Today Joe highlights a growing problem with news consumption, and warns how it may be destroying your soul.

Transcript:

Joe:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and if you think that keeping up with news and politics right now is just overwhelming, well, good news. I guess you’re correct and you should know that some of that feeling of being overwhelmed that you’re experiencing is actually by design. Now, Steve Bannon, one of the masterminds behind President Trump’s first campaign, gave a fascinating interview back in 2019 where he talked about feeling like they were up against both the Democratic party and the media and that one of the strategies for keeping the opposition both the media and the other party on the back foot was by doing so much stuff all at once that it was hard to organize any kind of opposition to it. In Bannon’s words, he says this,

CLIP:

In the first a hundred days, every day we’re going to be hitting with either three executive orders or whatever. Number one is that the Democratic party shattered. They don’t know if they’re coming or going, right? They got one group that’s doing identity politics, another group that’s the Clinton Rist. I said, we’ve broken ’em right now. They have no idea they’re going to have their own internal civil war, right? They’ll keep them occupied for a while, so what we’ve got to do is just hit, hit, hit and keep it. It’s momentum, momentum, momentum. The opposition party is the media, and the media can only because they’re dumb and they’re lazy. They can only focus on one thing at a time, and the one thing they’ll mainly focus on is either they do the horse race or once the horse race, who’s ins who’s out. It’s like the high school who are the cool kids in the cafeteria? Because it’s easy. It’s the reason they do the horse race stuff all the time and they won’t do the basic, what are the core things that are going on in the country? I said, all we have to do is flood the zone every day we hit ’em with three things, they’ll bite on one and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never be able to recover, but we got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, it’s got to hammer. What does it work? Muzzle velocity.

Joe:

So that momentum, minimum momentum, the bang, bang, bang, they hit him with three different things at once every day. Whatever you think of that, that certainly seems to work as a political strategy and moreover is only more amplified this time around. So just to put some numbers on it, in the first Trump presidency, he didn’t literally sign three executive orders a day. In the first a hundred days he was in office, he signed 24 executive orders, but this time around we’re only about halfway through his first a hundred days and he’s already signed 89. So it is much closer to three a day and they’re often on different topics, often in controversial areas, all of which could make a good media story or a good opposition ad. But when there’s so much stuff all at once, it’s overwhelming. Now, I don’t want to talk about it from the political angle.

I understand why it’s happening. I want to talk about the spiritual angle. What does it do to us as human beings to be saturated with this many different stimuli all at once, demanding a response of Congratulations, congratulations, outrage. Something else just to evaluate all these different policies going across so quickly day after day after day after day. And I would suggest that this is much more spiritually damaging to us as individuals than we realize and that this is true literally regardless of the merits of the policies and regardless of what one thinks of President Trump, that I’ll just put it like this, chances are or maybe are someone who talks about all these different political things day after day and you’ve got to form some kind of opinion. This is great because of this. This is horrible. Because of that, you’ve got to stir up they congratulations or the outrage or the outrage at the outrage day after day after day.

Now, if you’re someone who maybe you’ve seen a loved one go down this route, you’ve seen what it’s done to them, the sort of flattening effect it has on one’s personality, the way it makes them less pleasant to be around, and I’m going to suggest that’s not just because maybe you disagree with their politics, even if they share your general political orientation, it’s because it’s doing something else that’s really destructive and really damaging that we may be underappreciate. But to get into that kind of political frame, to analyze it fiercely, we have to actually dig a little deeper and say the underlying problem, political orientation. The underlying problem is that we are way too online right now, that there’s a technological problem that is behind and beneath the political division and outrage and everything else. And maybe the best way to put some numbers on that is just to say we hit a very strange and kind of igneous mark recently, which is we’d been year after year after year increasing more and more and more media. A lot of this is screen time. Not all of this. This is any kind of media consumption. It’s listening to Spotify, it’s listening to the radio, it’s watching tv, it’s being in front of a screen. And recently a weird thing happened. I’m going to let these marketers explain, but the short answer is that number stopped going up, but the reason it stopped going up is because it could not go up anymore.

CLIP:

Our conclusion is that media saturation is here from years and years and years. Sometimes I’ve come on to this podcast talking with you or just in general, this forecast has shown an ever increasing amount of time that Americans spend with media just goes up year after year and we are now pretty much ready to say that the wall is being hit now it’s being hit at a very high level, 12 and a half hours plus an enormous amount of time is spent with media

Joe:

More specifically when he says 12 and a half hours plus the number that came to was 12 hours in 42 minutes per day is what the average American is spending consuming media. And the reason that we’re hitting A is we’ve run out of waking hours in the day. I mean, there’s a certain amount of time when you sort of can’t be in front of a screen or listening to something because you’re asleep or doing something else. We’ve pretty much filled every moment of our waking lives with media and with the consumption of media. Now, hear me out. Not all of that is political. Not all of that is bad, but it’s a lot. It’s too much. And that would be true even if you were just watching nature programming 12 hours and 42 minutes a day, that’d be excessive. Even if you’re watching the most edifying, uplifting, heartening story of puppies finding their mothers, that would be too much.

But unfortunately, in that 12 hours and 42 minutes per day that you are a consumer being fed products by sophisticated media organizations, they have learned how to market effectively to you by making you angrier and less happy. And so we have a pretty clear, pretty well established addiction to outrage. Now, that’s not a conspiracy. We know that marketers have honed in on this and figured out ways to manipulate you and your emotions to make things rage. Bait is one of the terms that you’ll hear. People get addicted to certain emotions. Now, if you want to see someone promoting this, Jonah Berger has a book called Contagious, why? Things Catch On, and he’s writing from a marketing perspective basically asking why do some things go viral and others don’t? And it’s easy to say, oh, the problem is people respond more to negative emotions than positive ones.

That’s actually wrong. What they respond to are what he calls high arousal emotions. Emotions that get you worked up. Now they could get you worked up in a positive way. Wow, this is so amazing. I’m so excited. I got to go tell everybody or, and this is easier to do. They could get you worked up in a negative way. Like how dare they? And then I feel the need to comment. I’m going to tell everybody I can’t believe they did this. In contrast to high arousal emotions, you have low arousal emotions. These can also be positive or negative. So for instance, a positive low arousal emotion is contentment. Oh, I guess monkeypox wasn’t really the thing people were saying it was going to be. That’s good. You don’t feel the need to go in like, Hey everybody, good news, we don’t have monkeypox. But there’s also negative low arousal emotions, particularly sadness.

You read something, it just bums you about, you don’t want to talk about it. You’re not mad. You’re just like, that’s disappointing. Yeah, I’m not going to go share 30 articles about how the Eagles beat the chiefs in the Super Bowl. I might read them for some reason, but I’m not going to share them because oh, that kind of bums me out. That’s a low arousal negative emotion. So the issue isn’t positive versus negative emotions. The issue is high arousal emotions, and one of the easiest ways to tap into that is with negative high arousal emotions by triggering the fight or flight response. If you can make somebody really angry where they have to lash out, that’s great from a perverted marketing perspective because now they’re going to lash out and spread the word of your product or the thing you’re selling or the article you’re trying to get them to click on.

And Burger teaches people to do this. Here’s how he puts it. He said, when trying to use emotions to drive sharing, remember to pick ones that kindle the fire, select high arousal emotions that drive people to action on the positive side, excite people or inspire them by showing them how they can make a difference. On the negative side, make people mad, not sad. Then he says, simply adding more arousal to a story or add can have a big impact on people’s willingness to share it. In one experiment, we changed the details of a story to make it evoke more anger. In another experiment we made an ad funnier. In both cases, the results were the same. More anger or more humor led to more sharing. Negative emotions can also drive people to talk and share. I don’t know about you, but I think this is pretty gross.

In fact, I would say this, you should absolutely smash the like button and the share and comment below and share this to all of your friends to say, isn’t this outrageous that people are purposely stirring up outrage just to get easy clicks and likes and comments and do that without any sense of irony? But in all seriousness, this is something we have to watch out for because it’s not just that we are idly consuming way too much stuff. It’s that we’re consuming things that are calibrated to make us unhappy, and this bears terrible spiritual fruit. And we’re going to get into that in a moment. But before we get there, I want to actually handle a few objections that you might have because as you’re probably seeing, I’m going to say you need to radically curb your media diet. And I say this as a hypocrite, beautiful day outside the day, it’s warm, it feels wonderful.

We’ve had snow recently and it’s almost 70 degrees. And I was on my phone walking to work thinking about what I was going to say about people being on their phones too much and thought, Hmm, physician heal thyself. So I say this with some sense of self-incrimination and I can think of the objections I would give, and these might be the same objections you would give, and they are basically these three, number one, but I need to be politically informed. I keep track of the news so I know what’s going on in the US or in the world or whatever country you’re in. Number two, well, how am I going to stay connected if I radically cut media consumption out of my life? How will I stay connected to those around me? And number three, well, you can spiritualize it. Shouldn’t I be praying for the victims of tragedies around the world?

Let’s consider each of these in turn, because there is some sense in which consuming hours of media consumption a day might make you better politically informed than actually a little more disputed. Because oftentimes people consume things that strengthen their own biases and they end up just more biased and less understanding of the situation. But there’s some evidence that it does some good. But I would just ask this question, is political awareness worth it? And we can look at this in a pretty concrete way because there’s a moment in life which many of you watching this I know will not have reached yet, but should consider there’s a moment in life when people suddenly have a lot more time to consume media and that is retirement. And so Marcel Gars, professor at the University of Hamburg has a journal article called Retirement Consumption of Political Information and Political Knowledge from the European Journal of Political Economy.

But he’s actually looking in many cases at American consumption. So even though he’s writing for a European journal and he’s a European social scientist, nevertheless, here’s what he found. He says, after controlling for the age-related decline in cognitive abilities and other covariates, I’m going to explain what all that means. He found that retirement leads to an increase in the respondents to correctly answered questions. So in other words, they would quiz people about political stuff like who is the Secretary of State? And after they retired, people got better at answering those questions when you adjust for cognitive decline. So people actually got worse, but they got less worse than they would’ve if they were still getting older and not retired. So people get worse as they get older because of cognitive decline. But people who are getting older but are also watching more news because they’re retired, get worse at a slower rate. So this is not a great result to begin with, but kind of unavoidable. You’re just not going to be as sharp at 85 as you are at 55.

But then he said that the effect is larger for questions about issues that are particularly relevant to retirees like health policy and current events rather than general knowledge. So that’s the first thing. You’re not just generally better informed, you’re better informed about the stuff that’s most directly relevant to your life, which okay, fair enough, fine. But then he says, however, I do not find robust evidence of effects on intentions of respondents to vote. So number one, spending hours more watching political news doesn’t make retirees more likely to vote than they would’ve if they weren’t spending hours. So the most obvious thing you could say, the reason I need to watch all this political news is so I can be an informed citizen and go vote, and we just don’t find that effect happening. Instead, we find that people become more committed to the party they were already identified with.

They don’t switch from L to R or from R to L. They don’t switch from Democrat to Republican. They just become more ensconced with whatever they previously believed. And so Gar says, this result likely implies that retirees use the additional spare time to expand their consumption of congenial, partisan news, which strengthens existing beliefs and increases polarization. So I can point to even people in the Catholic online world who went from being not very overtly political to talking positively or negatively about Donald Trump all the time. And it seemed like this was not a political evolution of them switching from one position to another. They just became more and more and more vocal about the position. They already helped and alienated a lot of people who might’ve listened to them on more important issues otherwise. But this is what we find with retirees as well, that as they have this extra time, they’re not getting more nuanced in their political opinions.

They’re not getting more moderate or anything like this. No, it is the opposite. They’re becoming just more partisan because they’re consuming congenial, partisan news that we may tell ourselves that the reason that we are watching the news is to be informed. But if you are spending hours a day watching a political news show that agrees with your political leanings or listening to a podcast that agrees with your political leanings or reading stuff online or watching YouTube videos that agree with your existing leanings, it’s only so convincing to say that this is about education. It seems to be in no small part for entertainment. And don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing inherently wrong with entertainment. But let’s tell the truth. You are spending hours a day entertaining yourself by listening to people who maybe are smarter or more articulate than you telling you why the things you already believe are right.

That can feel really good. Confirmation bias is a heck of a drug, but there’s some real downside to that. And one of the downsides is you’re not really better politically informed except in a trivial sense, like you’re more likely to know what bill is before Congress, but understanding the other side say, you’re not really better at that. You’re if anything seemingly worse at that. And Garza’s words, he says in general, general knowledge is socially beneficial, but affective polarization is likely harmful affective polarization, meaning you are more emotionally detached from and opposed to people with whom you disagree. Thus, the welfare effects of the increase in media consumption due to retirement remain unclear. And then he connects this up to previous findings they have on demographic differences in polarization, namely increased exposure to traditional media in combination with the changing media landscape likely explain why older people have been becoming more polarized than other age groups over the last decades.

Like the radicalization of grandma and grandpa is a result of the political media environment, both traditional things like TV shows and the rise of online stuff. And because there’s a wealth of other stuff showing that this is the one group susceptible to not having a good sense of fake news versus real news. I mean literally non-existent news stories. This is a group most likely to fall for ai, art, all that stuff. These are the people being affected most strongly by that. Now, some of that is generational, some of that is maybe tied to the cognitive decline, but a lot of that is just tied to consuming way too much of this stuff. And so if you are someone, even if you’re not a retiree who finds that you consume a lot of this stuff, you should see maybe it’s having these effects on me as well.

We can talk about some of those effects. Now, we’ve already talked about a few of them, but the political polarization bears real spiritual fruit and its nasty fruit. So Pew back in 2022 had an article or a report really called as Partisan Hostility grows signs of frustration with the two party system. But despite the headline, the real takeaway is this members who are not just liens Republican or liens democratic, but people who were like, yeah, I definitely am a Republican. I definitely am a Democrat at shocking rates, have come to really hate the other party to view them with genuine antipathy. So when you look at favorable unfavorable on the unfavorables, we want to look specifically at the very unfavorable because obviously you’re going to disagree with the party. You’re not in almost definitionally, you’re not like I’m a Republican, but I think the Democrats have way better ideas or vice versa.

Why wouldn’t you just switch parties? So it’s normal to have some degree of, yeah, we part company and especially as the parties have seemingly moved further apart in some respects, some of this is totally normal, but it’s worth at least recognizing this is the state we’re in and that we were not always in this state because some of you are very much not retirees. Some of you don’t remember like the early nineties because maybe you weren’t alive then. And so you should just know that back in 1994, only about 21% of Republicans had a very unfavorable view of the Democratic party. Now it’s 62%, so it’s roughly tripled. On the flip side, only 17% of Democrats had a very unfavorable view of the Republican party, and now it’s 54%. It’s actually slightly more than tripled. So a majority of Democrats, the majority of Republicans view the other side at least as a party with great hostility.

But again, that by itself, okay, you might just say, well, this is a sign that the political parties have really differentiated one another and they have different policy proposals. Some of those proposals are better than others. My side’s obviously, right? So I view the other side quite unfavorably that by itself isn’t obviously bad, but Pew finds this partisan polarization increasingly means that Republicans and Democrats don’t just view the opposing party, but also the people in that party in a negative light growing shares in each party. Now, describe those in the other party as more closed-minded, dishonest, immoral, and unintelligent than other Americans. In fact, this is, I don’t know, I just thought the numbers here were quite shocking. So the questions are framed as, do you think members of opposing party are more closed-minded than the average American? That’s kind of the way it’s framed.

Most Republicans thought Democrats were more closed-minded, dishonest, immoral, unintelligent and lazy than ordinary Americans. Most Democrats thought Republicans were more close-minded, dishonest, immoral, and unintelligent than other Americans. They didn’t interestingly say, lazy. So you might be close-minded, dishonest, immoral, and unintelligent, but you work really hard. So that’s something among the just sort of like four or more of these traits where you’d say, oh, yeah, they’re all of the bad things. A majority of Republicans assigned four or more of the five traits, the five negative traits to an ordinary Democrat. Again, not the politicians, just members of the other party like your uncle, that sort of thing. And 43% of Democrats did likewise. So this is when I say it’s making us judge our neighbor in this harsh and uncharitable light. We have the data to show that this is not just a policy difference. This is not just, yeah, we disagree on some major things, but I think you’re a good person who’s mistaken on some important things.

This is, I think you’re an idiot and a liar and evil and close-minded, unlike me very much, not close-minded an... Read more on Catholic.com