The Rise of the Anger Industry

By James Poniewozik

I had paid for my purchases, but the security gate at Barnes & Noble was squealing anyway. The problem was Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. The cashier had not deactivated its anti-theft insert, but I couldn't help wondering if the book was screeching at being trapped in the same bag with liberal-bias critic Bernard Goldberg's best seller Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite. (One Franken chapter is titled "I Bitch-Slap Bernie Goldberg.") "Let me desensitize Mr. Franken for you," the guard said.

I'm afraid scientists have not invented a machine capable of desensitizing Mr. Franken. Nor Bill O'Reilly, Michael Moore, Ann Coulter, Molly Ivins, Laura Ingraham and the rest of the authors and TV and radio hosts divided by beliefs but united by a common employer: the burgeoning American anger industry. It's a multimedia platform--TV and radio shows stoking book sales and vice versa--that grew strong through the '90s with the rise of Rush Limbaugh and the conservative-publishing boom. But the monologue has become--O.K., not a dialogue, but at least two angry monologues, as liberals have discovered the cathartic power of mass-market name calling. (Moore's Dude, Where's My Country? is No. 1 on the Nov. 23 New York Times best-seller list, with Franken at No. 3, while a liberal talk-radio network appears to be in the works for next year.) "People feel more strongly because they perceive the stakes as being much higher," says publisher Steve Ross of Crown Publishing and its conservative Crown Forum imprint. "The more extreme the polemic, the greater the potential number of book buyers."

What do these political voices have in common? They're not political--not in the "vote for my side and we'll do X, Y and Z for you" sense anyway. They don't emphasize the substantive matters that define one as liberal or conservative--tax policy or affirmative action or abortion. If you are reading or tuning in, your convictions are a given. What you want, apparently, is to be told--at Wagnerian volume and in Proustian detail--what a bunch of S.O.B.s the other guys are.

For starters, they--the universal epithet--are liars. Besides Franken, David Corn holds forth for 337 pages on The Lies of George W. Bush; Coulter followed Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right with Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism. They are also elitists and exclusionary. Writes Ingraham in Shut Up & Sing, liberal elites "think where we live--anywhere but near or in a few major cities--is stupid." (Ingraham, says her "About the Author" note, "lives in the Washington area.") They control the media--notwithstanding the best seller you are holding or the hit radio show you are listening to--and their followers are sheep. Franken observes that Coulter's readers "buy her books out of an obsessive need to read stuff that reconfirms everything they already know or need to know." Franken disregards the fact that people buy his book for exactly that reason--proof No. 1 that he is good at his job.

How could any reasonable person doubt any of these claims? Look at the examples! The footnotes! The certitude! This is the great fallacy of the anger industry. It is no shocking feat to fill a broadcast, book or website with the untruths of politicians. But doing so is not proof that your side is any better--except to your grateful audience, who are all that matters. (And whom you can certainly count on not to know or care if you get your facts wrong.)

This American cacophony is not unprecedented--see Father Charles Coughlin in the '30s, or the partisan free-for-all of the early Republic. Nor is it all bad. Politics has always been a mud fight--better that citizens jump in the trough than lose interest. And even the anger industry sometimes recognizes such a thing as going too far. MSNBC fired aptly named right-wing host Michael Savage this year after he told a gay caller, "You should only get AIDS and die, you pig!"

But by themselves, these broadsides make politics less about issues than tactics. They're long on ad hominem and short on substance. They're less interested in convincing anyone--though Moore offers a limp chapter, "How to Talk to Your Conservative Brother-in-Law"--than in whipping up their own berserkers. At heart, the anger business is show business, which is why it's been so kind to comics like Franken and showmen like Limbaugh. "What you have," says Publishers Weekly editor Steven Zeitchik, "is the marrying of the interest in political books with the culture of celebrity." Even the noncomedians in the bunch use the tropes of comedy and show biz: sarcasm, hyperbole and shock. Britney kissing Madonna, Coulter saying we should convert Muslims and kill their leaders--hey, it's all publicity.

That doesn't mean the enmity is an act, though. The other common theme of most angry pundits is other angry pundits (hypocrites!), and the showdowns have got ugly. At a publishers' luncheon last summer, Franken goaded O'Reilly for wrongly saying his former show, Inside Edition, had won Peabody Awards; O'Reilly called Franken an "idiot" and told him to "shut up." But a rising bile lifts all boats. Franken's book is in its 12th week on the Times best-seller list; O'Reilly's Who's Looking Out for You? is in its seventh, and his Fox News show remains the most popular in cable news. In recent weeks Franken has entertained a future run for Senate, and O'Reilly for President. With enemies like that, who needs friends? --By James Poniewozik. Reported by Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York