Ever feel a little riled up watching “Hannity & Colmes” or exasperated after turning off “Lou Dobbs Tonight”?
If you are a regular viewer, chances are you are getting exactly what you were looking for: an opportunity to get angry.
These TV news shows – where the hosts focus on sensational topics and regularly get into heated exchanges with guests – trigger an emotional response from their audience that keeps viewers coming back.
Anger and fear – which some psychologists theorize are entwined – are the hooks.
It’s an odd form of entertainment after a hard day at work. Instead of unwinding, it creates stress. It makes one wonder: Are people addicted to anger?
Interestingly, the majority of the viewers are men.
Women, on the other hand, tend to look for shows that deal with relationships, such as “Sex and the City” – even if they’ve seen that episode three times already. They escape in romantic comedies aired on the Oxygen channel. They look for upbeat news stories.
It’s why lifestyle sections of newspapers used to be known as “the women’s pages.”
But this isn’t a question of simple gender preferences. According to a recent study, men and women subconsciously use the media to regulate their mood.
“Women look for news stories that will dissipate their anger, while men look for news that will fuel their anger,” said Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, an assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University, who co-wrote the study, which was published last month in the journal Human Communication Research.
During the study, supervisors would say things to provoke anger in participants who were not aware they were being emotionally manipulated. Then the supervisors would ask them to sit in front of a computer and read news stories online.
The men gravitated toward headlines such as “L.A.’s Violent New Video: Police are Caught in the Act of Beating a Civilian” while women clicked on headlines such as “A Breath of Fresh Air: How to Quit Smoking the Spa Way.”
“We believe that it has to do with socialization, but that was not something our study proved,” Knobloch-Westerwick said. She said women are expected to remain calm, while men are taught to stay angry if they are provoked.
Other kinds of media can have a more immediate effect on mood, she said, such as music. A Puccini aria can instantly make a person feel hopeful, while rock makes a person want to dance.
Same thing with TV news shows. In a highly competitive market, where there are dozens of channels competing for viewers, TV news shows increasingly appeal to the emotions of viewers,
Knobloch-Westerwick said.
They are also cheaper to produce than well-researched news magazines such as “60 Minutes.”
But unlike “60 Minutes” or PBS’s “The NewsHour,” the talking heads of TV tabloid news aren’t concerned with offering different perspectives that can inform people. Instead, these commentators bait guests and then pounce on them in a one-sided game of gotcha.
The viewers are like spectators watching their hometown-team play: Conservative viewers watch conservative hosts and get fired up over issues they present in alarmist fashion. Same for the liberal shows, of which there are few. (NBC chief executive Bob Wright said at a news conference a few months ago that there are few liberal hosts on cable news programs because progressives “don’t watch a lot of television.”)
We are a society that worries so much about what children are watching that we keep them from watching racy music videos and bar them from buying violent video games. Maybe we should look at what we watch and what it’s doing to us.
Cindy Rodríguez’s column appears Tuesdays in Scene and Sundays in Style. Contact her at 303-820-1211 or crodriguez@denverpost.com.
