Mark Salter, the longtime aide to John McCain, has an essay of sorts about how the media increasingly acts like a bunch sweat-stained wretches clutching dollar bills at the edge of a dusty barn cock fight ring. (My image.) Here are Salter’s words:
Winning the hour assumes there is news made in this town every hour. There isn’t. Most days, nothing that informs, enlightens or should be of serious interest to anyone occurs here. But if you inject the mundane with a little performance enhancing conflict you excite the competitive instincts of other reporters, and the curiosity of politicians and their staffs. You manufacture “buzz,” which might be the purpose of many political journalists. . . .The entire political class, which has grown to include the press, the internet, Hollywood, the music industry and God knows who else, thrives on confrontation, the more vitriolic the better.
Salter is essentially correct. The best evidence for his thesis is the evolution that cable news underwent in the last decade–FOX in the early 2000s and MSNBC in the last two years. The second best is everything about how political news is done differently on the Internet. At play here is the fact that all media outlets are increasingly niche media outlets. As the general audience fractures, publishers have to work harder to attract and retain audiences of their own, and they do that by actively building and reinforcing affinity groups, collections of people who are personally invested in, and united by, some perspective or another. Politico, the ostensible subject of Salter’s piece, often serves as a sort of outrage/intrigue wholesaler for multiple affinity groups, crafting catered stories for the Huffpost/MSNBC crowds and the Drudge/Fox crowds, each as spear-pointed as possible. TIME.com (not to mention Swampland), like lots of other outlets, does this as well, but generally not with the political vigor of Politico. Professional political consultants and communications directors also play this game, feeding the beast(s) as often as possible. (Newsflash: Karl Rove calls Joe Biden “a liar.”)
How is it done? The most basic device for creating affinity groups is unchanged throughout world history. Define an “us” and a “them,” pit the two sides against each other, and tell both that the buzzer has sounded, blood has been spilt, and the end is nigh.