Chris Hayes wants you to pay attention

David Weigel: When did you first realize that something had gone badly wrong in the battle for our attention?

Chris Hayes: I was covering ISIS, and it became very clear that we were in this kind of conundrum. They were pulling off these acts of spectacular ultraviolence that were horrific beyond measure. These were obviously newsworthy. They were marching across Iraq, too, but capturing attention was clearly what the goal was. I thought: Oh, these people are doing more than just fighting a physical war. They’re fighting an attentional war, and they’re being weirdly successful with it, and they’re putting me in a bit of a bind. This is news, and it should be covered, and what they’re doing is terrible. But in covering them, I’m kind of giving them what they want.

You write that “the big lie is often more attentionally compelling than a list of small truths.” How does that play out?

We have this phrase in journalism, which I love: “Too good to check.” When you become a reporter, someone will call you with a tip for a crazy story. You’ll get a letter from a prisoner saying, “I know the cops planted evidence” in my case. Maybe you start working the story, and it’s far more complicated, with a lot of holes. But the impulse is to run with the first version that’s so compelling attentionally, because it’s not muddied by the complexities and nuances of reality.

Everything Trump says is too good to check. He just goes with whatever is the most potentially salient. Sometimes it does have an aspect that’s true in some highly attenuated fashion, but in competitive attention markets, which is what we’re all dealing with — the most competitive attention markets we’ve probably ever seen — lies will outcompete truth, because lies are more attentionally compelling. COVID is a great example. My reading of the balance of evidence is that it came from a wet market and zoonotic transmission. But the “lab leak” story has attentional heft and power to it that the other story doesn’t. With Trump, the story that 2020 was just stolen from him is the best example.

Is there a gap between what the left and liberals will believe, even if it’s false, and what the right will believe?

I want to be as fair as possible here. Human impulses are not necessarily unevenly distributed across ideological beliefs. Lots of people on the center-left fall for false stuff on the internet, for sure. After this election, you would have thought there’d be a market for it. On some corners of the internet, there were left-wing people making videos about how the results were rigged, but it didn’t take off. I do think that validators and the vetted elites are just more responsible on the liberal side. If Kamala Harris came out and said the election was stolen, or people on my network did, it would have gotten traction. As much as we live in a post-gatekeeper information universe, that does matter a ton.

Probably the most popular media criticism I see among liberals these days is that something outrageous is happening and it’s not on the front page of The New York Times or it’s not on TV, right now. You probably see that criticism in your social media replies. How do you interpret it?

I saw someone clip a segment we did last year, during the campaign, with a bunch of bad-to-good charts about oil prices, inflation, crime — all these things getting better under Biden. And all the comments under the clip were like, “Where was THIS during the campaign?”

Look, I understand that there’s a kicking-the-dog impulse here. You don’t feel like you can control Trump or the voters that voted for him, but the media is adjacent to that. And there are lots of totally legitimate criticisms of the way the mainstream media covered the campaign and cover Trump. Some I agree with, some are overstated. But what people are experiencing is this inability of the media to set a focal agenda when it pertains to Trump.

They also see some asymmetry here, when it came to Joe Biden. The media was able to set an agenda after the first debate. But I’ve explained this to people: That was fueled by internal Democratic dissent. Trump never has that internal party problem now, and these stories get stamped out much faster. Another part of this is that everything is metabolized faster now.

I was on-air during the Boston Marathon bombing, which killed four Americans and injured a whole bunch of other people. There was a week-long manhunt and that was the number one story in the country for weeks, maybe a month. A dude with an ISIS flag kills 14 Americans on New Year’s Eve in New Orleans, and that’s metabolized and gone from the national consciousness in maybe 24 hours.

Independent of the events or the ideology, nothing sticks. Some things do stick to Trump; I think the Jan. 6 pardons are hurting him, politically. But the general complaint I see is: Why can’t you set the agenda and make stuff stick to him? That’s a totally reasonable frustration, but also is part of a much broader set of circumstances and dynamics.

I’d assumed, before the election, that liberals might turn off the news if Trump won. Previously, they might have thought this or that scandal was worth following, because it might have taken him down. They don’t think that anymore. What’s your analysis of why so many liberals have tuned out?

People feel depressed and overwhelmed. I get that feeling. And in a broad sense, liberals are more prone to self-flagellation and introspection. It’s funny to me that in the crowded market of “what Democrats must do now” takes, no one’s actually just said: Well, why don’t they just do what the last guy who lost did, and try to overturn the election with a violent insurrection? I don’t think anyone believes that would be good politics, and also — it’s morally indefensible! But the reason that I raise it, tongue-in-cheek, is that after Biden won in 2020, the liberal takes were about why the Democrats didn’t do better.

With the audience numbers, the same thing happened to Fox after the election four years ago. If you read the Dominion case filings, a big part of the reason they got into such trouble, and were willing to chase this obviously false story, was that their ratings were tanking and they were scared and desperate. And part of this is just basic psychology. If you’re a sports fan, do you watch the highlights that night if the team is doing poorly and lost? No, probably not. Do you watch the highlights if they won? Yes.

How have Elon Musk’s changes to Twitter affected how people see the news? I’m thinking about the rise of these accounts that get paid by engagement, and just rip off stories from elsewhere and give them sensational frames.

Oh, it’s just massively destructive. It’s pollution, pure pollution. No one’s ever going to beat Rupert Murdoch for sheer negative effect on English-speaking democracies throughout the world, but Musk is doing something similar. Look at what he said on his own platform, after an [82]-year old Paul Pelosi took a hammer to the head. It was: Oh, he was in his underwear with his lover. It was both disgusting and a lie. But it became a little viral moment. Even Republican lawmakers would joke about it. That was the moment I realized: Oh, that’s what this site is going to be. It’s going to be disgusting, poisonous lies, in a sort of reality distortion feed.

“You’re the media now!” Congratulations, you’ve reinvented medieval village rumor-mongering.

Yes, you’re the media now. We’ve had that before. It’s the attentional upside of news without all the work beneath it. You see the pirating of stories from other places without the actual work to make sure things are true. There are tons of people, subject matter experts, who comment without a media filter. That’s not what this is. What his site now selects for is people ripping off stuff and lying.

Which Democrats are good at grabbing attention? The answer I often hear is AOC, but who else?

The reason you hear AOC is because she is the answer. Jasmine Crockett is really good, Maxwell Frost is pretty good. Chris Murphy in the Senate is a little more old-school, but he doesn’t seem afraid to do press. And this is really the big thing: They’re not scared. Part of the reason they’re not is that they’re immune from liberal media coverage and excoriation. Jamaal Bowman was very good at grabbing attention, but he paid the price for it, because this can be a dangerous game.

The Democrat who’s probably been the best at this of anyone in our time was Andrew Cuomo during COVID. His domination of attention was complete and total. His approval ratings were through the roof. Narendra Modi does a call-in show. AMLO would do two-to-three-hour press conferences. Showmanship is as old as politics. The more important and vital and finite and competitive the fight for attention gets, the more important it is to get it. And I do not think Dems are very good at getting it, partly because they’re very risk-averse.

At the end of your book, you wonder if we’re at the end of one era of attention with no restrictions on social media consumption, and something’s going to change. How does that even start, when people demand the right to look at TikTok?

There are speech interests implicated by the TikTok ban. It’s not content-specific, so it doesn’t get strict scrutiny. It gets intermediate scrutiny, and so they let the ban go into effect. I actually think that’s actually pretty important. In this debate we’re having about Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act, and what can and can’t be said — you have to move to a higher abstraction and ask, just how much time are people looking at this? How is that attention being monetized?

That truly has nothing to do, at least at the level of regulation, with content. In a weird way, that TikTok decision is sort of useful, because if you’re thinking about completely independent speech, imagine that all platforms have some kind of hours per user limit they’re capped at, or they have to pay some tax. Let’s say that that would pass constitutional muster along the same line as the TikTok ban. There’s not a national security imperative here, but when you think about this as regulating time and attention, not regulating content, it’s more useful.

Are you personally worried about any retribution from the Trump administration?

I’m not personally worried about myself. I’m not scared of these people. Honestly, I’m an American citizen, and I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m a participant in our democracy. If they want to abuse the system, they’re welcome to try, but I’m not scared of them. Do I think they will try to do stuff that abuses their power — 100% yes. Any question about that’s been cleared up in the way they’ve handled themselves so far.