Politics on the sports model

I've complained for years that our nation is dumber and our democracy is threatened because we treat politics like sports.  In Matt Taibbi's latest installment of his work Hate, Inc., he claims indeed that is the plan, because it captures viewers.

News companies don’t just want you feeling ashamed of not knowing the news.

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Ahead of your families, friends, lovers, jobs, pets or any of ten dozen other things that more naturally decide the happiness of sane people, we want you obsessing over the cosmic coin flip that is news. It has to matter more to you than anything on earth.

When networks went in the direction of building this kind of audience for news, they knew exactly how to do it, because they had an existing, successful business model. They knew what the perfect news consumer looked like because he was already reading the sports page.

News purveyors knew: if they could find a way to cover politics like sports, and get news consumers behaving like the emotional captives we call sports fans, cash would flow like a river.

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A professional sportscaster in America may do just about anything in public, even things that from the outside appear to stretch the absolute limits of human idiocy.

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The one thing Mr. Sportscaster can’t ever do is remind audiences it’s just a game. He or she can’t ever tell them it’s okay not to care.<

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Most sports media trains audiences to see the world as a weird dualistic theology. The home city is a safe space where the righteous team is cheered and irrational worship is encouraged. Everywhere else is darkness.

Opposing fans are deluded haters. Increasingly most local fan bases are encouraged to see the national sports media as arrayed against them, too. Long before Donald Trump trained followers to see CNN as fake news, countless local fan bases learned to despise ESPN as a corporate villain out to undermine their team.

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The paranoia about both national media and the opposing fans is now such a central part of the fan experience that for some modern fans, the dread of an opposing city reveling in their city’s loss outweighs the potential satisfaction of winning.

There are Red Sox fans who’d prefer to not make the playoffs at all than lose to the Yankees there, and vice versa.

Because of all of these factors, the local on-air sports personality is now almost always a homer with a conspicuous regional accent who puffs up every local player and feeds the paranoia/inferiority complexes of callers.

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A sportscaster who gets into that mode will inevitably start to pander to the audience, willing to say anything for ratings.

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What follows is a symbiotic stupidity cycle. Fans become conditioned to having their dumbest ideas ratified, and sportscasters every day have to go deeper and deeper into the jungle of homerism to keep callers happy.

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“You’ve got someone who’s just telling you what you want to hear over and over.”

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“Since Trump’s been President… It’s just like sports. You pick a side and that’s your identity. There’s a lack of nuance. A lack of gray area.”

The phoniness, the constant hyping of conflict, the endless stroking of audience prejudices and expectations, these all started as staples of sports media. But now that same commercial formula has moved down the dial.

“It’s exactly like the political discourse on TV.”

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Most cable shows conduct pre-interviews. Typically, the show’s producer will call and toss out the same questions the host asks later.

This is part educational exercise, in which the producer picks the guest’s brain in search of nuggets the show might want to explore. It’s also audition, designed to weed out inept performers. If you stammer in the face of a surprise question, you’ll be told at the last minute you’ve been bumped over “time constraints” or some other transparent excuse.

The primary motive for the pre-interview, though, is to make sure guests stay in character. In both sports and news media, the biggest crime is to break type.

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If Chris Matthews has proudly liberal Joan Walsh on to talk affirmative action with Pat Buchanan, he knows he can sleepwalk through that player-piano setup: Walsh is automatically going to find a way to argue for affirmative action and denounce white privilege, and Buchanan is going to hit back by bleating about reverse racism.

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[A]ctual interplay between disagreeing guests is rare. Like sports channels, news outlets increasingly are more like cheering sections than debate forums. They’re safe intellectual spaces for their respective audiences. You get your side from your channel, while the other side gets its news on another channel.

It’s not uncommon now for a channel like CNN to have a host surrounded by three or four guests, all offering different takes on the terribleness of Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, Fox, as it’s been for decades, remains a place where conservatives tune in to see on-air figures collectively own the libs.

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Nobody on any channel ever tells you to take a deep breath and relax. On the contrary, the whole aesthetic of modern news is to make you feel a constantly rising tension, fear you’re missing out.

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Unlike sports, the news isn’t a game. It’s genuinely important (although I would argue the networks rarely show the most important issues to audiences, opting for the easiest/most inflammatory instead). The deception lay in the fact that there’s anything the ordinary person can do about the reams of troubling information we throw at you.

There’s more hunger and misery and cheating and corruption and prejudice and unfairness in the world than any one person could even begin to make sense of, let alone do anything about. Yet we bombard you with headlines all day long, and increasingly present the news as a sports-like zero-sum battle between two sides, in which every day can only end with heartbreak or triumph for your belief system.

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It’s a variety show designed to freak you out, and as a ratings strategy we’ve made not freaking out taboo. Any guest who’d be likely to tell you to calm down or spend more time with your kids won’t make it past the pre-interview.

We get people so invested in news stories that they’re unable to cope when headlines spit out the wrong way. People fall to pieces over election results and other news stories. It’s madness, and we’d never treat you this way – if it weren’t the best way for us to make money.

  Matt Taibbi

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.