The Age of Rage

POLITICO John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei

Here’s the optimistic case: The embarrassment of the Shirley Sherrod story — with its toxic convergence of partisan combat and media recklessness — will be a tipping point. It will remind journalists and politicians alike that personal reputations and professional credibility are at stake, and a bit more restraint and responsibility are in order.

Here’s the realistic case: Get ready for more of the same.

Every president since the first George Bush has delivered an inaugural address including as a main theme an appeal for more civility and less cynical conflict. Barack Obama is the fourth in a row to be thwarted in this mission — frustrated by forces that have grown far stronger over the past two decades and aren’t abating any time soon.

That is because there are two big incentives that drive behavior at the intersection where politics meets media. One is public attention. The other is money. Experience shows there’s a lot more of both to be had by engaging in extreme partisan behavior.

The Sherrod controversy is only a somewhat exaggerated version of the new normal. The usual signatures of this new breed of incentive-driven uproar were also on display in another of this week’s controversies, over JournoList, the defunct liberal listserv.

Both stories featured sharp personal attacks against political opponents. Both revolved around indignant claims from people claiming to be victims of bias and the corrupt ideological agendas of their opponents — all the while stoking and profiting from the bias and conspiratorial instincts of partisans on their own side.

Responsible people in power and in the mainstream media are only beginning to grapple with this new environment — in which facts hardly matter except as they can be used as weapon or shield in a nonstop ideological war. Do you dive into the next fact-lite partisan outrage — or do you stay out and risk looking slow, stupid or irrelevant? No one is close to figuring it out.

So, despite a new burst of hand-wringing and talk of “lessons learned,” many commentators predicted in interviews that the situation involving Shirley Sherrod would soon enough be regarded as merely another footnote in the Age of Rage.

Robert Thompson, a media analyst at Syracuse University, said the demands of a 24-7 news culture were the main engine of the Sherrod case. When conservative provocateur Andrew Breitbart posted a video of Sherrod seeming to engage in reverse racism, it was inevitable that other media would follow and politicians would react — never mind that the video soon turned out to be grossly misleading.

“I don’t think the fact that it unfolded in the way it did is going to make them gun-shy about it the next time,” Thompson said. “Their business is breaking news. You put news out as it is available. You don’t wait to contextualize it.”

Conservative commentator David Frum agreed: “I think everyone will for a little while be more cautious about thinly sourced material and clips that look edited,” he said. “The effect may even endure for some time. But beyond that, the imperatives that drive the modern media business are going to remain in place, and it’s hard to imagine that this incident — which after all has had no consequences for any of the people who are at fault — will persuade anyone that they need to do anything differently.”


And a more liberal voice, linguist and author Deborah Tannen, largely echoed this conclusion, though putting the emphasis on conservative ideological activists as much as on the new media environment.

“Why, exactly, did this relatively obscure speech surface in the first place?” Tannen asked. “Only because there is a cadre of people combing the Internet to uncover — or create — something that could damage the administration. This is one of the saddest aspects of the story. Even as we are busy mulling over this one, they've no doubt moved on, giddily seeking the next.”

Situations like the Sherrod case are sometimes explained with the voguish word “polarization.” But this alone doesn’t explain it. Divisions over race, class and war are nothing new in American history. Politics these days does not include riots or lynchings, as in the 1960s or 1930s, or canings on the Senate floor, as in the 19th century. What is different these days is the emergence of an industry — a political-media complex — for which ideological conflict is central to the business model.

Fox News has soared on the strength of commentators like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, both of whom fanned the Sherrod story on the strength of the misleading Breitbart video. (A Fox senior executive, by contrast, urged the news side of the operation to get Sherrod’s response before going with the story, The Washington Post reported.) On the left, MSNBC is trying to emulate the success of primetime partisanship. Meanwhile, CNN, which has largely strived toward a neutral ideological posture, is battling steady relative declines in its audience.

If media executives hunger for ratings, politicians hunger for campaign cash and fame.

Obama put it best earlier this year, after Republican Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted “you lie” during the president's State of the Union speech. "The easiest way to get on television right now is to be really rude,” the president told ABC News.

Indeed, at first Wilson seemed embarrassed and apologized for his outburst. But within days, Wilson and his opponent were both flooded with campaign contributions; Wilson took in more than $700,000 in the immediate aftermath of his outburst and was a guest of honor on Hannity’s show and Fox News Sunday.

It’s a well-traveled path: Flamethrowers Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) join Wilson on the list of Top 10 House fundraisers, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

At POLITICO, we have an unusual vantage point on this new reality. We are both an enabler (in the eyes of some critics) of the deterioration of political discourse, and a target of it (as we try to defend our values as neutral journalists amid constant criticism from activists who think we fail at neutrality or are disdainful of the goal in the first place).


There is some truth on both counts. Like all news sites, we are aware that conflict clicks. More traffic comes from an item on Sarah Palin’s “refudiation” faux pas than from our hundreds of stories on the complexities of health care reform or Wall Street regulation. We were slow to write about the initial charge of racism against Sherrod — but quick as anyone else to write about the political fallout. Over the past 36 hours, articles on Breitbart, Sherrod and Tucker Carlson (whose conservative Daily Caller broke the story about journalists taking partisan sides on JournoList) have shared space atop our site with more “substantive” stories on the failed climate bill and the charges against Charlie Rangel.

At the same time, as a nonpartisan news site, we face relentless attacks from the right and left, all looking for signs of bias. There is an entire industry dedicated to this hunt, including the liberal Media Matters, which is staffed like a midsized newsroom. We see almost every day how a small comment, often taken out of context, can toss a reporter or editor into the media.

In this environment, it is little surprise that — while almost everyone says there are lessons to be learned from the Sherrod fiasco — there is no agreement on what those lessons are.

“Well, there are a lot of people who screwed up, but the only folks who were eager to peddle that story was Fox News, and they showed themselves to be piggish character assassins that you'd come to expect,” Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.) told POLITICO. “It's an ideological hatchet machine and they should be ashamed for carrying that kind of crap without checking it out.”

Many Republicans reached the opposite conclusion. “Republicans and conservatives who make even the slightest politically incorrect comments, or take policy stances that are contrary to the left-leaning ethnic interest groups…should expect to be ‘Sherroded’ in pieces and branded racists,” says Cesar Conda, a former top adviser to Vice President Cheney.

A generation ago, a few networks and a handful of powerful newspapers set the agenda and tone for much coverage. This was a more insular and elitist arrangement, but also more restrained. The Sherrod uproar and the Obama administration’s jittery firing of Sherrod from her Agriculture Department job both flowed from the rapid spread of inflammatory but inaccurate information. That happened less in the old media order.

These days almost any news site or commentator is capable of driving the national political agenda on any given day — and a long roster of bloggers, bombastic talk show hosts and new online Web sites compete to do just this.

And the pace of change is breathtaking. Four years ago, there was no BigGovernment, no POLITICO, no Daily Caller, no Twitter — and The Huffington Post and YouTube were innocent newborns.


Most journalists couldn’t have cared less if their work appeared online — and political campaigns were waged on network TV and in the big newspapers. Only the Drudge Report had cracked the code for routinely pushing stories into mainstream circulation.

Now the Web dominates the debate, as a feeder for aggregators and cable. Traffic to ideological sites is exploding. The Huffington Post — the most influential site on the left — has seen its traffic nearly double over the past year and is now bigger than The Washington Post.

Right-wing sites are rising, too. No longer is Drudge the only influential conservative site. Breitbart, a disciple of Drudge, has built a string of fairly popular sites including one carrying his own name, as well as BigGovernment.com and BigJournalism.com. These sites are often bitterly partisan — and highly effective at forcing obscure stories into the MSM bloodstream.

There is only a small market for moderation and reason. Tucker Carlson seems to be learning this with his site, the Daily Caller. He launched with dreams of offering readers conservative news without harsh tones. But his site didn’t take off until he started pounding the drums on immigration, Keith Olbermann and liberal journalists. Now it’s the toast of the right wing.

Even venerable straight-news organizations such as The Washington Post are getting lured down the partisan road, recruiting bloggers with explicit ideological agendas and giving them top billing online.

So what happens now?

One scenario is that the excesses of this new media order will in time lead to self correction.

Rem Rieder, the editor of the American Journalism Review, wrote on his site: “Not to go all Pollyanna on you, but this might be one of those episodes that — by highlighting (lowlighting?) just how absurd and untenable the current state of affairs has become — [could] have a beneficial impact.”

But history suggests that sentiment is indeed a bit Pollyanna-ish.

In 1989, George H. W. Bush promised a new era of bipartisanship, declaring: “This is the age of the offered hand.” Bill Clinton used his second inaugural in 1997 to promise citizens an “end to the politics of petty bickering and extreme partisanship they plainly deplore." George W. Bush campaigned in 2000 on “changing the tone” in Washington and pledged in his first inaugural to cultivate “harmony” instead of a “chorus of discordant voices.”

And it would be interesting to hear Obama reflect on this prediction, delivered at his inauguration in January 2009: "What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long, no longer apply."

Zachary Abrahamson, James Hohmann, Keach Hagey and Daniel Strauss contributed to this report.