Everything’s a problem; nothing really matters
I have a general rule against taking pleasure in the decline of news outlets, regardless of their position on the ideological spectrum: Organizations that employ (and pay) people to write are too rare as it is, and a contraction of the journalistic ecosystem just makes things harder for everyone else. But I found that rule sorely tested while reading the Outline's reported feature on the decline of Mic.com.
Those of us who have spent any time online have come across an outrage-mongering bit of nonsense from the outlet aimed at woke millennials deciding what to be angry about on any given day. "Every day, there was someone, like plus-size model Ashley Graham, to cheer for, and someone else, like manspreaders, to excoriate," writes Adrianne Jeffries. "Kim Kardashian annihilated slut shamers, George Takei clapped back at transphobes. 'In a Single Tweet, One Man Beautifully Destroys the Hypocrisy of Anti- Muslim Bigotry.' ' This Brave Woman's Horrifying Photo Has Become a Viral Rallying Cry Against Sexual Harassment.' ' Young Conservative Tries to Mansplain Hijab in Viral Olympic Photo, Gets It All Wrong.' 'The Problematic Disney Body Image Trend We're Not Talking About.' 'The Very Problematic Reason This Woman Is Taking a Stand Against Leggings.'"
Mic, along with sites such as Upworthy and IJR, was one of the early winners in the Facebook traffic bonanza sweepstakes, ginning up clicks by crafting concise, mechanical headlines of the "What X Can Teach Us About Y" and "Celebrity X Stunned Everyone By Saying Z About Y Issue — Here's Why That Matters." The trick was to hit that perfectly shareable mix of idiotic anger and self-righteous indignation, that special confection that sets off all the pleasure centers in the social media addict's brain because it racks up likes and retweets and shares.
The viralization of outrage inevitably led to the trivialization of outrage, as even former Mic staffers came to understand.
"'Mic trafficked in outrage culture,' a former staffer who left in 2017 said. ... 'It ratchets everything up to 11, to a point where if everything is an outrage, nothing is an outrage. ... Everything is the biggest deal in the world because you're trying to create traffic, and it desensitizes us to what are actually huge breaks in social and political norms,'" Jeffries reported.
It's already a cliche to suggest that every little bit of silliness you see online is "how you get Donald Trump," but, well, this is how you get Donald Trump. When you constantly tell people that everything is an outrage, they simply stop believing you after a while and true outrages fail to register.
Additionally, you render people so afraid of making even the slightest misstep that you inspire truly nutty behavior — like, say, yanking a playby-play guy from a football game played in Charlottesville, Virginia, because the (Asian-American) broadcaster's name is Robert Lee. The story, which broke Tuesday night, was so ridiculous that I did not believe it at first — it seemed like a parody of a joke about fake news, something a prankster made up because the tenets of confirmation bias would make it irresistibly shareable. But no. Oh, no. It was real.
An ESPN executive told journalist Yashar Ali that memes were to blame for the change. "This wasn't about offending anyone. It was about the reasonable possibility that because of his name he would be subjected to memes and jokes and who knows what else," the anonymous executive said. Commentary editor John Podhoretz's assessment was probably closer to the truth: "ESPN did this out of fear of the yowling mob."
These are understandable worries, perhaps — Twitter jokesters are ruthless, and one can only imagine the Mic-style headlines that would follow about the terrifying insensitivity of the microaggression ESPN perpetrated — but they drive home the concerns of conservative viewers who, for the past several years, have argued that ESPN is more concerned with appeasing the left than paying attention to the field of play.
This is the world that Mic and its ilk have bequeathed us, one in which outrage is the coin of the realm and network executives are so scared of accidentally offending someone that they turn their whole product into a laughingstock. You'll excuse me if I don't shed too many tears for Mic's decline. But I fear its damage will be long-lasting.