A while back, I worked for a TV news station. One Friday evening as I was preparing to work a weekend shift publishing content for our website and social media pages, an editor asked me to write a story and post it on our social media pages.
The assignment was not what I would consider newsworthy, but it did have all the potential for an outrageous headline that would throw people into a tizzy of argument on the station’s Facebook timeline.
Grimacing mildly, I asked, “Why is this a story?”
The editor replied, smiling, “It’s a talker.”
Something clicked for me that day (pun intended.)
It could be said that the age of outrage has all but overtaken the age of information. We are making more judgments with less information than ever before. And increasingly, our societal judgments are as harsh as they are immediate.
I don’t even need to prove it to you; look at any shared story in your Facebook news feed. More than half the people opining in the comments didn’t even click on the link. They’re just judging the whole story by the headline.
But what is worse is that many media outlets are playing on this mob mentality. Driven by a desire for clicks, reactions and comments, they select specific words and facts to throw to the forefront, inciting – you guessed it – immediate outrage.
We all pick up our pitchforks. Here we go.
We forget that a five-word headline shared around the world is a drop in the bucket in the life of that human being.
We forget that these faraway monsters featured in the entertaining but appalling share of the day are our neighbors.
If we saw them face-to-face, perhaps we would not so quickly hurl our rocks of shame at them.
However, there is hope. Now and then there is a lone commenter, someone who knows more of the story, or who at least can imagine that there is more to the story. This hero logs on and writes something like, “Wait a minute. Let’s not all pile on. Let’s keep our heads. There could be a lot more here.”
Thank heaven for that person. And when it comes down to it, we should all be that person. We should be the person who holds the dam when the flood of public opinion is about to crash down on some poor soul. Here’s why we should all choose empathy in the age of outrage:
- There is always, always, more to the story. I think most of us, deep down, already know this. But by the time the publishing entity in question begrudgingly comes back to give us the facts – if they even do – the story has already taken on a life of its own. The damage – sickening, heart-wrenching – is done. If all of us skimmed our newsfeeds with a critical eye, and said, “I’ll bet there’s more to it than that,” we would certainly be a saner society.
- The media should not control our reaction. The writer chose the light in which to cast the story – an enormous responsibility when it comes to the potential for creating public enemies, destroying careers, and ruining lives. But the media too often is not driven by a desire to give us the truth, but rather to steal our eyeballs and our clicks for a few minutes. They should not determine our reaction to an event. We should, when we know the facts that can be known.
- Words can do so much harm, and cannot be taken back. Even if one returns later to delete a comment that was perhaps ill-informed or written in the spur of the moment, it lives on unseen. Words can serve as rudders in the lives of others, shifting them in new directions. They carry immense power. In an age where angry, condemning words are plentiful, a thoughtful response – or no response at all! – is golden.
- Anger should be saved for when it matters. Harsh words are, in fact, plentiful. So plentiful that “He should be hung,” “What an idiot,” and “She shouldn’t be allowed to have kids,” hardly even have meaning anymore. Why are we leaping to comment and make judgments on everything that happens in the world, anyway? Perhaps we should save our blood pressure.
- We will be become better people. Practicing empathy – the ability to see more than the surface, to acknowledge that there is more in each human than meets the eye or finds itself on the screen – will improve our world and ourselves. It takes wisdom to know when and how to speak, humility to understand that we do not see and know everything, and downright heroism to stand up for the good in others when the tide has shifted the other way.
Let the mob rage on. Let’s be those heroes.