A course correction in motion

Pulled together from a threaded Twitter thing …

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the past week that has seen numerous examples of conservative leaders posting cruel, awful things about the Parkland HS victims and survivors.

Some of these people are just awful people, flat out and no doubt. But I’ve been thinking about the modern history of fascism and how time and again it seems that somewhat reasonable voices turn ugly when we get to mob politics. This is somewhat related to the question I hear a lot: “Where did all the reasonable conservatives go?”

The answer lies in the state of our media landscape. One thing that liberals often seem to underestimate is the power of the conservative media machine to force conformity. I think most liberals understand conservative media has a big audience, but too often short shrift is given to the empire’s power to punish people who deviate from orthodoxy or represent vanilla, establishment conservatism when the machine rewards loud, offensive expressions of the ideology.

And while the party line is the media are liberal, it’s just not true. Conservatives rule the talk format on radio, they have the most watched TV networks. Social media experts only noticed the Russia bot activity because conservative news sharing far outpaced liberal news sharing. Conservatives produce more things that get far more eyeballs, and conservative audiences tend to pay in much greater numbers for right-wing media than liberals do for left-wing media (or media in general).

If you look at the Parkland aftermath, conservative voices face a familiar problem they face after any tragedy that threatens their policy goals: there are too many conservative voices. How do you create tweets that will get attention that will sell books when you have hundreds (or thousands) of people doing the same thing?

Conservatives building a media brand face a glut of competition on radio, TV, and on social media. Getting noticed is HARD. And if you’ve been in business, you know what’s next. The way to get noticed is to differentiate yourself.

So when the news hits and the commenters rush to their phones, there is a subconscious pressure to up the ante. Be more shocking, more cruel, say something that gets more attention. And the reason is because social media is built on an attention economy.

There’s a reason for example that if you search YouTube for @davidhogg111’s name the top hits will be either conspiracy theory videos or videos about the conspiracy theories.

So the conservative media machine, subject to a media landscape driven by attention, leads to people doing gymnastics trying to out-one-up each other. Again, some of these people are just awful folks. But for many others, this is just basic psychology of self-preservation and getting noticed in a crowded landscape, where the routines for doing so are more automated than we want to admit. Controversial comments go from brain to tongue with ease (and probably without a lot of thought).

I am certain there are a few doing this who are having trouble living with themselves (and I am glad for that). I am certain there are many more who are rationalizing every step of the way.

This is where I say that, of course, liberals have their own crackpots saying awful things. My point, though, is that the pressures are different. This is something specific to conservative ideology because there are money, empire, book sales hanging in the balance. Liberals have nothing on conservative media in terms of reach in terms of audience and attention. There simply is no comparison; there is no empire.

And so we get to this week, where we have witness countless instances of conservatives doing this whole bit and trying to Twitter dunk on teenage survivors from Parkland HS.

These are conservative leaders, folks. D’Souza is a best-selling conservative author. Ingraham is a top-rated conservative radio and TV host. This isn’t a case of searching Twitter for the biggest random crackpot you can find.

Except in this case, nobody is having it. It’s an awful look. I know conservatives cringing this week by what they’re seeing (and that is hopeful!).

And the students themselves are fighting back. They often (not always) understand these tools far better than us GenX and Baby Boomer types who are late to the party.

So, I’ll end by leaving you all with some hope.

The bigger the empire, the more dramatic, paranoid and fearful your voice needs to be. The conservative media world doesn’t need another 100 white conservative voices. It needs crazy people. Alex Jones realized that years ago.

The machine is breaking down, y’all. It may not happen this month or this year, but it’s showing signs of distress. Like all empires, it has gotten too big and has too many dependent on it, and so it has become self-indulgent.

It also faces another obstacle: Republicans have all the power in government right now. Your propaganda has to shift to identifying bogeymen, and the media empire already was trending toward the ridiculous.

I mean, these kids are getting companies to boycott the NRA, one of the most powerful forces in American politics. So times are changing. What we’re witnessing is the last gasps of conservative media that hasn’t figured out how to downshift during a time people are getting wiser about social media.

We will always have conservative media, of course. And on balance, that is a good thing. I don’t mind ideological media. But the conservative media empire is undergoing a course correction. It likely is reaching the limit of its influence at a time the public is more skeptical.

These things are cyclical, of course. But for now there are signs we are moving in a better direction. My hope is the reasonable conservatives who didn’t give in to the madness begin to reassert themselves.