Are we really THAT angry?
If so, why? If not, why do we seem so?
Status quo: The Noise
Because Trump is SUCH great copy, the media soundtrack has become noisier than ever.
- Yes, The Noise was already blaring before The Donald ran, often fueled by contempt for President Obama. Because the opinion industry has commercial inventory to fill, attention is currency. “Believe us, not them!” Even on the rare slow news day, shows begin with a Fox News Alert. Even between situations, Wolf is in The Situation Room. Clicks, baby.
- I’m complicit! I consult Talk Radio. From a memo to hosts I coach: “Donald Trump is the best thing that ever happened to Talk Radio. There are spontaneous statements at Executive Order autograph photo ops, Alternative Facts, botched calls with friendly foreign leaders, SNL, Ivanka Inc., the Russia flap. Twitter! Wiretaps??? Expect a-story-a-day, and assume NO topic burnout at this time. As ‘the Trump channel,’ we’ll enjoy tune-in from giddy supporters and appalled or scoffing resisters.”
Admittedly, that’s the trees. Wider-angle shot of the forest:
- Since the 5-term FDR/Truman years, Democrats and Republicans have swapped 8-year turns at The White House (Ike, Kennedy/Johnson, Nixon/Ford, Reagan, Clinton, Bush43, Obama) with only two one-term exceptions: Carter and Bush41.
- We seem to alternate between “Think” presidents and “Feel” presidents; bellicose Trump’s being the ultimate Feel narrative, following cerebral Obama’s too-calm-for-some Think style.
- But that long-term sine wave is invisible with media in Snapchat mode. Because we now have the attention span of a dog, the media shout “SQUIRREL!”
- Before Trump’s upset win, Rush Limbaugh sounded deflated by Hillary Clinton’s inevitability and Michael Moore was telling anybody willing to listen that Trump had it in the bag. Republicans were already asking, “Where do we go from here?” which Democrats are now asking.
- And Dems are over-analyzing the situation. Trump won by 77,774 votes in 3 states. THREE VOTES PER PRECINCT would have turned Michigan. Woody Allen was right. “80% of life is showing up.” Hillary didn’t. And her economic narrative seemed soft.
“For years, as a conservative radio talk show host, I played a role…by hammering the mainstream media for its bias and double standards. But the price turned out to be far higher than I imagined. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information. We thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical audience. Instead, we opened the door for President Trump, who found an audience that could be easily misled.”
New York Times op-end by retired WTMJ/Milwaukee talker Charlie Sykes,author of “How The Right Lost Its Mind:”
Sykes reckons that “Conservatism should be a reality-based philosophy, and the movement will be better off if it recognizes that facts really do matter. There may be short-term advantages to running headlines about millions of illegal immigrants voting or secret United Nations plots to steal your guns, but the longer the right enables such fabrications, the weaker it will be in the long run.”
It’s not just the professional media.
Remember the old gag that “Freedom of The Press belongs to anyone who owns one?” With Social Media, anyone does.
- Anyone can tell everyone anything, and many seem hell-bent on doing just that. Little People have found their voice; and even before our president’s clinic in “unfiltered,” what we see on Facebook and Twitter is too often angry and ill-mannered. I would like to think that many of these people are nicer than they seem online, and merely venting, naïve that their Noise is consequence-free (it isn’t, as they’ll learn in their next job interview).
- A Newsweek article surmised that “factors believed to be motivating [Social Media trolling] include craving attention from others, seeking pleasure from causing others pain, boredom and revenge.”
- Irony: Many months, wireless telecommunication is the #1 advertising category; and soreheads use these wondrous fit-in-your-pocket devices to post that things aren’t as good as they used to be. As good as when? Before your unlimited anywhere anytime minutes, when phones were wired into the wall and “toll calls” to two-towns-away were metered by the minute?
We squawk because we can.
And we choose to believe what we choose to believe.
Reverse Snobbery
Rush Limbaugh – a high school graduate who dispenses daily public policy critique on AM radio – dismisses scientific data and other detail inconvenient to his narrative as “faculty lounge” fantasy. Sarah Palin figured she could help lead America better than those pointy heads in Washington because, as “a hockey mawm,” she understands real life better. More and more, attention junkies seek celebrity by crowing that they’re smarter than the smart people.
Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. calls it “the most consequential political divide in this country. That divide is not between liberals and conservatives. Rather, it is between the ignorant and the informed, between those who have information and can extrapolate from it and those who do not and cannot.”
“If you had to choose any time in the course of history to be alive,
you’d choose this one. Right here in America, right now.”
Then-President Obama, in Wired magazine
- We’re healthier. We now live about 40 years longer than folks did last century. More Americans have insurance than ever; and the current joke in Washington is that our all-GOP government will replace Obamacare with The Affordable Care Act. Fewer Americans are smoking, cancer is down, teen pregnancy is down, and alcohol abuse is down. Our parents lived longer than our grandparents, and our children may live longer than we do. Whole Foods is rockin’ while McDonalds is in trouble and my broker is begging me to unload Coca-Cola.
- Social Media soreheads damn Obama’s economy, during which we suffered 75 consecutive months of private sector job growth, low inflation, half-price gas (the ultimate pay raise), and a Dow that slumped from 7,949.09 to 20,000+. Grouches who dismiss stock gains because the Fed cut rates are unwittingly acknowledging careful application of public policy. Jobless claims recently hit a 44-week low; and the number of welfare recipients has fallen steadily the past two decades.
- Americans are in school longer than ever before.
- The war on crime will never end. At any moment, the next gun nut will shoot-up an airport, an elementary school, a shopping mall, or a member of Congress. But despite Trump’s claim that the USA murder rate “is the highest it's been in 47 years,” FBI numbers show it near a 45-year low. Republican politicians talk tough, but it was during President Clinton’s first term when a Democratic Congress passed a crime bill which included The Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program which enabled the hiring of nearly 118,000 officers and advanced enforcement technology such as in-car computers and cameras and computerized dispatch systems. Over the next 6 years, violent crime decreased nationwide nearly 26%. Despite this success, President Bush then attempted to gut COPS funding in his very first budget; and by 2006, after steady decreases, funding for those local officers had fallen to $0.
- “Although the globe is scarred by violence, a world war is less likely now than any other time within living memory,” in the view of eminent British historian and author Paul Johnson, in Forbes magazine, no lefty rag. “The so-called caliphate of the Islamic state has failed to establish itself, and as a guerrilla force, ISIS is in manifest disorder. Russia is active in Syria because it’s a cheap and easy way to play power politics and employ its military muscle without any serious risk.” One thing Obama and Trump seem to agree on: Iraq was a fiasco. Instead of the $800 billion and 4486 American lives squandered on the regime change which begat ISIS, ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt reckons that “what we should have done is laid down fiber-optic cable and built out a wireless infrastructure to empower the Iraqi citizens.”
- Technology! We say “the International Space Station” with a nonchalance I couldn’t have imagined as an 18 year old watching man set foot on the moon. I write this at home on Block Island RI, site of the USA’s first offshore wind farm – “steel in the water and blades in the sky” as our governor says – 5 windmills that will power 17,000 homes, mostly elsewhere along the grid, since only about a thousand of us reside on The Block. Funded by? Venture Capital, those risk-takers Republican office-seekers wax wistful of. Each January in Las Vegas (where city government is 100% powered by renewables) the Consumer Electronics Show is an orgy of innovation, inventions that impact and can improve every aspect of our lives.
Millennials tune-out The Noise.
Soreheads fret that their lives won’t be as prosperous as their parents.’ Baloney.
“Twenty years ago, most well-off US citizens owned a camera, a video camera, a cell phone, a watch, an alarm clock, a set of encyclopedias, a world atlas, a Thomas Guide, and a whole bunch of other assets that easily add up to more than $10,000. All of which come standard on today’s smart phones, or are available for purchase at the app store for less than a cup of coffee.”
From “Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think” by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler (Simon & Schuster Free Press):
So right there, young people are ten grand better-off than their parents.
But seriously, EVERYTHING is now a political Rorschach Test. The same voices who scorned Obama’s use of Executive Orders as unconstitutional praise Trump’s as progress. As lefties called Kellyanne Conway’s feet-on-the-couch gauche, righties quickly Googled pictures of Obama’s feet on the desk. To the biggest generation in history, this is The Noise.
This calendar year, Millennials’ retail spending will surpass Baby Boomers.’ So we in News/Talk Radio – an advertiser-supported medium – should do what our Talk Radio format does best: listen. Music stations that strive to be “the station everyone at work can agree on” beg to be background. Talk is inevitably foreground, unavoidably conspicuous. If we sound welcoming to conversation, Millennials might just join in. They’re pragmatic and allergic to recreational acrimony. So let’s deliver on our two-pronged News/Talk promise:
- Consistently deliver the news, the latest, sounding newer than what they heard last time, without sounding like you’re selling what you’re telling. And if your competition is robotic, and you’re a source of relevant, what-you-can-do-about-it local news, you’ll be especially appealing to young adults’ sense of community.
- As for the Talk half of our franchise: LET THEM. IF we sound like that crazy uncle young people tolerate on Thanksgiving -- who has just discovered Twitter -- we’re just The Noise.
Occasional cable news talking head Holland Cooke (HollandCooke.com) is a media consultant working at the intersection of broadcasting and the Internet. Follow @HollandCooke