Abstract
In my earliest years of graduate school in 2005, my dissertation advisor approached me with a research suggestion: study the people who were consuming conservative news. Find the places where they gathered and socialized, go there, hangout, and try to understand what meaning Fox News brought to their lives. I didn’t take his advice. Using the cutting edge (at the time) social networking platform MeetUp, I did attend a MeetUp of “O’Reilly Factor” listeners in Manhattan; everyone there seemed perfectly nice and reasonable and no one had horns on their head, though they hastened to assure me that they were all still New York City “Factor” listeners and thus a bit more reasonable than those Factor fans on the other side of the Hudson.
In the end I didn’t stick with the research and ended up doing an ethnographic dissertation on journalism production in Philadelphia, which eventually became my first book. And while I’ve never regretted the shift, I still wonder to what degree the story I was telling about the decline of journalism in the United States was really a subset of a larger narrative about the rise of the radical American right and its associated media apparatus. Maybe what I thought to be the more important story- the collapse and rebirth of journalism—really was about something else.
Whether or not this is the case, there is still something of a void when it comes to quality political communication scholarship on the American right. This situation has begun to rectify, however, and the clearest evidence for this is the publication of Dannagal Young’s Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States and Nadler and Bauer’s edited collection News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures, both published by Oxford University Press. Both books are important, not only for what they teach us about journalism, politics, and partisanship in the 21st century, but what they demonstrate about the disciplinary boundaries of the political communication field.
Young’s thesis is straightforward: liberals and conservatives possess differential psychological profiles, and thus gravitate toward different forms of political media because they fulfill different audience needs. As she puts it in the early pages of the book, “I connect these psychological correlates of both aesthetic preference and political ideology to liberal and conservatives’ affinity for (and production of) satire and outrage (respectively).” Liberals find political and psychological gratification through the consumption of satire, while conservatives garner similar gratification from the production and consumption of outrage. Such differing psychological profiles thus affect not only the forms of journalism and public affairs content that media industries produce, but the larger dynamics of political life in the United States and indeed, the public sphere itself.
The main evidence for this argument comes in four tightly linked and empirically impressive chapters at the heart of the book. Starting from the relatively straightforward conclusion to Chapter 6, that individuals psychological and physiological traits interact with their environments in ways that influence their political attitudes, Young then maps this onto aesthetic preferences in Chapters 7 and 8. The key explanatory factor here is ambiguity. Simply put, conservatives hate it. Moving beyond a 2012 study that explored liberal and conservative reactions to standup humor, she worked with a professional comedian to write their own jokes and test them on subjects with a variety of political preferences. Not only did conservatives have a far lower tolerance for ambiguity, they had less of a sense of humor in general (p. 131). In Chapter 9, Young ultimately concludes that: Satire and outrage . . . play similar roles in the lives of their viewers and listeners. These genres look different because each is a logical expression of a distinct set of psychological and epistemologica characteristics. Simply put, these genres look like two different animals because the creators and audiences of outrage . . . and satire are – quite literally—different animals.
There is little doubt that Young, operating within the scholarly subdomain of political psychology and political communication, makes a convincing case. The entire book is airtight when it comes to the claims it advances and the larger empirical methods used to ground them. And yet it also seems to me that there is a deep tension at the heart of the book, not so much at the empirical but at the normative level. It is torn between its desire to be genuinely sympathetic to the conservative point of view and an argument that, when boiled down to its essence, amounts to the claim that because conservatives are psychologically “different” they lack the ability to appreciate more nuanced forms of political satire and thus default to anger.
But it is really as straightforward as all that? Young is not alone when it comes to the manifestation of this tension in her scholarship; indeed, I think it is fair to say that the vast majority of political research in the aftermath of the 2016 Trump election was torn between a desire to understand and sympathize with the American voters who made such a decision possible and a revulsion at the politics that underlay such a voting decision.? This tension does not take away from the brilliance and quality of this book, but it does mean we might need to look to additional subfields of communication scholarship in order to gain a more complete picture of the dynamics driving media and political communication in the first decades of the 21st century.
Luckily, just the type of book necessary to grasp this broader scope was published at almost the same time as Irony and Outrage—Anthony Nadler and AJ Bauer’s edited collection News on the Right: Studying Conservative News Cultures. If Irony and Outrage is grounded in political psychology and experimental methods, News and the Right comes from the traditional of historical cultural studies. Like any edited volume, the quality of the contributions varies a great deal, but overall of the ratio of hits to misses is impressively high. Standout chapters include but are not limited to Mark Ward on evangelical mass media, Reece Peck on country music, Dawn Gilpin on NPR and gun rights, and Angela Phillips on the British right. It is an impressively eclectic scope of analyzed media material.
In their introduction, Nadler and Bauer make the case for a historically informed understanding of conservative news cultures. “Popular and scholarly critiques of right-wing media can too easily slip into ‘magic bullet’ discourses- presuming conservatives are merely hapless dupes of the machinations of right-wing media . . . [but also deserving of critical scrutiny] are opposing assumptions of market populism that frame conservative news outlets as merely reflecting their consumers’ pre-existing tastes and dispositions.” (p. 8) It is this concept of culture- as something that exists outside and apart from economics and human psychology that make it a distinctive contribution to the debate about the relationship between conservative media and the growth of far-right politics in America.
To conclude, let’s return to a question posed in the opening pages of Irony and Outrage. In them, Young is recounting a conversation she had with University of Texas professor Scott Stroud in 2011. “What if, for conservatives, Glenn Beck is a form of satire?” Stroud asks Young. “[Beck] is mockingly critical of the left. He uses hyperbole to emphasize his points.” (p. 5) Young concludes that indeed, Glenn Beck cannot be satire insofar as we typically understand it because the ambiguity identified by Stroud (not surprisingly, a scholar in the humanities) is absent from the conservative psychological makeup. But what if the answer to that question is more complex than simple psychological preference? What if, in some way, consumers on the right understand this very outrageous conservative media as in and of itself ironic? What if they are actually in on the joke? And what if being in on the joke does not make them all that different from their more knowing counterparts on the left, but simply means that the content of joke is in and of itself offensive, and indeed, deeply anti-liberal? Irony and Outrage is already a classic in the field, and it will be read, I hope, by generations of graduate students. News on the Right, for all its brilliant chapters, is simply an edited volume with chapters of varying quality. And yet, the most interesting questions that Young poses are unanswerable without Nadler and Bauer’s work, and without the historically grounded arguments about media culture- as something that goes beyond psychological heuristics- that they advance.