Begging for the Gaslight
Why the distractions never don’t work
As Trump invades Iran to distract from the Epstein files, and as he promises to do the same to Cuba, and for the same reason, every talking head in America and beyond is asking the question “What will Trump do next?”
This is the wrong question, that is, unless your goal is to get clicks and views. But if that is your goal, and these days, it’s the only goal, then “What will Trump do next?” is the perfect question, because it never fails.
Perhaps the simplest way to demonstrate this is with an example:
This letter is recognizable to almost every American. It’s a birthday note, framed by a poorly drawn image of a naked young girl, in which Trump again and again makes references to criminal sexual acts before signing off with the phrase “may every day be another wonderful secret.” It is one of the creepier things I have ever seen, and reading it still makes me terribly uncomfortable.
Granted, this letter is not a specific admission of guilt, but it doesn’t need to be that in order for all of us to know that something is very wrong here. And while Trump has said that the letter was not written or signed by him, only an idiot would believe that a man who has lied more than any other politician in American history is suddenly telling the truth. But Trump said it wasn’t him, and after a few news cycles, we all just stopped asking about it. And the follow up questions that a first-year undergrad in journalism would know to ask just never materialized.
Our media simply moved on.
Why this happens over and over again is a complex question, but at least part of the answer involves an understanding of attention and how to gain it and keep it. Why does our media abandon stories so quickly? It’s simple. Today’s outrage is always more clickable than yesterday’s outrage. And no matter how many girls are assaulted and no matter how many powerful men are implicated, whatever happens tomorrow will always be more attractive to the audience.
Our media moves on because it doesn’t serve us. It never has. The interests of the business are best served by loading up America with new and fresh outrage as often as possible. And covering any of these individual events completely may be what justice requires, but media is not in the justice business. Media is in the outrage business, and anything else is bad for the bottom line.
And dear reader, please understand that the rise of independent media will not make this problem better. It will almost certainly make it worse. Independent media has far less money than its corporate competition, and it operates in a Hunger Games kind of environment in which the scarcity of resources ties success and failure specifically to the day-to-day whims of a growing but fickle audience. In today’s independent media, outrage is everything, and journalism just … isn’t. Independent media folks like myself must grapple with this imbalance, or we risk being just the next problem rather than a solution to the current one.
The audience may say it wants a return to the journalistic ethics of old, but the clicks and views say otherwise, and the stats simply don’t lie. So as independent media grows, we will see it reach for that new outrage with much more speed and aggression than corporate media ever did, because it must in order to survive. And if you want proof of this, simply look at your inboxes, which are now as flush with fundraising asks from independent media as they ever were with emails from politicians telling us that the only way to save America is to give them our hard-earned money.
Meanwhile, an aspiring autocrat will keep avoiding those pesky child rape accusations because no one in media is willing to lose money asking the follow up questions taught in the first year of journalism school.
Media is failing us for sure, but it is doing so by giving the people what we want. The rest is on us.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.