Dr. Jaime Settle Offers Insight on "Outrage Politics" in NPR Interview
Dr. Jaime Settle, Associate Professor of the Department of Government, spoke with NPR's All Things Considered on outrage politics as a business model. More specifically, the story focused on Ben Shapiro, a conservative podcast host, and the success and popularity his website, The Daily Wire, has found on Facebook. According to NPR's analysis, The Daily Wire outperforms much larger and more established news publishers, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, "by a wide margin" in terms of likes, shares, and comments. Dr. Settle said on the matter, "There's a demand amongst certain subsets of the public for outrage politics. This happens on both the left and the right. But the people who do this on the right have just found a lot more successful ways of doing it." While sites like The Daily Wire do not necessarily publish falsehoods, "[t]hey tend to not provide very much context for the information that they are providing. If you've stripped enough context away, any piece of truth can become a piece of misinformation," according to Dr. Settle. You can listen to the full story and read the transcript on NPR's website.
