New Media Rules: Playing to the Base Sells, Facts Be Damned

During the recent Republican presidential debate, a few members of the Tea Party audience cheered the notion of refusing care to someone who intentionally declined health insurance but eventually developed a life-threatening condition. A disturbing outburst by a tiny portion of the people attending? Sure. Texas Gov. Rick Perry said he was "taken aback" by the response.

Had you read the popular liberal blog Talking Points Memo, though, you might have come away with a different impression. TPM headlined its item on the subject "Tea Party Debate Audience Cheers Idea Of Letting Sick Man Without Insurance Die." Read the post and then watch the video. TPM distorted what happened and hyped the incident to grab readers.
Of course, that's unlikely to do TPM, a decade-old new-media mini-empire, any harm. The country is in a new -- rather, an old -- era of media that plays to the base much the way politicians do. And whether the topic is politics, sports, technology or business, anything that outrages or angers or cheers the base can be a profitable business. Think that's a cynical view of the industry? No doubt. It also happens to be an accurate one.

If most of an audience doesn't cheer, is it really there?

In a phone interview with me, TPM managing editor David Kurtz said, "We stand by our post. The video speaks for itself and our post speaks for itself." The site had a follow-up story about Democrats not planning to make a big deal out of the incident.

It's not hard to see why in the full context. The original TPM post creates the impression of an entire audience cheering the idea of leaving an uninsured man to die:

Blitzer asked if under [Representative Ron] Paul's libertarian philosophy, a sick man without insurance should be allowed to die in the hospital rather than have the state pay his medical bills. Before Paul could answer that question, shouts of "yes!" and cheering bubbled up from the audience.

Only, that's not exactly what happened. Watch the video embedded in TPM's post and here's what you'll see:

• Wolf Blitzer asks a hypothetical question. A healthy 30-year-old man with a "good job" chooses not to spend several hundred dollars a month for health insurance, but suddenly finds himself in need of critical care. Who should pay?
• Paul answers that "in a society that accepts welfarism [sic] and socialism, he expects the government to take care of it." Paul says that while he'd have advised the man to have a major medical policy, the individual needs to accept responsibility for his choice.
• Blitzer then says the man doesn't have insurance and needs "intensive care for six months."
• Paul replies, "That's what freedom is about, taking your own risks." That is when much of the crowd cheers.
• Blitzer then asks, "But Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?"
• One voice yells, "Yeah." Paul begins to say no, and is interrupted as a few more cheers rise from the audience.

Paul went on to argue that churches or other private organizations should provide charity care, adding that this was the way things worked when he was a newly minted doctor in the early 1960s. And the vast majority of the audience remained silent during and after the remark about letting the hypothetical man die. (The TPM clip cuts off everything past the last bullet point. You can see the full video here; start at 3:30.)
Making the news
You might or might not agree with Paul. Still, for a media outlet to create the impression from this exchange that the entire crowd was in favor of letting people die is twisting what actually happened.

In contrast, Huffington Post did run a similar headline -- "GOP Tea Party Debate: Audience Cheers, Says Society Should Let Uninsured Patient Die." However, at least the body of the story made clear that it was "several members of the crowd" who yelled "Yeah!" and didn't create the impression that the entire audience was cheering the macabre notion.

Whatever you make of the way liberal bloggers handled the GOP debate, it's all still a rather mild example of the manipulation and exploitation that's starting to characterize other corners of new media.

And then it gets worse
Young conservative activist James O'Keefe achieved notoriety for staging sting videos and then selectively editing them to give the appearance that people were doing or saying things that they weren't. He made NPR fundraising executive Ron Schiller look as though he was laughing at a remark about Muslims lobbying for sharia law. (A different remark that Schiller legitimately made, about Tea Party members, cost him his job, with NPR president Vivian Schiller --they aren't related -- out the door close behind.)

Then there was the Acorn incident, in which O'Keefe heavily edited videos to make some staff of the organization falsely appear to offer advice to a pimp and prostitute on how to cheat on their taxes.

Another conservative, Andrew Breitbart, ran a video to make U.S. Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod look like an active racist. Breitbart denied any deception, although the full video proved that he selectively took a segment out of context. Breitbart's audience clearly doesn't care; traffic figures for Breitbart's BigGovernment.com show that his baseline audience has remained stable, other than occasional large spikes for a particularly sensational or controversial story.

So the TPM example isn't at the level or Breitbart or O'Keefe. But are either of those worse than, say, some of the work of filmmaker Michael Moore, whom critic Roger Ebert has said at times has been "unfair," with supposedly factual statements that were actually "wrong, false or fudged"?

They all share one factor. When playing to the base, the importance of accuracy drops away. The audience looks for something else: the sense of belonging, identifying with a group or cause, reinforcement of views. Or just red meat.

We're so over it
Is it really such a surprising idea? We're in a post-Watergate, post-Reagan, post-so-much-else era. Electronic media often has more in common with 18th century partisan colonial newspapers or the sensationalizing newspaper wars between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.

There are money and careers to be made by whipping up some group or other. It's not just true in politics. There are sites devoted to pro-Apple news and people who only want to read the good about Google (GOOG). What else is celebrity gossip site TMZ.com but a chance to sensationalize stories that, were they about ordinary people, would fall flat?

Maybe that's why traditional media, for all their faults, have such a hard time making headway. It's far more expensive to have dozens or hundreds of journalists reporting about what isn't particularly sexy. When the ad revenue drops because online doesn't pay anywhere near as well as print, those costs turn into losses.

Related:

• NPR Cancels CEO Vivian Schiller: Right Decision, Wrong Reason
• 7 Business Lessons From the NPR Meltdown
• Juan Williams Fired -- Do Words Now Speak Louder Than Actions?
• How NPR's CEO was Dumped
• NPR's Totenberg Drops Quasi Q-Bomb
• Fred Goodwin Loses NPR Gig Over GlaxoSmithKline Ties
• NPR News App Brings Live and On-Demand Streaming to Android OS

Erik Sherman

Erik Sherman is a widely published writer and editor who also does select ghosting and corporate work. The views expressed in this column belong to Sherman and do not represent the views of CBS Interactive. Follow him on Twitter at @ErikSherman or on Facebook.

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