This Christmas season, I noticed how often I was greeted with “Merry Christmas!” as if I was being challenged or tested. Having recently returned from living abroad for six years, I found such encounters bizarre. Then, I read The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility by Berry and Sobieraj. The book explains the structural changes that allowed the genre of manufactured outrage to develop into a profitable industry. It also posits that the outrage industry contributes to incivility, which threatens a healthy democracy. The book helped me make a connection as to how manufactured outrage ties into the War on Christmas.
Manufactured Outrage
According to The Outrage Industry, outrage discourse involves “efforts to provoke emotional responses (e.g., anger, fear, moral indignation) from the audience through the use of overgeneralization, sensationalism, misleading or patently inaccurate information, ad hominem attacks, and belittling ridicule of opponents.”1 As a rhetorical technique it uses ideological extremizing language (far-right, far-left), attempts to prove that an opponent is a hypocrite, and presents that the speaker’s version of the news as “the real story” while claiming that all other accounts are biased.
The genre has five recognizable attributes which include it being:
- Personality Centered with a dominant, charismatic voice defining the medium in which it is being delivered (TV program, blog, radio show). Think of Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, or Rachel Maddow as prime examples of the genre.
- Reactive since it is a response to something. It reinterprets, reframes, and unpacks the news. The genre of outrage discourse reacts to something that happens.
- Ideologically selective as it filters what it reports through the lens of ideological coherence and superiority. The personality must be framed as the hero and the enemy tainted as a villain (dangerous, inept, or immoral).
- Part of an engaging performance. There are jokes, drama, conflict, fervor, sometimes comfort, and audiences find their worldview validated. The viewers also feel included in a community of like-minded folks.
- Internally intertextual, with outrage performers continually referring to each other. Not only do outrage actors name drop others with the same ideological positions, but profit by playing off others on the other end of the political spectrum. Who can forget, Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person of the World” segment in which he roasted conservative pundits?
The War on Christmas
The War on Christmas exploded into the American zeitgeist in 2005, when Bill O’Reilly invited conservative talk radio show host John Gibson, who authored the relatively unknown book, The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought onto his show. Using the book title as a launching point, O’Reilly explained to his viewers that liberals were “tying the Christmas situation into secular progressive politics” because they wanted “a new America, and traditional Christmas isn’t a part of it.” In a New York Times interview that ran in 2012, Gibson admitted that he never considered the political implications of the War on Christmas and that his book focused on the rare occurrence when non-religious symbols like Santa Claus or Christmas trees were banned by public officials who did not understand that they did not violate the Constitution.2
Taking the theme much farther than intended by Gibson’s book, FOX News ran with the “War on Christmas.” FOX News made it part of its brand as the narrative spread from the O’Reilly factor to nearly every program on the network—while other news organizations largely ignored it.
The FOX News network campaign succeeded to shift the entire nation away from the Bing Crosby approved phrase, Happy Holidays—as evidenced by the steep drop in its preference over Merry Christmas, from 41% in 2005, to 25% by 2015.3 By keeping its viewers outraged by the sheer audacity of liberals to attack the beloved Christmas season, FOX also kept it viewers glued to their television sets. Roger Ailes, former Chairman, and CEO of Fox News and Fox Television Stations explained the strategy behind the War on Christmas as being purely one of profit since “90 percent of the people like Christmas, so CBS, CNN, and MSNBC, can take the other 10 percent. We’ll say, ‘Merry Christmas,’ and we’ll make all the money.”4
The War on Christmas and Manufactured Outrage
Connecting the dots between the War on Christmas and the five attributes of outrage discourse is a simple exercise. The War on Christmas was certainly personality centered since it was initially championed by the charismatic TV personality, Bill O’Reilly. It was reactive since the impetus for it was a book with a very provocative title. O’Reilly and other FOX news pundits filtered the uncommon occurrence of officials misinterpreting the doctrine of the separation of Church and State through an ideological lens as they reframed the issue into an existential threat to Christendom and Western Civilization. FOX’s new personalities played their roles as they showed umbrage to the very idea that nameless liberals threatened Christmas, which engaged and entertained their audience. In the War on Christmas narrative, O’Reilly and his peers often congratulated each other for further elaborating upon the liberal plot to destroy Christmas while casting the ACLU as their central villain—satisfying the fifth attribute of being internally intertextual.
The Outrage Industry and Incivility
The authors of the Outrage Industry hope that their research sheds some light on the increase in incivility that threatens democratic norms. I believe they succeed. What Berry and Sobieraj call outrage discourse absolutely contributes to the polarizing of society over events that are trivial to non-existent. Unfortunately, manufactured outrage is not limited to the War on Christmas. Television networks, including FOX News and MSN, build outrage into their very business model. Berry and Sobieraj make it clear that outrage is practiced by both sides of the political spectrum, often with media personalities profiting by facing off against each other. I share the hope with the book’s authors that with increased media literacy, people will begin demanding better of the press.
Footnotes
1 See The outrage industry: Political opinion media and the new incivility by Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj.
2 See How the ‘War on Christmas’ Controversy Was Created by Liam Stack in the New York Times on December 19, 2016.
3 According to a Gallup Poll in 2005 and PublicMind Research Center in 2015.
4 From The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built FOX NEWS—and Divided a Country by Gabriel Sherman
Suggested Reading
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
The outrage industry: Political opinion media and the new incivility
