by Bill Eddy
ever before, our media outlets now largely focus on personalities and
what they say about each other and do to each other. Which personal-
ities? Those who can best grab our attention. Those who show extreme
charm and confidence. And those who consistently hold our interest
with mood swings, unpredictable behavior, and a preoccupation with
blaming others. Sound familiar?
Our modern high- emotion media outlets highlight—and crave—high-
conflict personalities. And, remember, on the preconscious level, so do
we. To ensure our survival, our brains are wired to focus on conflict,
crisis, chaos, and fear over everything else. As a result, we naturally pay
more attention to simple stories of heroes and villains, potential threats
and attacks, victories and defeats. These are the very stories that HCPs
consistently feed us—casting themselves as the heroes.
4 DRAMA DAY AND NIGHT With our modern digital technology, we can
watch movies and TV shows on demand at any time of day or night—
even during work hours—and for as many hours as we want. We can also
play video games for hours. Adults now spend an average of eleven hours
in front of screens every day.66 Yes, part of that may be for work.
But much of what we consume via our screens is fantasy drama—
made- up stories of heroes and villains, Grand Theft Auto video games,
world war games, evil monsters, and marvelous superheroes. And the
theme of much of this drama is adversarial conflict resolution. There’s
a terrible crisis! There’s an evil villain! And there’s an incredible super-
hero who will beat the crap out of our opponents! Basically, more feel-
ing, less thinking.
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40 Part I: How Narcissists and Sociopaths Get Elected
5 IT’S VERY PERSONAL Today’s media outlets allow individual politicians
to communicate with us directly in a very intimate, personal way. They
can speak to us in our living room or bedroom, their faces filling the
screen and their voices surrounding us with compelling words. And as
we’ve seen, narcissists and sociopaths are supremely skilled at intimate
seduction—figuring out what we want to hear, and then telling us exactly
what we want to hear—and then manipulation. They can sense our vul-
nerabilities and strike fear in our hearts or tell us how special we are.
Usually they do both.
In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler spoke to many millions of Germans in their
own homes by radio on a regular basis. In the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy
reached into most American homes that had TV with broadcasts of his
hearings on Communists in our government (although he never found a
single one). In the 2016 United States presidential election and through-
out the first two years of his presidency, Donald Trump tweeted almost
every day. Those tweets not only got retweeted but repeated by most
major news media, partly because they were from the world’s most pow-
erful human being, partly because they were so bizarre and emotionally
exciting, and partly because they helped each media outlet grow market
share. It appears that with each new invention of a method of intimate
mass communication, the public initially gives it extra power and signif-
icance—until we discover how easily it can be used to manipulate us and
start to set limits on its power.
6 YET IT’S ALSO VERY VIRAL The speed at which today’s face and voice
media can send emotional messages is astonishing. Facebook, YouTube,
Twitter, and other social media platforms have developed an incredi-
ble capacity to spread political messages—true and false—ricocheting
around the globe. A major study showed that false emotional news
spreads farther and faster.
False news reached more people than the truth; the top 1% of false news
cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth
rarely diffused to more than 1000 people. Falsehood also diffused faster
than the truth. The degree of novelty and the emotional reactions of recip-
ients may be responsible for the differences observed.67
One of the biggest issues in the 2016 US presidential election was whether
foreign governments—notably Russia—had assisted in manipulating
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4: High- Emotion Media 41
voters into believing false news. National correspondents have com-
mented that “Without Facebook, Donald Trump probably wouldn’t
be president. . . . The platform was an essential vector for Russian
disinformation.68
In the Philippines, fake news spread on social media is credited with
contributing to the election of Rodrigo Duterte.
[T]he internet in the Philippines of Mr. Duterte has become an outlet for
threats and deceit. . . . Facebook [is] the source of almost all internet news
in the Philippines. It’s a losing battle—false news is so rooted in the Philip-
pines that one Facebook executive has called it “patient zero” in the global
misinformation epidemic.69
7 IMPAIRED ABILITY TO THINK It’s not just the information promoted by
today’s media, but it’s the process of watching as well. As Marshall
McLuhan used to say, “the medium is the message. ”70 Here’s how our
screens impact us:
Screens are insatiable. At a cognitive level, they are voracious vampires
for your attention, and as soon as you look at one, you are basically toast.
There are studies that bear this out. One, by a team led by Adrian Ward,
a marketing professor at the University of Texas’ business school, found
that the mere presence of a smartphone within glancing distance can sig-
nificantly reduce your cognitive capacity.71 (Emphasis added)
All of these trends have made today’s high- conflict politicians far more
emotionally powerful than any HCP Wannabe King in the past. Emotional
warfare is now the name of the game in modern politics. And it all operates
beneath our logical radar, intimately passed on to thousands and millions of
people at a time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Welcome to the Future and the Past
Because of the rise of high- emotion media, many of us have started to view
the world in highly emotional terms: primarily as a dangerous, adversarial
place in which we desperately need heroes to protect us from many villains.
Just like in the old days.
Yet this is mostly untrue. Overall, today our lives are less dangerous than
ever before (with some notable exceptions). In general, most of us expe-
rience less war, less poverty, and generally live longer and healthier lives
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42 Part I: How Narcissists and Sociopaths Get Elected
than in any earlier era.72 It just feels more dangerous and frightening. Why?
Because of our high- emotion media over the past thirty years and because of
the Wannabe Kings who use it to frighten and manipulate us.
Consumers of negative news, not surprisingly, become glum: a recent litera-
ture review cited “misperception of risk, anxiety, lower mood levels, learned
helplessness, contempt and hostility towards others, desensitization, and in
some cases, . . . complete avoidance of the news.” And they become fatalis-
tic, saying things like “Why should I vote? It’s not gonna help . . . ”73
And when we feel this frightened, this fear creates an ideal opening for
HCPs to step forward, build followings, and grab power. Remember, as I said
in Chapter 3, when people feel anxious, they are more likely to absorb other
people’s emotions—especially high- conflict emotions.
In addition, the constant negativity in the media changes people’s politi-
cal mood to embrace more extreme solutions:
For decades, journalism’s steady focus on problems and seemingly incur-
able pathologies was preparing the soil that allowed Trump’s seeds of
discontent and despair to take root. . . . One consequence is that many
Americans today have difficulty imagining, valuing or even believing in
the promise of incremental change, which leads to a greater appetite for
revolutionary, smash- the- machine change.74
Our Political Culture of Blame
Our current political culture of blame also began in the 1990s. For the fifty
years before that, Americans (and people throughout much of the free
world) had a shared enemy—a frightening, powerful, and bitter enemy. That
enemy was the Soviet Union (or the USSR). For most of those five decades,
the US and the USSR had thousands of nuclear missiles aimed directly at
each other.
Then, in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed
over the next couple years. It literally ceased to exist. In its place were many
independent, but generally weak, nations. Suddenly, the nuclear threat from all
of the former Soviet countries decreased dramatically. Just as suddenly, among
Americans, the decades of justifiable fear, anger, and blame had no target.
Then a strange thing started to happen. Americans began turning inward
to find new enemies to blame and fear—and they discovered them at home
and next door.
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4: High- Emotion Media 43
As a result, national politics began changing as well. Year by year, espe-
cially on the national level, our elected officials became less and less colle-
gial, and more and more rancorous and obstructive. Instead of having lunch
together in the Senate Dining Room, Democrats and Republicans declared
the opposing party their sworn enemy. They stopped spending as much
time together, both personally and politically. Adversarial thinking replaced
the compromise and collaboration of the past, even including the Ronald
Reagan and Tip O’Neill era of cooperation in the 1980s.
Some credit Newt Gingrich, a congressman from South Carolina who
eventually became Speaker of the House, for changing the tone.
By 1988, Gingrich’s plan to conquer Congress via sabotage was well under
way. . . . Gingrich encouraged them to go after their enemies with catchy,
alliterative nicknames—“Daffy Dukakis,” “the loony left”—and schooled
them in the art of partisan blood sport. Through GOPAC, he sent out
cassette tapes and memos to Republican candidates across the country
who wanted to “speak like Newt,” providing them with carefully honed
attack lines and creating, quite literally, a new vocabulary for a genera-
tion of conservatives. One memo, titled “Language: A Key Mechanism
of Control,” included a list of recommended words to use in describing
Democrats: sick, pathetic, lie, anti- flag, traitors, radical, corrupt.75
Now, on the national level at least, though often at other levels as well,
it’s largely about fundraising for the next election. It’s also, of course, about
winning—defeating the enemy in the opposing party. So, as a politician,
you’d better be a fighter. Politics has again become a job for which HCPs are
especially well qualified.
The Media and Politics
In 1979, C- SPAN began providing live television coverage of congressional
proceedings, as well as many other forms of political programming. Two
years later, Judge Joseph Wapner and Court TV transformed our view of
the legal system as well. What had been private decision- making quickly
became emotional public entertainment. Newt Gingrich was one of the first
to make good use of it.
He recognized an opportunity in the newly installed C-span cameras, and
began delivering tirades against Democrats to an empty chamber, know-
ing that his remarks would be beamed to viewers across the country. . . .
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44 Part I: How Narcissists and Sociopaths Get Elected
The goal was to reframe the boring policy debates in Washington as a
national battle between good and evil, white hats versus black—a fight
for the very soul of America. Through this prism, any news story could be
turned into a wedge.76
Another big change came a few years later: the end of the fairness doctrine.
This had been instituted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
in 1949 to require radio and television stations to provide a balance of polit-
ical opinions. This meant that their programs on politics were required to
include opposing opinions on whatever topic was under discussion.
The rule also required broadcasters to alert anyone who was subject to
a personal attack in their programming and to give them an opportunity to
respond. In addition, it required any broadcasters who endorsed political
candidates to invite other candidates to speak.
The FCC began to reconsider this rule in the mid-80s and stopped
enforcing it in 1987. (The rule was officially scrapped in 2011.) This meant
that by the 1990s, any radio or TV station (or network) could state its own
point of view as strongly and as repeatedly as it wished—and that it had no
obligation to ever provide its audience with any other viewpoint.77
This change resulted in the explosion of political talk radio in the late 80s
and early 90s. Then, in 1996, this naturally led to the creation and rise of the
cable news channels Fox News and MSNBC—and, of course, to many other
equally partisan media outlets.
During the past three decades, many of these outlets have spread an us-
against- them view of the world. Welcome back to the simplified world of
heroes and villains.
No one better understood how to encourage this us- against- them men-
tality, or how to use it to grab and hold people’s attention, than Roger Ailes,
the founder of Fox News. As Gabriel Sherman noted in his book The Loudest
Voice in the Room,
Ailes remade both American politics and media. More than anyone of
his generation, he helped transform politics into mass entertainment—
monetizing the politics while making entertainment a potent organizing
force. . . . Through Fox, Ailes helped polarize the American electorate,
drawing sharp, with- us- or- against- us lines, demonizing foes, preaching
against compromise.78
Ailes also made news sexy. He understood and proved that television—
including po
litically oriented television—is built on good drama and plenty
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4: High- Emotion Media 45
of blame. And well- funded political divisions, when turned into personal
attacks and the public exposure of private lives, can provide plenty of both,
especially when a sex scandal is involved. The Fox Network made a name for
itself with its coverage of the Bill Clinton sex scandal and impeachment of
the 1990s.79
By 2002, Fox was the number one cable news network. Its audience soon
grew to more than twice that of CNN and MSNBC. It has held this lead for
most of the last two decades.80
Cultural Leaders
Soon, other TV networks—and other media outlets in general—decided that
they needed to adopt some of Fox News’s aggressive style. During the Obama
administration, The New York Times’s managing editor, Jill Abramson, said,
“The narrative was being hijacked by Fox. Fox had taken over a thought- leader
role in the national press corps.” She acknowledged that the Times’s reporting
style would need to become slightly more like Fox’s in the future.81
Roger Ailes became a cultural leader without even being in political office.
“Political conflict has never been more compelling than on Ailes’s Fox
News. . . . Though marketed as an antidote to the epistemic closure of
the mainstream media, Fox News is as closed off as the media world it
proposes to balance—Ailes’s audience seldom watches anything else.82
(Emphasis added)
This is a good time to introduce the concept of emotional repetition in
isolation. Most people realize that when we are exposed to emotional infor-
mation repeatedly, it is easily absorbed without thinking. TV advertising is
based on this principle. But when it comes to politics and cultural issues,
people have traditionally been exposed to many sources of information, in
their neighborhoods, their workplaces, and city or regional newspapers.
As newspapers are vanishing and cable TV is all pervasive (as well as
Facebook and other social media), the risks of getting political informa-
tion from only one source is significant—and dangerous, as the examples in
Part II demonstrate.
On Fox News, the tedious personages of workaday politics are reborn as
heroes and villains with triumphs and reverses—never- ending story lines.