of cancer patients! People with heart disease and diabetes and you name it! NO! The story is that Obama’s pivoting! Who gives a crap if he’s pivoting!?” Michael Lazzaro (“Hunter”)

Daily Kos, Dec. 23, 2013, on 2013’s “twelve months of crazy”: “We continued our tradition of not being able to accomplish even the most basic of legislative tasks; we were introduced to new battle lines declaring that however many children needed to be shot down in their classrooms, it was the price we were willing to pay for maintaining the collective white male gun erection; we saw the slow sinking of every last political savior into swamps of their own making.”

The basic business model encourages hosts and bloggers to court controversy as a way of generating higher ratings (and, thus, more advertising dollars). This week’s uproar over Harris-Perry’s treatment of Romney’s grandchild is illustrative. Harris-Perry subsequently apologized, but while she and the network may regret having offended the Romneys, it’s doubtful they regret the fallout for her program. The episode has garnered a good deal of attention in the mainstream press, putting Harris-Perry square in the national spotlight. Unless she loses her job (as Bashir ultimately did), the controversy could prove more a blessing than a curse, because carefully negotiated shock is profitable.

Consider that Fox News Channel’s 2012 profit (admittedly in an election year) neared $1 billion, up 11 percent from the previous year, according to SNL Kagan, the media and communications analysis firm. MSNBC’s $203 million in profits, while much smaller, was up 4 percent from the previous year. The media holdings of Clear Channel Communications, the largest owner and syndicator of talk radio, are also highly profitable (though talk radio over-expanded and is now undergoing something of a shakeout). Only outrage blogs fail to make much in the way of money; few attract significant amounts of advertising, and they instead tend to be subsidized by their writers or owners, whose labor keeps these blogs going. The hope of many bloggers is to gain enough notoriety so that their writers can become political figures in their own right, like bloggers Erick Erickson or Michelle Malkin, who are now frequent guests on—you guessed it—cable TV.

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Five years ago, when we started discussing this brand of incivility, and how common it seemed, we decided to investigate more deeply, by measuring the use of outrage on the most widely followed television shows, talk radio programs and blogs in the United States. We defined “outrage” for our purposes as talk designed to provoke emotional responses in the audience (anger, fear or moral indignation, for instance) through the use of overgeneralizations, sensationalism, inaccurate information and ad hominem attacks. Outrageous political content, in particular, sidesteps the messy nuances of complex policy issues in favor of melodrama, misrepresentative exaggeration, mockery and hyperbolic forecasts of impending doom. Despite its coarseness, outrage is engaging, usually driven by a charismatic figure audiences find persuasive and trustworthy. Personalities such as Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Rachel Maddow, Bill O’Reilly and Ed Schultz are loved by their fans not simply because they entertain and inform, but because their followers believe they stand up to the other side and tell the truth. And advertising executives told us in interviews that audience trust in these hosts is particularly valuable to commercial sponsors.

To assess the pervasiveness and character of outrage in U.S. political media, our nonpartisan research team conducted a large-scale quantitative content analysis of the most popular cable and radio shows and political blogs over the course of 10 weeks in 2009. Coders measured 13 distinct forms of outrage that we identified, ranging from misrepresentative exaggeration to the use of ideologically polarizing language (such as calling someone a “right-wing extremist”). To ensure consistency across different forms of outrage and different media, coders were instructed to follow a lengthy guidebook developed through four rounds of pilot tests with expansive definitions and examples for each variable. (We will spare readers further details here, but a comprehensive description of the methodology can be found in our book.) We evaluated 10 top-rated shows on cable news, 10 top-rated shows on talk radio and 20 widely read political blogs. For cable and blogs, we divided the outlets between those that are liberal and those that are conservative. Talk radio, which is more than 90 percent conservative, offered only a modest selection of liberal programs, all with much smaller audiences; as a result, only two of the 10 radio programs we studied are oriented toward liberal audiences.

What we found was a constant outpouring of venom that overwhelmed the political commentary. In many cases, outrage is not part of the content, outrage is the content. Fully 100 percent of the cable program episodes our coders watched contained outrage, while close to 90 percent of radio shows and about 80 percent of blog entries were characterized by outrage. On the Fox and MSNBC shows that predominated in our cable sample, outrage appeared roughly every other minute of non-commercial airtime. Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann (both still on cable at the time) were the worst offenders, with Sean Hannity close behind.

On the radio, Mark Levin and Michael Savage served up a steady diet of acidic commentary, using “outrage” speech or behavior at a rate of about once per minute of live airtime during the period we studied. The anger is often palpable—Levin, for example, shouts in virtually every episode of his program and often many times per show, not only about Obama and Democrats, but also directly at his callers and guests. Rush Limbaugh won the bronze for frequency of outrage speech, which included such race-baiting as the time he ridiculed a Hispanic winner of the New York City Marathon by saying, “An immigration agent chased him the last 10 miles.” Although the Internet is known for being the Wild West of political incivility, we found blogs to have lower levels of outrage than TV or radio, even after controlling for the difference in post lengths, as compared to the typically longer transcripts from TV and radio.

Of the 13 unique forms of outrage we tracked, mockery was the most prevalent—not affectionate, light-hearted teasing, but rather the kind of ridicule intended to degrade. For instance, there was Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson targeting Republicans for denying they played a role in the country’s financial crisis by writing, “They had a decade long toga party, safeguarding our money with the diligence and sobriety of the fraternity brothers in Animal House.” The next most common form of outrage was what we called “misrepresentative exaggeration”—hyperbole that significantly distorts or obscures the truth. For example, at the blog “Gateway Pundit” Jim Hoft wrote that “Nazism and communism couldn’t bring down capitalism. Instead it will be leftist hacks pushing global warming junk science that will cause the economy to collapse.” (At least you’ve been warned.) Closely following misrepresentative exaggeration was insulting language; in coding this we counted only language with insulting words like “idiotic” or “pompous,” not more generic insults like calling someone a “child.” The liberal blog Firedoglake, for instance, posted, “Jindal, you sucked!” after the Louisiana governor’s GOP response to President Obama’s first nationally televised speech to Congress.

The Outrage Gap While the authors' analysis found that outrage was a major component of both liberal and conservative television, radio and blogs, the most extreme cases were far more likely to be conservative: As the number of incidents of outrage in a given episode or blog post increased, its host or author was more likely to lean right than left. (Additional information about the regression on which this graph is based is available in Chapter 2 of The Outrage Industry.)

Name-calling emerged as the fourth most common type of outrage. Not stopping with generic names like “moron” or “idiot” or even with political insults like “partisan hack” or the fresher “ hack-in-the-box” (that was the comedian Dennis Miller to Bill O’Reilly in reference to Nancy Pelosi), speakers and writers offered quite inventive concoctions. Consider the riffs on politicians’ names: Savage calling Sen. Charles Schumer “Up-Chuck Schumer,” or Levin repeatedly referring to then-Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich as “Boyabitch.” Obama supporters, meanwhile, were called names such as “Obamabots” (Michelle Malkin) and “Obamatards” (Wonkette). Sometimes insulting language and name-calling were strung together for maximum effect, as when Olbermann referred to Tea Party protesters as “a bunch of greedy, water-carrying corporate-slave hypocrites,” or when Digby, the pen name of the Hullabaloo blogger Heather Parton, described the defenders of torture practices as “illogical, sadistic scumbags.”

When we talk to liberals about our work, they invariably tell us stories about how awful Fox is, while MSNBC is just a conventional news network that strives for neutrality in the tradition of NBC. Curious about this, we compared left and right outlets and found that, in fact, MSNBC, liberal talk radio and liberal blogs are quite nasty. Wild exaggerations, conspiracy theories and ridicule abound. Bashir and Harris-Perry’s recent controversial segments are just the latest examples.

That said, the data from our analysis still show that the liberal outrage media is no match for the conservative side. Looking at low levels of outrage—say, two to five incidents per episode—we found that left- and right-leaning programs and blogs were roughly equal. However, as the number of outrage incidents per episode or post increased, the source was more and more likely to be conservative. This is most visible at the far end of the spectrum: The most outrageous cases (with 50 or more incidents per episode or post) come almost exclusively from conservative sources.

There’s no question outrage has become a fundamental part of the American political media landscape, and if anything, its presence has grown stronger since we conducted our study. But should we worry? There’s plenty of balanced journalism and more restrained political opinion available, and no one is forced to watch, read or listen to outrage. Plus, for many happy producers and devoted fans, outrage is invigorating—they like watching, hearing or reading it.

Our research, however, suggests that outrage poses a threat to some of our most vital democratic practices. Because rage in the media is almost exclusively directed at political opponents—invariably portrayed as malfeasant, dangerous or inept—the industry sharpens and deepens societal divisions. At the individual level, such discourse can undercut our tolerance of other views (as anyone with a different worldview is a fool or a menace) and promote misunderstandings about public issues. Recall the myth that circulated that “death panels” would be part of Obama’s health-care overhaul; in a pre-outrage era the misinformation might have been corrected or simply gone unrepeated, but instead commentators including Glenn Back and Rush Limbaugh circulated and re-circulated the claim, such that Pew Research ultimately found that 30 percent of those polled in total, and 45 percent of those polled who watch Fox News, believed the panels were real. Dramatic exaggerations and misinformation have consequences.

At the institutional level, outrage works to stigmatize compromise and bipartisanship, and undercuts the political prospects of more moderate voices. For legislators, the threat is real, as the core audience for outrage is highly engaged in the political system. In primaries, which are low-turnout affairs, the outrage audience comes out to vote. On both the conservative and liberal sides, these viewers, listeners and readers are the base. So when hosts and bloggers equate compromise with capitulation, members of Congress hear these themes repeated in emails, tweets and pointed arguments at town hall meetings.

What is particularly problematic is that the business model of the Outrage Industry encourages ever-heightened levels of hyperbole and rage. When hosts push the envelope and are rewarded with mainstream media attention, it often boosts ratings. When Rush Limbaugh claimed that Georgetown University law student and women’s right advocate Sandra Fluke “wants to be paid to have sex,” it set off an immediate firestorm of criticism. Yet this controversy incentivized Limbaugh to keep at it. Relishing the unabated fury in the mainstream press, Limbaugh continued to ridicule Fluke with sexist comments for two additional days. The tirade only stopped when advertisers began to pull away. In fact, advertising revenue has been central to the increase in outrage-based commentary; as the Limbaugh/Fluke example illustrates, only when those revenues are threatened do we see retreat.

The Outrage Industry is a creation of market forces, and even with controversial incidents like Harris-Perry’s—in fact, especially with them—this market remains healthy. As long as that remains true, the outrage business in the United States has a bright future.