Content area
Full Text
The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility. By Berry Jeffrey M. and Sobieraj Sarah. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. 288p. $33.95 cloth, $23.95 paper.
I hesitate to write at all about the politics of incivility, partisan-inspired venom, and outrage right now, in early summer 2017, given the fluidity of contemporary American political culture. Years from now, as always, the period we occupy will be framed and perhaps even understood, as time passes and we achieve the distance necessary for more accurate analysis. But the dynamics of political culture demand study even while we are deep in them, or the visceral sensibility of the moment is lost to history. In any case, it is difficult to recommend policy or organizational change without analysis: We may be mucking around in the depths of an ugly morass, but journalists—pressed by deadlines and without social-scientific tools—cannot always help, even with a shrewd eye and dedication to their public mission.
Against this backdrop, The Outrage Industry makes excellent mid-range theoretical arguments about the nature of mediated political discourse and argues that we are witnessing the explosion and hardening of an “industry”—one that bulldozes over the quaint incivility of past decades. While we have not reached (and hopefully will not reach) the crater of the 1850s, we are without question living in a period that makes past nastiness and incivility look like child’s play. Call it what you will with the current lingo—“alternative facts,” “fake news,” or just plain lying—we have lived with it a long while, and the Founding Fathers excelled at it. But something is different now, very different, Jeffrey Berry and Sarah Sobieraj argue.
While incivility is, of course, part of outrage politics, that concept does not quite capture the personality-centered, reactive, and intertextual magnificence (outrageous commentators feeding off, and legitimating, their ideological compatriots) of current media content. The authors write: “Outrage discourse involves efforts to provoke emotional responses (e.g., anger, fear, moral indignation) from the audience through the use of overgeneralizations, sensationalism, misleading...