Outrage is letting someone else set the frame

William Randolph Hearst bought the New York Morning Journal in 1895 - and immediately started running stories designed to make his readers furious before they’d finished their breakfast. The pages manufactured a mood, and that mood sold papers.Three years later, when his correspondent Frederic Remington cabled from Cuba that there was no war to cover, Hearst replied with the line that became his epitaph: “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”That was the original sin, and the original business model. Find a target, deliver the outrage daily, harvest the engagement and sell the audience to advertisers.The economics haven’t changed since 1895.Walter Lippmann, writing in Public Opinion in 1922, described how a small class of editors and publicists had taken on the job of “manufacturing consent” by deciding which stories would be put in front of the public and to which framings they would be attached. He thought this was, on balance, fine. Most readers, he said, would never…