The Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel and the war in Gaza have left many people disgusted and shocked, and the mainstream news media’s 24/7 coverage of the war and global protests have only increased this outrage.
While the job of the media is to inform, it often just makes audiences angry and anxious, pushing a partisan agenda while offering few answers. This partially explains why trust in the news media has dipped to new lows.
According to an October Gallup poll, only 32 percent of Americans say they trust the media a “great deal” or a “fair amount” to report the news in a full, fair and accurate way. And 39 percent of respondents said they don’t trust the media to be fair or accurate.
A report from AdWeek showed that, among the big three cable news networks (CNN, MSNBC and FOX News), the audience numbers at the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October were amazingly low. CNN averaged 722,000 total primetime viewers and 600,000 daytime viewers; MSNBC averaged 1.33 million primetime viewers and 895,000 daytime viewers; and FOX News averaged 2.12 million primetime viewers and 1.36-million daytime viewers.
Newspapers are faring worse. According to The New York Times, the paper had 670,000 print subscribers and 9.41 million digital subscribers in November, while The Washington Post had only 2.5 million digital subscribers in late 2022 and 159,040 print subscribers in 2021.
This waning trust in the news, combined with a Pew Research Center report showing young people all but abandoning traditional news for social media, means that the mainstream news media is competing for shrinking, niche, partisan audiences.
Part of the problem is that most mainstream news media outlets are partisan, with few labeled as center or objective, according to AllSides. The only way these outlets hold onto their remaining audiences is by keeping them in a constant state of outrage, addicted to the feeling of righteous indignation in an echo chamber of their partisan beliefs. But many people don’t want to live in perpetual outrage or be filled with constant anxiety, worrying that the country (and the world) are doomed.
To preserve some sanity, many people choose to stop watching the news completely and opt for blissful ignorance, comfortable with their unchallenged, partisan beliefs. Other people switch to alternative media sources, solely get their news from social media or stop consuming mainstream media altogether.
But alternative media is often just as partisan. Ignoring the news does not make people informed citizens. Social media is even more partisan, with more misinformation. And going back to partisan media just repeats the cycle.
Our country faces a laundry list of issues. And while the media does a great job of highlighting the problems and placing partisan blame, it gives no solutions for the audience to make a difference.
Should we be surprised when people protest or riot after being exposed to a stream of partisan outrage that offers no solutions other than to vote or post a hashtag to social media? The problems we face won’t be solved in an election, and a hashtag never stopped bad people from doing bad things.
While there is no silver bullet for solving this problem, there are a few things that can be done.
For audiences, instead of consuming far-left and far-right partisan media, they could read and watch more centrist news. They will possibly be more angered at first as their echo chambers are challenged, but realizing that there is more than one side to a story will eventually decrease their rage and make them more informed.
For mainstream news media, expecting less partisanship is unlikely, and partisan media is protected under the First Amendment. But partisan news media doesn’t have to be a perpetual outrage machine; it can also offer practical solutions like joining the school board or attending city council meetings. Even partisan solutions are solutions and prevent the entrenched anger many people feel, which leads them to protest, riot and be ugly to each other. News audiences are not helpless; they just don’t know the options that are available to them.
People in this country are angry, and they have themselves and the media to blame, yet few people seem to be doing anything about it. We wrongly attribute to Albert Einstein the quote: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” But regardless of who said it, we all want to stop living in an insane world.
Andrew Selepak, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Media Production, Management, and Technology at the University of Florida (UF), and teaches a media and politics course.