Audience Capture and the Golden Age of Hypocrisy

There's big money to be made telling audiences what they want to hear, but it comes at a steep cost.

The press has adopted a new business model to keep pace with the ever-expanding information landscape. Audience capture has become the name of the game. Nearly every writer, journalist, and media outlet now has a specific audience, and that audience is never “the average person” or “most of society.” There are no more Walter Cronkites addressing the nation. Long gone is the Fairness Doctrine, which mandated some degree of balance in news coverage. Now, there are countless boutique silos catering to the precise specifications of your VIP tastes. “Have it your way”, as Burger King’s motto once went. Hold the pickles? Extra bias? Hey, the customer is always right! Audiences have become the great puppet masters. The result of this arrangement is the death of principles and the golden age of hypocrisy. Feed them what they want to hear, and audiences will pay you handsomely with one hand while robbing you of your integrity with the other.

Hypocrisy is the natural state of the human condition. We are wired to pursue self-interest and then rationalize our decisions after the fact, not to contemplate abstract concepts like intellectual honesty and logical consistency. It falls to those people who are allergic to bullshit and content to be outsiders — the freethinkers, iconoclasts, gadflies, and sticklers for truth — to observe society and point these things out. We rely on these now-dwindling black sheep to inject that moment of collective self-reflection and even epiphany into public awareness.

It is no longer realistic or commercially viable to present a range of perspectives that captures most of public opinion, nor to tell uncomfortable truths. The objective in today’s environment is to find a niche and cultivate a following within it, harping on the same few themes, and flattering the audience by shoveling heap after heap of affirmation down their gaping, insatiable maws. There is no impetus to call out hypocrisy and thereby anger your customers, most of whom are there not to be informed, nor to grow as people, but to feel validated and endlessly told how right they are about everything. Hypocrisy isn’t an accidental byproduct of this state of affairs — it’s every second-rate journalist’s meal ticket in a fractured attention economy. Writers and content creators set out to capture an audience. In so doing, the audience captures them. Donald Trump and Joe Biden are about as likely to divorce their respective wives and marry each other as the press is to upset this well-greased gravy train.

This dynamic is compounded by the fact that the advertising model is gradually giving way to the subscriber-based model. Rather than attracting large numbers of readers, viewers, and listeners, each of whom generates marginal amounts of ad revenue, outlets and creators now build more lucrative businesses with smaller numbers of paid subscribers who generate many times more profit than any ad-based audience member. This creates a feedback loop where audiences can become radicalized and reinforced in extreme views and then turn around and exert their pressure on publications to produce more in the same vein. This is why, although there is a great diversity of thought among LGBT people, virtually all of the visible faces, voices, and organizations who purport to speak for the community exclusively represent the views of the radical activist fringe.

Andrew Sullivan, who saw the danger in this development sooner than most, wrote in 2018:

“The shift in revenue sources from advertising to subscriptions gives these reader sentiments real power and makes editing in a non-tribal way a constant struggle. The economic and political incentives are increasingly lined up against diversity of thought in journalism. And in some ways, advertisers are easier to resist than a mob of impassioned readers, especially those whipped up into a frenzy on social media.”

With so few left to shine the disinfecting light of ridicule on the unprincipled contradictions that abound in society, hypocrisy is left to run rampant. When Trump was banned from Twitter following the January 6, 2021 US Capitol Riots, his many defenders cried foul. Twitter was the de facto public square, they argued, and the company should not be allowed to silence a US president. Trump’s more numerous critics cited his countless violations of Twitter’s rules and pointed out that, as a private company, the platform was free to do as it wished. This was not a free speech issue in the constitutional sense, they argued, but a matter of property rights and free enterprise.

Fast forward a couple years to Twitter’s new regime, with Elon Musk working his digital necromancy to resurrect the legions of the damned from Twitter Hell — including Donald Trump. What happened next was a collective mind swap. Trump’s detractors abandoned their position on property rights and demanded the government swoop in to stop this travesty. Trump’s fans, who just months prior had been demanding more or less the same thing, suddenly draped themselves in “Don’t tread on me” flags and began pontificating about how private companies were free to do as they wished.

Nobody seemed to notice. Nobody seemed to care. As desperate for content as the commentariat are, this stunning display of hypocrisy went all but uncovered, as do so many similar instances. The reason why is depressingly simple. The hypocrites in need of calling out included not only most of the writers, journalists, and media outlets themselves, but more to the point, their audiences, too.

The examples are endless. When academics not in step with the current moment have their careers torched on questionable grounds and with little due process, one side shrieks about “cancel culture” while the other can only smirk and titter about “accountability culture.” When the shoe is on the other foot, however, and people on the other side are fired following partisan outrage campaigns, the mind swap is activated. On terrorism: one side says the January 6th rioters were terrorists, but the antifa George Floyd rioters were “protestors”; the other says the January 6th rioters were “tourists” and the antifa George Floyd rioters were terrorists. During the pandemic: the anti-lockdown protests of 2020 were regarded as public health crises by the very same people who just weeks later embraced Black Lives Matter protests nationwide. On social issues: the same people who decry government regulation as a tyrannous incursion into private life also want the state up in every woman’s uterus with a clipboard and a jeweler’s loupe.

Sexuality functions as a fulcrum of contradiction on matters of nature versus nurture. Traditionalists lean into essentialism, playing up the role of nature and genetics for every human trait and difference between groups except sexuality — which, alone, among traits, they attribute to nurture and social influence. Those who consider themselves more progressive-minded, by contrast, believe the exact inverse. To them, nurture is paramount. Nothing is nature, nothing is genetic, and everything is socially conditioned, the result of social systems — except sexuality, which they see as innate. These incoherencies carry over into politics.

The traditionalists who believe that trying to turn LGB kids straight is totally fine and not at all creepy also view affirming gender transition as “grooming.” To them, it’s okay to change someone’s sexuality, but not their gender. Radical trans activists, who currently dominate on this issue, regard even sensible attempts to help questioning youths feel comfortable in their own bodies as tantamount to conversion therapy. They cite the high success rate of gender transition under the “Dutch model” to argue for the urgent need to remove barriers to transition for dysphoric youth, completely ignoring that the key to that model’s success is a more conservative approach involving years of psychological screening and counseling.

They insist that online subcultures in which transgender identity offers meaning and community to lonely and disassociated youth could not possibly be a factor behind the meteoric rise in the rate of youth wishing to transition or the dramatic change in that population from mostly natal males to natal females. Somehow they deem young folks so impressionable that any effort to take things slowly will push them away from their true identities to disastrous ends, while also insisting that cis kids could not possibly be influenced to mistakenly identify as trans (not even LGB ones trying to figure out their sexuality). For both groups, this boils down to: it’s fine for my side to influence and guide impressionable youths to our desired outcomes but it’s “grooming” or “conversion” when your side does it.

Like a bachelor who lives too long alone, our collective bad habits fester in the absence of regular criticism — specifically when it comes from those on our own side. The problem is, the incentives are all wrong. A useful case study on audience capture is the tale of Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. The two co-authored Cynical Theories (2020), a liberal critique exploring the academic roots of Critical Social Justice. In the aftermath of its publication, the two authors found themselves with hundreds of thousands of new fans, including many alt-rightists and Trump supporters. Lindsay embraced this new audience, and allowed himself to be sucked down the rabbit hole. In the two years since, he has become a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary. Pluckrose, on the other hand, resisted this pull. She pushed back against her audience, and was so inundated by abusive messages that she resigned her post as Editor-in-Chief of Areo Magazine and took a multi-year hiatus from public life. This, in microcosm, starkly distills both the allure and the danger of audience capture. Embrace it and be richly rewarded, or stand up for your principles and be eviscerated.

There are a few others who have successfully resisted this tide. Andrew Sullivan is one, famous for publishing and engaging with the strongest of his reader’s “dissents” every week, and never one to shy away from calling out hypocrisy. Others include Dan Savage, Bill Maher, Sam Harris, and Quillette Founder Claire Lehmann. Harris in particular, and to a lesser extent Lehmann, went out of their way to harshly criticize Donald Trump, isolationism, and the anti-vax movement, despite the many populists within their audience attracted by their opposition to Critical Social Justice. As a result, large segments of their audience turned on them. Amid prolonged deluges of online dogpiling, mostly from people who would once have considered themselves fans, the two both deactivated their Twitter accounts only hours apart from one another in 2022 (Lehmann returned some months later).

Harris and Lehmann continue to produce widely consumed content, and Areo Magazine is now in the deft hands of my colleague Iona Italia, but they remain the exceptions, not the rule. When it is in your own self-interest to court an audience and allow them to capture you, true independence of thought will always be the exception. Removing the profit motive altogether does not necessarily provide inoculation either. Nonprofits can still find themselves beholden to donors both large and small (including governments), and if they’re run by and filled with people who think alike and are rigidly set in their views, they will fall prey to ideological capture from within. But with the right leadership and without the wrong incentives, publications are freer to produce diverse, thought-provoking content that challenges their own audience. Hopes lies in us.

Audience capture rules, and its reign will not soon end. This means that we, as readers, listeners, viewers, and consumers of information have more influence than ever before. If audiences are ultimately the ones pulling the strings, and we make up these audiences, then we have power. If we want a better media landscape, we must become better audiences: audiences who demand some degree of balance, fairness, and charity, and who object to falsehoods, even if peddled in service of narratives we cherish; audiences who are easily bored with being patted on the back — who are willing to unsubscribe not when we are challenged, or when we encounter opinions with which we vehemently disagree, but when we detect partisan hypocrisy and pandering. George Carlin once joked that he never complained about politicians because they were merely products of the wider society that we all collectively comprise. “If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you’re going to get selfish, ignorant leaders.” This includes the press, too. If we want a more principled public discourse, we must lead by example.

A version of this piece was originally published in Queer Majority in 2022. You can read the original here: “Beholden to the Mob”

See also: “Fact-checking Has Become a Partisan Charade”

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