I have long become accustomed to what I call the “BTMF” reflex whenever a great, newsmaking calamity or outrage happens.
That’s short for “Blame the media first.”
As a long-tenured journalist, I try not to take it personally. Yet sometimes the complainers have a point, and we in the news business would do a better job and provide better public service if we listened.
That’s why amid the anger, fear and recrimination that followed the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, a couple of timely words from Utah’s Republican Gov. Spencer Cox stayed on my mind: ”conflict entrepreneurs.”
“I can’t emphasize enough the damage that social media and the internet is doing to all of us, those dopamine hits,“ he explained in a later interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press”
”These companies, trillion-dollar market caps, the most powerful companies in the history of the world have figured out to how to hack our brains, get us addicted to outrage, which is the same type of dopamine, the same chemical that you get from taking fentanyl, get us addicted to outrage, and get us to hate each other.”
Cox makes an important point. As long as I’ve been a journalist, I have heard complaints about media bringing more heat than light, even in the once-respected print and broadcast realms.
But social media have amplified this tendency exponentially. Their algorithms are designed to capture and retain eyeballs, and few things do a better job than good old-fashioned outrage.
And given that they submit to minimal moderation and no editorial oversight, amateur social media “influencers” are free to lie and shill and manipulate reality if they find these tactics build their audiences and fill their bank accounts. And the audiences are huge for many influencers, similar in size to those once reserved to major network anchors.
I don’t advocate censorship. I do advocate good sense.
Gov. Cox raised a question on many minds and across party lines: Will Kirk’s shocking murder finally mark a turning point in this era of recurring political violence?
“This is our moment,” Cox told reporters. “Do we escalate or do we find an off-ramp?”
But there was a question Cox did not ask, or answer: Was Charlie Kirk himself a conflict entrepreneur?
Many who eulogized him tried to portray him as having been a moderate, reasonable voice on the right. How, then, do we explain these quotations, helpfully collected by Britain’s Guardian website:
“I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified,” he said in a podcast last year.
“If you’re a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States marine?“
He said on his show in 2022.
“It’s happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more,“ he said in 2023.
“If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence,” he said last year, ”or is she there because of affirmative action?”
Then there was the professor watchlist that Kirk maintained, which facilitated the electronic harassment, including death threats, of dozens of academics for the crime of holding views that were too liberal for Kirk’s liking.
Kirk was a highly successful media entrepreneur. Nobody will dispute this. His signature product was videos of himself facing lines of callow undergraduates waiting for a chance to debate him, and him invariably “owning” them. The payoff of these vignettes is the dopamine hit of conflict, not arriving at some shared truth through an iterative exchange of views.
There’s nothing necessarily immoral or unethical about this kind of entertainment, unless you examine the content. Mostly, the messages delivered in Kirk’s podcasts were standard Republican fare; occasionally they were hateful and ignorant.
We like to think ignorance is curable with information and with education, for those willing to engage in dialogue with others.
I always remember my Sunday school lessons where I learned the Bible verse from the Crucifixion that Charlie’s widow Erika Kirk quoted tearfully at her husband’s memorial: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”
That’s the problem with the ignorant, whom I feel bound professionally and humanly to lead to a better place. They know not what they do.
But the excuse of ignorance is not available to the conflict entrepreneurs. They know what they are doing. They play to the ignorant. They wish to profit from keeping the ignorant in that state.
I’ll give Kirk his due. He was not the most extreme among the conflict entrepreneurs of the right. He constantly invited his audiences to do their best in disputation; he faced them, rather than just hurling insults like too many of today’s influencers.
Conflict entrepreneurs give themselves away if they can’t describe a clear and positive end goal for the conflict — or if their words and actions tend to fuel more animosity and division than promote understanding.
What American politics needs right now is meaningful dialogue, discourse that brings more light than heat. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how well that works as a business proposition.
Clarence Page is a syndicated columnist and Washington-based member of Chicago Tribune’s editorial board. Among other awards, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary (1989) and lifetime achievement awards from Chicago Headline Club, National Society of Newspaper Columnists, National Press Foundation and National Association of Black Journalists.