They want to make you angry

Twenty-six years ago, when I was still new to both New York and the world of journalism, I got a job. It was at a place I hadn’t really heard of, but still recognized the name—a place called FoxNews.com.

Back then, no one knew what Fox News was or was going to become. Yeah, it was making a big deal of its slogans—”Fair & Balanced” and “We Report, You Decide”—and had a conservative air, but it seemed more like a Wall Street Journal conservatism than anything else. Those of us who worked on the website, where I was a news editor, mostly focused on pulling stories from the Associated Press and Reuters wires, rewriting their boring-ass ledes to be more dynamic (we called this “Foxification”), and trying not to screw up the HTML that would get directly uploaded to the live site via an app known as The Integrator. We covered a lot of breaking news, including the Columbine massacre, and never really thought much about what aired on the Fox News Channel, apart from laughing at the asinine hosts of the Fox & Friends morning show.

And they never really thought about us, either. For one, we were the web, which didn’t matter yet, and for another, we were in a completely different building from them, 30 blocks of their Rockefeller Center headquarters.

Before long, however, we began to matter. People—people like you!—were beginning to get their news online, and our humble little site was attracting attention. My intern would send out weekly traffic emails, with stories regularly hitting half a million page views. Incredible!

Eventually, the mothership decided to take action. They sent down an executive editor to oversee us, a guy named Scott Norvell, who very quickly set in place a new directive: From now on, he said, we were to do stories that would make our audience angry. Those readers (and viewers) were mostly middle-aged white men, and we were supposed to pick and report stories that would have them yelling at their TVs and computer screens. This was the stated goal.

At the time, we—I—accepted this. There was, I thought, a way of finding stories that would do this, that would play on the audience’s visceral feelings, but that could still tell real stories, could still be real journalism: We report, they decide, right?

Alas. I don’t need to tell you how it all turned out, but I will point out that it quickly became clear that “we report” mattered very little. For a while, for example, I oversaw the transformation of Fox News Channel video scripts into written pieces for the website: At best, they’d clock in at a minute and 15 seconds, maybe half the length of a similar CNN clip, and the sheer lack of reported facts meant those web stories were maybe a few hundred words long. There was enough there to make readers angry, but never enough for them to understand what they were angry about.

It took me a long time, maybe a couple of decades, to wrap my head around what was going on. First, I had to shed the idea that “making audiences angry” was a tactic—a means of achieving some greater, probably political goal. Fox may have skewed right, or far right, but the politics weren’t really the point. The anger was the point. Fox made people angry in order to make people angry, because angry people like being angry, like feeling as if their rage is justified, and those angry people kept watching Fox in order to stay angry. Fox’s goal was not to use anger to build a right-wing audience, but to mold Americans, right or left, into an audience of angry people.

This story is not about Fox News

I don’t have a problem with anger. Anger is satisfying. Rage is satisfying. Righteous fury is fucking wonderful. The world is unjust, and we are all going to die sooner or later, and there is nothing much we can do about it, and don’t you just want to scream and scream and scream until the architects of our reality crumple and submit and weepingly consent to rewrite the rules? I do, all the goddamn time.

But anger on its own is never enough. If that’s all you’ve got, you’re doomed: You will rage to no end, and nothing will change, and so you’ll rage some more. And because anger is all you have, it will blind you and you will make poor decisions and you will stay angry. Which is precisely where a lot of Powers That Be want you—angry, blind, malleable, gullible. Anger—your anger—is a tool for control, and it’s often a tool you hand them yourselves.

It doesn’t have to be. I like anger, but I want anger to be a starting point, not an end unto itself. I want to be angry, and I want you to be angry, and I want us all to be angry often enough that we learn to live with that emotion, to understand how it warps us and shames us, so that we can come to grips with it—so that we can use its rough, dumb weight to hone our responses to the infinite ways that the universe abuses us. Anger should clarify. Anger should be the lens through which we focus the illuminating rays of the sun into precision laser beams that etch a new reality.

All right, whew! Getting a little overheated there. Lemme calm down a minute.

Okay: If you’re still with me, then this is the time to think calmly. When you read or watch something that makes you angry—a news story, for example—you have to ask yourself: Is it trying to make me angry, or is my anger of my own doing? And then, if it’s the former, you need to figure out why it’s trying to anger you. Is there a greater purpose at work, or is your reaction the only point? Are you being manipulated and monetized, or is there some legitimate issue at stake, something you could do something about (or something), or at least come to understand what’s happening, even if you remain powerless to affect it?

What I want you to do is this: I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: “I’m as mad as hell—and I can take this all just fine, because I’ve learned to express my negative emotions, appropriately if absurdly, and am no longer at their mercy.“

Failing that, you could just click this button right here. I promise you, it will be so, so satisfying:

And if that doesn’t assuage your darkest emotions, there’s always this. 🪨🪨🪨

Read a Previous Attempt: That’s So Brooklyn!